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+Money is any item or verifiable record that is generally accepted as payment for goods and services and repayment of debts, such as taxes, in a particular country or socio-economic context.[1][2][3] The main functions of money are distinguished as: a medium of exchange, a unit of account, a store of value and sometimes, a standard of deferred payment.[4][5] Any item or verifiable record that fulfils these functions can be considered as money.
+
+Money is historically an emergent market phenomenon establishing a commodity money, but nearly all contemporary money systems are based on fiat money.[4] Fiat money, like any check or note of debt, is without use value as a physical commodity.[citation needed] It derives its value by being declared by a government to be legal tender; that is, it must be accepted as a form of payment within the boundaries of the country, for "all debts, public and private".[6][better source needed] Counterfeit money can cause good money to lose its value.
+
+The money supply of a country consists of currency (banknotes and coins) and, depending on the particular definition used, one or more types of bank money (the balances held in checking accounts, savings accounts, and other types of bank accounts). Bank money, which consists only of records (mostly computerized in modern banking), forms by far the largest part of broad money in developed countries.[7][8][9]
+
+The word "money" is believed to originate from a temple of Juno, on Capitoline, one of Rome's seven hills.  In the ancient world Juno was often associated with money. The temple of Juno Moneta at Rome was the place where the mint of Ancient Rome was located.[10] The name "Juno" may derive from the Etruscan goddess Uni (which means "the one", "unique", "unit", "union", "united") and "Moneta" either from the Latin word "monere" (remind, warn, or instruct) or the Greek word "moneres" (alone, unique).
+
+In the Western world, a prevalent term for coin-money has been specie, stemming from Latin in specie, meaning 'in kind'.[11]
+
+The use of barter-like methods may date back to at least 100,000 years ago, though there is no evidence of a society or economy that relied primarily on barter.[12][13] Instead, non-monetary societies operated largely along the principles of gift economy and debt.[14][15] When barter did in fact occur, it was usually between either complete strangers or potential enemies.[16]
+
+Many cultures around the world eventually developed the use of commodity money. The Mesopotamian shekel was a unit of weight, and relied on the mass of something like 160 grains of barley.[17] The first usage of the term came from Mesopotamia circa 3000 BC.  Societies in the Americas, Asia, Africa and Australia used shell money – often, the shells of the cowry (Cypraea moneta L. or C. annulus L.). According to Herodotus, the Lydians were the first people to introduce the use of gold and silver coins.[18] It is thought by modern scholars that these first stamped coins were minted around 650–600 BC.[19]
+
+The system of commodity money eventually evolved into a system of representative money.[citation needed] This occurred because gold and silver merchants or banks would issue receipts to their depositors – redeemable for the commodity money deposited. Eventually, these receipts became generally accepted as a means of payment and were used as money. Paper money or banknotes were first used in China during the Song dynasty. These banknotes, known as "jiaozi", evolved from promissory notes that had been used since the 7th century. However, they did not displace commodity money, and were used alongside coins. In the 13th century, paper money became known in Europe through the accounts of travelers, such as Marco Polo and William of Rubruck.[20] Marco Polo's account of paper money during the Yuan dynasty is the subject of a chapter of his book, The Travels of Marco Polo, titled "How the Great Kaan Causeth the Bark of Trees, Made Into Something Like Paper, to Pass for Money All Over his Country."[21] Banknotes were first issued in Europe by Stockholms Banco in 1661, and were again also used alongside coins. The gold standard, a monetary system where the medium of exchange are paper notes that are convertible into pre-set, fixed quantities of gold, replaced the use of gold coins as currency in the 17th–19th centuries in Europe. These gold standard notes were made legal tender, and redemption into gold coins was discouraged. By the beginning of the 20th century almost all countries had adopted the gold standard, backing their legal tender notes with fixed amounts of gold.
+
+After World War II and the Bretton Woods Conference, most countries adopted fiat currencies that were fixed to the U.S. dollar. The U.S. dollar was in turn fixed to gold. In 1971 the U.S. government suspended the convertibility of the U.S. dollar to gold. After this many countries de-pegged their currencies from the U.S. dollar, and most of the world's currencies became unbacked by anything except the governments' fiat of legal tender and the ability to convert the money into goods via payment. According to proponents of modern money theory, fiat money is also backed by taxes. By imposing taxes, states create demand for the currency they issue.[22]
+
+Heterodox
+
+In Money and the Mechanism of Exchange (1875), William Stanley Jevons famously analyzed money in terms of four functions: a medium of exchange, a common measure of value (or unit of account), a standard of value (or standard of deferred payment), and a store of value. By 1919, Jevons's four functions of money were summarized in the couplet:
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+This couplet would later become widely popular in macroeconomics textbooks.[24]  Most modern textbooks now list only three functions, that of medium of exchange, unit of account, and store of value, not considering a standard of deferred payment as a distinguished function, but rather subsuming it in the others.[4][25][26]
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+There have been many historical disputes regarding the combination of money's functions, some arguing that they need more separation and that a single unit is insufficient to deal with them all. One of these arguments is that the role of money as a medium of exchange is in conflict with its role as a store of value: its role as a store of value requires holding it without spending, whereas its role as a medium of exchange requires it to circulate.[5]  Others argue that storing of value is just deferral of the exchange, but does not diminish the fact that money is a medium of exchange that can be transported both across space and time. The term "financial capital" is a more general and inclusive term for all liquid instruments, whether or not they are a uniformly recognized tender.
+
+When money is used to intermediate the exchange of goods and services, it is performing a function as a medium of exchange. It thereby avoids the inefficiencies of a barter system, such as the "coincidence of wants" problem.  Money's most important usage is as a method for comparing the values of dissimilar objects.
+
+A unit of account (in economics)[27] is a standard numerical monetary unit of measurement of the market value of goods, services, and other transactions. Also known as a "measure" or "standard" of relative worth and deferred payment, a unit of account is a necessary prerequisite for the formulation of commercial agreements that involve debt.
+
+Money acts as a standard measure and common denomination of trade. It is thus a basis for quoting and bargaining of prices. It is necessary for developing efficient accounting systems.
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+While standard of deferred payment is distinguished by some texts,[5] particularly older ones, other texts subsume this under other functions.[4][25][26][clarification needed] A "standard of deferred payment" is an accepted way to settle a debt – a unit in which debts are denominated, and the status of money as legal tender, in those jurisdictions which have this concept, states that it may function for the discharge of debts. When debts are denominated in money, the real value of debts may change due to inflation and deflation, and for sovereign and international debts via debasement and devaluation.
+
+To act as a store of value, a money must be able to be reliably saved, stored, and retrieved – and be predictably usable as a medium of exchange when it is retrieved. The value of the money must also remain stable over time. Some have argued that inflation, by reducing the value of money, diminishes the ability of the money to function as a store of value.[4]
+
+To fulfill its various functions, money must have certain properties:[28]
+
+In economics, money is any financial instrument that can fulfill the functions of money (detailed above). These financial instruments together are collectively referred to as the money supply of an economy. In other words, the money supply is the number of financial instruments within a specific economy available for purchasing goods or services. Since the money supply consists of various financial instruments (usually currency, demand deposits and various other types of deposits), the amount of money in an economy is measured by adding together these financial instruments creating a monetary aggregate.
+
+Modern monetary theory distinguishes among different ways to measure the stock of money or money supply, reflected in different types of monetary aggregates, using a categorization system that focuses on the liquidity of the financial instrument used as money. The most commonly used monetary aggregates (or types of money) are conventionally designated M1, M2 and M3. These are successively larger aggregate categories: M1 is currency (coins and bills) plus demand deposits (such as checking accounts); M2 is M1 plus savings accounts and time deposits under $100,000; and M3 is M2 plus larger time deposits and similar institutional accounts. M1 includes only the most liquid financial instruments, and M3 relatively illiquid instruments. The precise definition of M1, M2 etc. may be different in different countries.
+
+Another measure of money, M0, is also used; unlike the other measures, it does not represent actual purchasing power by firms and households in the economy.[citation needed] M0 is base money, or the amount of money actually issued by the central bank of a country. It is measured as currency plus deposits of banks and other institutions at the central bank. M0 is also the only money that can satisfy the reserve requirements of commercial banks.
+
+In current economic systems, money is created by two procedures:
+
+Legal tender, or narrow money (M0) is the cash money created by a Central Bank by minting coins and printing banknotes.
+
+Bank money, or broad money (M1/M2) is the money created by private banks through the recording of loans as deposits of borrowing clients, with partial support indicated by the cash ratio. Currently, bank money is created as electronic money.
+
+In most countries, the majority of money is mostly created as M1/M2 by commercial banks making loans. Contrary to some popular misconceptions, banks do not act simply as intermediaries, lending out deposits that savers place with them, and do not depend on central bank money (M0) to create new loans and deposits.[29]
+
+"Market liquidity" describes how easily an item can be traded for another item, or into the common currency within an economy. Money is the most liquid asset because it is universally recognised and accepted as the common currency. In this way, money gives consumers the freedom to trade goods and services easily without having to barter.
+
+Liquid financial instruments are easily tradable and have low transaction costs. There should be no (or minimal) spread between the prices to buy and sell the instrument being used as money.
+
+Many items have been used as commodity money such as naturally scarce precious metals, conch shells, barley, beads etc., as well as many other things that are thought of as having value. Commodity money value comes from the commodity out of which it is made. The commodity itself constitutes the money, and the money is the commodity.[30] Examples of commodities that have been used as mediums of exchange include gold, silver, copper, rice, Wampum, salt, peppercorns, large stones, decorated belts, shells, alcohol, cigarettes, cannabis, candy, etc. These items were sometimes used in a metric of perceived value in conjunction to one another, in various commodity valuation or price system economies. Use of commodity money is similar to barter, but a commodity money provides a simple and automatic unit of account for the commodity which is being used as money. Although some gold coins such as the Krugerrand are considered legal tender, there is no record of their face value on either side of the coin. The rationale for this is that emphasis is laid on their direct link to the prevailing value of their fine gold content.[31]
+American Eagles are imprinted with their gold content and legal tender face value.[32]
+
+In 1875, the British economist William Stanley Jevons described the money used at the time as "representative money". Representative money is money that consists of token coins, paper money or other physical tokens such as certificates, that can be reliably exchanged for a fixed quantity of a commodity such as gold or silver. The value of representative money stands in direct and fixed relation to the commodity that backs it, while not itself being composed of that commodity.[33]
+
+Fiat money or fiat currency is money whose value is not derived from any intrinsic value or guarantee that it can be converted into a valuable commodity (such as gold). Instead, it has value only by government order (fiat). Usually, the government declares the fiat currency (typically notes and coins from a central bank, such as the Federal Reserve System in the U.S.) to be legal tender, making it unlawful not to accept the fiat currency as a means of repayment for all debts, public and private.[34][35]
+
+Some bullion coins such as the Australian Gold Nugget and American Eagle are legal tender, however, they trade based on the market price of the metal content as a commodity, rather than their legal tender face value (which is usually only a small fraction of their bullion value).[32][36]
+
+Fiat money, if physically represented in the form of currency (paper or coins), can be accidentally damaged or destroyed. However, fiat money has an advantage over representative or commodity money, in that the same laws that created the money can also define rules for its replacement in case of damage or destruction. For example, the U.S. government will replace mutilated Federal Reserve Notes (U.S. fiat money) if at least half of the physical note can be reconstructed, or if it can be otherwise proven to have been destroyed.[37] By contrast, commodity money which has been lost or destroyed cannot be recovered.
+
+These factors led to the shift of the store of value being the metal itself: at first silver, then both silver and gold, and at one point there was bronze as well. Now we have copper coins and other non-precious metals as coins. Metals were mined, weighed, and stamped into coins. This was to assure the individual taking the coin that he was getting a certain known weight of precious metal. Coins could be counterfeited, but they also created a new unit of account, which helped lead to banking. Archimedes' principle provided the next link: coins could now be easily tested for their fine weight of metal, and thus the value of a coin could be determined, even if it had been shaved, debased or otherwise tampered with (see Numismatics).
+
+In most major economies using coinage, copper, silver and gold formed three tiers of coins. Gold coins were used for large purchases, payment of the military and backing of state activities. Silver coins were used for midsized transactions, and as a unit of account for taxes, dues, contracts and fealty, while copper coins represented the coinage of common transaction. This system had been used in ancient India since the time of the Mahajanapadas. In Europe, this system worked through the medieval period because there was virtually no new gold, silver or copper introduced through mining or conquest.[citation needed] Thus the overall ratios of the three coinages remained roughly equivalent.
+
+In premodern China, the need for credit and for circulating a medium that was less of a burden than exchanging thousands of copper coins led to the introduction of paper money, commonly known today as "banknote"s. This economic phenomenon was a slow and gradual process that took place from the late Tang dynasty (618–907) into the Song dynasty (960–1279). It began as a means for merchants to exchange heavy coinage for receipts of deposit issued as promissory notes from shops of wholesalers, notes that were valid for temporary use in a small regional territory. In the 10th century, the Song dynasty government began circulating these notes amongst the traders in their monopolized salt industry. The Song government granted several shops the sole right to issue banknotes, and in the early 12th century the government finally took over these shops to produce state-issued currency. Yet the banknotes issued were still regionally valid and temporary; it was not until the mid 13th century that a standard and uniform government issue of paper money was made into an acceptable nationwide currency. The already widespread methods of woodblock printing and then Pi Sheng's movable type printing by the 11th century was the impetus for the massive production of paper money in premodern China.
+
+At around the same time in the medieval Islamic world, a vigorous monetary economy was created during the 7th–12th centuries on the basis of the expanding levels of circulation of a stable high-value currency (the dinar). Innovations introduced by economists, traders and merchants of the Muslim world include the earliest uses of credit,[38] cheques, savings accounts, transactional accounts, loaning, trusts, exchange rates, the transfer of credit and debt,[39] and banking institutions for loans and deposits.[39][need quotation to verify]
+
+In Europe, paper money was first introduced in Sweden in 1661. Sweden was rich in copper, thus, because of copper's low value, extraordinarily big coins (often weighing several kilograms) had to be made. The advantages of paper currency were numerous: it reduced transport of gold and silver, and thus lowered the risks; it made loaning gold or silver at interest easier, since the specie (gold or silver) never left the possession of the lender until someone else redeemed the note; and it allowed for a division of currency into credit and specie backed forms. It enabled the sale of stock in joint stock companies, and the redemption of those shares in paper.
+
+However, these advantages held within them disadvantages. First, since a note has no intrinsic value, there was nothing to stop issuing authorities from printing more of it than they had specie to back it with. Second, because it increased the money supply, it increased inflationary pressures, a fact observed by David Hume in the 18th century. The result is that paper money would often lead to an inflationary bubble, which could collapse if people began demanding hard money, causing the demand for paper notes to fall to zero. The printing of paper money was also associated with wars, and financing of wars, and therefore regarded as part of maintaining a standing army. For these reasons, paper currency was held in suspicion and hostility in Europe and America. It was also addictive, since the speculative profits of trade and capital creation were quite large. Major nations established mints to print money and mint coins, and branches of their treasury to collect taxes and hold gold and silver stock.
+
+At this time both silver and gold were considered legal tender, and accepted by governments for taxes. However, the instability in the ratio between the two grew over the course of the 19th century, with the increase both in supply of these metals, particularly silver, and of trade. This is called bimetallism and the attempt to create a bimetallic standard where both gold and silver backed currency remained in circulation occupied the efforts of inflationists. Governments at this point could use currency as an instrument of policy, printing paper currency such as the United States greenback, to pay for military expenditures. They could also set the terms at which they would redeem notes for specie, by limiting the amount of purchase, or the minimum amount that could be redeemed.
+
+By 1900, most of the industrializing nations were on some form of gold standard, with paper notes and silver coins constituting the circulating medium. Private banks and governments across the world followed Gresham's law: keeping gold and silver paid, but paying out in notes. This did not happen all around the world at the same time, but occurred sporadically, generally in times of war or financial crisis, beginning in the early part of the 20th century and continuing across the world until the late 20th century, when the regime of floating fiat currencies came into force. One of the last countries to break away from the gold standard was the United States in 1971.
+
+No country anywhere in the world today has an enforceable gold standard or silver standard currency system.
+
+Commercial bank money or demand deposits are claims against financial institutions that can be used for the purchase of goods and services. A demand deposit account is an account from which funds can be withdrawn at any time by check or cash withdrawal without giving the bank or financial institution any prior notice. Banks have the legal obligation to return funds held in demand deposits immediately upon demand (or 'at call'). Demand deposit withdrawals can be performed in person, via checks or bank drafts, using automatic teller machines (ATMs), or through online banking.[40]
+
+Commercial bank money is created through fractional-reserve banking, the banking practice where banks keep only a fraction of their deposits in reserve (as cash and other highly liquid assets) and lend out the remainder, while maintaining the simultaneous obligation to redeem all these deposits upon demand.[41][page needed][42] Commercial bank money differs from commodity and fiat money in two ways: firstly it is non-physical, as its existence is only reflected in the account ledgers of banks and other financial institutions, and secondly, there is some element of risk that the claim will not be fulfilled if the financial institution becomes insolvent. The process of fractional-reserve banking has a cumulative effect of money creation by commercial banks, as it expands the money supply (cash and demand deposits) beyond what it would otherwise be.  Because of the prevalence of fractional reserve banking, the broad money supply of most countries is a multiple (greater than 1) of the amount of base money created by the country's central bank. That multiple (called the money multiplier) is determined by the reserve requirement or other financial ratio requirements imposed by financial regulators.
+
+The money supply of a country is usually held to be the total amount of currency in circulation plus the total value of checking and savings deposits in the commercial banks in the country. In modern economies, relatively little of the money supply is in physical currency. For example, in December 2010 in the U.S., of the $8853.4 billion in broad money supply (M2), only $915.7 billion (about 10%) consisted of physical coins and paper money.[43]
+
+The development of computer technology in the second part of the twentieth century allowed money to be represented digitally. By 1990, in the United States all money transferred between its central bank and commercial banks was in electronic form.  By the 2000s most money existed as digital currency in bank databases.[44] In 2012, by number of transaction, 20 to 58 percent of transactions were electronic (dependant on country).[45]
+
+Non-national digital currencies were developed in the early 2000s. In particular, Flooz and Beenz had gained momentum before the Dot-com bubble.[citation needed] Not much innovation occurred until the conception of Bitcoin in 2008, which introduced the concept of a cryptocurrency – a decentralised trustless currency.[46]
+
+When gold and silver are used as money, the money supply can grow only if the supply of these metals is increased by mining. This rate of increase will accelerate during periods of gold rushes and discoveries, such as when Columbus discovered the New World and brought back gold and silver to Spain, or when gold was discovered in California in 1848. This causes inflation, as the value of gold goes down. However, if the rate of gold mining cannot keep up with the growth of the economy, gold becomes relatively more valuable, and prices (denominated in gold) will drop, causing deflation. Deflation was the more typical situation for over a century when gold and paper money backed by gold were used as money in the 18th and 19th centuries.
+
+Modern day monetary systems are based on fiat money and are no longer tied to the value of gold. The control of the amount of money in the economy is known as monetary policy. Monetary policy is the process by which a government, central bank, or monetary authority manages the money supply to achieve specific goals. Usually the goal of monetary policy is to accommodate economic growth in an environment of stable prices. For example, it is clearly stated in the Federal Reserve Act that the Board of Governors and the Federal Open Market Committee should seek "to promote effectively the goals of maximum employment, stable prices, and moderate long-term interest rates."[47]
+
+A failed monetary policy can have significant detrimental effects on an economy and the society that depends on it. These include hyperinflation, stagflation, recession, high unemployment, shortages of imported goods, inability to export goods, and even total monetary collapse and the adoption of a much less efficient barter economy. This happened in Russia, for instance, after the fall of the Soviet Union.
+
+Governments and central banks have taken both regulatory and free market approaches to monetary policy. Some of the tools used to control the money supply include:
+
+In the US, the Federal Reserve is responsible for controlling the money supply, while in the Euro area the respective institution is the European Central Bank. Other central banks with significant impact on global finances are the Bank of Japan, People's Bank of China and the Bank of England.
+
+For many years much of monetary policy was influenced by an economic theory known as monetarism. Monetarism is an economic theory which argues that management of the money supply should be the primary means of regulating economic activity. The stability of the demand for money prior to the 1980s was a key finding of Milton Friedman and Anna Schwartz[48] supported by the work of David Laidler,[49] and many others. The nature of the demand for money changed during the 1980s owing to technical, institutional, and legal factors[clarification needed] and the influence of monetarism has since decreased.
+
+Counterfeit money is imitation currency produced without the legal sanction of the state or government. Producing or using counterfeit money is a form of fraud or forgery. Counterfeiting is almost as old as money itself. Plated copies (known as Fourrées) have been found of Lydian coins which are thought to be among the first western coins.[50]  Before the introduction of paper money, the most prevalent method of counterfeiting involved mixing base metals with pure gold or silver. A form of counterfeiting is the production of documents by legitimate printers in response to fraudulent instructions. During World War II, the Nazis forged British pounds and American dollars. Today some of the finest counterfeit banknotes are called Superdollars because of their high quality and likeness to the real U.S. dollar. There has been significant counterfeiting of Euro banknotes and coins since the launch of the currency in 2002, but considerably less than for the U.S. dollar.[51]
+
+Money laundering is the process in which the proceeds of crime are transformed into ostensibly legitimate money or other assets. However, in a number of legal and regulatory systems the term money laundering has become conflated with other forms of financial crime, and sometimes used more generally to include misuse of the financial system (involving things such as securities, digital currencies, credit cards, and traditional currency), including terrorism financing, tax evasion, and evading of international sanctions.

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+William Henry Gates III  (born October 28, 1955) is an American business magnate, software developer, investor, and philanthropist. He is best known as the co-founder of Microsoft Corporation.[2][3] During his career at Microsoft, Gates held the positions of chairman, chief executive officer (CEO), president and chief software architect, while also being the largest individual shareholder until May 2014. He is one of the best-known entrepreneurs and pioneers of the microcomputer revolution of the 1970s and 1980s.
+
+Born and raised in Seattle, Washington, Gates co-founded Microsoft with childhood friend Paul Allen in 1975, in Albuquerque, New Mexico; it went on to become the world's largest personal computer software company.[4][a] Gates led the company as chairman and CEO until stepping down as CEO in January 2000, but he remained chairman and became chief software architect.[7] During the late 1990s, Gates had been criticized for his business tactics, which have been considered anti-competitive. This opinion has been upheld by numerous court rulings.[8] In June 2006, Gates announced that he would be transitioning to a part-time role at Microsoft and full-time work at the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the private charitable foundation that he and his wife, Melinda Gates, established in 2000.[9] He gradually transferred his duties to Ray Ozzie and Craig Mundie.[10] He stepped down as chairman of Microsoft in February 2014 and assumed a new post as technology adviser to support the newly appointed CEO Satya Nadella.[11]
+
+Since 1987, he has been included in the Forbes list of the world's wealthiest people.[12][13] From 1995 to 2017, he held the Forbes title of the richest person in the world all but four of those years.[1] In October 2017, he was surpassed by Amazon founder and CEO Jeff Bezos, who had an estimated net worth of US$90.6 billion compared to Gates's net worth of US$89.9 billion at the time.[14] As of July 2020[update], Gates had an estimated net worth of US$111.8 billion, making him the second-wealthiest person in the world, behind Bezos.[15][b]
+
+Later in his career and since leaving day-to-day operations at Microsoft in 2008, Gates has pursued a number of philanthropic endeavors. He has given sizable amounts of money to various charitable organizations and scientific research programs through the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, reported to be the world's largest private charity.[17] In 2009, Gates and Warren Buffett founded The Giving Pledge, whereby they and other billionaires pledge to give at least half of their wealth to philanthropy.[18]
+
+Gates was born in Seattle, Washington, on October 28, 1955.[3] He is the son of William H. Gates Sr.[c] (b. 1925) and Mary Maxwell Gates (1929–1994).[19] His ancestry includes English, German, and Irish/Scots-Irish.[20] His father was a prominent lawyer, and his mother served on the board of directors for First Interstate BancSystem and the United Way of America. Gates's maternal grandfather was J. W. Maxwell, a national bank president. Gates has an older sister Kristi (Kristianne) and a younger sister Libby. He is the fourth of his name in his family but is known as William Gates III or "Trey" (i.e., three) because his father had the "II" suffix.[21][22] The family lived in the Sand Point area of Seattle in a home that was damaged by a rare tornado when Gates was seven years old.[23]
+
+Early in his life, Gates observed that his parents wanted him to pursue a law career.[24] When he was young, his family regularly attended a church of the Congregational Christian Churches, a Protestant Reformed denomination.[25][26][27] Gates was small for his age and was bullied as a child.[22] The family encouraged competition; one visitor reported that "it didn't matter whether it was hearts or pickleball or swimming to the dock; there was always a reward for winning and there was always a penalty for losing".[28]
+
+At 13, he enrolled in the private Lakeside prep school,[29][30] where he wrote his first software program.[31] When he was in the eighth grade, the Mothers' Club at the school used proceeds from Lakeside School's rummage sale to buy a Teletype Model 33 ASR terminal and a block of computer time on a General Electric (GE) computer for the students.[32] Gates took an interest in programming the GE system in BASIC, and he was excused from math classes to pursue his interest. He wrote his first computer program on this machine, an implementation of tic-tac-toe that allowed users to play games against the computer. Gates was fascinated by the machine and how it would always execute software code perfectly.[33] After the Mothers Club donation was exhausted, Gates and other students sought time on systems including DEC PDP minicomputers. One of these systems was a PDP-10 belonging to Computer Center Corporation (CCC) which banned for the summer Gates, Paul Allen, Ric Weiland, and Gates's best friend and first business partner Kent Evans, after it caught them exploiting bugs in the operating system to obtain free computer time.[34][22]
+
+The four students formed the Lakeside Programmers Club to make money.[22] At the end of the ban, they offered to find bugs in CCC's software in exchange for extra computer time. Rather than use the system remotely via Teletype, Gates went to CCC's offices and studied source code for various programs that ran on the system, including Fortran, Lisp, and machine language. The arrangement with CCC continued until 1970 when the company went out of business.
+
+The following year, a Lakeside teacher enlisted Gates and Evans to automate the school's class-scheduling system, providing them computer time and royalties in return. The duo worked diligently in order to have the program ready for their senior year. Towards the end of their junior year, Evans was killed in a mountain climbing accident, which Gates has described as one of the saddest days of his life. Gates then turned to Allen who helped him finish the system for Lakeside.[22]
+
+At 17, Gates formed a venture with Allen called Traf-O-Data to make traffic counters based on the Intel 8008 processor.[35] In 1972, he served as a congressional page in the House of Representatives.[36][37] He was a National Merit Scholar when he graduated from Lakeside School in 1973.[38] He scored 1590 out of 1600 on the Scholastic Aptitude Tests (SAT) and enrolled at Harvard College in the autumn of 1973.[39][40] He chose a pre-law major but took mathematics and graduate level computer science courses.[41] While at Harvard, he met fellow student Steve Ballmer. Gates left Harvard after two years while Ballmer stayed and graduated magna cum laude. Years later, Ballmer succeeded Gates as Microsoft's CEO and maintained that position from 2000 until his resignation in 2014.[42][43]
+
+Gates devised an algorithm for pancake sorting as a solution to one of a series of unsolved problems[44] presented in a combinatorics class by professor Harry Lewis. His solution held the record as the fastest version for over 30 years, and its successor is faster by only 2%.[44][45] His solution was formalized and published in collaboration with Harvard computer scientist Christos Papadimitriou.[46]
+
+Gates remained in contact with Paul Allen and joined him at Honeywell during the summer of 1974.[47] In 1975, the MITS Altair 8800 was released based on the Intel 8080 CPU, and Gates and Allen saw the opportunity to start their own computer software company.[48] Gates dropped out of Harvard that same year. His parents were supportive of him after seeing how much he wanted to start his own company.[49] He explained his decision to leave Harvard: "if things hadn't worked out, I could always go back to school. I was officially on leave."[50]
+
+Gates read the January 1975 issue of Popular Electronics which demonstrated the Altair 8800, and he contacted Micro Instrumentation and Telemetry Systems (MITS) to inform them that he and others were working on a BASIC interpreter for the platform.[51] In reality, Gates and Allen did not have an Altair and had not written code for it; they merely wanted to gauge MITS's interest. MITS president Ed Roberts agreed to meet them for a demonstration, and over the course of a few weeks they developed an Altair emulator that ran on a minicomputer, and then the BASIC interpreter. The demonstration was held at MITS's offices in Albuquerque, New Mexico; it was a success and resulted in a deal with MITS to distribute the interpreter as Altair BASIC. MITS hired Allen,[52] and Gates took a leave of absence from Harvard to work with him at MITS in November 1975. Allen named their partnership "Micro-Soft", a combination of "microcomputer" and "software", and their first office was in Albuquerque. The first employee Gates and Allen hired was their high school collaborator Ric Weiland.[52] They dropped the hyphen within a year and officially registered the trade name "Microsoft" with the Secretary of the State of New Mexico on November 26, 1976.[52] Gates never returned to Harvard to complete his studies.
+
+Microsoft's Altair BASIC was popular with computer hobbyists, but Gates discovered that a pre-market copy had leaked out and was being widely copied and distributed. In February 1976, he wrote an Open Letter to Hobbyists in the MITS newsletter in which he asserted that more than 90% of the users of Microsoft Altair BASIC had not paid Microsoft for it and the Altair "hobby market" was in danger of eliminating the incentive for any professional developers to produce, distribute, and maintain high-quality software.[53] This letter was unpopular with many computer hobbyists, but Gates persisted in his belief that software developers should be able to demand payment. Microsoft became independent of MITS in late 1976, and it continued to develop programming language software for various systems.[52] The company moved from Albuquerque to Bellevue, Washington on January 1, 1979.[51]
+
+Gates said he personally reviewed and often rewrote every line of code that the company produced in its first five years. As the company grew he transitioned into a manager role, then an executive.[54]
+
+IBM, the leading supplier of computer equipment to commercial enterprises at the time, approached Microsoft in July 1980 concerning software for its upcoming personal computer, the IBM PC.[55] IBM first proposed that Microsoft write the BASIC interpreter. IBM's representatives also mentioned that they needed an operating system, and Gates referred them to Digital Research (DRI), makers of the widely used CP/M operating system.[56] IBM's discussions with Digital Research went poorly, however, and they did not reach a licensing agreement. IBM representative Jack Sams mentioned the licensing difficulties during a subsequent meeting with Gates and asked if Microsoft could provide an operating system. A few weeks later, Gates and Allen proposed using 86-DOS, an operating system similar to CP/M, that Tim Paterson of Seattle Computer Products (SCP) had made for hardware similar to the PC.[57] Microsoft made a deal with SCP to be the exclusive licensing agent of 86-DOS, and later the full owner. Microsoft employed Paterson to adapt the operating system for the PC[58] and delivered it to IBM as PC DOS for a one-time fee of $50,000.[59]
+
+The contract itself only earned Microsoft a relatively small fee.  It was the prestige brought to Microsoft by IBM's adoption of their operating system that would be the origin of Microsoft's transformation from a small business to the leading software company in the world. Gates had not offered to transfer the copyright on the operating system to IBM because he believed that other personal computer makers would clone IBM's PC hardware.[59] They did, making the IBM-compatible PC, running DOS, a de facto standard. The sales of MS-DOS (the version of DOS sold to customers other than IBM) made Microsoft a major player in the industry.[60] The press quickly identified Microsoft as being very influential on the IBM PC. PC Magazine asked if Gates was "the man behind the machine?".[55]
+
+Gates oversaw Microsoft's company restructuring on June 25, 1981, which re-incorporated the company in Washington state and made Gates the president and chairman of the board, with Paul Allen as vice president and vice chairman. In early 1983, Allen left the company after receiving a Hodgkin lymphoma diagnosis, effectively ending the formal business partnership between Gates and Allen, which had been strained months prior due to a contentious dispute over Microsoft equity.[51][61] Later in the decade, Gates repaired his relationship with Allen and together the two donated millions to their childhood school Lakeside.[22] They remained friends until Allen's death in October 2018.[62]
+
+Microsoft launched its first retail version of Microsoft Windows on November 20, 1985. In August of the following year, the company struck a deal with IBM to develop a separate operating system called OS/2. Although the two companies successfully developed the first version of the new system, the partnership deteriorated due to mounting creative differences.[63]
+
+Gates had primary responsibility for Microsoft's product strategy from the company's founding in 1975 until 2006. He gained a reputation for being distant from others; an industry executive complained in 1981 that "Gates is notorious for not being reachable by phone and for not returning phone calls."[64] An Atari executive recalled that he showed Gates a game and defeated him 35 of 37 times. When they met again a month later, Gates "won or tied every game. He had studied the game until he solved it. That is a competitor".[65]
+
+Gates met regularly with Microsoft's senior managers and program managers, and the managers described him as being verbally combative. He also berated them for perceived holes in their business strategies or proposals that placed the company's long-term interests at risk.[66][67] He interrupted presentations with such comments as "that's the stupidest thing I've ever heard"[68] and "why don't you just give up your options and join the Peace Corps?"[69] The target of his outburst would then have to defend the proposal in detail until Gates was fully convinced.[68] When subordinates appeared to be procrastinating, he was known to remark sarcastically, "I'll do it over the weekend."[70][71][72]
+
+During Microsoft's early years, Gates was an active software developer, particularly in the company's programming language products, but his primary role in most of the company's history was as a manager and executive. He has not officially been on a development team since working on the TRS-80 Model 100,[73] but he wrote code that shipped with the company's products as late as 1989.[71] Jerry Pournelle wrote in 1985 when Gates announced Microsoft Excel: "Bill Gates likes the program, not because it's going to make him a lot of money (although I'm sure it will do that), but because it's a neat hack."[74]
+
+On June 15, 2006, Gates announced that he would transition out of his role at Microsoft to dedicate more time to philanthropy. He divided his responsibilities between two successors when he placed Ray Ozzie in charge of management and Craig Mundie in charge of long-term product strategy.[75]
+
+Gates approved of many decisions that led to antitrust litigation over Microsoft's business practices. In the 1998 United States v. Microsoft case, Gates gave deposition testimony that several journalists characterized as evasive. He argued with examiner David Boies over the contextual meaning of words such as "compete", "concerned", and "we". Later in the year, when portions of the videotaped deposition were played back in court, the judge was seen laughing and shaking his head.[76] BusinessWeek reported:
+
+Early rounds of his deposition show him offering obfuscatory answers and saying "I don't recall" so many times that even the presiding judge had to chuckle. Worse, many of the technology chief's denials and pleas of ignorance were directly refuted by prosecutors with snippets of e-mail that Gates both sent and received.[77]
+
+Gates later said that he had simply resisted attempts by Boies to mischaracterize his words and actions. "Did I fence with Boies? … I plead guilty… rudeness to Boies in the first degree."[78] Despite Gates's denials, the judge ruled that Microsoft had committed monopolization, tying and blocking competition, each in violation of the Sherman Antitrust Act.[78]
+
+Since leaving day-to-day operations at Microsoft, Gates has continued his philanthropy and works on other projects.
+
+According to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index, Gates was the world's highest-earning billionaire in 2013, as his net worth increased by US$15.8 billion to US$78.5 billion. As of January 2014[update], most of Gates's assets are held in Cascade Investment LLC, an entity through which he owns stakes in numerous businesses, including Four Seasons Hotels and Resorts, and Corbis Corp.[79] On February 4, 2014, Gates stepped down as chairman of Microsoft to become "technology advisor" alongside CEO Satya Nadella.[11][80]
+
+Gates provided his perspective on a range of issues in a substantial interview that was published in the March 27, 2014 issue of Rolling Stone magazine. In the interview, Gates provided his perspective on climate change, his charitable activities, various tech companies and people involved in them, and the state of America. In response to a question about his greatest fear when he looks 50 years into the future, Gates stated: "... there'll be some really bad things that'll happen in the next 50 or 100 years, but hopefully none of them on the scale of, say, a million people that you didn't expect to die from a pandemic, or nuclear or bioterrorism." Gates also identified innovation as the "real driver of progress" and pronounced that "America's way better today than it's ever been."[81]
+
+Gates has expressed concern about the potential harms of superintelligence; in a Reddit "ask me anything", he stated that:
+
+First the machines will do a lot of jobs for us and not be super intelligent. That should be positive if we manage it well. A few decades after that though the intelligence is strong enough to be a concern. I agree with Elon Musk and some others on this and don't understand why some people are not concerned.[82][83][84][85]
+
+In an interview that was held at the TED conference in March 2015, with Baidu's CEO, Robin Li, Gates said he would "highly recommend" Nick Bostrom's recent work, Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies.[86] During the conference, Gates warned that the world was not prepared for the next pandemic, a situation that would come to pass in late 2019 when the COVID-19 pandemic began.[87] In March 2018, Gates met at his home in Seattle with Mohammed bin Salman, the reformist crown prince and de facto ruler of Saudi Arabia to discuss investment opportunities for Saudi Vision 2030.[88][89] In June 2019, Gates admitted that losing the mobile operating system race to Android was his biggest mistake. He stated that it was within their skill set of being the dominant player, but partially blames the antitrust litigation during the time.[90] That same year, Gates became an Advisory Board Member of the Bloomberg New Economy Forum.[91]
+
+On March 13, 2020, Microsoft announced Gates would be leaving his board positions at Berkshire Hathaway and Microsoft to dedicate his efforts in philanthropic endeavors such as climate change, global health and development, and education.[92]
+
+Gates studied the work of Andrew Carnegie and John D. Rockefeller, and donated some of his Microsoft stock in 1994 to create the "William H. Gates Foundation." In 2000, Gates and his wife combined three family foundations and Gates donated stock valued at $5 billion to create the charitable Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, which was identified by the Funds for NGOs company in 2013, as the world's wealthiest charitable foundation, with assets reportedly valued at more than $34.6 billion.[93][94] The foundation allows benefactors to access information that shows how its money is being spent, unlike other major charitable organizations such as the Wellcome Trust.[95][96] Gates, through his foundation, also donated $20 million to Carnegie Mellon University for a new building to be named Gates Center for Computer Science which opened in 2009.[97][98]
+
+Gates has credited the generosity and extensive philanthropy of David Rockefeller as a major influence. Gates and his father met with Rockefeller several times, and their charity work is partly modeled on the Rockefeller family's philanthropic focus, whereby they are interested in tackling the global problems that are ignored by governments and other organizations.[99] As of 2007[update], Bill and Melinda Gates were the second-most generous philanthropists in America, having given over $28 billion to charity;[100] the couple plan to eventually donate 95% of their wealth to charity.[101]
+
+The foundation is organized into four program areas: Global Development Division, Global Health Division, United States Division, and Global Policy & Advocacy Division.[102] The foundation supports the use of genetically modified organisms in agricultural development. Specifically, the foundation is supporting the International Rice Research Institute in developing Golden Rice, a genetically modified rice variant used to combat vitamin A deficiency.[103] The goal of the foundation is to provide 120 million women and girls, in the poorest countries, with high-quality contraceptive information and services, with the longer-term goal of universal access to voluntary family planning.[104] In 2007, the Los Angeles Times criticized the foundation for investing its assets in companies that have been accused of worsening poverty, pollution and pharmaceutical firms that do not sell to developing countries.[105] Although the foundation announced a review of its investments to assess social responsibility,[106] it was subsequently canceled and upheld its policy of investing for maximum return, while using voting rights to influence company practices.[107] In 2014, protests in Vancouver occurred when Gates decided to donate $50 million to UNAIDS through the Foundation for the purpose of mass circumcision in Zambia and Swaziland.[108][109]
+
+Melinda Gates suggested that people should emulate the philanthropic efforts of the Salwen family, who sold their home and gave away half of its value, as detailed in their book, The Power of Half.[110] Gates and his wife invited Joan Salwen to Seattle to speak about what the family had done, and on December 9, 2010, Bill and Melinda Gates and investor Warren Buffett each signed a commitment they called the "Giving Pledge", which is a commitment by all three to donate at least half of their wealth, over the course of time, to charity.[111][112][113]
+
+Gates has also provided personal donations to educational institutions. In 1999, Gates donated $20 million to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology for the construction of a computer laboratory named the "William H. Gates Building" that was designed by architect Frank Gehry. While Microsoft had previously given financial support to the institution, this was the first personal donation received from Gates.[114]
+
+The Maxwell Dworkin Laboratory of the Harvard John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences is named after the mothers of both Gates and Microsoft President Steven A. Ballmer, both of whom were students (Ballmer was a member of the School's graduating class of 1977, while Gates left his studies for Microsoft), and donated funds for the laboratory's construction.[115] Gates also donated $6 million to the construction of the Gates Computer Science Building, completed in January 1996, on the campus of Stanford University. The building contains the Computer Science Department and the Computer Systems Laboratory (CSL) of Stanford's Engineering department.[116]
+
+Since 2005, Gates and his foundation have taken an interest in solving global sanitation problems. For example, they announced the "Reinvent the Toilet Challenge", which has received considerable media interest.[117] To raise awareness for the topic of sanitation and possible solutions, Gates drank water that was "produced from human feces" in 2014 – in fact it was produced from a sewage sludge treatment process called the Omni Processor.[118][119] In early 2015, he also appeared with Jimmy Fallon on The Tonight Show and challenged him to see if he could taste the difference between this reclaimed water or bottled water.[120]
+
+In November 2017, Gates said he would give $50 million to the Dementia Discovery Fund, a venture capital that seeks treatment for Alzheimer's disease. He also pledged an additional $50 million to start-up ventures working in Alzheimer's research.[121] Bill and Melinda Gates have said that they intend to leave their three children $10 million each as their inheritance. With only $30 million kept in the family, they are expected to give away about 99.96% of their wealth.[122] On August 25, 2018, Gates distributed $600,000 through his foundation via UNICEF which is helping flood affected victims in Kerala, India.[123]
+
+On April 29, 2017, Gates partnered with Swiss tennis legend Roger Federer in play in the Match for Africa 4, a noncompetitive tennis match at a sold-out Key Arena in Seattle. The event was in support of Roger Federer Foundation's charity efforts in Africa.[124] Federer and Gates played against John Isner, the top-ranked American player for much of this decade, and Mike McCready, the lead guitarist for Pearl Jam. The pair won the match 6 to 4. Overall, they raised $2 million for children in Africa.[125] The following year, Gates and Federer returned to play in the Match for Africa 5 on March 5, 2018, at San Jose's SAP Center. Their opponents were Jack Sock, one of the top American players and a grand slam winner in doubles, and Savannah Guthrie, a co-anchor for NBC's Today show. Gates and Federer recorded their second match victory together by a score of 6–3 and the event raised over $2.5 million.[126]
+
+Gates married Melinda French on a golf course on the Hawaiian island of Lanai on January 1, 1994. They have three children. The family resides in Xanadu 2.0, an earth-sheltered mansion in the side of a hill overlooking Lake Washington in Medina, Washington. In 2009, property taxes on the mansion were reported to be US$1.063 million, on a total assessed value of US$147.5 million.[158] The 66,000-square-foot (6,100 m2) estate has a 60-foot (18 m) swimming pool with an underwater music system, as well as a 2,500-square-foot (230 m2) gym and a 1,000-square-foot (93 m2) dining room.[159]
+
+In an interview with Rolling Stone, Gates stated in regard to his faith: "The moral systems of religion, I think, are super important. We've raised our kids in a religious way; they've gone to the Catholic church that Melinda goes to and I participate in. I've been very lucky, and therefore I owe it to try and reduce the inequity in the world. And that's kind of a religious belief. I mean, it's at least a moral belief."[160]
+
+Gates also said: "I agree with people like Richard Dawkins that mankind felt the need for creation myths. Before we really began to understand disease and the weather and things like that, we sought false explanations for them. Now science has filled in some of the realm – not all – that religion used to fill. But the mystery and the beauty of the world is overwhelmingly amazing, and there's no scientific explanation of how it came about. To say that it was generated by random numbers, that does seem, you know, sort of an uncharitable view [laughs]. I think it makes sense to believe in God, but exactly what decision in your life you make differently because of it, I don't know."[160]
+
+Gates purchased the Codex Leicester, a collection of scientific writings by Leonardo da Vinci, for US$30.8 million at an auction in 1994.[161] Gates is an avid reader, and the ceiling of his large home library is engraved with a quotation from The Great Gatsby.[162] He also enjoys playing bridge, tennis, and golf.[163][164] Gates's days are planned for him on a minute-by-minute basis, similar to the U.S. President's schedule.[165] Despite his wealth and extensive business travel, Gates flew coach in commercial aircraft until 1997, when he bought a private jet.
+
+In 1999, his wealth briefly surpassed US$101 billion.[166][167] Since 2000, the nominal value of his Microsoft holdings has declined due to a fall in Microsoft's stock price after the dot-com bubble burst and the multi-billion dollar donations he has made to his charitable foundations. In May 2006, Gates remarked that he wished that he were not the richest man in the world because he disliked the attention it brought.[168] In March 2010, Gates was the second wealthiest person behind Carlos Slim, but regained the top position in 2013, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires List.[169][170] Slim retook the position again in June 2014[171][172] (but then lost the top position back to Gates). Between 2009 and 2014, his wealth doubled from US$40 billion to more than US$82 billion.[173] In October 2017, Gates was surpassed by Amazon founder Jeff Bezos as the richest person in the world.[14] On November 15, 2019, he once again became the richest person in the world after a 48% increase in Microsoft shares, surpassing Bezos.[174] Gates told the BBC, "I've paid more tax than any individual ever, and gladly so ... I've paid over $6 billion in taxes."[175] He is a proponent of higher taxes, particularly for the rich.[176]
+
+Gates has held the top spot on the list of The World's Billionaires for 18 out of the past 23 years.[177] Gates has several investments outside Microsoft, which in 2006 paid him a salary of US$616,667 and US$350,000 bonus totalling US$966,667.[178] In 1989, he founded Corbis, a digital imaging company. In 2004, he became a director of Berkshire Hathaway, the investment company headed by long-time friend Warren Buffett.[179]
+
+In 2016, he revealed that he is color-blind.[180]
+
+Gates has a multi-billion dollar investment portfolio with stake in various sectors[181] and has participated in several entrepreneurial ventures beyond Microsoft, including:
+
+Gates has written three books:
+
+Gates was the guest on BBC Radio 4's Desert Island Discs on January 31, 2016, in which he talked about his relationships with his father and Steve Jobs, meeting Melinda Ann French, the start of Microsoft and some of his habits (for example reading The Economist "from cover to cover every week"). His choice of things to take on a desert island were, for music: "Blue Skies" by Willie Nelson; a book: The Better Angels of Our Nature by Steven Pinker; and luxury item: a DVD Collection of Lectures from The Teaching Company.[189]
+
+Gates made a guest appearance as himself on the Emmy Award winning TV show, The Big Bang Theory. The episode on which he appeared was appropriately entitled, "The Gates Excitation."[190] He also appeared in a cameo role in 2019 on the series finale of Silicon Valley.[191]
+

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+
+
+Biodiversity is the variety and variability of life on Earth. Biodiversity is typically a measure of variation at the genetic, species, and ecosystem level.[1] Terrestrial biodiversity is usually greater near the equator,[2] which is the result of the warm climate and high primary productivity.[3] Biodiversity is not distributed evenly on Earth, and is richest in the tropics.[4] These tropical forest ecosystems cover less than 10 percent of earth's surface, and contain about 90 percent of the world's species.[5] Marine biodiversity is usually highest along coasts in the Western Pacific, where sea surface temperature is highest, and in the mid-latitudinal band in all oceans.[6] There are latitudinal gradients in species diversity.[6] Biodiversity generally tends to cluster in hotspots,[7] and has been increasing through time,[8][9] but will be likely to slow in the future.[10]
+
+Rapid environmental changes typically cause mass extinctions.[11][12][13] More than 99.9 percent of all species that ever lived on Earth, amounting to over five billion species,[14] are estimated to be extinct.[15][16] Estimates on the number of Earth's current species range from 10 million to 14 million,[17] of which about 1.2 million have been documented and over 86 percent have not yet been described.[18] More recently, in May 2016, scientists reported that 1 trillion species are estimated to be on Earth currently with only one-thousandth of one percent described.[19] The total amount of related DNA base pairs on Earth is estimated at 5.0 x 1037 and weighs 50 billion tonnes.[20] In comparison, the total mass of the biosphere has been estimated to be as much as 4 TtC (trillion tons of carbon).[21] In July 2016, scientists reported identifying a set of 355 genes from the Last Universal Common Ancestor (LUCA) of all organisms living on Earth.[22]
+
+The age of the Earth is about 4.54 billion years.[23][24][25] The earliest undisputed evidence of life on Earth dates at least from 3.5 billion years ago,[26][27][28] during the Eoarchean Era after a geological crust started to solidify following the earlier molten Hadean Eon. There are microbial mat fossils found in 3.48 billion-year-old sandstone discovered in Western Australia.[29][30][31] Other early physical evidence of a biogenic substance is graphite in 3.7 billion-year-old meta-sedimentary rocks discovered in Western Greenland.[32] More recently, in 2015, "remains of biotic life" were found in 4.1 billion-year-old rocks in Western Australia.[33][34] According to one of the researchers, "If life arose relatively quickly on Earth .. then it could be common in the universe."[33]
+
+Since life began on Earth, five major mass extinctions and several minor events have led to large and sudden drops in biodiversity. The Phanerozoic eon (the last 540 million years) marked a rapid growth in biodiversity via the Cambrian explosion—a period during which the majority of multicellular phyla first appeared.[35] The next 400 million years included repeated, massive biodiversity losses classified as mass extinction events. In the Carboniferous, rainforest collapse led to a great loss of plant and animal life.[36] The Permian–Triassic extinction event, 251 million years ago, was the worst; vertebrate recovery took 30 million years.[37] The most recent, the Cretaceous–Paleogene extinction event, occurred 65 million years ago and has often attracted more attention than others because it resulted in the extinction of the non-avian dinosaurs.[38]
+
+The period since the emergence of humans has displayed an ongoing biodiversity reduction and an accompanying loss of genetic diversity. Named the Holocene extinction, the reduction is caused primarily by human impacts, particularly habitat destruction.[39] Conversely, biodiversity positively impacts human health in a number of ways, although a few negative effects are studied.[40]
+
+The United Nations designated 2011–2020 as the United Nations Decade on Biodiversity.[41] and 2021–2030 as the United Nations Decade on Ecosystem Restoration[42] According to a 2019 Global Assessment Report on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services by IPBES, 25% of plant and animal species are threatened with extinction as the result of human activity.[43][44][45] ...
+
+"Biodiversity" is most commonly used to replace the more clearly defined and long established terms, species diversity and species richness.[52]
+
+Biologists most often define biodiversity as the "totality of genes, species and ecosystems of a region".[53][54] An advantage of this definition is that it seems to describe most circumstances and presents a unified view of the traditional types of biological variety previously identified:
+
+An explicit definition consistent with this interpretation was first given in a paper by Bruce A. Wilcox commissioned by the International Union for the Conservation of Nature and Natural Resources (IUCN) for the 1982 World National Parks Conference. [58]Wilcox's definition was "Biological diversity is the variety of life forms...at all levels of biological systems (i.e., molecular, organismic, population, species and ecosystem)...".[58]
+
+Biodiversity can be defined genetically as the diversity of alleles, genes and organisms. They study processes such as mutation and gene transfer that drive evolution.[58]
+
+The 1992 United Nations Earth Summit defined "biological diversity" as "the variability among living organisms from all sources, including, 'inter alia', terrestrial, marine and other aquatic ecosystems and the ecological complexes of which they are part: this includes diversity within species, between species and of ecosystems".[59] This definition is used in the United Nations Convention on Biological Diversity.[59]
+
+Gaston & Spicer's definition in their book "Biodiversity: an introduction" is "variation of life at all levels of biological organization".[60]
+
+Biodiversity is not evenly distributed, rather it varies greatly across the globe as well as within regions. Among other factors, the diversity of all living things (biota) depends on temperature, precipitation, altitude, soils, geography and the presence of other species. The study of the spatial distribution of organisms, species and ecosystems, is the science of biogeography.[61][62]
+
+Diversity consistently measures higher in the tropics and in other localized regions such as the Cape Floristic Region and lower in polar regions generally. Rain forests that have had wet climates for a long time, such as Yasuní National Park in Ecuador, have particularly high biodiversity.[63][64]
+
+Terrestrial biodiversity is thought to be up to 25 times greater than ocean biodiversity.[65] A new method used in 2011, put the total number of species on Earth at 8.7 million, of which 2.1 million were estimated to live in the ocean.[66] However, this estimate seems to under-represent the diversity of microorganisms.[67]
+
+Generally, there is an increase in biodiversity from the poles to the tropics. Thus localities at lower latitudes have more species than localities at higher latitudes. This is often referred to as the latitudinal gradient in species diversity. Several ecological factors may contribute to the gradient, but the ultimate factor behind many of them is the greater mean temperature at the equator compared to that of the poles.[68][69][70]
+
+Even though terrestrial biodiversity declines from the equator to the poles,[71] some studies claim that this characteristic is unverified in aquatic ecosystems, especially in marine ecosystems.[72] The latitudinal distribution of parasites does not appear to follow this rule.[61]
+
+In 2016, an alternative hypothesis ("the fractal biodiversity") was proposed to explain the biodiversity latitudinal gradient.[73] In this study, the species pool size and the fractal nature of ecosystems were combined to clarify some general patterns of this gradient. This hypothesis considers temperature, moisture, and net primary production (NPP) as the main variables of an ecosystem niche and as the axis of the ecological hypervolume. In this way, it is possible to build fractal hypervolumes, whose fractal dimension rises to three moving towards the equator.[74]
+
+A biodiversity hotspot is a region with a high level of endemic species that have experienced great habitat loss.[75] The term hotspot was introduced in 1988 by Norman Myers.[76][77][78][79] While hotspots are spread all over the world, the majority are forest areas and most are located in the tropics.
+
+Brazil's Atlantic Forest is considered one such hotspot, containing roughly 20,000 plant species, 1,350 vertebrates and millions of insects, about half of which occur nowhere else.[80][citation needed] The island of Madagascar and India are also particularly notable. Colombia is characterized by high biodiversity, with the highest rate of species by area unit worldwide and it has the largest number of endemics (species that are not found naturally anywhere else) of any country. About 10% of the species of the Earth can be found in Colombia, including over 1,900 species of bird, more than in Europe and North America combined, Colombia has 10% of the world's mammals species, 14% of the amphibian species and 18% of the bird species of the world.[81] Madagascar dry deciduous forests and lowland rainforests possess a high ratio of endemism.[82][83] Since the island separated from mainland Africa 66 million years ago, many species and ecosystems have evolved independently.[84] Indonesia's 17,000 islands cover 735,355 square miles (1,904,560 km2) and contain 10% of the world's flowering plants, 12% of mammals and 17% of reptiles, amphibians and birds—along with nearly 240 million people.[85] Many regions of high biodiversity and/or endemism arise from specialized habitats which require unusual adaptations, for example, alpine environments in high mountains, or Northern European peat bogs.[83]
+
+Accurately measuring differences in biodiversity can be difficult. Selection bias amongst researchers may contribute to biased empirical research for modern estimates of biodiversity. In 1768, Rev. Gilbert White succinctly observed of his Selborne, Hampshire "all nature is so full, that that district produces the most variety which is the most examined."[86]
+
+Biodiversity is the result of 3.5 billion years of evolution.[12] The origin of life has not been established by science, however, some evidence suggests that life may already have been well-established only a few hundred million years after the formation of the Earth. Until approximately 2.5 billion years ago, all life consisted of microorganisms – archaea, bacteria, and single-celled protozoans and protists.[67]
+
+The history of biodiversity during the Phanerozoic (the last 540 million years), starts with rapid growth during the Cambrian explosion—a period during which nearly every phylum of multicellular organisms first appeared. [88]Over the next 400 million years or so, invertebrate diversity showed little overall trend and vertebrate diversity shows an overall exponential trend.[55] This dramatic rise in diversity was marked by periodic, massive losses of diversity classified as mass extinction events.[55] A significant loss occurred when rainforests collapsed in the carboniferous.[36] The worst was the Permian-Triassic extinction event, 251 million years ago. Vertebrates took 30 million years to recover from this event.[37]
+
+The fossil record suggests that the last few million years featured the greatest biodiversity in history.[55] However, not all scientists support this view, since there is uncertainty as to how strongly the fossil record is biased by the greater availability and preservation of recent geologic sections.[26] Some scientists believe that corrected for sampling artifacts, modern biodiversity may not be much different from biodiversity 300 million years ago,[88] whereas others consider the fossil record reasonably reflective of the diversification of life.[55] Estimates of the present global macroscopic species diversity vary from 2 million to 100 million, with a best estimate of somewhere near 9 million,[66] the vast majority arthropods.[89] Diversity appears to increase continually in the absence of natural selection.[90]
+
+The existence of a global carrying capacity, limiting the amount of life that can live at once, is debated, as is the question of whether such a limit would also cap the number of species. While records of life in the sea show a logistic pattern of growth, life on land (insects, plants and tetrapods) shows an exponential rise in diversity.[55] As one author states, "Tetrapods have not yet invaded 64 percent of potentially habitable modes and it could be that without human influence the ecological and taxonomic diversity of tetrapods would continue to increase exponentially until most or all of the available eco-space is filled."[55]
+
+It also appears that the diversity continues to increase over time, especially after mass extinctions.[91]
+
+On the other hand, changes through the Phanerozoic correlate much better with the hyperbolic model (widely used in population biology, demography and macrosociology, as well as fossil biodiversity) than with exponential and logistic models. The latter models imply that changes in diversity are guided by a first-order positive feedback (more ancestors, more descendants) and/or a negative feedback arising from resource limitation. Hyperbolic model implies a second-order positive feedback. [92]Differences in the strength of the second-order feedback due to different intensities of interspecific competition might explain the faster rediversification of ammonoids in comparison to bivalves after the end-Permian extinction.[92] The hyperbolic pattern of the world population growth arises from a second-order positive feedback between the population size and the rate of technological growth.[93] The hyperbolic character of biodiversity growth can be similarly accounted for by a feedback between diversity and community structure complexity. [93][94]The similarity between the curves of biodiversity and human population probably comes from the fact that both are derived from the interference of the hyperbolic trend with cyclical and stochastic dynamics.[93][94]
+
+Most biologists agree however that the period since human emergence is part of a new mass extinction, named the Holocene extinction event, caused primarily by the impact humans are having on the environment.[95] It has been argued that the present rate of extinction is sufficient to eliminate most species on the planet Earth within 100 years.[96]
+
+New species are regularly discovered (on average between 5–10,000 new species each year, most of them insects) and many, though discovered, are not yet classified (estimates are that nearly 90% of all arthropods are not yet classified).[89] Most of the terrestrial diversity is found in tropical forests and in general, the land has more species than the ocean; some 8.7 million species may exist on Earth, of which some 2.1 million live in the ocean.[66]
+
+"Ecosystem services are the suite of benefits that ecosystems provide to humanity."[97] The natural species, or biota, are the caretakers of all ecosystems. It is as if the natural world is an enormous bank account of capital assets capable of paying life sustaining dividends indefinitely, but only if the capital is maintained.[98]
+
+These services come in three flavors:
+
+There have been many claims about biodiversity's effect on these ecosystem services, especially provisioning and regulating services. [97]After an exhaustive survey through peer-reviewed literature to evaluate 36 different claims about biodiversity's effect on ecosystem services, 14 of those claims have been validated, 6 demonstrate mixed support or are unsupported, 3 are incorrect and 13 lack enough evidence to draw definitive conclusions.[97]
+
+Greater species diversity
+
+Greater species diversity
+
+Other sources have reported somewhat conflicting results and in 1997 Robert Costanza and his colleagues reported the estimated global value of ecosystem services (not captured in traditional markets) at an average of $33 trillion annually.[114]
+
+Since the Stone Age, species loss has accelerated above the average basal rate, driven by human activity. Estimates of species losses are at a rate 100–10,000 times as fast as is typical in the fossil record.[115] Biodiversity also affords many non-material benefits including spiritual and aesthetic values, knowledge systems and education.[115]
+
+Agricultural diversity can be divided into two categories: intraspecific diversity, which includes the genetic variation within a single species, like the potato (Solanum tuberosum) that is composed of many different forms and types (e.g. in the U.S. they might compare russet potatoes with new potatoes or purple potatoes, all different, but all part of the same species, S. tuberosum).
+
+The other category of agricultural diversity is called interspecific diversity and refers to the number and types of different species. Thinking about this diversity we might note that many small vegetable farmers grow many different crops like potatoes and also carrots, peppers, lettuce, etc.
+
+Agricultural diversity can also be divided by whether it is 'planned' diversity or 'associated' diversity. This is a functional classification that we impose and not an intrinsic feature of life or diversity. Planned diversity includes the crops which a farmer has encouraged, planted or raised (e.g. crops, covers, symbionts, and livestock, among others), which can be contrasted with the associated diversity that arrives among the crops, uninvited (e.g. herbivores, weed species and pathogens, among others).[116]
+
+The control of associated biodiversity is one of the great agricultural challenges that farmers face. On monoculture farms, the approach is generally to eradicate associated diversity using a suite of biologically destructive pesticides, mechanized tools and transgenic engineering techniques, then to rotate crops. Although some polyculture farmers use the same techniques, they also employ integrated pest management strategies as well as more labor-intensive strategies, but generally less dependent on capital, biotechnology, and energy.
+
+Interspecific crop diversity is, in part, responsible for offering variety in what we eat. Intraspecific diversity, the variety of alleles within a single species, also offers us a choice in our diets. If a crop fails in a monoculture, we rely on agricultural diversity to replant the land with something new. If a wheat crop is destroyed by a pest we may plant a hardier variety of wheat the next year, relying on intraspecific diversity. We may forgo wheat production in that area and plant a different species altogether, relying on interspecific diversity. Even an agricultural society that primarily grows monocultures relies on biodiversity at some point.
+
+Monoculture was a contributing factor to several agricultural disasters, including the European wine industry collapse in the late 19th century and the US southern corn leaf blight epidemic of 1970.[119]
+
+Although about 80 percent of humans' food supply comes from just 20 kinds of plants,[citation needed][120] humans use at least 40,000 species.[citation needed][121] Many people depend on these species for food, shelter and clothing.[citation needed] Earth's surviving biodiversity provides resources for increasing the range of food and other products suitable for human use, although the present extinction rate shrinks that potential.[96]
+
+Biodiversity's relevance to human health is becoming an international political issue, as scientific evidence builds on the global health implications of biodiversity loss.[122][123][124] This issue is closely linked with the issue of climate change,[125] as many of the anticipated health risks of climate change are associated with changes in biodiversity (e.g. changes in populations and distribution of disease vectors, scarcity of fresh water, impacts on agricultural biodiversity and food resources etc.). This is because the species most likely to disappear are those that buffer against infectious disease transmission, while surviving species tend to be the ones that increase disease transmission, such as that of West Nile Virus, Lyme disease and Hantavirus, according to a study done co-authored by Felicia Keesing, an ecologist at Bard College and Drew Harvell, associate director for Environment of the Atkinson Center for a Sustainable Future (ACSF) at Cornell University.[126]
+
+The growing demand and lack of drinkable water on the planet presents an additional challenge to the future of human health. Partly, the problem lies in the success of water suppliers to increase supplies and failure of groups promoting the preservation of water resources.[127] While the distribution of clean water increases, in some parts of the world it remains unequal. According to the World Health Organisation (2018), only 71% of the global population used a safely managed drinking-water service.[128]
+
+Some of the health issues influenced by biodiversity include dietary health and nutrition security, infectious disease, medical science and medicinal resources, social and psychological health.[129] Biodiversity is also known to have an important role in reducing disaster risk and in post-disaster relief and recovery efforts.[130][131]
+
+According to the United Nations Environment Programme a pathogen, like a virus, have more chances to meet resistance in a diverse population. Therefore, in a population genetically similar it expands more easily. For example, the Coronavirus pandemic had less chances to occur in a world with higher biodiversity[132].
+
+Biodiversity provides critical support for drug discovery and the availability of medicinal resources.[133][134] A significant proportion of drugs are derived, directly or indirectly, from biological sources: at least 50% of the pharmaceutical compounds on the US market are derived from plants, animals and microorganisms, while about 80% of the world population depends on medicines from nature (used in either modern or traditional medical practice) for primary healthcare.[123] Only a tiny fraction of wild species has been investigated for medical potential. Biodiversity has been critical to advances throughout the field of bionics. Evidence from market analysis and biodiversity science indicates that the decline in output from the pharmaceutical sector since the mid-1980s can be attributed to a move away from natural product exploration ("bioprospecting") in favour of genomics and synthetic chemistry, indeed claims about the value of undiscovered pharmaceuticals may not provide enough incentive for companies in free markets to search for them because of the high cost of development;[135] meanwhile, natural products have a long history of supporting significant economic and health innovation.[136][137] Marine ecosystems are particularly important,[138] although inappropriate bioprospecting can increase biodiversity loss, as well as violating the laws of the communities and states from which the resources are taken.[139][140][141]
+
+Many industrial materials derive directly from biological sources. These include building materials, fibers, dyes, rubber, and oil. Biodiversity is also important to the security of resources such as water, timber, paper, fiber, and food.[142][143][144] As a result, biodiversity loss is a significant risk factor in business development and a threat to long-term economic sustainability.[145][146]
+
+Biodiversity enriches leisure activities such as hiking, birdwatching or natural history study. Biodiversity inspires musicians, painters, sculptors, writers and other artists. Many cultures view themselves as an integral part of the natural world which requires them to respect other living organisms.
+
+Popular activities such as gardening, fishkeeping and specimen collecting strongly depend on biodiversity. The number of species involved in such pursuits is in the tens of thousands, though the majority do not enter commerce.
+
+The relationships between the original natural areas of these often exotic animals and plants and commercial collectors, suppliers, breeders, propagators and those who promote their understanding and enjoyment are complex and poorly understood. The general public responds well to exposure to rare and unusual organisms, reflecting their inherent value.
+
+Philosophically it could be argued that biodiversity has intrinsic aesthetic and spiritual value to mankind in and of itself. This idea can be used as a counterweight to the notion that tropical forests and other ecological realms are only worthy of conservation because of the services they provide.[147]
+
+Biodiversity supports many ecosystem services:
+
+"There is now unequivocal evidence that biodiversity loss reduces the efficiency by which ecological communities capture biologically essential resources, produce biomass, decompose and recycle biologically essential nutrients... There is mounting evidence that biodiversity increases the stability of ecosystem functions through time... Diverse communities are more productive because they contain key species that have a large influence on productivity and differences in functional traits among organisms increase total resource capture... The impacts of diversity loss on ecological processes might be sufficiently large to rival the impacts of many other global drivers of environmental change... Maintaining multiple ecosystem processes at multiple places and times requires higher levels of biodiversity than does a single process at a single place and time."[97]
+
+It plays a part in regulating the chemistry of our atmosphere and water supply. Biodiversity is directly involved in water purification, recycling nutrients and providing fertile soils. Experiments with controlled environments have shown that humans cannot easily build ecosystems to support human needs;[148] for example insect pollination cannot be mimicked, though there have been attempts to create artificial pollinators using unmanned aerial vehicles.[149] The economic activity of pollination alone represented between $2.1–14.6 billion in 2003.[150]
+
+According to Mora and colleagues, the total number of terrestrial species is estimated to be around 8.7 million while the number of oceanic species is much lower, estimated at 2.2 million. The authors note that these estimates are strongest for eukaryotic organisms and likely represent the lower bound of prokaryote diversity.[151] Other estimates include:
+
+Since the rate of extinction has increased, many extant species may become extinct before they are described.[163] Not surprisingly, in the animalia the most studied groups are birds and mammals, whereas fishes and arthropods are the least studied animals groups.[164]
+
+No longer do we have to justify the existence of humid tropical forests on the feeble grounds that they might carry plants with drugs that cure human disease. Gaia theory forces us to see that they offer much more than this. Through their capacity to evapotranspirate vast volumes of water vapor, they serve to keep the planet cool by wearing a sunshade of white reflecting cloud. Their replacement by cropland could precipitate a disaster that is global in scale.
+
+During the last century, decreases in biodiversity have been increasingly observed. In 2007, German Federal Environment Minister Sigmar Gabriel cited estimates that up to 30% of all species will be extinct by 2050.[166] Of these, about one eighth of known plant species are threatened with extinction.[167] Estimates reach as high as 140,000 species per year (based on Species-area theory).[168] This figure indicates unsustainable ecological practices, because few species emerge each year.[citation needed] Almost all scientists acknowledge that the rate of species loss is greater now than at any time in human history, with extinctions occurring at rates hundreds of times higher than background extinction rates.[167] As of 2012, some studies suggest that 25% of all mammal species could be extinct in 20 years.[169]
+
+In absolute terms, the planet has lost 58% of its biodiversity since 1970 according to a 2016 study by the World Wildlife Fund. The Living Planet Report 2014 claims that "the number of mammals, birds, reptiles, amphibians, and fish across the globe is, on average, about half the size it was 40 years ago". Of that number, 39% accounts for the terrestrial wildlife gone, 39% for the marine wildlife gone and 76% for the freshwater wildlife gone. Biodiversity took the biggest hit in Latin America, plummeting 83 percent. High-income countries showed a 10% increase in biodiversity, which was canceled out by a loss in low-income countries. This is despite the fact that high-income countries use five times the ecological resources of low-income countries, which was explained as a result of a process whereby wealthy nations are outsourcing resource depletion to poorer nations, which are suffering the greatest ecosystem losses.[170]
+
+A 2017 study published in PLOS One found that the biomass of insect life in Germany had declined by three-quarters in the last 25 years. Dave Goulson of Sussex University stated that their study suggested that humans "appear to be making vast tracts of land inhospitable to most forms of life, and are currently on course for ecological Armageddon. If we lose the insects then everything is going to collapse."[171]
+
+In 2006, many species were formally classified as rare or endangered or threatened; moreover, scientists have estimated that millions more species are at risk which have not been formally recognized. About 40 percent of the 40,177 species assessed using the IUCN Red List criteria are now listed as threatened with extinction—a total of 16,119.[172]
+
+Jared Diamond describes an "Evil Quartet" of habitat destruction, overkill, introduced species and secondary extinctions.[173] Edward O. Wilson prefers the acronym HIPPO, standing for Habitat destruction, Invasive species, Pollution, human over-Population and Over-harvesting.[174][175] The most authoritative classification in use today is IUCN's Classification of Direct Threats[176] (version 2.0 released in 2016) which has been adopted by major international conservation organizations such as the US Nature Conservancy, the World Wildlife Fund, Conservation International and BirdLife International.
+
+The 11 main direct threats to conservation are:
+
+1.  residential & commercial development
+
+2.  farming activities
+
+3.  energy production & mining
+
+4.  transportation & service corridors
+
+5.  biological resource usages
+
+6.  human intrusions & activities that alter, destroy, simply disturb habitats and species from exhibiting natural behaviors
+
+7.  natural system modifications
+
+8.  invasive & problematic species, pathogens & genes
+
+9.  pollution
+
+10. catastrophic geological events
+
+11. climate changes
+
+Habitat destruction has played a key role in extinctions, especially in relation to tropical forest destruction.[177] Factors contributing to habitat loss include: overconsumption, overpopulation, land use change, deforestation,[178] pollution (air pollution, water pollution, soil contamination) and global warming or climate change.[179][180]
+
+Habitat size and numbers of species are systematically related. Physically larger species and those living at lower latitudes or in forests or oceans are more sensitive to reduction in habitat area.[181] Conversion to "trivial" standardized ecosystems (e.g., monoculture following deforestation) effectively destroys habitat for the more diverse species that preceded the conversion. Even the simplest forms of agriculture affect diversity – through clearing/draining the land, discouraging weeds and "pests", and encouraging just a limited set of domesticated plant and animal species. In some countries, property rights [182] or lax law/regulatory enforcement are associated with deforestation and habitat loss.[183]
+
+A 2007 study conducted by the National Science Foundation found that biodiversity and genetic diversity are codependent—that diversity among species requires diversity within a species and vice versa. "If anyone type is removed from the system, the cycle can break down and the community becomes dominated by a single species."[184]
+At present[update], the most threatened ecosystems occur in fresh water, according to the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment 2005, which was confirmed by the "Freshwater Animal Diversity Assessment" organised by the biodiversity platform and the French Institut de recherche pour le développement (MNHNP).[185]
+
+Co-extinctions are a form of habitat destruction. Co-extinction occurs when the extinction or decline in one species accompanies similar processes in another, such as in plants and beetles.[186]
+
+A 2019 report has revealed that bees and other pollinating insects have been wiped out of almost a quarter of their habitats across the United Kingdom. The population crashes have been happening since the 1980s and are affecting biodiversity. The increase in industrial farming and pesticide use, combined with diseases, invasive species, and climate change is threatening the future of these insects and the agriculture they support.[187]
+
+Barriers such as large rivers, seas, oceans, mountains and deserts encourage diversity by enabling independent evolution on either side of the barrier, via the process of allopatric speciation. The term invasive species is applied to species that breach the natural barriers that would normally keep them constrained. Without barriers, such species occupy new territory, often supplanting native species by occupying their niches, or by using resources that would normally sustain native species.
+
+The number of species invasions has been on the rise at least since the beginning of the 1900s. Species are increasingly being moved by humans (on purpose and accidentally). In some cases the invaders are causing drastic changes and damage to their new habitats (e.g.: zebra mussels and the emerald ash borer in the Great Lakes region and the lion fish along the North American Atlantic coast). Some evidence suggests that invasive species are competitive in their new habitats because they are subject to less pathogen disturbance.[188] Others report confounding evidence that occasionally suggest that species-rich communities harbor many native and exotic species simultaneously[189] while some say that diverse ecosystems are more resilient and resist invasive plants and animals.[190] An important question is, "do invasive species cause extinctions?" Many studies cite effects of invasive species on natives,[191] but not extinctions. Invasive species seem to increase local (i.e.: alpha diversity) diversity, which decreases turnover of diversity (i.e.: beta diversity). Overall gamma diversity may be lowered because species are going extinct because of other causes,[192] but even some of the most insidious invaders (e.g.: Dutch elm disease, emerald ash borer, chestnut blight in North America) have not caused their host species to become extinct. Extirpation, population decline and homogenization of regional biodiversity are much more common. Human activities have frequently been the cause of invasive species circumventing their barriers,[193] by introducing them for food and other purposes. Human activities therefore allow species to migrate to new areas (and thus become invasive) occurred on time scales much shorter than historically have been required for a species to extend its range.
+
+Not all introduced species are invasive, nor all invasive species deliberately introduced. In cases such as the zebra mussel, invasion of US waterways was unintentional. In other cases, such as mongooses in Hawaii, the introduction is deliberate but ineffective (nocturnal rats were not vulnerable to the diurnal mongoose). In other cases, such as oil palms in Indonesia and Malaysia, the introduction produces substantial economic benefits, but the benefits are accompanied by costly unintended consequences.
+
+Finally, an introduced species may unintentionally injure a species that depends on the species it replaces. In Belgium, Prunus spinosa from Eastern Europe leafs much sooner than its West European counterparts, disrupting the feeding habits of the Thecla betulae butterfly (which feeds on the leaves). Introducing new species often leaves endemic and other local species unable to compete with the exotic species and unable to survive. The exotic organisms may be predators, parasites, or may simply outcompete indigenous species for nutrients, water and light.
+
+At present, several countries have already imported so many exotic species, particularly agricultural and ornamental plants, that their indigenous fauna/flora may be outnumbered. For example, the introduction of kudzu from Southeast Asia to Canada and the United States has threatened biodiversity in certain areas.[194]
+
+Endemic species can be threatened with extinction[195] through the process of genetic pollution, i.e. uncontrolled hybridization, introgression and genetic swamping. Genetic pollution leads to homogenization or replacement of local genomes as a result of either a numerical and/or fitness advantage of an introduced species.[196]
+Hybridization and introgression are side-effects of introduction and invasion. These phenomena can be especially detrimental to rare species that come into contact with more abundant ones. The abundant species can interbreed with the rare species, swamping its gene pool. This problem is not always apparent from morphological (outward appearance) observations alone. Some degree of gene flow is normal adaptation and not all gene and genotype constellations can be preserved. However, hybridization with or without introgression may, nevertheless, threaten a rare species' existence.[197][198]
+
+Overexploitation occurs when a resource is consumed at an unsustainable rate. This occurs on land in the form of overhunting, excessive logging, poor soil conservation in agriculture and the illegal wildlife trade.
+
+About 25% of world fisheries are now overfished to the point where their current biomass is less than the level that maximizes their sustainable yield.[199]
+
+The overkill hypothesis, a pattern of large animal extinctions connected with human migration patterns, can be used to explain why megafaunal extinctions can occur within a relatively short time period.[200]
+
+In agriculture and animal husbandry, the Green Revolution popularized the use of conventional hybridization to increase yield. Often hybridized breeds originated in developed countries and were further hybridized with local varieties in the developing world to create high yield strains resistant to local climate and diseases. Local governments and industry have been pushing hybridization. Formerly huge gene pools of various wild and indigenous breeds have collapsed causing widespread genetic erosion and genetic pollution. This has resulted in the loss of genetic diversity and biodiversity as a whole.[201]
+
+Genetically modified organisms contain genetic material that is altered through genetic engineering. Genetically modified crops have become a common source for genetic pollution in not only wild varieties, but also in domesticated varieties derived from classical hybridization.[202][203][204][205][206]
+
+Genetic erosion and genetic pollution have the potential to destroy unique genotypes, threatening future access to food security. A decrease in genetic diversity weakens the ability of crops and livestock to be hybridized to resist disease and survive changes in climate.[201]
+
+Global warming is a major threat to global biodiversity.[207][208] For example, coral reefs – which are biodiversity hotspots – will be lost within the century if global warming continues at the current rate.[209][210]
+
+Climate change has proven to affect biodiversity and evidence supporting the altering effects is widespread. Increasing atmospheric carbon dioxide certainly affects plant morphology[211] and is acidifying oceans,[212] and temperature affects species ranges,[213][214][215] phenology,[216] and weather,[217] but, mercifully, the major impacts that have been predicted are still potential futures. We have not documented major extinctions yet, even as climate change drastically alters the biology of many species.
+
+In 2004, an international collaborative study on four continents estimated that 10 percent of species would become extinct by 2050 because of global warming. "We need to limit climate change or we wind up with a lot of species in trouble, possibly extinct," said Dr. Lee Hannah, a co-author of the paper and chief climate change biologist at the Center for Applied Biodiversity Science at Conservation International.[218]
+
+A recent study predicts that up to 35% of the world terrestrial carnivores and ungulates will be at higher risk of extinction by 2050 because of the joint effects of predicted climate and land-use change under business-as-usual human development scenarios.[219]
+
+Climate change has advanced the time of evening when Brazilian free-tailed bats (Tadarida brasiliensis) emerge to feed.  This change is believed to be related to the drying of regions as temperatures rise. This earlier emergence exposes the bats to greater predation increased competition with other insectivores who feed in the twilight or daylight hours.[220]
+
+The world's population numbered nearly 7.6 billion as of mid-2017 (which is approximately one billion more inhabitants compared to 2005) and is forecast to reach 11.1 billion in 2100.[221] Sir David King, former chief scientific adviser to the UK government, told a parliamentary inquiry: "It is self-evident that the massive growth in the human population through the 20th century has had more impact on biodiversity than any other single factor."[222][223] At least until the middle of the 21st century, worldwide losses of pristine biodiverse land will probably depend much on the worldwide human birth rate.[224] Biologists such as Paul R. Ehrlich and Stuart Pimm have noted that human population growth and overconsumption are the main drivers of species extinction.[225][226][227]
+
+According to a 2014 study by the World Wildlife Fund, the global human population already exceeds planet's biocapacity – it would take the equivalent of 1.5 Earths of biocapacity to meet our current demands.[228] The report further points that if everyone on the planet had the Footprint of the average resident of Qatar, we would need 4.8 Earths and if we lived the lifestyle of a typical resident of the US, we would need 3.9 Earths.[170]
+
+Rates of decline in biodiversity in this sixth mass extinction match or exceed rates of loss in the five previous mass extinction events in the fossil record.[229][230][231][232][233][234][235] Loss of biodiversity results in the loss of natural capital that supplies ecosystem goods and services. From the perspective of the method known as Natural Economy the economic value of 17 ecosystem services for Earth's biosphere (calculated in 1997) has an estimated value of US$33 trillion (3.3x1013) per year.[236]
+
+In 2019, a summary for policymakers of the largest, most comprehensive study to date of biodiversity and ecosystem services, the Global Assessment Report on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services, was published by the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services. The report was finalized in Paris. The main conclusions:
+
+1. Over the last 50 years, the state of nature has deteriorated at an unprecedented and accelerating rate.
+
+2. The main drivers of this deterioration have been changes in land and sea use, exploitation of living beings, climate change, pollution, and invasive species. These five drivers, in turn, are caused by societal behaviors, from consumption to governance.
+
+3. Damage to ecosystems undermines 35 of 44 selected UN targets, including the UN General Assembly's Sustainable Development Goals for poverty, hunger, health, water, cities' climate, oceans, and land. It can cause problems with food, water and humanity's air supply.
+
+4. To fix the problem, humanity will need a transformative change, including sustainable agriculture, reductions in consumption and waste, fishing quotas and collaborative water management. On page 8 the report proposes on page 8 of the summary " enabling visions of a good quality of life that do not entail ever-increasing material consumption" as one of the main measures. The report states that  "Some pathways chosen to achieve the goals related to energy, economic growth, industry and infrastructure and sustainable consumption and production (Sustainable Development Goals 7, 8, 9 and 12), as well as targets related to poverty, food security and cities (Sustainable Development Goals 1, 2 and 11), could have substantial positive or negative impacts on nature and therefore on the achievement of other Sustainable Development Goals".[237][238]
+
+Conservation biology matured in the mid-20th century as ecologists, naturalists and other scientists began to research and address issues pertaining to global biodiversity declines.[240][241][242]
+
+The conservation ethic advocates management of natural resources for the purpose of sustaining biodiversity in species, ecosystems, the evolutionary process and human culture and society.[230][240][242][243][244]
+
+Conservation biology is reforming around strategic plans to protect biodiversity.[240][245][246] Preserving global biodiversity is a priority in strategic conservation plans that are designed to engage public policy and concerns affecting local, regional and global scales of communities, ecosystems and cultures.[247] Action plans identify ways of sustaining human well-being, employing natural capital, market capital and ecosystem services.[248][249]
+
+In the EU Directive 1999/22/EC zoos are described as having a role in the preservation of the biodiversity of wildlife animals by conducting research or participation in breeding programs.[250]
+
+Removal of exotic species will allow the species that they have negatively impacted to recover their ecological niches. Exotic species that have become pests can be identified taxonomically (e.g., with Digital Automated Identification SYstem (DAISY), using the barcode of life).[251][252] Removal is practical only given large groups of individuals due to the economic cost.
+
+As sustainable populations of the remaining native species in an area become assured, "missing" species that are candidates for reintroduction can be identified using databases such as the Encyclopedia of Life and the Global Biodiversity Information Facility.
+
+Protected areas are meant for affording protection to wild animals and their habitat which also includes forest reserves and biosphere reserves.[255] Protected areas have been set up all over the world with the specific aim of protecting and conserving plants and animals. Some scientists have called on the global community to designate as protected areas of 30 percent of the planet by 2030, and 50 percent by 2050, in order to mitigate biodiversity loss from anthropogenic causes.[256]
+
+National park and nature reserve is the area selected by governments or private organizations for special protection against damage or degradation with the objective of biodiversity and landscape conservation. National parks are usually owned and managed by national or state governments. A limit is placed on the number of visitors permitted to enter certain fragile areas. Designated trails or roads are created. The visitors are allowed to enter only for study, cultural and recreation purposes. Forestry operations, grazing of animals and hunting of animals are regulated and the exploitation of habitat or wildlife is banned.
+
+Wildlife sanctuaries aim only at the conservation of species and have the following features:
+
+The forests play a vital role in harboring more than 45,000 floral and 81,000 faunal species of which 5150 floral and 1837 faunal species are endemic.[citation needed] Plant and animal species confined to a specific geographical area are called endemic species. In reserved forests, rights to activities like hunting and grazing are sometimes given to communities living on the fringes of the forest, who sustain their livelihood partially or wholly from forest resources or products. The unclassed forests cover 6.4 percent of the total forest area and they are marked by the following characteristics:
+
+In zoological parks or zoos, live animals are kept for public recreation, education and conservation purposes. Modern zoos offer veterinary facilities, provide opportunities for threatened species to breed in captivity and usually build environments that simulate the native habitats of the animals in their care. Zoos play a major role in creating awareness about the need to conserve nature.
+
+In botanical gardens, plants are grown and displayed primarily for scientific and educational purposes. They consist of a collection of living plants, grown outdoors or under glass in greenhouses and conservatories. Also, a botanical garden may include a collection of dried plants or herbarium and such facilities as lecture rooms, laboratories, libraries, museums and experimental or research plantings.
+
+Focusing on limited areas of higher potential biodiversity promises greater immediate return on investment than spreading resources evenly or focusing on areas of little diversity but greater interest in biodiversity.[257]
+
+A second strategy focuses on areas that retain most of their original diversity, which typically require little or no restoration. These are typically non-urbanized, non-agricultural areas. Tropical areas often fit both criteria, given their natively high diversity and relative lack of development.[258]
+
+Global agreements such as the Convention on Biological Diversity, give "sovereign national rights over biological resources" (not property). The agreements commit countries to "conserve biodiversity", "develop resources for sustainability" and "share the benefits" resulting from their use. Biodiverse countries that allow bioprospecting or collection of natural products, expect a share of the benefits rather than allowing the individual or institution that discovers/exploits the resource to capture them privately. Bioprospecting can become a type of biopiracy when such principles are not respected.[259]
+
+Sovereignty principles can rely upon what is better known as Access and Benefit Sharing Agreements (ABAs). The Convention on Biodiversity implies informed consent between the source country and the collector, to establish which resource will be used and for what and to settle on a fair agreement on benefit sharing.
+
+In May 2020, the European Union published its Biodiversity Strategy for 2030. The biodiversity strategy is an essential part of the climate change mitigation strategy of the European Union. From the 25% of the European budget that will go to fight climate change, large part will go to restore biodiversity and nature based solutions.
+
+The EU Biodiversity Strategy for 2030 include the next targets:
+
+According to the page, approximately half of the global GDP depend on nature. In Europe many parts of the economy that generate trillions € per year, depend on nature. Only the benefits of Natura 2000 in Europe are €200 - €300 billions per year[261]
+
+Biodiversity is taken into account in some political and judicial decisions:
+
+Uniform approval for use of biodiversity as a legal standard has not been achieved, however. Bosselman argues that biodiversity should not be used as a legal standard, claiming that the remaining areas of scientific uncertainty cause unacceptable administrative waste and increase litigation without promoting preservation goals.[263]
+
+India passed the Biological Diversity Act in 2002 for the conservation of biological diversity in India. The Act also provides mechanisms for equitable sharing of benefits from the use of traditional biological resources and knowledge.
+
+Less than 1% of all species that have been described have been studied beyond simply noting their existence.[264] The vast majority of Earth's species are microbial. Contemporary biodiversity physics is "firmly fixated on the visible [macroscopic] world".[265] For example, microbial life is metabolically and environmentally more diverse than multicellular life (see e.g., extremophile). "On the tree of life, based on analyses of small-subunit ribosomal RNA, visible life consists of barely noticeable twigs. The inverse relationship of size and population recurs higher on the evolutionary ladder—to a first approximation, all multicellular species on Earth are insects".[266] Insect extinction rates are high—supporting the Holocene extinction hypothesis.[267][268]
+
+The number of morphological attributes that can be scored for diversity study is generally limited and prone to environmental influences; thereby reducing the fine resolution required to ascertain the phylogenetic relationships. DNA based markers- microsatellites otherwise known as simple sequence repeats (SSR) were therefore used for the diversity studies of certain species and their wild relatives.
+
+In the case of cowpea, a study conducted to assess the level of genetic diversity in cowpea germplasm and related wide species, where the relatedness among various taxa was compared, primers useful for classification of taxa identified, and the origin and phylogeny of cultivated cowpea classified show that SSR markers are useful in validating with species classification and revealing the center of diversity.[269]

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+Jean de La Fontaine (UK: /ˌlæ fɒnˈtɛn, -ˈteɪn/,[1] US: /ˌlɑː fɒnˈteɪn, lə -, ˌlɑː foʊnˈtɛn/,[2][3] French: [ʒɑ̃ d(ə) la fɔ̃tɛn]; 8 July 1621 – 13 April 1695) was a French fabulist and one of the most widely read French poets of the 17th century. He is known above all for his Fables, which provided a model for subsequent fabulists across Europe and numerous alternative versions in France, as well as in French regional languages.
+
+After a long period of royal suspicion, he was admitted to the French Academy and his reputation in France has never faded since. Evidence of this is found in the many pictures and statues of the writer, later depictions on medals, coins and postage stamps.
+
+La Fontaine was born at Château-Thierry in France. His father was Charles de La Fontaine, maître des eaux et forêts – a kind of deputy-ranger – of the Duchy of Château-Thierry; his mother was Françoise Pidoux. Both sides of his family were of the highest provincial middle class; though they were not noble, his father was fairly wealthy.[4][5]
+
+Jean, the eldest child, was educated at the collège (grammar school) of Château-Thierry, and at the end of his school days he entered the Oratory in May 1641, and the seminary of Saint-Magloire in October of the same year; but a very short sojourn proved to him that he had mistaken his vocation. He then apparently studied law, and is said to have been admitted as avocat/lawyer.[4]
+
+He was, however, settled in life, or at least might have been so, somewhat early. In 1647 his father resigned his rangership in his favor, and arranged a marriage for him with Marie Héricart, a girl of fourteen, who brought him 20,000 livres, and expectations. She seems to have been both beautiful and intelligent, but the two did not get along well together. There appears to be absolutely no ground for the vague scandal as to her conduct, which was, for the most part, raised long afterwards by gossip or personal enemies of La Fontaine. All that can be positively said against her is that she was a negligent housewife and an inveterate novel reader; La Fontaine himself was constantly away from home, was certainly not strict in point of conjugal fidelity, and was so bad a man of business that his affairs became involved in hopeless difficulty, and a financial separation of property (separation de biens) had to take place in 1658. This was a perfectly amicable transaction for the benefit of the family; by degrees, however, the pair, still without any actual quarrel, ceased to live together, and for the greater part of the last forty years of de la Fontaine's life he lived in Paris while his wife remained in Chateau Thierry which, however, he frequently visited. One son was born to them in 1653, and was educated and taken care of wholly by his mother.[4][6]
+
+Even in the earlier years of his marriage, La Fontaine seems to have been much in Paris, but it was not until about 1656 that he became a regular visitor to the capital. The duties of his office, which were only occasional, were compatible with this non-residence. It was not until he was past thirty that his literary career began. The reading of Malherbe, it is said, first awoke poetical fancies in him, but for some time he attempted nothing but trifles in the fashion of the time – epigrams, ballades, rondeaux, etc.[4]
+
+His first serious work was a translation or adaptation of the Eunuchus of Terence (1654). At this time the patron of French writing was the Superintendent Fouquet, to whom La Fontaine was introduced by Jacques Jannart, a connection of his wife's. Few people who paid their court to Fouquet went away empty-handed, and La Fontaine soon received a pension of 1000 livres (1659), on the easy terms of a copy of verses for each quarters receipt. He also began a medley of prose and poetry, entitled Le Songe de Vaux, on Fouquet's famous country house.[4]
+
+It was about this time that his wife's property had to be separately secured to her, and he seems by degrees to have had to sell everything that he owned; but, as he never lacked powerful and generous patrons, this was of small importance to him. In the same year he wrote a ballad, Les Rieurs du Beau-Richard, and this was followed by many small pieces of occasional poetry addressed to various personages from the king downwards. Fouquet fell out of favour with the king and was arrested. La Fontaine, like most of Fouquet's literary protégés, showed some fidelity to him by writing the elegy Pleurez, Nymphes de Vaux.[4]
+
+Just at this time his affairs did not look promising. His father and he had assumed the title of esquire, to which they were not strictly entitled, and, some old edicts on the subject having been put in force, an informer procured a sentence against the poet fining him 2000 livres. He found, however, a new protector in the duke and still more in the Duchess of Bouillon, his feudal superiors at Château-Thierry, and nothing more is heard of the fine.[4]
+
+Some of La Fontaine's liveliest verses are addressed to the duchess Marie Anne Mancini, the youngest of Mazarin's nieces, and it is even probable that the taste of the duke and duchess for Ariosto had something to do with the writing of his first work of real importance, the first book of the Contes, which appeared in 1664. He was then forty-three years old, and his previous printed productions had been comparatively trivial, though much of his work was handed about in manuscript long before it was regularly published.[4]
+
+It was about this time that the quartet of the Rue du Vieux Colombier, so famous in French literary history, was formed. It consisted of La Fontaine, Racine, Boileau and Molière, the last of whom was almost of the same age as La Fontaine, the other two considerably younger. Chapelain was also a kind of outsider in the coterie. There are many anecdotes, some pretty obviously apocryphal, about these meetings. The most characteristic is perhaps that which asserts that a copy of Chapelain's unlucky Pucelle always lay on the table, a certain number of lines of which was the appointed punishment for offences against the company. The coterie furnished under feigned names the personages of La Fontaine's version of the Cupid and Psyche story, which, however, with Adonis, was not printed till 1669.[4]
+
+Meanwhile, the poet continued to find friends. In 1664 he was regularly commissioned and sworn in as gentleman to the duchess dowager of Orléans, and was installed in the Luxembourg. He still retained his rangership, and in 1666 we have something like a reprimand from Colbert suggesting that he should look into some malpractices at Chateau Thierry. In the same year appeared the second book of the Contes, and in 1668 the first six books of the Fables, with more of both kinds in 1671. In this latter year a curious instance of the docility with which the poet lent himself to any influence was afforded by his officiating, at the instance of the Port-Royalists, as editor of a volume of sacred poetry dedicated to the Prince of Conti.[4]
+
+A year afterwards his situation, which had for some time been decidedly flourishing, showed signs of changing very much for the worse. The duchess of Orléans died, and he apparently had to give up his rangership, probably selling it to pay debts. But there was always a providence for La Fontaine. Madame de la Sablière, a woman of great beauty, of considerable intellectual power and of high character, invited him to make his home in her house, where he lived for some twenty years. He seems to have had no trouble whatever about his affairs thenceforward; and could devote himself to his two different lines of poetry, as well as to that of theatrical composition.[4]
+
+In 1682 he was, at more than sixty years of age, recognized as one of the foremost men of letters of France. Madame de Sévigné, one of the soundest literary critics of the time, and by no means given to praise mere novelties, had spoken of his second collection of Fables published in the winter of 1678 as divine; and it is pretty certain that this was the general opinion. It was not unreasonable, therefore, that he should present himself to the Académie française, and, though the subjects of his Contes were scarcely calculated to propitiate that decorous assembly, while his attachment to Fouquet and to more than one representative of the old Frondeur party made him suspect to Colbert and the king, most of the members were his personal friends.[4]
+
+He was first proposed in 1682, but was rejected for Marquis de Dangeau. The next year Colbert died and La Fontaine was again nominated. Boileau was also a candidate, but the first ballot gave the fabulist sixteen votes against seven only for the critic. The king, whose assent was necessary, not merely for election but for a second ballot in case of the failure of an absolute majority, was ill-pleased, and the election was left pending. Another vacancy occurred, however, some months later, and to this Boileau was elected. The king hastened to approve the choice effusively, adding, Vous pouvez incessamment recevoir La Fontaine, il a promis d'etre sage.[7]
+
+His admission was indirectly the cause of the only serious literary quarrel of his life. A dispute took place between the Academy and one of its members, Antoine Furetière, on the subject of the latter's French dictionary, which was decided to be a breach of the Academy's corporate privileges. Furetière, a man of no small ability, bitterly assailed those whom he considered to be his enemies, and among them La Fontaine, whose unlucky Contes made him peculiarly vulnerable, his second collection of these tales having been the subject of a police condemnation. The death of the author of the Roman Bourgeois, however, put an end to this quarrel.[8]
+
+Shortly afterwards La Fontaine had a share in a still more famous affair, the celebrated Ancient-and-Modern squabble in which Boileau and Charles Perrault were the chiefs, and in which La Fontaine (though he had been specially singled out by Perrault for better comparison with Aesop and Phaedrus) took the Ancient side. About the same time (1685–1687) he made the acquaintance of the last of his many hosts and protectors, Monsieur and Madame d'Hervart, and fell in love with a certain Madame Ulrich, a lady of some position but of doubtful character. This acquaintance was accompanied by a great familiarity with Vendôme, Chaulieu and the rest of the libertine coterie of the Temple; but, though Madame de la Sablière had long given herself up almost entirely to good works and religious exercises, La Fontaine continued an inmate of her house until her death in 1693. What followed is told in one of the best known of the many stories bearing on his childlike nature. Hervart on hearing of the death, had set out at once to find La Fontaine. He met him in the street in great sorrow, and begged him to make his home at his house. J'y allais was La Fontaine's answer.[8]
+
+In 1692, the writer had published a revised edition of the Contes, although he suffered a severe illness. In that same year, La Fontaine converted to Christianity. A young priest, M. Poucet, tried to persuade him about the impropriety of the Contes and it is said that the destruction of a new play was demanded and submitted to as a proof of repentance.[9] La Fontaine received the Viaticum, and the following years he continued to write poems and fables.[10]
+
+A story is told of the young duke of Burgundy, Fénelon's pupil, who was then only eleven years old, sending 50 louis to La Fontaine as a present of his own motion. But, though La Fontaine recovered for the time, he was broken by age and infirmity, and his new hosts had to nurse rather than to entertain him, which they did very carefully and kindly. He did a little more work, completing his Fables among other things; but he did not survive Madame de la Sablière much more than two years, dying on 13 April 1695 in Paris, at the age of seventy-three. When the Père Lachaise Cemetery opened in Paris, La Fontaine's remains were moved there. His wife survived him nearly fifteen years.[8]
+
+The curious personal character of La Fontaine, like that of some other men of letters, has been enshrined in a kind of legend by literary tradition. At an early age his absence of mind and indifference to business gave a subject to Gédéon Tallemant des Réaux. His later contemporaries helped to swell the tale, and the 18th century finally accepted it, including the anecdotes of his meeting his son, being told who he was, and remarking, Ah, yes, I thought I had seen him somewhere!, of his insisting on fighting a duel with a supposed admirer of his wife, and then imploring him to visit at his house just as before; of his going into company with his stockings wrong side out, &c., with, for a contrast, those of his awkwardness and silence, if not positive rudeness in company.[8]
+
+It ought to be remembered, as a comment on the unfavourable description by Jean de La Bruyère, that La Fontaine was a special friend and ally of Benserade, La Bruyere's chief literary enemy. But after all deductions much will remain, especially when it is remembered that one of the chief authorities for these anecdotes is Louis Racine, a man who possessed intelligence and moral worth, and who received them from his father, La Fontaine's attached friend for more than thirty years. Perhaps the best worth recording of all these stories is one of the Vieux Colombier quartet, which tells how Molière, while Racine and Boileau were exercising their wits upon le bonhomme or le bon (by both which titles La Fontaine was familiarly known), remarked to a bystander, Nos beaux esprits ont beau faire, ils n'effaceront pas le bonhomme. They have not.[8]
+
+The numerous works of La Fontaine fall into three traditional divisions: the Fables, the Tales and the miscellaneous (including dramatic) works. He is best known for the first of these, in which a tradition of fable collecting in French verse reaching back to the Middle Ages was brought to a peak. Although these earlier works refer to Aesop in their title, they collected many fables from more recent sources. Among the foremost were Marie de France's Ysopet (1190) and Gilles Corrozet’s Les Fables du très ancien Esope, mises en rithme françoise (1542).
+
+The publication of the twelve books of La Fontaine's Fables extended from 1668 to 1694. The stories in the first six of these derive for the most part from Aesop and Horace and are pithily told in free verse. Those in the later editions are often taken from more recent sources or from translations of Eastern stories and are told at greater length. The deceptively simple verses are easily memorised, yet display deep insights into human nature. Many of the lines have entered the French language as standard phrases, often proverbial. The fables are also distinguished by their occasionally ironical ambivalence. The fable of "The Sculptor and the Statue of Jupiter" (IX.6), for example, reads like a satire on superstition, but its moralising conclusion that "All men, as far as in them lies,/Create realities of dreams" might equally be applied to religion as a whole.[11]
+
+The second division of his work, the tales (Contes et nouvelles en vers), were at one time almost equally as popular and their writing extended over a longer period. The first were published in 1664 and the last appeared posthumously. They were particularly marked by their archly licentious tone.[12]
+
+While the Fables have an international reputation, celebration of their author has largely been confined to France.  Even in his own lifetime, such was his renown, he was painted by three leading portraitists. It was at the age of 63, on the occasion of his reception into the Académie française in 1684, that he was portrayed by Hyacinthe Rigaud.[13] Nicolas de Largillière painted him at the age of 73,[14] and a third portrait is attributed to François de Troy (see below).[15]
+
+Two contemporary sculptors made head and shoulders busts of La Fontaine. Jean-Jacques Caffieri’s was exhibited at the 1779 Salon and then given to the Comédie Française; Jean-Antoine Houdon’s dates from 1782.[16] There are in fact two versions by Houdon, one now at the Philadelphia Museum of Art,[17] and another at the castle of his former patron Fouquet at Vaux-le-Vicomte (see below).
+
+In Paris there is a full length marble statue by Pierre Julien, now in the Louvre, that was commissioned in 1781 and exhibited at the 1785 Salon. The writer is represented in an ample cloak, sitting in contemplation on a gnarled tree on which a vine with grapes is climbing. On his knee is the manuscript of the fable of the fox and the grapes, while at his feet a fox is seated on his hat with its paw on a leather-bound volume, looking up at him.[18] Small scale porcelain models were made of this by the Sèvres pottery and in polychrome porcelain by the Frankenthal pottery. In the following century small models were made of the bronze statue by Etienne Marin Melingue, exhibited in Paris in 1840 and in London in 1881. In this the poet is leaning thoughtfully against a rock, hat in hand.[19] Also in the Cour Napoléon of the Louvre is the 1857 standing stone statue by Jean-Louis Jaley.[20]
+
+Another commemorative monument to La Fontaine was set up at the head of the Parisian Jardin du Ranelagh in 1891. The bronze bust designed by Achille Dumilâtre was exhibited at the Exposition Universelle (1889) before being placed on a high stone pedestal surrounded by various figures from the fables.[21] The work was melted down, like many others during World War II, but was replaced in 1983 by Charles Correia's standing statue of the fabulist looking down at the fox and the crow on the steps and plinth below him.[22]
+
+There are more statues in Château-Thierry, the town of the poet's birth. The most prominent is the standing statue by Charles-René Laitié,[23] which was ordered by command of Louis XVIII as a gift to the town. It was officially set in place in a square overlooking the Marne in 1824. During the Second Battle of the Marne it was damaged and was then moved about the town. Repaired now, its present position is in the square fronting the poet's former house. At his feet the race between the Tortoise and the Hare is taking place.[24] The house itself has now been converted into a museum, outside which stands the life-sized statue created by Bernard Seurre.[25] Inside the museum is Louis-Pierre Deseine’s head and shoulders clay bust of La Fontaine.[26]
+
+Further evidence of La Fontaine's enduring popularity is his appearance on a playing card from the second year of the French Revolution.[27] In this pack royalty is displaced by the rationalist free-thinkers known as Philosophes, and the ironical fabulist figures as the King of Spades. He was no less popular at the Bourbon Restoration, as is evidenced by the royal commission of his statue. Besides that, there was the 1816 bronze commemorative medal depicting the poet's head, designed by Jacques-Édouard Gatteaux, in the Great Men of France series.[28] More recently there has been a sideways seated view of him in the Histoire de France series.[29]
+The head of La Fontaine also appeared on a 100 franc coin to commemorate the 300th anniversary of his death, on the reverse of which the fable of the fox and the crow is depicted.[30] Another commemoration that year included the strip of 2.80 euro fable stamps, in the composite folder of which appeared a detachable portrait without currency. In 1995 equally, the asteroid 5780 Lafontaine was named in his honour.[31]
+
+Other appearances on postage stamps include the 55 centimes issue of 1938, with a medallion of the fable of The Wolf and the Lamb below him;[32] and the Monaco 50-cent stamp commemorating the 350th anniversary of La Fontaine's birth in 1971, in which the head and shoulders of the fabulist appear below some the more famous characters about which he wrote.[33] Another coin series on which he appears is the annualFables de La Fontaine celebration of the (Chinese) lunar new year. Issued since 2006, these bullion coins have had his portrait on the reverse and on the face each year's particular zodiac animal.[34]
+
+Fictional depictions have followed the fashionable view of La Fontaine at their period. As a minor character in Alexandre Dumas's novel The Vicomte of Bragelonne, he appears as a bumbling and scatterbrained courtier of Nicolas Fouquet.[35] In the 2007 film Jean de La Fontaine – le défi, however, the poet resists the absolutist rule of Louis XIV after the fall of Fouquet.[36][circular reference]
+

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+Jean de La Fontaine (UK: /ˌlæ fɒnˈtɛn, -ˈteɪn/,[1] US: /ˌlɑː fɒnˈteɪn, lə -, ˌlɑː foʊnˈtɛn/,[2][3] French: [ʒɑ̃ d(ə) la fɔ̃tɛn]; 8 July 1621 – 13 April 1695) was a French fabulist and one of the most widely read French poets of the 17th century. He is known above all for his Fables, which provided a model for subsequent fabulists across Europe and numerous alternative versions in France, as well as in French regional languages.
+
+After a long period of royal suspicion, he was admitted to the French Academy and his reputation in France has never faded since. Evidence of this is found in the many pictures and statues of the writer, later depictions on medals, coins and postage stamps.
+
+La Fontaine was born at Château-Thierry in France. His father was Charles de La Fontaine, maître des eaux et forêts – a kind of deputy-ranger – of the Duchy of Château-Thierry; his mother was Françoise Pidoux. Both sides of his family were of the highest provincial middle class; though they were not noble, his father was fairly wealthy.[4][5]
+
+Jean, the eldest child, was educated at the collège (grammar school) of Château-Thierry, and at the end of his school days he entered the Oratory in May 1641, and the seminary of Saint-Magloire in October of the same year; but a very short sojourn proved to him that he had mistaken his vocation. He then apparently studied law, and is said to have been admitted as avocat/lawyer.[4]
+
+He was, however, settled in life, or at least might have been so, somewhat early. In 1647 his father resigned his rangership in his favor, and arranged a marriage for him with Marie Héricart, a girl of fourteen, who brought him 20,000 livres, and expectations. She seems to have been both beautiful and intelligent, but the two did not get along well together. There appears to be absolutely no ground for the vague scandal as to her conduct, which was, for the most part, raised long afterwards by gossip or personal enemies of La Fontaine. All that can be positively said against her is that she was a negligent housewife and an inveterate novel reader; La Fontaine himself was constantly away from home, was certainly not strict in point of conjugal fidelity, and was so bad a man of business that his affairs became involved in hopeless difficulty, and a financial separation of property (separation de biens) had to take place in 1658. This was a perfectly amicable transaction for the benefit of the family; by degrees, however, the pair, still without any actual quarrel, ceased to live together, and for the greater part of the last forty years of de la Fontaine's life he lived in Paris while his wife remained in Chateau Thierry which, however, he frequently visited. One son was born to them in 1653, and was educated and taken care of wholly by his mother.[4][6]
+
+Even in the earlier years of his marriage, La Fontaine seems to have been much in Paris, but it was not until about 1656 that he became a regular visitor to the capital. The duties of his office, which were only occasional, were compatible with this non-residence. It was not until he was past thirty that his literary career began. The reading of Malherbe, it is said, first awoke poetical fancies in him, but for some time he attempted nothing but trifles in the fashion of the time – epigrams, ballades, rondeaux, etc.[4]
+
+His first serious work was a translation or adaptation of the Eunuchus of Terence (1654). At this time the patron of French writing was the Superintendent Fouquet, to whom La Fontaine was introduced by Jacques Jannart, a connection of his wife's. Few people who paid their court to Fouquet went away empty-handed, and La Fontaine soon received a pension of 1000 livres (1659), on the easy terms of a copy of verses for each quarters receipt. He also began a medley of prose and poetry, entitled Le Songe de Vaux, on Fouquet's famous country house.[4]
+
+It was about this time that his wife's property had to be separately secured to her, and he seems by degrees to have had to sell everything that he owned; but, as he never lacked powerful and generous patrons, this was of small importance to him. In the same year he wrote a ballad, Les Rieurs du Beau-Richard, and this was followed by many small pieces of occasional poetry addressed to various personages from the king downwards. Fouquet fell out of favour with the king and was arrested. La Fontaine, like most of Fouquet's literary protégés, showed some fidelity to him by writing the elegy Pleurez, Nymphes de Vaux.[4]
+
+Just at this time his affairs did not look promising. His father and he had assumed the title of esquire, to which they were not strictly entitled, and, some old edicts on the subject having been put in force, an informer procured a sentence against the poet fining him 2000 livres. He found, however, a new protector in the duke and still more in the Duchess of Bouillon, his feudal superiors at Château-Thierry, and nothing more is heard of the fine.[4]
+
+Some of La Fontaine's liveliest verses are addressed to the duchess Marie Anne Mancini, the youngest of Mazarin's nieces, and it is even probable that the taste of the duke and duchess for Ariosto had something to do with the writing of his first work of real importance, the first book of the Contes, which appeared in 1664. He was then forty-three years old, and his previous printed productions had been comparatively trivial, though much of his work was handed about in manuscript long before it was regularly published.[4]
+
+It was about this time that the quartet of the Rue du Vieux Colombier, so famous in French literary history, was formed. It consisted of La Fontaine, Racine, Boileau and Molière, the last of whom was almost of the same age as La Fontaine, the other two considerably younger. Chapelain was also a kind of outsider in the coterie. There are many anecdotes, some pretty obviously apocryphal, about these meetings. The most characteristic is perhaps that which asserts that a copy of Chapelain's unlucky Pucelle always lay on the table, a certain number of lines of which was the appointed punishment for offences against the company. The coterie furnished under feigned names the personages of La Fontaine's version of the Cupid and Psyche story, which, however, with Adonis, was not printed till 1669.[4]
+
+Meanwhile, the poet continued to find friends. In 1664 he was regularly commissioned and sworn in as gentleman to the duchess dowager of Orléans, and was installed in the Luxembourg. He still retained his rangership, and in 1666 we have something like a reprimand from Colbert suggesting that he should look into some malpractices at Chateau Thierry. In the same year appeared the second book of the Contes, and in 1668 the first six books of the Fables, with more of both kinds in 1671. In this latter year a curious instance of the docility with which the poet lent himself to any influence was afforded by his officiating, at the instance of the Port-Royalists, as editor of a volume of sacred poetry dedicated to the Prince of Conti.[4]
+
+A year afterwards his situation, which had for some time been decidedly flourishing, showed signs of changing very much for the worse. The duchess of Orléans died, and he apparently had to give up his rangership, probably selling it to pay debts. But there was always a providence for La Fontaine. Madame de la Sablière, a woman of great beauty, of considerable intellectual power and of high character, invited him to make his home in her house, where he lived for some twenty years. He seems to have had no trouble whatever about his affairs thenceforward; and could devote himself to his two different lines of poetry, as well as to that of theatrical composition.[4]
+
+In 1682 he was, at more than sixty years of age, recognized as one of the foremost men of letters of France. Madame de Sévigné, one of the soundest literary critics of the time, and by no means given to praise mere novelties, had spoken of his second collection of Fables published in the winter of 1678 as divine; and it is pretty certain that this was the general opinion. It was not unreasonable, therefore, that he should present himself to the Académie française, and, though the subjects of his Contes were scarcely calculated to propitiate that decorous assembly, while his attachment to Fouquet and to more than one representative of the old Frondeur party made him suspect to Colbert and the king, most of the members were his personal friends.[4]
+
+He was first proposed in 1682, but was rejected for Marquis de Dangeau. The next year Colbert died and La Fontaine was again nominated. Boileau was also a candidate, but the first ballot gave the fabulist sixteen votes against seven only for the critic. The king, whose assent was necessary, not merely for election but for a second ballot in case of the failure of an absolute majority, was ill-pleased, and the election was left pending. Another vacancy occurred, however, some months later, and to this Boileau was elected. The king hastened to approve the choice effusively, adding, Vous pouvez incessamment recevoir La Fontaine, il a promis d'etre sage.[7]
+
+His admission was indirectly the cause of the only serious literary quarrel of his life. A dispute took place between the Academy and one of its members, Antoine Furetière, on the subject of the latter's French dictionary, which was decided to be a breach of the Academy's corporate privileges. Furetière, a man of no small ability, bitterly assailed those whom he considered to be his enemies, and among them La Fontaine, whose unlucky Contes made him peculiarly vulnerable, his second collection of these tales having been the subject of a police condemnation. The death of the author of the Roman Bourgeois, however, put an end to this quarrel.[8]
+
+Shortly afterwards La Fontaine had a share in a still more famous affair, the celebrated Ancient-and-Modern squabble in which Boileau and Charles Perrault were the chiefs, and in which La Fontaine (though he had been specially singled out by Perrault for better comparison with Aesop and Phaedrus) took the Ancient side. About the same time (1685–1687) he made the acquaintance of the last of his many hosts and protectors, Monsieur and Madame d'Hervart, and fell in love with a certain Madame Ulrich, a lady of some position but of doubtful character. This acquaintance was accompanied by a great familiarity with Vendôme, Chaulieu and the rest of the libertine coterie of the Temple; but, though Madame de la Sablière had long given herself up almost entirely to good works and religious exercises, La Fontaine continued an inmate of her house until her death in 1693. What followed is told in one of the best known of the many stories bearing on his childlike nature. Hervart on hearing of the death, had set out at once to find La Fontaine. He met him in the street in great sorrow, and begged him to make his home at his house. J'y allais was La Fontaine's answer.[8]
+
+In 1692, the writer had published a revised edition of the Contes, although he suffered a severe illness. In that same year, La Fontaine converted to Christianity. A young priest, M. Poucet, tried to persuade him about the impropriety of the Contes and it is said that the destruction of a new play was demanded and submitted to as a proof of repentance.[9] La Fontaine received the Viaticum, and the following years he continued to write poems and fables.[10]
+
+A story is told of the young duke of Burgundy, Fénelon's pupil, who was then only eleven years old, sending 50 louis to La Fontaine as a present of his own motion. But, though La Fontaine recovered for the time, he was broken by age and infirmity, and his new hosts had to nurse rather than to entertain him, which they did very carefully and kindly. He did a little more work, completing his Fables among other things; but he did not survive Madame de la Sablière much more than two years, dying on 13 April 1695 in Paris, at the age of seventy-three. When the Père Lachaise Cemetery opened in Paris, La Fontaine's remains were moved there. His wife survived him nearly fifteen years.[8]
+
+The curious personal character of La Fontaine, like that of some other men of letters, has been enshrined in a kind of legend by literary tradition. At an early age his absence of mind and indifference to business gave a subject to Gédéon Tallemant des Réaux. His later contemporaries helped to swell the tale, and the 18th century finally accepted it, including the anecdotes of his meeting his son, being told who he was, and remarking, Ah, yes, I thought I had seen him somewhere!, of his insisting on fighting a duel with a supposed admirer of his wife, and then imploring him to visit at his house just as before; of his going into company with his stockings wrong side out, &c., with, for a contrast, those of his awkwardness and silence, if not positive rudeness in company.[8]
+
+It ought to be remembered, as a comment on the unfavourable description by Jean de La Bruyère, that La Fontaine was a special friend and ally of Benserade, La Bruyere's chief literary enemy. But after all deductions much will remain, especially when it is remembered that one of the chief authorities for these anecdotes is Louis Racine, a man who possessed intelligence and moral worth, and who received them from his father, La Fontaine's attached friend for more than thirty years. Perhaps the best worth recording of all these stories is one of the Vieux Colombier quartet, which tells how Molière, while Racine and Boileau were exercising their wits upon le bonhomme or le bon (by both which titles La Fontaine was familiarly known), remarked to a bystander, Nos beaux esprits ont beau faire, ils n'effaceront pas le bonhomme. They have not.[8]
+
+The numerous works of La Fontaine fall into three traditional divisions: the Fables, the Tales and the miscellaneous (including dramatic) works. He is best known for the first of these, in which a tradition of fable collecting in French verse reaching back to the Middle Ages was brought to a peak. Although these earlier works refer to Aesop in their title, they collected many fables from more recent sources. Among the foremost were Marie de France's Ysopet (1190) and Gilles Corrozet’s Les Fables du très ancien Esope, mises en rithme françoise (1542).
+
+The publication of the twelve books of La Fontaine's Fables extended from 1668 to 1694. The stories in the first six of these derive for the most part from Aesop and Horace and are pithily told in free verse. Those in the later editions are often taken from more recent sources or from translations of Eastern stories and are told at greater length. The deceptively simple verses are easily memorised, yet display deep insights into human nature. Many of the lines have entered the French language as standard phrases, often proverbial. The fables are also distinguished by their occasionally ironical ambivalence. The fable of "The Sculptor and the Statue of Jupiter" (IX.6), for example, reads like a satire on superstition, but its moralising conclusion that "All men, as far as in them lies,/Create realities of dreams" might equally be applied to religion as a whole.[11]
+
+The second division of his work, the tales (Contes et nouvelles en vers), were at one time almost equally as popular and their writing extended over a longer period. The first were published in 1664 and the last appeared posthumously. They were particularly marked by their archly licentious tone.[12]
+
+While the Fables have an international reputation, celebration of their author has largely been confined to France.  Even in his own lifetime, such was his renown, he was painted by three leading portraitists. It was at the age of 63, on the occasion of his reception into the Académie française in 1684, that he was portrayed by Hyacinthe Rigaud.[13] Nicolas de Largillière painted him at the age of 73,[14] and a third portrait is attributed to François de Troy (see below).[15]
+
+Two contemporary sculptors made head and shoulders busts of La Fontaine. Jean-Jacques Caffieri’s was exhibited at the 1779 Salon and then given to the Comédie Française; Jean-Antoine Houdon’s dates from 1782.[16] There are in fact two versions by Houdon, one now at the Philadelphia Museum of Art,[17] and another at the castle of his former patron Fouquet at Vaux-le-Vicomte (see below).
+
+In Paris there is a full length marble statue by Pierre Julien, now in the Louvre, that was commissioned in 1781 and exhibited at the 1785 Salon. The writer is represented in an ample cloak, sitting in contemplation on a gnarled tree on which a vine with grapes is climbing. On his knee is the manuscript of the fable of the fox and the grapes, while at his feet a fox is seated on his hat with its paw on a leather-bound volume, looking up at him.[18] Small scale porcelain models were made of this by the Sèvres pottery and in polychrome porcelain by the Frankenthal pottery. In the following century small models were made of the bronze statue by Etienne Marin Melingue, exhibited in Paris in 1840 and in London in 1881. In this the poet is leaning thoughtfully against a rock, hat in hand.[19] Also in the Cour Napoléon of the Louvre is the 1857 standing stone statue by Jean-Louis Jaley.[20]
+
+Another commemorative monument to La Fontaine was set up at the head of the Parisian Jardin du Ranelagh in 1891. The bronze bust designed by Achille Dumilâtre was exhibited at the Exposition Universelle (1889) before being placed on a high stone pedestal surrounded by various figures from the fables.[21] The work was melted down, like many others during World War II, but was replaced in 1983 by Charles Correia's standing statue of the fabulist looking down at the fox and the crow on the steps and plinth below him.[22]
+
+There are more statues in Château-Thierry, the town of the poet's birth. The most prominent is the standing statue by Charles-René Laitié,[23] which was ordered by command of Louis XVIII as a gift to the town. It was officially set in place in a square overlooking the Marne in 1824. During the Second Battle of the Marne it was damaged and was then moved about the town. Repaired now, its present position is in the square fronting the poet's former house. At his feet the race between the Tortoise and the Hare is taking place.[24] The house itself has now been converted into a museum, outside which stands the life-sized statue created by Bernard Seurre.[25] Inside the museum is Louis-Pierre Deseine’s head and shoulders clay bust of La Fontaine.[26]
+
+Further evidence of La Fontaine's enduring popularity is his appearance on a playing card from the second year of the French Revolution.[27] In this pack royalty is displaced by the rationalist free-thinkers known as Philosophes, and the ironical fabulist figures as the King of Spades. He was no less popular at the Bourbon Restoration, as is evidenced by the royal commission of his statue. Besides that, there was the 1816 bronze commemorative medal depicting the poet's head, designed by Jacques-Édouard Gatteaux, in the Great Men of France series.[28] More recently there has been a sideways seated view of him in the Histoire de France series.[29]
+The head of La Fontaine also appeared on a 100 franc coin to commemorate the 300th anniversary of his death, on the reverse of which the fable of the fox and the crow is depicted.[30] Another commemoration that year included the strip of 2.80 euro fable stamps, in the composite folder of which appeared a detachable portrait without currency. In 1995 equally, the asteroid 5780 Lafontaine was named in his honour.[31]
+
+Other appearances on postage stamps include the 55 centimes issue of 1938, with a medallion of the fable of The Wolf and the Lamb below him;[32] and the Monaco 50-cent stamp commemorating the 350th anniversary of La Fontaine's birth in 1971, in which the head and shoulders of the fabulist appear below some the more famous characters about which he wrote.[33] Another coin series on which he appears is the annualFables de La Fontaine celebration of the (Chinese) lunar new year. Issued since 2006, these bullion coins have had his portrait on the reverse and on the face each year's particular zodiac animal.[34]
+
+Fictional depictions have followed the fashionable view of La Fontaine at their period. As a minor character in Alexandre Dumas's novel The Vicomte of Bragelonne, he appears as a bumbling and scatterbrained courtier of Nicolas Fouquet.[35] In the 2007 film Jean de La Fontaine – le défi, however, the poet resists the absolutist rule of Louis XIV after the fall of Fouquet.[36][circular reference]
+

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+
+
+A biography, or simply bio, is a detailed description of a person's life. It involves more than just the basic facts like education, work, relationships, and death; it portrays a person's experience of these life events. Unlike a profile or curriculum vitae (résumé), a biography presents a subject's life story, highlighting various aspects of his or her life, including intimate details of experience, and may include an analysis of the subject's personality.
+
+Biographical works are usually non-fiction, but fiction can also be used to portray a person's life. One in-depth form of biographical coverage is called legacy writing. Works in diverse media, from literature to film, form the genre known as biography.
+
+An authorized biography is written with the permission, cooperation, and at times, participation of a subject or a subject's heirs. An autobiography is written by the person himself or herself, sometimes with the assistance of a collaborator or ghostwriter.
+
+At first, biographical writings were regarded merely as a subsection of history with a focus on a particular individual of historical importance. The independent genre of biography as distinct from general history writing, began to emerge in the 18th century and reached its contemporary form at the turn of the 20th century.[1]
+
+One of the earliest biographers was Cornelius Nepos, who published his work Excellentium Imperatorum Vitae ("Lives of outstanding generals") in 44 BC. Longer and more extensive biographies were written in Greek by Plutarch, in his Parallel Lives, published about 80 A.D. In this work famous Greeks are paired with famous Romans, for example the orators Demosthenes and Cicero, or the generals Alexander the Great and Julius Caesar; some fifty biographies from the work survive. Another well-known collection of ancient biographies is De vita Caesarum ("On the Lives of the Caesars") by Suetonius, written about AD 121 in the time of the emperor Hadrian.
+
+In the early Middle Ages (AD 400 to 1450), there was a decline in awareness of the classical culture in Europe. During this time, the only repositories of knowledge and records of the early history in Europe were those of the Roman Catholic Church. Hermits, monks, and priests used this historic period to write biographies. Their subjects were usually restricted to the church fathers, martyrs, popes, and saints. Their works were meant to be inspirational to the people and vehicles for conversion to Christianity (see Hagiography). One significant secular example of a biography from this period is the life of Charlemagne by his courtier Einhard.
+
+In Medieval Islamic Civilization (c. AD 750 to 1258), similar traditional Muslim biographies of Muhammad and other important figures in the early history of Islam began to be written, beginning the Prophetic biography tradition. Early biographical dictionaries were published as compendia of famous Islamic personalities from the 9th century onwards. They contained more social data for a large segment of the population than other works of that period. The earliest biographical dictionaries initially focused on the lives of the prophets of Islam and their companions, with one of these early examples being The Book of The Major Classes by Ibn Sa'd al-Baghdadi. And then began the documentation of the lives of many other historical figures (from rulers to scholars) who lived in the medieval Islamic world.[2]
+
+By the late Middle Ages, biographies became less church-oriented in Europe as biographies of kings, knights, and tyrants began to appear. The most famous of such biographies was Le Morte d'Arthur by Sir Thomas Malory. The book was an account of the life of the fabled King Arthur and his Knights of the Round Table. Following Malory, the new emphasis on humanism during the Renaissance promoted a focus on secular subjects, such as artists and poets, and encouraged writing in the vernacular.
+
+Giorgio Vasari's Lives of the Artists (1550) was the landmark biography focusing on secular lives. Vasari made celebrities of his subjects, as the Lives became an early "bestseller". Two other developments are noteworthy: the development of the printing press in the 15th century and the gradual increase in literacy.
+
+Biographies in the English language began appearing during the reign of Henry VIII. John Foxe's Actes and Monuments (1563), better known as Foxe's Book of Martyrs, was essentially the first dictionary of the biography in Europe, followed by Thomas Fuller's The History of the Worthies of England (1662), with a distinct focus on public life.
+
+Influential in shaping popular conceptions of pirates, A General History of the Pyrates (1724), by Charles Johnson, is the prime source for the biographies of many well-known pirates.[3]
+
+A notable early collection of biographies of eminent men and women in the United Kingdom was Biographia Britannica (1747-1766) edited by William Oldys.
+
+The American biography followed the English model, incorporating Thomas Carlyle's view that biography was a part of history. Carlyle asserted that the lives of great human beings were essential to understanding society and its institutions. While the historical impulse would remain a strong element in early American biography, American writers carved out a distinct approach. What emerged was a rather didactic form of biography, which sought to shape the individual character of a reader in the process of defining national character.[4][5]
+
+The first modern biography, and a work which exerted considerable influence on the evolution of the genre, was James Boswell's The Life of Samuel Johnson, a biography of lexicographer and man-of-letters Samuel Johnson published in 1791.[6][unreliable source?][7][8]
+
+While Boswell's personal acquaintance with his subject only began in 1763, when Johnson was 54 years old, Boswell covered the entirety of Johnson's life by means of additional research. Itself an important stage in the development of the modern genre of biography, it has been claimed to be the greatest biography written in the English language. Boswell's work was unique in its level of research, which involved archival study, eye-witness accounts and interviews, its robust and attractive narrative, and its honest depiction of all aspects of Johnson's life and character - a formula which serves as the basis of biographical literature to this day.[9]
+
+Biographical writing generally stagnated during the 19th century - in many cases there was a reversal to the more familiar hagiographical method of eulogizing the dead, similar to the biographies of saints produced in Medieval times. A distinction between mass biography and literary biography began to form by the middle of the century, reflecting a breach between high culture and middle-class culture. However, the number of biographies in print experienced a rapid growth, thanks to an expanding reading public. This revolution in publishing made books available to a larger audience of readers. In addition, affordable paperback editions of popular biographies were published for the first time. Periodicals began publishing a sequence of biographical sketches.[10]
+
+Autobiographies became more popular, as with the rise of education and cheap printing, modern concepts of fame and celebrity began to develop. Autobiographies were written by authors, such as Charles Dickens (who incorporated autobiographical elements in his novels) and Anthony Trollope, (his Autobiography appeared posthumously, quickly becoming a bestseller in London[11]), philosophers, such as John Stuart Mill, churchmen – John Henry Newman – and entertainers – P. T. Barnum.
+
+The sciences of psychology and sociology were ascendant at the turn of the 20th century and would heavily influence the new century's biographies.[12] The demise of the "great man" theory of history was indicative of the emerging mindset. Human behavior would be explained through Darwinian theories. "Sociological" biographies conceived of their subjects' actions as the result of the environment, and tended to downplay individuality. The development of psychoanalysis led to a more penetrating and comprehensive understanding of the biographical subject, and induced biographers to give more emphasis to childhood and adolescence. Clearly these psychological ideas were changing the way biographies were written, as a culture of autobiography developed, in which the telling of one's own story became a form of therapy.[10] The conventional concept of heroes and narratives of success disappeared in the obsession with psychological explorations of personality.
+
+British critic Lytton Strachey revolutionized the art of biographical writing with his 1918 work Eminent Victorians, consisting of biographies of four leading figures from the Victorian era: Cardinal Manning, Florence Nightingale, Thomas Arnold, and General Gordon.[13] Strachey set out to breathe life into the Victorian era for future generations to read. Up until this point, as Strachey remarked in the preface, Victorian biographies had been "as familiar as the cortège of the undertaker", and wore the same air of "slow, funereal barbarism." Strachey defied the tradition of "two fat volumes ... of undigested masses of material" and took aim at the four iconic figures. His narrative demolished the myths that had built up around these cherished national heroes, whom he regarded as no better than a "set of mouth bungled hypocrites". The book achieved worldwide fame due to its irreverent and witty style, its concise and factually accurate nature, and its artistic prose.[14]
+
+In the 1920s and '30s, biographical writers sought to capitalize on Strachey's popularity by imitating his style. This new school featured iconoclasts, scientific analysts, and fictional biographers and included Gamaliel Bradford, André Maurois, and Emil Ludwig, among others. Robert Graves (I, Claudius, 1934) stood out among those following Strachey's model of "debunking biographies." The trend in literary biography was accompanied in popular biography by a sort of "celebrity voyeurism", in the early decades of the century. This latter form's appeal to readers was based on curiosity more than morality or patriotism. By World War I, cheap hard-cover reprints had become popular. The decades of the 1920s witnessed a biographical "boom."
+
+The feminist scholar Carolyn Heilbrun observed that women's biographies and autobiographies began to change character during the second wave of feminist activism. She cited Nancy Milford's 1970 biography Zelda, as the "beginning of a new period of women's biography, because "[only] in 1970 were we ready to read not that Zelda had destroyed Fitzgerald, but Fitzgerald her: he had usurped her narrative." Heilbrun named 1973 as the turning point in women's autobiography, with the publication of May Sarton's Journal of a Solitude, for that was the first instance where a woman told her life story, not as finding "beauty even in pain" and transforming "rage into spiritual acceptance," but acknowledging what had previously been forbidden to women: their pain, their rage, and their "open admission of the desire for power and control over one's life."[15]
+
+In recent years, multimedia biography has become more popular than traditional literary forms. Along with documentary biographical films, Hollywood produced numerous commercial films based on the lives of famous people. The popularity of these forms of biography have led to the proliferation of TV channels dedicated to biography, including A&E, The Biography Channel, and The History Channel.
+
+CD-ROM and online biographies have also appeared. Unlike books and films, they often do not tell a chronological narrative: instead they are archives of many discrete media elements related to an individual person, including video clips, photographs, and text articles. Biography-Portraits were created in 2001, by the German artist Ralph Ueltzhoeffer. Media scholar Lev Manovich says that such archives exemplify the database form, allowing users to navigate the materials in many ways.[16] General "life writing" techniques are a subject of scholarly study.[17]
+
+In recent years, debates have arisen as to whether all biographies are fiction, especially when authors are writing about figures from the past. President of Wolfson College at Oxford University, Hermione Lee argues that all history is seen through a perspective that is the product of our contemporary society and as a result  biographical truths are constantly shifting. So the history biographers write about will not be the way that it happened; it will be the way they remembered it.[18] Debates have also arisen concerning the importance of space in life-writing.[19]
+
+Daniel R. Meister in 2017 argues that:
+
+Biographical research is defined by Miller as a research method that collects and analyses a person's whole life, or portion of a life, through the in-depth and unstructured interview, or sometimes reinforced by semi-structured interview or personal documents.[21] It is a way of viewing social life in procedural terms, rather than static terms. The information can come from "oral history, personal narrative, biography and autobiography” or "diaries, letters, memoranda and other materials".[22] The central aim of biographical research is to produce rich descriptions of persons or "conceptualise structural types of actions", which means to "understand the action logics or how persons and structures are interlinked".[23] This method can be used to understand an individual's life within its social context or understand the cultural phenomena.
+
+There are many largely unacknowledged pitfalls to writing good biographies, and these largely concern the relation between firstly the individual and the context, and, secondly, the private and public. Paul James writes:
+
+The problems with such conventional biographies are manifold. Biographies usually treat the public as a reflection of the private, with the private realm being assumed to be foundational. This is strange given that biographies are most often written about public people who project a persona. That is, for such subjects the dominant passages of the presentation of themselves in everyday life are already formed by what might be called a ‘self-biofication’ process.[24]
+
+Several countries offer an annual prize for writing a biography such as the:

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+
+Biology is the natural science that studies life and living organisms, including their physical structure, chemical processes, molecular interactions, physiological mechanisms, development and evolution.[1] Despite the complexity of the science, certain unifying concepts consolidate it into a single, coherent field. Biology recognizes the cell as the basic unit of life, genes as the basic unit of heredity, and evolution as the engine that propels the creation and extinction of species. Living organisms are open systems that survive by transforming energy and decreasing their local entropy[2] to maintain a stable and vital condition defined as homeostasis.[3]
+
+Sub-disciplines of biology are defined by the research methods employed and the kind of system studied: theoretical biology uses mathematical methods to formulate quantitative models while experimental biology performs empirical experiments to test the validity of proposed theories and understand the mechanisms underlying life and how it appeared and evolved from non-living matter about 4 billion years ago through a gradual increase in the complexity of the system.[4][5][6] See branches of biology.
+
+Biology derives from the Ancient Greek words of βίος; romanized bíos meaning "life" and -λογία; romanized logía (-logy) meaning "branch of study" or "to speak". [7][8]  Those combined make the Greek word βιολογία; romanized biología meaning biology. Despite this, the term βιολογία as a whole didn't exist in Ancient Greek. The first to borrow it was the English and French (biologie). Since the advent of the scientific era, reanalyzable as a compound using the combining forms bio + logy.[clarification needed]
+
+The Latin-language form of the term first appeared in 1736 when Swedish scientist Carl Linnaeus (Carl von Linné) used biologi in his Bibliotheca Botanica. It was used again in 1766 in a work entitled Philosophiae naturalis sive physicae: tomus III, continens geologian, biologian, phytologian generalis, by Michael Christoph Hanov, a disciple of Christian Wolff. The first German use, Biologie, was in a 1771 translation of Linnaeus' work. In 1797, Theodor Georg August Roose used the term in the preface of a book, Grundzüge der Lehre van der Lebenskraft. Karl Friedrich Burdach used the term in 1800 in a more restricted sense of the study of human beings from a morphological, physiological and psychological perspective (Propädeutik zum Studien der gesammten Heilkunst). The term came into its modern usage with the six-volume treatise Biologie, oder Philosophie der lebenden Natur (1802–22) by Gottfried Reinhold Treviranus, who announced:[9]
+
+Although modern biology is a relatively recent development, sciences related to and included within it have been studied since ancient times. Natural philosophy was studied as early as the ancient civilizations of Mesopotamia, Egypt, the Indian subcontinent, and China. However, the origins of modern biology and its approach to the study of nature are most often traced back to ancient Greece.[10][11] While the formal study of medicine dates back to Pharaonic Egypt, it was Aristotle (384–322 BC) who contributed most extensively to the development of biology. Especially important are his History of Animals and other works where he showed naturalist leanings, and later more empirical works that focused on biological causation and the diversity of life. Aristotle's successor at the Lyceum, Theophrastus, wrote a series of books on botany that survived as the most important contribution of antiquity to the plant sciences, even into the Middle Ages.[12]
+
+Scholars of the medieval Islamic world who wrote on biology included al-Jahiz (781–869), Al-Dīnawarī (828–896), who wrote on botany,[13] and Rhazes (865–925) who wrote on anatomy and physiology. Medicine was especially well studied by Islamic scholars working in Greek philosopher traditions, while natural history drew heavily on Aristotelian thought, especially in upholding a fixed hierarchy of life.
+
+Biology began to quickly develop and grow with Anton van Leeuwenhoek's dramatic improvement of the microscope. It was then that scholars discovered spermatozoa, bacteria, infusoria and the diversity of microscopic life. Investigations by Jan Swammerdam led to new interest in entomology and helped to develop the basic techniques of microscopic dissection and staining.[14]
+
+Advances in microscopy also had a profound impact on biological thinking. In the early 19th century, a number of biologists pointed to the central importance of the cell. Then, in 1838, Schleiden and Schwann began promoting the now universal ideas that (1) the basic unit of organisms is the cell and (2) that individual cells have all the characteristics of life, although they opposed the idea that (3) all cells come from the division of other cells. Thanks to the work of Robert Remak and Rudolf Virchow, however, by the 1860s most biologists accepted all three tenets of what came to be known as cell theory.[15][16]
+
+Meanwhile, taxonomy and classification became the focus of natural historians. Carl Linnaeus published a basic taxonomy for the natural world in 1735 (variations of which have been in use ever since), and in the 1750s introduced scientific names for all his species.[17] Georges-Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon, treated species as artificial categories and living forms as malleable—even suggesting the possibility of common descent. Although he was opposed to evolution, Buffon is a key figure in the history of evolutionary thought; his work influenced the evolutionary theories of both Lamarck and Darwin.[18]
+
+Serious evolutionary thinking originated with the works of Jean-Baptiste Lamarck, who was the first to present a coherent theory of evolution.[19] He posited that evolution was the result of environmental stress on properties of animals, meaning that the more frequently and rigorously an organ was used, the more complex and efficient it would become, thus adapting the animal to its environment. Lamarck believed that these acquired traits could then be passed on to the animal's offspring, who would further develop and perfect them.[20] However, it was the British naturalist Charles Darwin, combining the biogeographical approach of Humboldt, the uniformitarian geology of Lyell, Malthus's writings on population growth, and his own morphological expertise and extensive natural observations, who forged a more successful evolutionary theory based on natural selection; similar reasoning and evidence led Alfred Russel Wallace to independently reach the same conclusions.[21][22] Although it was the subject of controversy (which continues to this day), Darwin's theory quickly spread through the scientific community and soon became a central axiom of the rapidly developing science of biology.
+
+The discovery of the physical representation of heredity came along with evolutionary principles and population genetics. In the 1940s and early 1950s, experiments pointed to DNA as the component of chromosomes that held the trait-carrying units that had become known as genes. A focus on new kinds of model organisms such as viruses and bacteria, along with the discovery of the double-helical structure of DNA in 1953, marked the transition to the era of molecular genetics. From the 1950s to the present times, biology has been vastly extended in the molecular domain. The genetic code was cracked by Har Gobind Khorana, Robert W. Holley and Marshall Warren Nirenberg after DNA was understood to contain codons. Finally, the Human Genome Project was launched in 1990 with the goal of mapping the general human genome. This project was essentially completed in 2003,[23] with further analysis still being published. The Human Genome Project was the first step in a globalized effort to incorporate accumulated knowledge of biology into a functional, molecular definition of the human body and the bodies of other organisms.
+
+Cell theory states that the cell is the fundamental unit of life, that all living things are composed of one or more cells, and that all cells arise from pre-existing cells through cell division. In multicellular organisms, every cell in the organism's body derives ultimately from a single cell in a fertilized egg. The cell is also considered to be the basic unit in many pathological processes.[24] In addition, the phenomenon of energy flow occurs in cells in processes that are part of the function known as metabolism. Finally, cells contain hereditary information (DNA), which is passed from cell to cell during cell division. Research into the origin of life, abiogenesis, amounts to an attempt to discover the origin of the first cells.
+
+A central organizing concept in biology is that life changes and develops through evolution, and that all life-forms known have a common origin. The theory of evolution postulates that all organisms on the Earth, both living and extinct, have descended from a common ancestor or an ancestral gene pool. This universal common ancestor of all organisms is believed to have appeared about 3.5 billion years ago.[25] Biologists regard the ubiquity of the genetic code as definitive evidence in favor of the theory of universal common descent for all bacteria, archaea, and eukaryotes (see: origin of life).[26]
+
+The term "evolution" was introduced into the scientific lexicon by Jean-Baptiste de Lamarck in 1809,[27] and fifty years later Charles Darwin posited a scientific model of natural selection as evolution's driving force.[28][29][30] (Alfred Russel Wallace is recognized as the co-discoverer of this concept as he helped research and experiment with the concept of evolution.)[31] Evolution is now used to explain the great variations of life found on Earth.
+
+Darwin theorized that species flourish or die when subjected to the processes of natural selection or selective breeding.[32] Genetic drift was embraced as an additional mechanism of evolutionary development in the modern synthesis of the theory.[33]
+
+The evolutionary history of the species—which describes the characteristics of the various species from which it descended—together with its genealogical relationship to every other species is known as its phylogeny. Widely varied approaches to biology generate information about phylogeny. These include the comparisons of DNA sequences, a product of molecular biology (more particularly genomics), and comparisons of fossils or other records of ancient organisms, a product of paleontology.[34] Biologists organize and analyze evolutionary relationships through various methods, including phylogenetics, phenetics, and cladistics. (For a summary of major events in the evolution of life as currently understood by biologists, see evolutionary timeline.)
+
+Evolution is relevant to the understanding of the natural history of life forms and to the understanding of the organization of current life forms. But, those organizations can only be understood in light of how they came to be by way of the process of evolution. Consequently, evolution is central to all fields of biology.[35]
+
+Genes are the primary units of inheritance in all organisms. A gene is a unit of heredity and corresponds to a region of DNA that influences the form or function of an organism in specific ways. All organisms, from bacteria to animals, share the same basic machinery that copies and translates DNA into proteins. Cells transcribe a DNA gene into an RNA version of the gene, and a ribosome then translates the RNA into a sequence of amino acids known as a protein. The translation code from RNA codon to amino acid is the same for most organisms. For example, a sequence of DNA that codes for insulin in humans also codes for insulin when inserted into other organisms, such as plants.[36]
+
+DNA is found as linear chromosomes in eukaryotes, and circular chromosomes in prokaryotes. A chromosome is an organized structure consisting of DNA and histones. The set of chromosomes in a cell and any other hereditary information found in the mitochondria, chloroplasts, or other locations is collectively known as a cell's genome. In eukaryotes, genomic DNA is localized in the cell nucleus, or with small amounts in mitochondria and chloroplasts. In prokaryotes, the DNA is held within an irregularly shaped body in the cytoplasm called the nucleoid.[37] The genetic information in a genome is held within genes, and the complete assemblage of this information in an organism is called its genotype.[38]
+
+Homeostasis is the ability of an open system to regulate its internal environment to maintain stable conditions by means of multiple dynamic equilibrium adjustments that are controlled by interrelated regulation mechanisms. All living organisms, whether unicellular or multicellular, exhibit homeostasis.[40]
+
+To maintain dynamic equilibrium and effectively carry out certain functions, a system must detect and respond to perturbations. After the detection of a perturbation, a biological system normally responds through negative feedback that stabilize conditions by reducing or increasing the activity of an organ or system. One example is the release of glucagon when sugar levels are too low.
+
+The survival of a living organism depends on the continuous input of energy. Chemical reactions that are responsible for its structure and function are tuned to extract energy from substances that act as its food and transform them to help form new cells and sustain them. In this process, molecules of chemical substances that constitute food play two roles; first, they contain energy that can be transformed and reused in that organism's biological, chemical reactions; second, food can be transformed into new molecular structures (biomolecules) that are of use to that organism.
+
+The organisms responsible for the introduction of energy into an ecosystem are known as producers or autotrophs. Nearly all such organisms originally draw their energy from the sun.[41] Plants and other phototrophs use solar energy via a process known as photosynthesis to convert raw materials into organic molecules, such as ATP, whose bonds can be broken to release energy.[42] A few ecosystems, however, depend entirely on energy extracted by chemotrophs from methane, sulfides, or other non-luminal energy sources.[43]
+
+Some of the energy thus captured produces biomass and energy that is available for growth and development of other life forms. The majority of the rest of this biomass and energy are lost as waste molecules and heat. The most important processes for converting the energy trapped in chemical substances into energy useful to sustain life are metabolism[44] and cellular respiration.[45]
+
+Molecular biology is the study of biology at the molecular level.[46] This field overlaps with other areas of biology, particularly those of genetics and biochemistry. Molecular biology is a study of the interactions of the various systems within a cell, including the interrelationships of DNA, RNA, and protein synthesis and how those interactions are regulated.
+
+The next larger scale, cell biology, studies the structural and physiological properties of cells, including their internal behavior, interactions with other cells, and with their environment. This is done on both the microscopic and molecular levels, for unicellular organisms such as bacteria, as well as the specialized cells of multicellular organisms such as humans. Understanding the structure and function of cells is fundamental to all of the biological sciences. The similarities and differences between cell types are particularly relevant to molecular biology.
+
+Anatomy is a treatment of the macroscopic forms of such structures organs and organ systems.[47]
+
+Genetics is the science of genes, heredity, and the variation of organisms.[48][49] Genes encode the information needed by cells for the synthesis of proteins, which in turn play a central role in influencing the final phenotype of the organism. Genetics provides research tools used in the investigation of the function of a particular gene, or the analysis of genetic interactions. Within organisms, genetic information is physically represented as chromosomes, within which it is represented by a particular sequence of amino acids in particular DNA molecules.
+
+Developmental biology studies the process by which organisms grow and develop. Developmental biology, originated from embryology, studies the genetic control of cell growth, cellular differentiation, and "cellular morphogenesis," which is the process that progressively gives rise to tissues, organs, and anatomy.
+Model organisms for developmental biology include the round worm Caenorhabditis elegans,[50] the fruit fly Drosophila melanogaster,[51] the zebrafish Danio rerio,[52] the mouse Mus musculus,[53] and the weed Arabidopsis thaliana.[54][55] (A model organism is a species that is extensively studied to understand particular biological phenomena, with the expectation that discoveries made in that organism provide insight into the workings of other organisms.)[56]
+
+Physiology is the study of the mechanical, physical, and biochemical processes of living organisms function as a whole. The theme of "structure to function" is central to biology. Physiological studies have traditionally been divided into plant physiology and animal physiology, but some principles of physiology are universal, no matter what particular organism is being studied. For example, what is learned about the physiology of yeast cells can also apply to human cells. The field of animal physiology extends the tools and methods of human physiology to non-human species. Plant physiology borrows techniques from both research fields.
+
+Physiology is the study the interaction of how, for example, the nervous, immune, endocrine, respiratory, and circulatory systems, function and interact. The study of these systems is shared with such medically oriented disciplines as neurology and immunology.
+
+Evolutionary research is concerned with the origin and descent of species, and their change over time. It employs scientists from many taxonomically oriented disciplines, for example, those with special training in particular organisms such as mammalogy, ornithology, botany, or herpetology, but are of use in answering more general questions about evolution.
+
+Evolutionary biology is partly based on paleontology, which uses the fossil record to answer questions about the mode and tempo of evolution,[57] and partly on the developments in areas such as population genetics.[58] In the 1980s, developmental biology re-entered evolutionary biology after its initial exclusion from the modern synthesis through the study of evolutionary developmental biology.[59] Phylogenetics, systematics, and taxonomy are related fields often considered part of evolutionary biology.
+
+Multiple speciation events create a tree structured system of relationships between species. The role of systematics is to study these relationships and thus the differences and similarities between species and groups of species.[60]
+However, systematics was an active field of research long before evolutionary thinking was common.[61]
+
+Traditionally, living things have been divided into five kingdoms: Monera; Protista; Fungi; Plantae; Animalia.[62] However, many scientists now consider this five-kingdom system outdated. Modern alternative classification systems generally begin with the three-domain system: Archaea (originally Archaebacteria); Bacteria (originally Eubacteria) and Eukaryota (including protists, fungi, plants, and animals).[63] These domains reflect whether the cells have nuclei or not, as well as differences in the chemical composition of key biomolecules such as ribosomes.[63]
+
+Further, each kingdom is broken down recursively until each species is separately classified. The order is:
+Domain; Kingdom; Phylum; Class; Order; Family; Genus; Species.
+
+Outside of these categories, there are obligate intracellular parasites that are "on the edge of life"[64] in terms of metabolic activity, meaning that many scientists do not actually classify such structures as alive, due to their lack of at least one or more of the fundamental functions or characteristics that define life. They are classified as viruses, viroids, prions, or satellites.
+
+The scientific name of an organism is generated from its genus and species. For example, humans are listed as Homo sapiens. Homo is the genus, and sapiens the species. When writing the scientific name of an organism, it is proper to capitalize the first letter in the genus and put all of the species in lowercase.[65] Additionally, the entire term may be italicized or underlined.[66]
+
+The dominant classification system is called the Linnaean taxonomy. It includes ranks and binomial nomenclature. How organisms are named is governed by international agreements such as the International Code of Nomenclature for algae, fungi, and plants (ICN), the International Code of Zoological Nomenclature (ICZN), and the International Code of Nomenclature of Bacteria (ICNB). The classification of viruses, viroids, prions, and all other sub-viral agents that demonstrate biological characteristics is conducted by the International Committee on Taxonomy of Viruses (ICTV) and is known as the International Code of Viral Classification and Nomenclature (ICVCN).[67][68][69][70] However, several other viral classification systems do exist.
+
+A merging draft, BioCode, was published in 1997 in an attempt to standardize nomenclature in these three areas, but has yet to be formally adopted.[71] The BioCode draft has received little attention since 1997; its originally planned implementation date of January 1, 2000, has passed unnoticed. A revised BioCode that, instead of replacing the existing codes, would provide a unified context for them, was proposed in 2011.[72][73][74] However, the International Botanical Congress of 2011 declined to consider the BioCode proposal. The ICVCN remains outside the BioCode, which does not include viral classification.
+
+Animalia – Bos primigenius taurus
+
+Plantae – Triticum
+
+Fungi – Morchella esculenta
+
+Stramenopila/Chromista – Fucus serratus
+
+Bacteria – Gemmatimonas aurantiaca (-=1 Micrometer)
+
+Archaea – Halobacteria
+
+Virus – Gamma phage
+
+Ecology is the study of the distribution and abundance of living organisms, the interaction between them and their environment.[75] An organism shares an environment that includes other organisms and biotic factors as well as local abiotic factors (non-living) such as climate and ecology.[76] One reason that biological systems can be difficult to study is that so many different interactions with other organisms and the environment are possible, even on small scales. A microscopic bacterium responding to a local sugar gradient is responding to its environment as much as a lion searching for food in the African savanna. For any species, behaviors can be co-operative, competitive, parasitic, or symbiotic. Matters become more complex when two or more species interact in an ecosystem.
+
+Ecological systems are studied at several different levels, from the scale of the ecology of individual organisms, to those of populations, to the ecosystems and finally the biosphere. The term population biology is often used interchangeably with population ecology, although population biology is more frequently used in the case of diseases, viruses, and microbes, while the term population ecology is more commonly applied to the study of plants and animals. Ecology draws on many subdisciplines.
+
+Ethology is the study of animal behavior (particularly that of social animals such as primates and canids), and is sometimes considered a branch of zoology. Ethologists have been particularly concerned with the evolution of behavior and the understanding of behavior in terms of the theory of natural selection. In one sense, the first modern ethologist was Charles Darwin, whose book, The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals, influenced many ethologists to come.[77]
+
+Biogeography studies the spatial distribution of organisms on the Earth, focusing on such topics as plate tectonics, climate change, dispersal and migration, and cladistics.
+
+Despite the profound advances made over recent decades in our understanding of life's fundamental processes, some basic problems have remained unresolved. Some examples are
+
+Origin of life. While there is very good evidence for the abiotic origin of biological compounds such as amino acids, nucleotides and lipids, it is largely unclear how these molecules came together to form the first cells. Related is the question of extra-terrestrial life. If we understand how life originated on earth, we can predict more reliably which conditions are required to generate life on other planets.
+
+Aging. At present, there is no consensus view on the underlying cause of aging. Various competing theories are outlined in Ageing Theories.
+
+Pattern formation. We have a good understanding of pattern formation in some systems, such as the early insect embryo, but the generation of many patterns in nature cannot be explained easily, e.g. the stripes in zebras or many snakes, such as coral snakes. While we know that the patterns are generated by selective activation or repression of genes, many of these genes and their regulatory mechanisms remain unknown.
+
+Biology is an area of science with numerous subdisciplines that are concerned with all aspects of life, in fact all aspects of modern human life. That said, there are countless career options, ranging from basic science to industrial or agricultural applications. These are the main branches of biology:[78][79][a]
+

en/677.html.txt

@@ -0,0 +1,117 @@
+
+
+Biology is the natural science that studies life and living organisms, including their physical structure, chemical processes, molecular interactions, physiological mechanisms, development and evolution.[1] Despite the complexity of the science, certain unifying concepts consolidate it into a single, coherent field. Biology recognizes the cell as the basic unit of life, genes as the basic unit of heredity, and evolution as the engine that propels the creation and extinction of species. Living organisms are open systems that survive by transforming energy and decreasing their local entropy[2] to maintain a stable and vital condition defined as homeostasis.[3]
+
+Sub-disciplines of biology are defined by the research methods employed and the kind of system studied: theoretical biology uses mathematical methods to formulate quantitative models while experimental biology performs empirical experiments to test the validity of proposed theories and understand the mechanisms underlying life and how it appeared and evolved from non-living matter about 4 billion years ago through a gradual increase in the complexity of the system.[4][5][6] See branches of biology.
+
+Biology derives from the Ancient Greek words of βίος; romanized bíos meaning "life" and -λογία; romanized logía (-logy) meaning "branch of study" or "to speak". [7][8]  Those combined make the Greek word βιολογία; romanized biología meaning biology. Despite this, the term βιολογία as a whole didn't exist in Ancient Greek. The first to borrow it was the English and French (biologie). Since the advent of the scientific era, reanalyzable as a compound using the combining forms bio + logy.[clarification needed]
+
+The Latin-language form of the term first appeared in 1736 when Swedish scientist Carl Linnaeus (Carl von Linné) used biologi in his Bibliotheca Botanica. It was used again in 1766 in a work entitled Philosophiae naturalis sive physicae: tomus III, continens geologian, biologian, phytologian generalis, by Michael Christoph Hanov, a disciple of Christian Wolff. The first German use, Biologie, was in a 1771 translation of Linnaeus' work. In 1797, Theodor Georg August Roose used the term in the preface of a book, Grundzüge der Lehre van der Lebenskraft. Karl Friedrich Burdach used the term in 1800 in a more restricted sense of the study of human beings from a morphological, physiological and psychological perspective (Propädeutik zum Studien der gesammten Heilkunst). The term came into its modern usage with the six-volume treatise Biologie, oder Philosophie der lebenden Natur (1802–22) by Gottfried Reinhold Treviranus, who announced:[9]
+
+Although modern biology is a relatively recent development, sciences related to and included within it have been studied since ancient times. Natural philosophy was studied as early as the ancient civilizations of Mesopotamia, Egypt, the Indian subcontinent, and China. However, the origins of modern biology and its approach to the study of nature are most often traced back to ancient Greece.[10][11] While the formal study of medicine dates back to Pharaonic Egypt, it was Aristotle (384–322 BC) who contributed most extensively to the development of biology. Especially important are his History of Animals and other works where he showed naturalist leanings, and later more empirical works that focused on biological causation and the diversity of life. Aristotle's successor at the Lyceum, Theophrastus, wrote a series of books on botany that survived as the most important contribution of antiquity to the plant sciences, even into the Middle Ages.[12]
+
+Scholars of the medieval Islamic world who wrote on biology included al-Jahiz (781–869), Al-Dīnawarī (828–896), who wrote on botany,[13] and Rhazes (865–925) who wrote on anatomy and physiology. Medicine was especially well studied by Islamic scholars working in Greek philosopher traditions, while natural history drew heavily on Aristotelian thought, especially in upholding a fixed hierarchy of life.
+
+Biology began to quickly develop and grow with Anton van Leeuwenhoek's dramatic improvement of the microscope. It was then that scholars discovered spermatozoa, bacteria, infusoria and the diversity of microscopic life. Investigations by Jan Swammerdam led to new interest in entomology and helped to develop the basic techniques of microscopic dissection and staining.[14]
+
+Advances in microscopy also had a profound impact on biological thinking. In the early 19th century, a number of biologists pointed to the central importance of the cell. Then, in 1838, Schleiden and Schwann began promoting the now universal ideas that (1) the basic unit of organisms is the cell and (2) that individual cells have all the characteristics of life, although they opposed the idea that (3) all cells come from the division of other cells. Thanks to the work of Robert Remak and Rudolf Virchow, however, by the 1860s most biologists accepted all three tenets of what came to be known as cell theory.[15][16]
+
+Meanwhile, taxonomy and classification became the focus of natural historians. Carl Linnaeus published a basic taxonomy for the natural world in 1735 (variations of which have been in use ever since), and in the 1750s introduced scientific names for all his species.[17] Georges-Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon, treated species as artificial categories and living forms as malleable—even suggesting the possibility of common descent. Although he was opposed to evolution, Buffon is a key figure in the history of evolutionary thought; his work influenced the evolutionary theories of both Lamarck and Darwin.[18]
+
+Serious evolutionary thinking originated with the works of Jean-Baptiste Lamarck, who was the first to present a coherent theory of evolution.[19] He posited that evolution was the result of environmental stress on properties of animals, meaning that the more frequently and rigorously an organ was used, the more complex and efficient it would become, thus adapting the animal to its environment. Lamarck believed that these acquired traits could then be passed on to the animal's offspring, who would further develop and perfect them.[20] However, it was the British naturalist Charles Darwin, combining the biogeographical approach of Humboldt, the uniformitarian geology of Lyell, Malthus's writings on population growth, and his own morphological expertise and extensive natural observations, who forged a more successful evolutionary theory based on natural selection; similar reasoning and evidence led Alfred Russel Wallace to independently reach the same conclusions.[21][22] Although it was the subject of controversy (which continues to this day), Darwin's theory quickly spread through the scientific community and soon became a central axiom of the rapidly developing science of biology.
+
+The discovery of the physical representation of heredity came along with evolutionary principles and population genetics. In the 1940s and early 1950s, experiments pointed to DNA as the component of chromosomes that held the trait-carrying units that had become known as genes. A focus on new kinds of model organisms such as viruses and bacteria, along with the discovery of the double-helical structure of DNA in 1953, marked the transition to the era of molecular genetics. From the 1950s to the present times, biology has been vastly extended in the molecular domain. The genetic code was cracked by Har Gobind Khorana, Robert W. Holley and Marshall Warren Nirenberg after DNA was understood to contain codons. Finally, the Human Genome Project was launched in 1990 with the goal of mapping the general human genome. This project was essentially completed in 2003,[23] with further analysis still being published. The Human Genome Project was the first step in a globalized effort to incorporate accumulated knowledge of biology into a functional, molecular definition of the human body and the bodies of other organisms.
+
+Cell theory states that the cell is the fundamental unit of life, that all living things are composed of one or more cells, and that all cells arise from pre-existing cells through cell division. In multicellular organisms, every cell in the organism's body derives ultimately from a single cell in a fertilized egg. The cell is also considered to be the basic unit in many pathological processes.[24] In addition, the phenomenon of energy flow occurs in cells in processes that are part of the function known as metabolism. Finally, cells contain hereditary information (DNA), which is passed from cell to cell during cell division. Research into the origin of life, abiogenesis, amounts to an attempt to discover the origin of the first cells.
+
+A central organizing concept in biology is that life changes and develops through evolution, and that all life-forms known have a common origin. The theory of evolution postulates that all organisms on the Earth, both living and extinct, have descended from a common ancestor or an ancestral gene pool. This universal common ancestor of all organisms is believed to have appeared about 3.5 billion years ago.[25] Biologists regard the ubiquity of the genetic code as definitive evidence in favor of the theory of universal common descent for all bacteria, archaea, and eukaryotes (see: origin of life).[26]
+
+The term "evolution" was introduced into the scientific lexicon by Jean-Baptiste de Lamarck in 1809,[27] and fifty years later Charles Darwin posited a scientific model of natural selection as evolution's driving force.[28][29][30] (Alfred Russel Wallace is recognized as the co-discoverer of this concept as he helped research and experiment with the concept of evolution.)[31] Evolution is now used to explain the great variations of life found on Earth.
+
+Darwin theorized that species flourish or die when subjected to the processes of natural selection or selective breeding.[32] Genetic drift was embraced as an additional mechanism of evolutionary development in the modern synthesis of the theory.[33]
+
+The evolutionary history of the species—which describes the characteristics of the various species from which it descended—together with its genealogical relationship to every other species is known as its phylogeny. Widely varied approaches to biology generate information about phylogeny. These include the comparisons of DNA sequences, a product of molecular biology (more particularly genomics), and comparisons of fossils or other records of ancient organisms, a product of paleontology.[34] Biologists organize and analyze evolutionary relationships through various methods, including phylogenetics, phenetics, and cladistics. (For a summary of major events in the evolution of life as currently understood by biologists, see evolutionary timeline.)
+
+Evolution is relevant to the understanding of the natural history of life forms and to the understanding of the organization of current life forms. But, those organizations can only be understood in light of how they came to be by way of the process of evolution. Consequently, evolution is central to all fields of biology.[35]
+
+Genes are the primary units of inheritance in all organisms. A gene is a unit of heredity and corresponds to a region of DNA that influences the form or function of an organism in specific ways. All organisms, from bacteria to animals, share the same basic machinery that copies and translates DNA into proteins. Cells transcribe a DNA gene into an RNA version of the gene, and a ribosome then translates the RNA into a sequence of amino acids known as a protein. The translation code from RNA codon to amino acid is the same for most organisms. For example, a sequence of DNA that codes for insulin in humans also codes for insulin when inserted into other organisms, such as plants.[36]
+
+DNA is found as linear chromosomes in eukaryotes, and circular chromosomes in prokaryotes. A chromosome is an organized structure consisting of DNA and histones. The set of chromosomes in a cell and any other hereditary information found in the mitochondria, chloroplasts, or other locations is collectively known as a cell's genome. In eukaryotes, genomic DNA is localized in the cell nucleus, or with small amounts in mitochondria and chloroplasts. In prokaryotes, the DNA is held within an irregularly shaped body in the cytoplasm called the nucleoid.[37] The genetic information in a genome is held within genes, and the complete assemblage of this information in an organism is called its genotype.[38]
+
+Homeostasis is the ability of an open system to regulate its internal environment to maintain stable conditions by means of multiple dynamic equilibrium adjustments that are controlled by interrelated regulation mechanisms. All living organisms, whether unicellular or multicellular, exhibit homeostasis.[40]
+
+To maintain dynamic equilibrium and effectively carry out certain functions, a system must detect and respond to perturbations. After the detection of a perturbation, a biological system normally responds through negative feedback that stabilize conditions by reducing or increasing the activity of an organ or system. One example is the release of glucagon when sugar levels are too low.
+
+The survival of a living organism depends on the continuous input of energy. Chemical reactions that are responsible for its structure and function are tuned to extract energy from substances that act as its food and transform them to help form new cells and sustain them. In this process, molecules of chemical substances that constitute food play two roles; first, they contain energy that can be transformed and reused in that organism's biological, chemical reactions; second, food can be transformed into new molecular structures (biomolecules) that are of use to that organism.
+
+The organisms responsible for the introduction of energy into an ecosystem are known as producers or autotrophs. Nearly all such organisms originally draw their energy from the sun.[41] Plants and other phototrophs use solar energy via a process known as photosynthesis to convert raw materials into organic molecules, such as ATP, whose bonds can be broken to release energy.[42] A few ecosystems, however, depend entirely on energy extracted by chemotrophs from methane, sulfides, or other non-luminal energy sources.[43]
+
+Some of the energy thus captured produces biomass and energy that is available for growth and development of other life forms. The majority of the rest of this biomass and energy are lost as waste molecules and heat. The most important processes for converting the energy trapped in chemical substances into energy useful to sustain life are metabolism[44] and cellular respiration.[45]
+
+Molecular biology is the study of biology at the molecular level.[46] This field overlaps with other areas of biology, particularly those of genetics and biochemistry. Molecular biology is a study of the interactions of the various systems within a cell, including the interrelationships of DNA, RNA, and protein synthesis and how those interactions are regulated.
+
+The next larger scale, cell biology, studies the structural and physiological properties of cells, including their internal behavior, interactions with other cells, and with their environment. This is done on both the microscopic and molecular levels, for unicellular organisms such as bacteria, as well as the specialized cells of multicellular organisms such as humans. Understanding the structure and function of cells is fundamental to all of the biological sciences. The similarities and differences between cell types are particularly relevant to molecular biology.
+
+Anatomy is a treatment of the macroscopic forms of such structures organs and organ systems.[47]
+
+Genetics is the science of genes, heredity, and the variation of organisms.[48][49] Genes encode the information needed by cells for the synthesis of proteins, which in turn play a central role in influencing the final phenotype of the organism. Genetics provides research tools used in the investigation of the function of a particular gene, or the analysis of genetic interactions. Within organisms, genetic information is physically represented as chromosomes, within which it is represented by a particular sequence of amino acids in particular DNA molecules.
+
+Developmental biology studies the process by which organisms grow and develop. Developmental biology, originated from embryology, studies the genetic control of cell growth, cellular differentiation, and "cellular morphogenesis," which is the process that progressively gives rise to tissues, organs, and anatomy.
+Model organisms for developmental biology include the round worm Caenorhabditis elegans,[50] the fruit fly Drosophila melanogaster,[51] the zebrafish Danio rerio,[52] the mouse Mus musculus,[53] and the weed Arabidopsis thaliana.[54][55] (A model organism is a species that is extensively studied to understand particular biological phenomena, with the expectation that discoveries made in that organism provide insight into the workings of other organisms.)[56]
+
+Physiology is the study of the mechanical, physical, and biochemical processes of living organisms function as a whole. The theme of "structure to function" is central to biology. Physiological studies have traditionally been divided into plant physiology and animal physiology, but some principles of physiology are universal, no matter what particular organism is being studied. For example, what is learned about the physiology of yeast cells can also apply to human cells. The field of animal physiology extends the tools and methods of human physiology to non-human species. Plant physiology borrows techniques from both research fields.
+
+Physiology is the study the interaction of how, for example, the nervous, immune, endocrine, respiratory, and circulatory systems, function and interact. The study of these systems is shared with such medically oriented disciplines as neurology and immunology.
+
+Evolutionary research is concerned with the origin and descent of species, and their change over time. It employs scientists from many taxonomically oriented disciplines, for example, those with special training in particular organisms such as mammalogy, ornithology, botany, or herpetology, but are of use in answering more general questions about evolution.
+
+Evolutionary biology is partly based on paleontology, which uses the fossil record to answer questions about the mode and tempo of evolution,[57] and partly on the developments in areas such as population genetics.[58] In the 1980s, developmental biology re-entered evolutionary biology after its initial exclusion from the modern synthesis through the study of evolutionary developmental biology.[59] Phylogenetics, systematics, and taxonomy are related fields often considered part of evolutionary biology.
+
+Multiple speciation events create a tree structured system of relationships between species. The role of systematics is to study these relationships and thus the differences and similarities between species and groups of species.[60]
+However, systematics was an active field of research long before evolutionary thinking was common.[61]
+
+Traditionally, living things have been divided into five kingdoms: Monera; Protista; Fungi; Plantae; Animalia.[62] However, many scientists now consider this five-kingdom system outdated. Modern alternative classification systems generally begin with the three-domain system: Archaea (originally Archaebacteria); Bacteria (originally Eubacteria) and Eukaryota (including protists, fungi, plants, and animals).[63] These domains reflect whether the cells have nuclei or not, as well as differences in the chemical composition of key biomolecules such as ribosomes.[63]
+
+Further, each kingdom is broken down recursively until each species is separately classified. The order is:
+Domain; Kingdom; Phylum; Class; Order; Family; Genus; Species.
+
+Outside of these categories, there are obligate intracellular parasites that are "on the edge of life"[64] in terms of metabolic activity, meaning that many scientists do not actually classify such structures as alive, due to their lack of at least one or more of the fundamental functions or characteristics that define life. They are classified as viruses, viroids, prions, or satellites.
+
+The scientific name of an organism is generated from its genus and species. For example, humans are listed as Homo sapiens. Homo is the genus, and sapiens the species. When writing the scientific name of an organism, it is proper to capitalize the first letter in the genus and put all of the species in lowercase.[65] Additionally, the entire term may be italicized or underlined.[66]
+
+The dominant classification system is called the Linnaean taxonomy. It includes ranks and binomial nomenclature. How organisms are named is governed by international agreements such as the International Code of Nomenclature for algae, fungi, and plants (ICN), the International Code of Zoological Nomenclature (ICZN), and the International Code of Nomenclature of Bacteria (ICNB). The classification of viruses, viroids, prions, and all other sub-viral agents that demonstrate biological characteristics is conducted by the International Committee on Taxonomy of Viruses (ICTV) and is known as the International Code of Viral Classification and Nomenclature (ICVCN).[67][68][69][70] However, several other viral classification systems do exist.
+
+A merging draft, BioCode, was published in 1997 in an attempt to standardize nomenclature in these three areas, but has yet to be formally adopted.[71] The BioCode draft has received little attention since 1997; its originally planned implementation date of January 1, 2000, has passed unnoticed. A revised BioCode that, instead of replacing the existing codes, would provide a unified context for them, was proposed in 2011.[72][73][74] However, the International Botanical Congress of 2011 declined to consider the BioCode proposal. The ICVCN remains outside the BioCode, which does not include viral classification.
+
+Animalia – Bos primigenius taurus
+
+Plantae – Triticum
+
+Fungi – Morchella esculenta
+
+Stramenopila/Chromista – Fucus serratus
+
+Bacteria – Gemmatimonas aurantiaca (-=1 Micrometer)
+
+Archaea – Halobacteria
+
+Virus – Gamma phage
+
+Ecology is the study of the distribution and abundance of living organisms, the interaction between them and their environment.[75] An organism shares an environment that includes other organisms and biotic factors as well as local abiotic factors (non-living) such as climate and ecology.[76] One reason that biological systems can be difficult to study is that so many different interactions with other organisms and the environment are possible, even on small scales. A microscopic bacterium responding to a local sugar gradient is responding to its environment as much as a lion searching for food in the African savanna. For any species, behaviors can be co-operative, competitive, parasitic, or symbiotic. Matters become more complex when two or more species interact in an ecosystem.
+
+Ecological systems are studied at several different levels, from the scale of the ecology of individual organisms, to those of populations, to the ecosystems and finally the biosphere. The term population biology is often used interchangeably with population ecology, although population biology is more frequently used in the case of diseases, viruses, and microbes, while the term population ecology is more commonly applied to the study of plants and animals. Ecology draws on many subdisciplines.
+
+Ethology is the study of animal behavior (particularly that of social animals such as primates and canids), and is sometimes considered a branch of zoology. Ethologists have been particularly concerned with the evolution of behavior and the understanding of behavior in terms of the theory of natural selection. In one sense, the first modern ethologist was Charles Darwin, whose book, The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals, influenced many ethologists to come.[77]
+
+Biogeography studies the spatial distribution of organisms on the Earth, focusing on such topics as plate tectonics, climate change, dispersal and migration, and cladistics.
+
+Despite the profound advances made over recent decades in our understanding of life's fundamental processes, some basic problems have remained unresolved. Some examples are
+
+Origin of life. While there is very good evidence for the abiotic origin of biological compounds such as amino acids, nucleotides and lipids, it is largely unclear how these molecules came together to form the first cells. Related is the question of extra-terrestrial life. If we understand how life originated on earth, we can predict more reliably which conditions are required to generate life on other planets.
+
+Aging. At present, there is no consensus view on the underlying cause of aging. Various competing theories are outlined in Ageing Theories.
+
+Pattern formation. We have a good understanding of pattern formation in some systems, such as the early insect embryo, but the generation of many patterns in nature cannot be explained easily, e.g. the stripes in zebras or many snakes, such as coral snakes. While we know that the patterns are generated by selective activation or repression of genes, many of these genes and their regulatory mechanisms remain unknown.
+
+Biology is an area of science with numerous subdisciplines that are concerned with all aspects of life, in fact all aspects of modern human life. That said, there are countless career options, ranging from basic science to industrial or agricultural applications. These are the main branches of biology:[78][79][a]
+

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+in ASEAN (dark grey)  –  [Legend]
+
+Myanmar (English pronunciation below; Burmese: မြန်မာ, [mjəmà])[nb 1] or Burma (see §Etymology), officially the Republic of the Union of Myanmar[nb 2], is a country in Southeast Asia. Myanmar is bordered by Bangladesh and India to its northwest, China to its northeast, Laos and Thailand to its east and southeast, and the Andaman Sea and the Bay of Bengal to its south and southwest. With a size of 676,578 square kilometres (261,228 square miles), Myanmar is the largest of the Mainland Southeast Asian states by area. As of 2017, the population is about 54 million.[4] Its capital city is Naypyidaw, and its largest city is Yangon (Rangoon).[1] Myanmar has been a member of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) since 1997.
+
+Early civilisations in Myanmar included the Tibeto-Burman-speaking Pyu city-states in Upper Burma and the Mon kingdoms in Lower Burma.[8] In the 9th century, the Bamar people entered the upper Irrawaddy valley and, following the establishment of the Pagan Kingdom in the 1050s, the Burmese language, culture and Theravada Buddhism slowly became dominant in the country. The Pagan Kingdom fell due to the Mongol invasions and several warring states emerged. In the 16th century, reunified by the Taungoo dynasty, the country was for a brief period the largest empire in the history of Mainland Southeast Asia.[9] The early 19th-century Konbaung dynasty ruled over an area that included modern Myanmar and briefly controlled Manipur and Assam as well. The British East India Company seized control of the administration of Myanmar after three Anglo-Burmese Wars in the 19th century and the country became a British colony. Myanmar was granted independence in 1948, as a democratic nation. Following a coup d'état in 1962, it became a military dictatorship under the Burma Socialist Programme Party.
+
+For most of its independent years, the country has been engrossed in rampant ethnic strife and its myriad ethnic groups have been involved in one of the world's longest-running ongoing civil wars. During this time, the United Nations and several other organisations have reported consistent and systematic human rights violations in the country.[10] In 2011, the military junta was officially dissolved following a 2010 general election, and a nominally civilian government was installed. This, along with the release of Aung San Suu Kyi and political prisoners, has improved the country's human rights record and foreign relations, and has led to the easing of trade and other economic sanctions.[11] There is, however, continuing criticism of the government's treatment of ethnic minorities, its response to the ethnic insurgency, and religious clashes.[12] In the landmark 2015 election, Aung San Suu Kyi's party won a majority in both houses. However, the Burmese military remains a powerful force in politics.
+
+Myanmar is a member of the East Asia Summit, Non-Aligned Movement, ASEAN and BIMSTEC, but not a member of the Commonwealth of Nations. It is a country rich in jade and gems, oil, natural gas and other mineral resources. Myanmar is also endowed with renewable energy; it has the highest solar power potential compared to other countries of the Great Mekong Subregion.[13] In 2013, its GDP (nominal) stood at US$56.7 billion and its GDP (PPP) at US$221.5 billion.[14] The income gap in Myanmar is among the widest in the world, as a large proportion of the economy is controlled by supporters of the former military government.[15] As of 2016[update], Myanmar ranks 145 out of 188 countries in human development, according to the Human Development Index.[7]
+
+The name of the country has been a matter of dispute and disagreement, particularly in recent decades, focusing mainly on the political legitimacy of those using Myanmar vs. Burma.[16][17] Both names derive from the earlier Burmese Myanma or Myamma, an ethnonym for the majority Bamar ethnic group, of uncertain etymology.[18] The terms are also popularly thought to derive from Brahma Desha after Brahma.[19]
+
+In 1989, the military government officially changed the English translations of many names dating back to Burma's colonial period or earlier, including that of the country itself: Burma became Myanmar. The renaming remains a contested issue.[20] Many political and ethnic opposition groups and countries continue to use Burma because they do not recognise the legitimacy of the ruling military government or its authority to rename the country.[21]
+
+In April 2016, soon after taking office, Aung San Suu Kyi said concerning the question of which name should be used that, "it is up to you, because there is nothing in the constitution of our country that says that you must use any term in particular". She continued, "I use Burma very often because I am used to using it. But it does not mean that I require other people to do that as well. And I’ll make an effort to say Myanmar from time to time so you all feel comfortable".[22]
+
+The country's official full name is the "Republic of the Union of Myanmar" (ပြည်ထောင်စုသမ္မတ မြန်မာနိုင်ငံတော်, Pyihtaungsu Thamada Myanma Naingngantaw, pronounced [pjìdàʊɴzṵ θàɴməda̰ mjəmà nàɪɴŋàɴdɔ̀]). Countries that do not officially recognise that name use the long form "Union of Burma" instead.[1][23]
+
+In English, the country is popularly known as either Burma or Myanmar. Both these names are derived from the name of the majority Burmese Bamar ethnic group. Myanmar is considered to be the literary form of the name of the group, while Burma is derived from "Bamar", the colloquial form of the group's name.[20] Depending on the register used, the pronunciation would be Bama (pronounced [bəmà]) or Myamah (pronounced [mjəmà]).[20] The name Burma has been in use in English since the 18th century.
+
+Official United States policy retains Burma as the country's name, although the State Department's website lists the country as Burma (Myanmar) and Barack Obama has referred to the country by both names.[24] The CIA's World Factbook lists the country as Burma as of August 2019[update].[1] The government of Canada has in the past used Burma,[25] such as in its 2007 legislation imposing sanctions,[26] but as of the mid-2010s generally uses Myanmar.[27] The Czech Republic officially uses Myanmar, although its Ministry of Foreign Affairs uses both Myanmar and Burma on its website.[28] The United Nations uses Myanmar, as do the Association of Southeast Asian Nations, Australia,[29] Russia, Germany,[30] China, India, Bangladesh, Norway,[31] Japan[25] and Switzerland.[32]
+
+Most English-speaking international news media refer to the country by the name Myanmar, including the BBC,[33] CNN,[34] Al Jazeera,[35] Reuters,[36] and the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC)/Radio Australia.[37]
+
+Myanmar is known with a name deriving from Burma as opposed to Myanmar in Spanish, Italian, Romanian, and Greek – Birmania being the local version of Burma in the Spanish language, for example. Myanmar used to be known as Birmânia in Portuguese, and as Birmanie in French.[38] As in the past, French-language media today consistently use Birmanie.[39][40]
+
+There is no established pronunciation of the name Myanmar in English. It is approximated at least nine different ways: /ˌmjænˈmɑːr/, /ˈmiːənmɑːr/, /ˌmjɑːnˈmɑːr/ (listen), /ˈmjænmɑːr/, /miˈænmɑːr/, /ˈmjɑːnmɑːr/, /ˌmaɪ.ənˈmɑːr/, /maɪˈɑːnmɑːr/, /ˈmaɪænmɑːr/.[41]
+
+Archaeological evidence shows that Homo erectus lived in the region now known as Myanmar as early as 750,000 years ago, with no more erectus finds after 75,000 years ago.[42] The first evidence of Homo sapiens is dated to about 25,000 BP with discoveries of stone tools in central Myanmar.[43] Evidence of Neolithic age domestication of plants and animals and the use of polished stone tools dating to sometime between 10,000 and 6,000 BCE has been discovered in the form of cave paintings in Padah-Lin Caves.[44]
+
+The Bronze Age arrived c. 1500 BCE when people in the region were turning copper into bronze, growing rice and domesticating poultry and pigs; they were among the first people in the world to do so.[45] Human remains and artefacts from this era were discovered in Monywa District in the Sagaing Division.[46] The Iron Age began around 500 BCE with the emergence of iron-working settlements in an area south of present-day Mandalay.[47] Evidence also shows the presence of rice-growing settlements of large villages and small towns that traded with their surroundings as far as China between 500 BCE and 200 CE.[48] Iron Age Burmese cultures also had influences from outside sources such as India and Thailand, as seen in their funerary practices concerning child burials. This indicates some form of communication between groups in Myanmar and other places, possibly through trade.[49]
+
+Around the second century BCE the first-known city-states emerged in central Myanmar. The city-states were founded as part of the southward migration by the Tibeto-Burman-speaking Pyu people, the earliest inhabitants of Myanmar of whom records are extant, from present-day Yunnan.[50] The Pyu culture was heavily influenced by trade with India, importing Buddhism as well as other cultural, architectural and political concepts, which would have an enduring influence on later Burmese culture and political organisation.[51]
+
+By the 9th century, several city-states had sprouted across the land: the Pyu in the central dry zone, Mon along the southern coastline and Arakanese along the western littoral. The balance was upset when the Pyu came under repeated attacks from Nanzhao between the 750s and the 830s. In the mid-to-late 9th century the Bamar people founded a small settlement at Bagan. It was one of several competing city-states until the late 10th century when it grew in authority and grandeur.[52]
+
+Pagan gradually grew to absorb its surrounding states until the 1050s–1060s when Anawrahta founded the Pagan Kingdom, the first ever unification of the Irrawaddy valley and its periphery. In the 12th and 13th centuries, the Pagan Empire and the Khmer Empire were two main powers in mainland Southeast Asia.[53] The Burmese language and culture gradually became dominant in the upper Irrawaddy valley, eclipsing the Pyu, Mon and Pali norms by the late 12th century.[54]
+
+Theravada Buddhism slowly began to spread to the village level, although Tantric, Mahayana, Hinduism, and folk religion remained heavily entrenched. Pagan's rulers and wealthy built over 10,000 Buddhist temples in the Pagan capital zone alone. Repeated Mongol invasions (1277–1301) toppled the four-century-old kingdom in 1287.[54]
+
+Pagan's collapse was followed by 250 years of political fragmentation that lasted well into the 16th century. Like the Burmans four centuries earlier, Shan migrants who arrived with the Mongol invasions stayed behind. Several competing Shan States came to dominate the entire northwestern to eastern arc surrounding the Irrawaddy valley. The valley too was beset with petty states until the late 14th century when two sizeable powers, Ava Kingdom and Hanthawaddy Kingdom, emerged. In the west, a politically fragmented Arakan was under competing influences of its stronger neighbours until the Kingdom of Mrauk U unified the Arakan coastline for the first time in 1437. The kingdom was a protectorate of the Bengal Sultanate at different time periods.[55]
+
+Early on, Ava fought wars of unification (1385–1424) but could never quite reassemble the lost empire. Having held off Ava, the Mon-speaking Hanthawaddy entered its golden age, and Arakan went on to become a power in its own right for the next 350 years. In contrast, constant warfare left Ava greatly weakened, and it slowly disintegrated from 1481 onward. In 1527, the Confederation of Shan States conquered Ava itself, and ruled Upper Myanmar until 1555.
+
+Like the Pagan Empire, Ava, Hanthawaddy and the Shan states were all multi-ethnic polities. Despite the wars, cultural synchronisation continued. This period is considered a golden age for Burmese culture. Burmese literature "grew more confident, popular, and stylistically diverse", and the second generation of Burmese law codes as well as the earliest pan-Burma chronicles emerged.[56] Hanthawaddy monarchs introduced religious reforms that later spread to the rest of the country.[57] Many splendid temples of Mrauk U were built during this period.
+
+Political unification returned in the mid-16th century, due to the efforts of Taungoo, a former vassal state of Ava. Taungoo's young, ambitious king Tabinshwehti defeated the more powerful Hanthawaddy in the Toungoo–Hanthawaddy War (1534–41). His successor Bayinnaung went on to conquer a vast swath of mainland Southeast Asia including the Shan states, Lan Na, Manipur, Mong Mao, the Ayutthaya Kingdom, Lan Xang and southern Arakan. However, the largest empire in the history of Southeast Asia unravelled soon after Bayinnaung's death in 1581, completely collapsing by 1599. Ayutthaya seized Tenasserim and Lan Na, and Portuguese mercenaries established Portuguese rule at Thanlyin (Syriam).
+
+The dynasty regrouped and defeated the Portuguese in 1613 and Siam in 1614. It restored a smaller, more manageable kingdom, encompassing Lower Myanmar, Upper Myanmar, Shan states, Lan Na and upper Tenasserim. The Restored Toungoo kings created a legal and political framework whose basic features would continue well into the 19th century. The crown completely replaced the hereditary chieftainships with appointed governorships in the entire Irrawaddy valley, and greatly reduced the hereditary rights of Shan chiefs. Its trade and secular administrative reforms built a prosperous economy for more than 80 years. From the 1720s onward, the kingdom was beset with repeated Meithei raids into Upper Myanmar and a nagging rebellion in Lan Na. In 1740, the Mon of Lower Myanmar founded the Restored Hanthawaddy Kingdom. Hanthawaddy forces sacked Ava in 1752, ending the 266-year-old Toungoo Dynasty.
+
+After the fall of Ava, the Konbaung–Hanthawaddy War involved one resistance group under Alaungpaya defeating the Restored Hanthawaddy, and by 1759, he had reunited all of Myanmar and Manipur, and driven out the French and the British, who had provided arms to Hanthawaddy. By 1770, Alaungpaya's heirs had subdued much of Laos (1765) and fought and won the Burmese–Siamese War (1765–67) against Ayutthaya and the Sino-Burmese War (1765–69) against Qing China (1765–1769).[58]
+
+With Burma preoccupied by the Chinese threat, Ayutthaya recovered its territories by 1770, and went on to capture Lan Na by 1776. Burma and Siam went to war until 1855, but all resulted in a stalemate, exchanging Tenasserim (to Burma) and Lan Na (to Ayutthaya). Faced with a powerful China and a resurgent Ayutthaya in the east, King Bodawpaya turned west, acquiring Arakan (1785), Manipur (1814) and Assam (1817). It was the second-largest empire in Burmese history but also one with a long ill-defined border with British India.[59]
+
+The breadth of this empire was short lived. Burma lost Arakan, Manipur, Assam and Tenasserim to the British in the First Anglo-Burmese War (1824–1826). In 1852, the British easily seized Lower Burma in the Second Anglo-Burmese War. King Mindon Min tried to modernise the kingdom, and in 1875 narrowly avoided annexation by ceding the Karenni States. The British, alarmed by the consolidation of French Indochina, annexed the remainder of the country in the Third Anglo-Burmese War in 1885.
+
+Konbaung kings extended Restored Toungoo's administrative reforms, and achieved unprecedented levels of internal control and external expansion. For the first time in history, the Burmese language and culture came to predominate the entire Irrawaddy valley. The evolution and growth of Burmese literature and theatre continued, aided by an extremely high adult male literacy rate for the era (half of all males and 5% of females).[60] Nonetheless, the extent and pace of reforms were uneven and ultimately proved insufficient to stem the advance of British colonialism.
+
+The eighteenth century saw Burmese rulers, whose country had not previously been of particular interest to European traders, seek to maintain their traditional influence in the western areas of Assam, Manipur and Arakan. Pressing them, however, was the British East India Company, which was expanding its interests eastwards over the same territory. Over the next sixty years, diplomacy, raids, treaties and compromises continued until, after three Anglo-Burmese Wars (1824–1885), Britain proclaimed control over most of Burma.[61] British rule brought social, economic, cultural and administrative changes.
+
+With the fall of Mandalay, all of Burma came under British rule, being annexed on 1 January 1886. Throughout the colonial era, many Indians arrived as soldiers, civil servants, construction workers and traders and, along with the Anglo-Burmese community, dominated commercial and civil life in Burma. Rangoon became the capital of British Burma and an important port between Calcutta and Singapore.
+
+Burmese resentment was strong and was vented in violent riots that paralysed Yangon (Rangoon) on occasion all the way until the 1930s.[62] Some of the discontent was caused by a disrespect for Burmese culture and traditions such as the British refusal to remove shoes when they entered pagodas. Buddhist monks became the vanguards of the independence movement. U Wisara, an activist monk, died in prison after a 166-day hunger strike to protest against a rule that forbade him to wear his Buddhist robes while imprisoned.[63]
+
+On 1 April 1937, Burma became a separately administered colony of Great Britain and Ba Maw became the first Prime Minister and Premier of Burma. Ba Maw was an outspoken advocate for Burmese self-rule and he opposed the participation of Great Britain, and by extension Burma, in World War II. He resigned from the Legislative Assembly and was arrested for sedition. In 1940, before Japan formally entered the Second World War, Aung San formed the Burma Independence Army in Japan.
+
+A major battleground, Burma was devastated during World War II by March 1942. Within months after they entered the war, Japanese troops had advanced on Rangoon and the British administration had collapsed. A Burmese Executive Administration headed by Ba Maw was established by the Japanese in August 1942. Wingate's British Chindits were formed into long-range penetration groups trained to operate deep behind Japanese lines.[64] A similar American unit, Merrill's Marauders, followed the Chindits into the Burmese jungle in 1943.[65] Beginning in late 1944, allied troops launched a series of offensives that led to the end of Japanese rule in July 1945. The battles were intense with much of Burma laid waste by the fighting. Overall, the Japanese lost some 150,000 men in Burma with only 1,700 prisoners taken.[66]
+
+Although many Burmese fought initially for the Japanese as part of the Burma Independence Army, many Burmese, mostly from the ethnic minorities, served in the British Burma Army.[67] The Burma National Army and the Arakan National Army fought with the Japanese from 1942 to 1944 but switched allegiance to the Allied side in 1945. Under Japanese occupation, 170,000 to 250,000 civilians died.[68]
+
+Following World War II, Aung San negotiated the Panglong Agreement with ethnic leaders that guaranteed the independence of Myanmar as a unified state. Aung Zan Wai, Pe Khin, Bo Hmu Aung, Sir Maung Gyi, Dr. Sein Mya Maung, Myoma U Than Kywe were among the negotiators of the historical Panglong Conference negotiated with Bamar leader General Aung San and other ethnic leaders in 1947. In 1947, Aung San became Deputy Chairman of the Executive Council of Myanmar, a transitional government. But in July 1947, political rivals[69] assassinated Aung San and several cabinet members.[70]
+
+On 4 January 1948, the nation became an independent republic, under the terms of the Burma Independence Act 1947. The new country was named the Union of Burma, with Sao Shwe Thaik as its first President and U Nu as its first Prime Minister. Unlike most other former British colonies and overseas territories, Burma did not become a member of the Commonwealth. A bicameral parliament was formed, consisting of a Chamber of Deputies and a Chamber of Nationalities,[71] and multi-party elections were held in 1951–1952, 1956 and 1960.
+
+The geographical area Burma encompasses today can be traced to the Panglong Agreement, which combined Burma Proper, which consisted of Lower Burma and Upper Burma, and the Frontier Areas, which had been administered separately by the British.[72]
+
+In 1961, U Thant, then the Union of Burma's Permanent Representative to the United Nations and former Secretary to the Prime Minister, was elected Secretary-General of the United Nations, a position he held for ten years.[73] Among the Burmese to work at the UN when he was Secretary-General was a young Aung San Suu Kyi (daughter of Aung San), who went on to become winner of the 1991 Nobel Peace Prize.
+
+When the non-Burman ethnic groups pushed for autonomy or federalism, alongside having a weak civilian government at the centre, the military leadership staged a coup d’état in 1962. Though incorporated in the 1947 Constitution, successive military governments construed the use of the term ‘federalism’ as being anti-national, anti-unity and pro-disintegration.[74]
+
+On 2 March 1962, the military led by General Ne Win took control of Burma through a coup d'état, and the government has been under direct or indirect control by the military since then. Between 1962 and 1974, Myanmar was ruled by a revolutionary council headed by the general. Almost all aspects of society (business, media, production) were nationalised or brought under government control under the Burmese Way to Socialism,[75] which combined Soviet-style nationalisation and central planning.
+
+A new constitution of the Socialist Republic of the Union of Burma was adopted in 1974. Until 1988, the country was ruled as a one-party system, with the General and other military officers resigning and ruling through the Burma Socialist Programme Party (BSPP).[76] During this period, Myanmar became one of the world's most impoverished countries.[77]
+
+There were sporadic protests against military rule during the Ne Win years and these were almost always violently suppressed. On 7 July 1962, the government broke up demonstrations at Rangoon University, killing 15 students.[75] In 1974, the military violently suppressed anti-government protests at the funeral of U Thant. Student protests in 1975, 1976, and 1977 were quickly suppressed by overwhelming force.[76]
+
+In 1988, unrest over economic mismanagement and political oppression by the government led to widespread pro-democracy demonstrations throughout the country known as the 8888 Uprising. Security forces killed thousands of demonstrators, and General Saw Maung staged a coup d'état and formed the State Law and Order Restoration Council (SLORC). In 1989, SLORC declared martial law after widespread protests. The military government finalised plans for People's Assembly elections on 31 May 1989.[78] SLORC changed the country's official English name from the "Socialist Republic of the Union of Burma" to the "Union of Myanmar" in 18 June 1989 by enacting the adaptation of the expression law.
+
+In May 1990, the government held free elections for the first time in almost 30 years and the National League for Democracy (NLD), the party of Aung San Suu Kyi, won 392 out of a total 492 seats (i.e., 80% of the seats). However, the military junta refused to cede power[79] and continued to rule the nation as SLORC until 1997, and then as the State Peace and Development Council (SPDC) until its dissolution in March 2011.
+
+On 23 June 1997, Myanmar was admitted into the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN). On 27 March 2006, the military junta, which had moved the national capital from Yangon to a site near Pyinmana in November 2005, officially named the new capital Naypyidaw, meaning "city of the kings".[80]
+
+In August 2007, an increase in the price of fuel led to the Saffron Revolution led by Buddhist monks that were dealt with harshly by the government.[81] The government cracked down on them on 26 September 2007. The crackdown was harsh, with reports of barricades at the Shwedagon Pagoda and monks killed. There were also rumours of disagreement within the Burmese armed forces, but none was confirmed. The military crackdown against unarmed protesters was widely condemned as part of the international reactions to the Saffron Revolution and led to an increase in economic sanctions against the Burmese Government.
+
+In May 2008, Cyclone Nargis caused extensive damage in the densely populated, rice-farming delta of the Irrawaddy Division.[82] It was the worst natural disaster in Burmese history with reports of an estimated 200,000 people dead or missing, damage totalled to 10 billion US dollars, and as many as 1 million left homeless.[83] In the critical days following this disaster, Myanmar's isolationist government was accused of hindering United Nations recovery efforts.[84] Humanitarian aid was requested but concerns about foreign military or intelligence presence in the country delayed the entry of United States military planes delivering medicine, food, and other supplies.[85]
+
+In early August 2009, a conflict known as the Kokang incident broke out in Shan State in northern Myanmar. For several weeks, junta troops fought against ethnic minorities including the Han Chinese,[86] Wa, and Kachin.[87][88] During 8–12 August, the first days of the conflict, as many as 10,000 Burmese civilians fled to Yunnan in neighbouring China.[87][88][89]
+
+Civil wars have been a constant feature of Myanmar's socio-political landscape since the attainment of independence in 1948. These wars are predominantly struggles for ethnic and sub-national autonomy, with the areas surrounding the ethnically Bamar central districts of the country serving as the primary geographical setting of conflict. Foreign journalists and visitors require a special travel permit to visit the areas in which Myanmar's civil wars continue.[90]
+
+In October 2012, the ongoing conflicts in Myanmar included the Kachin conflict,[91] between the Pro-Christian Kachin Independence Army and the government;[92] a civil war between the Rohingya Muslims, and the government and non-government groups in Rakhine State;[93] and a conflict between the Shan,[94] Lahu, and Karen[95][96] minority groups, and the government in the eastern half of the country. In addition, al-Qaeda signalled an intention to become involved in Myanmar. In a video released on 3 September 2014, mainly addressed to India, the militant group's leader Ayman al-Zawahiri said al-Qaeda had not forgotten the Muslims of Myanmar and that the group was doing "what they can to rescue you".[97] In response, the military raised its level of alertness, while the Burmese Muslim Association issued a statement saying Muslims would not tolerate any threat to their motherland.[98]
+
+Armed conflict between ethnic Chinese rebels and the Myanmar Armed Forces have resulted in the Kokang offensive in February 2015. The conflict had forced 40,000 to 50,000 civilians to flee their homes and seek shelter on the Chinese side of the border.[99] During the incident, the government of China was accused of giving military assistance to the ethnic Chinese rebels. Burmese officials have been historically "manipulated" and pressured by the Chinese government throughout Burmese modern history to create closer and binding ties with China, creating a Chinese satellite state in Southeast Asia.[100] However, uncertainties exist as clashes between Burmese troops and local insurgent groups continue.
+
+The goal of the Burmese constitutional referendum of 2008, held on 10 May 2008, is the creation of a "discipline-flourishing democracy". As part of the referendum process, the name of the country was changed from the "Union of Myanmar" to the "Republic of the Union of Myanmar", and general elections were held under the new constitution in 2010. Observer accounts of the 2010 election describe the event as mostly peaceful; however, allegations of polling station irregularities were raised, and the United Nations (UN) and a number of Western countries condemned the elections as fraudulent.[101]
+
+The military-backed Union Solidarity and Development Party declared victory in the 2010 elections, stating that it had been favoured by 80 per cent of the votes; however, the claim was disputed by numerous pro-democracy opposition groups who asserted that the military regime had engaged in rampant fraud.[102][103] One report documented 77 per cent as the official turnout rate of the election.[102] The military junta was dissolved on 30 March 2011.
+
+Opinions differ whether the transition to liberal democracy is underway. According to some reports, the military's presence continues as the label "disciplined democracy" suggests. This label asserts that the Burmese military is allowing certain civil liberties while clandestinely institutionalising itself further into Burmese politics. Such an assertion assumes that reforms only occurred when the military was able to safeguard its own interests through the transition—here, "transition" does not refer to a transition to a liberal democracy, but transition to a quasi-military rule.[104]
+
+Since the 2010 election, the government has embarked on a series of reforms to direct the country towards liberal democracy, a mixed economy, and reconciliation, although doubts persist about the motives that underpin such reforms. The series of reforms includes the release of pro-democracy leader Aung San Suu Kyi from house arrest, the establishment of the National Human Rights Commission, the granting of general amnesties for more than 200 political prisoners, new labour laws that permit labour unions and strikes, a relaxation of press censorship, and the regulation of currency practices.[105]
+
+The impact of the post-election reforms has been observed in numerous areas, including ASEAN's approval of Myanmar's bid for the position of ASEAN chair in 2014;[106] the visit by United States Secretary of State Hillary Clinton in December 2011 for the encouragement of further progress, which was the first visit by a Secretary of State in more than fifty years,[107] during which Clinton met with the Burmese president and former military commander Thein Sein, as well as opposition leader Aung San Suu Kyi;[108] and the participation of Aung San Suu Kyi's National League for Democracy (NLD) party in the 2012 by-elections, facilitated by the government's abolition of the laws that previously barred the NLD.[109] As of July 2013, about 100[110][111] political prisoners remain imprisoned, while conflict between the Burmese Army and local insurgent groups continues.
+
+In 1 April 2012 by-elections, the NLD won 43 of the 45 available seats; previously an illegal organisation, the NLD had not won a single seat under new constitution. The 2012 by-elections were also the first time that international representatives were allowed to monitor the voting process in Myanmar.[112]
+
+General elections were held on 8 November 2015. These were the first openly contested elections held in Myanmar since 1990. The results gave the National League for Democracy an absolute majority of seats in both chambers of the national parliament, enough to ensure that its candidate would become president, while NLD leader Aung San Suu Kyi is constitutionally barred from the presidency.[113]
+
+The new parliament convened on 1 February 2016[114] and, on 15 March 2016, Htin Kyaw was elected as the first non-military president since the military coup of 1962.[115] On 6 April 2016, Aung San Suu Kyi assumed the newly created role of State Counsellor, a role akin to a Prime Minister.
+
+Myanmar has a total area of 678,500 square kilometres (262,000 sq mi). It lies between latitudes 9° and 29°N, and longitudes 92° and 102°E. As of February 2011, Myanmar consisted of 14 states and regions, 67 districts, 330 townships, 64 sub-townships, 377 towns, 2,914 Wards, 14,220 village tracts and 68,290 villages.
+
+Myanmar is bordered in the northwest by the Chittagong Division of Bangladesh and the Mizoram, Manipur, Nagaland and Arunachal Pradesh states of India. Its north and northeast border is with the Tibet Autonomous Region and Yunnan for a Sino-Myanmar border total of 2,185 km (1,358 mi). It is bounded by Laos and Thailand to the southeast. Myanmar has 1,930 km (1,200 mi) of contiguous coastline along the Bay of Bengal and Andaman Sea to the southwest and the south, which forms one quarter of its total perimeter.[1]
+
+In the north, the Hengduan Mountains form the border with China. Hkakabo Razi, located in Kachin State, at an elevation of 5,881 metres (19,295 ft), is the highest point in Myanmar.[116] Many mountain ranges, such as the Rakhine Yoma, the Bago Yoma, the Shan Hills and the Tenasserim Hills exist within Myanmar, all of which run north-to-south from the Himalayas.[117]
+
+The mountain chains divide Myanmar's three river systems, which are the Irrawaddy, Salween (Thanlwin), and the Sittaung rivers.[118] The Irrawaddy River, Myanmar's longest river, nearly 2,170 kilometres (1,348 mi) long, flows into the Gulf of Martaban. Fertile plains exist in the valleys between the mountain chains.[117] The majority of Myanmar's population lives in the Irrawaddy valley, which is situated between the Rakhine Yoma and the Shan Plateau.
+
+Myanmar is divided into seven states (ပြည်နယ်) and seven regions (တိုင်းဒေသကြီး), formerly called divisions.[119] Regions are predominantly Bamar (that is, mainly inhabited by the dominant ethnic group). States, in essence, are regions that are home to particular ethnic minorities. The administrative divisions are further subdivided into districts, which are further subdivided into townships, wards, and villages.
+
+Below are the number of districts, townships, cities/towns, wards, village groups and villages in each divisions and states of Myanmar as of 31 December 2001:[120]
+
+Much of the country lies between the Tropic of Cancer and the Equator. It lies in the monsoon region of Asia, with its coastal regions receiving over 5,000 mm (196.9 in) of rain annually. Annual rainfall in the delta region is approximately 2,500 mm (98.4 in), while average annual rainfall in the Dry Zone in central Myanmar is less than 1,000 mm (39.4 in). The Northern regions of Myanmar are the coolest, with average temperatures of 21 °C (70 °F). Coastal and delta regions have an average maximum temperature of 32 °C (89.6 °F).[118]
+
+Myanmar continues to perform badly in the global Environmental Performance Index (EPI) with an overall ranking of 153 out of 180 countries in 2016; among the worst in the South Asian region, only ahead of Bangladesh and Afghanistan. The EPI was established in 2001 by the World Economic Forum as a global gauge to measure how well individual countries perform in implementing the United Nations' Sustainable Development Goals. The environmental areas where Myanmar performs worst (ie. highest ranking) are air quality (174), health impacts of environmental issues (143) and biodiversity and habitat (142). Myanmar performs best (ie. lowest ranking) in environmental impacts of fisheries (21), but with declining fish stocks. Despite several issues, Myanmar also ranks 64 and scores very good (ie. a high percentage of 93.73%) in environmental effects of the agricultural industry because of an excellent management of the nitrogen cycle.[121][122] Myanmar is one of the most highly vulnerable countries to climate change; this poses a number of social, political, economic and foreign policy challenges to the country.[123]
+
+Myanmar's slow economic growth has contributed to the preservation of much of its environment and ecosystems. Forests, including dense tropical growth and valuable teak in lower Myanmar, cover over 49% of the country, including areas of acacia, bamboo, ironwood and Magnolia champaca. Coconut and betel palm and rubber have been introduced. In the highlands of the north, oak, pine and various rhododendrons cover much of the land.[124]
+
+Heavy logging since the new 1995 forestry law went into effect has seriously reduced forest acreage and wildlife habitat.[125] The lands along the coast support all varieties of tropical fruits and once had large areas of mangroves although much of the protective mangroves have disappeared. In much of central Myanmar (the Dry Zone), vegetation is sparse and stunted.
+
+Typical jungle animals, particularly tigers, occur sparsely in Myanmar. In upper Myanmar, there are rhinoceros, wild water buffalo, clouded leopard, wild boars, deer, antelope, and elephants, which are also tamed or bred in captivity for use as work animals, particularly in the lumber industry. Smaller mammals are also numerous, ranging from gibbons and monkeys to flying foxes. The abundance of birds is notable with over 800 species, including parrots, myna, peafowl, red junglefowl, weaverbirds, crows, herons, and barn owl. Among reptile species there are crocodiles, geckos, cobras, Burmese pythons, and turtles. Hundreds of species of freshwater fish are wide-ranging, plentiful and are very important food sources.[126] For a list of protected areas, see List of protected areas of Myanmar.
+
+The constitution of Myanmar, its third since independence, was drafted by its military rulers and published in September 2008. The country is governed as a parliamentary system with a bicameral legislature (with an executive President accountable to the legislature), with 25% of the legislators appointed by the military and the rest elected in general elections.
+
+The legislature, called the Pyidaungsu Hluttaw, is bicameral and made up of two houses: the 224-seat upper house Amyotha Hluttaw (House of Nationalities) and the 440-seat lower house Pyithu Hluttaw (House of Representatives). The upper house consists of 224 members, of whom 168 are directly elected and 56 are appointed by the Burmese Armed Forces. The lower house consists of 440 members, of whom 330 are directly elected and 110 are appointed by the armed forces.
+
+The major political parties are the National League for Democracy and the Union Solidarity and Development Party.
+
+Myanmar's army-drafted constitution was approved in a referendum in May 2008. The results, 92.4% of the 22 million voters with an official turnout of 99%, are considered suspect by many international observers and by the National League of Democracy with reports of widespread fraud, ballot stuffing, and voter intimidation.[127]
+
+The elections of 2010 resulted in a victory for the military-backed Union Solidarity and Development Party. Various foreign observers questioned the fairness of the elections.[128][129][130] One criticism of the election was that only government-sanctioned political parties were allowed to contest in it and the popular National League for Democracy was declared illegal.[131] However, immediately following the elections, the government ended the house arrest of the democracy advocate and leader of the National League for Democracy, Aung San Suu Kyi,[132] and her ability to move freely around the country is considered an important test of the military's movement toward more openness.[131] After unexpected reforms in 2011, NLD senior leaders have decided to register as a political party and to field candidates in future by-elections.[133]
+
+Myanmar's recent political history is underlined by its struggle to establish democratic structures amidst conflicting factions. This political transition from a closely held military rule to a free democratic system is widely believed to be determining the future of Myanmar. The resounding victory of Aung San Suu Kyi's National League for Democracy in 2015 general elections has raised hope for a successful culmination of this transition.[134][135]
+
+Myanmar rates as a corrupt nation on the Corruption Perceptions Index with a rank of 136th out of 176 countries worldwide, with 1st being least corrupt, as of 2016[update].[136]
+
+Though the country's foreign relations, particularly with Western nations, have historically been strained, the situation has markedly improved since the reforms following the 2010 elections. After years of diplomatic isolation and economic and military sanctions,[137] the United States relaxed curbs on foreign aid to Myanmar in November 2011[108] and announced the resumption of diplomatic relations on 13 January 2012[138] The European Union has placed sanctions on Myanmar, including an arms embargo, cessation of trade preferences, and suspension of all aid with the exception of humanitarian aid.[139]
+
+Sanctions imposed by the United States and European countries against the former military government, coupled with boycotts and other direct pressure on corporations by supporters of the democracy movement, have resulted in the withdrawal from the country of most US and many European companies.[140]
+On 13 April 2012 British Prime Minister David Cameron called for the economic sanctions on Myanmar to be suspended in the wake of the pro-democracy party gaining 43 seats out of a possible 45 in the 2012 by-elections with the party leader, Aung San Suu Kyi becoming a member of the Burmese parliament.[141]
+
+Despite Western isolation, Asian corporations have generally remained willing to continue investing in the country and to initiate new investments, particularly in natural resource extraction. The country has close relations with neighbouring India and China with several Indian and Chinese companies operating in the country. Under India's Look East policy, fields of co-operation between India and Myanmar include remote sensing,[142] oil and gas exploration,[143] information technology,[144] hydro power[145] and construction of ports and buildings.[146]
+
+In 2008, India suspended military aid to Myanmar over the issue of human rights abuses by the ruling junta, although it has preserved extensive commercial ties, which provide the regime with much-needed revenue.[147] The thaw in relations began on 28 November 2011, when Belarusian Prime Minister Mikhail Myasnikovich and his wife Ludmila arrived in the capital, Naypyidaw, the same day as the country received a visit by US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, who also met with pro-democracy opposition leader Aung San Suu Kyi.[148] International relations progress indicators continued in September 2012 when Aung San Suu Kyi visited the United States[149] followed by Myanmar's reformist president visit to the United Nations.[150]
+
+In May 2013, Thein Sein became the first Myanmar president to visit the White House in 47 years; the last Burmese leader to visit the White House was Ne Win in September 1966. President Barack Obama praised the former general for political and economic reforms, and the cessation of tensions between Myanmar and the United States. Political activists objected to the visit due to concerns over human rights abuses in Myanmar but Obama assured Thein Sein that Myanmar will receive US support. The two leaders discussed to release more political prisoners, the institutionalisation of political reform and rule of law, and ending ethnic conflict in Myanmar—the two governments agreed to sign a bilateral trade and investment framework agreement on 21 May 2013.[151]
+
+In June 2013, Myanmar held its first ever summit, the World Economic Forum on East Asia 2013. A regional spinoff of the annual World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, the summit was held on 5–7 June and attended by 1,200 participants, including 10 heads of state, 12 ministers and 40 senior directors from around the world.[152]
+
+In July 2019, UN ambassadors of 37 countries, including Myanmar, have signed a joint letter to the UNHRC defending China's treatment of Uyghurs and other Muslim minority groups in the Xinjiang region.[153]
+
+Myanmar has received extensive military aid from China in the past.[154]
+Myanmar has been a member of ASEAN since 1997. Though it gave up its turn to hold the ASEAN chair and host the ASEAN Summit in 2006, it chaired the forum and hosted the summit in 2014.[155] In November 2008, Myanmar's political situation with neighbouring Bangladesh became tense as they began searching for natural gas in a disputed block of the Bay of Bengal.[156] Controversy surrounding the Rohingya population also remains an issue between Bangladesh and Myanmar.[157]
+
+Myanmar's armed forces are known as the Tatmadaw, which numbers 488,000. The Tatmadaw comprises the Army, the Navy, and the Air Force. The country ranked twelfth in the world for its number of active troops in service.[23][verification needed] The military is very influential in Myanmar, with all top cabinet and ministry posts usually held by military officials. Official figures for military spending are not available. Estimates vary widely because of uncertain exchange rates, but Myanmar's military forces' expenses are high.[158] Myanmar imports most of its weapons from Russia, Ukraine, China and India.
+
+Myanmar is building a research nuclear reactor near Pyin Oo Lwin with help from Russia. It is one of the signatories of the nuclear non-proliferation pact since 1992 and a member of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) since 1957. The military junta had informed the IAEA in September 2000 of its intention to construct the reactor. The research reactor outbuilding frame was built by ELE steel industries limited of Yangon/Rangoon and water from Anisakhan/BE water fall will be used for the reactor cavity cooling system.[159][160]
+
+In 2010 as part of the Wikileaks leaked cables, Myanmar was suspected of using North Korean construction teams to build a fortified Surface-to-Air Missile facility.[161]
+
+Until 2005, the United Nations General Assembly annually adopted a detailed resolution about the situation in Myanmar by consensus.[162][163][164][165] But in 2006 a divided United Nations General Assembly voted through a resolution that strongly called upon the government of Myanmar to end its systematic violations of human rights.[166] In January 2007, Russia and China vetoed a draft resolution before the United Nations Security Council[167] calling on the government of Myanmar to respect human rights and begin a democratic transition. South Africa also voted against the resolution.[168]
+
+There is consensus that the former military regime in Myanmar (1962–2010) was one of the world's most repressive and abusive regimes.[169][170] In November 2012, Samantha Power, Barack Obama's Special Assistant to the President on Human Rights, wrote on the White House blog in advance of the president's visit that "Serious human rights abuses against civilians in several regions continue, including against women and children."[94] Members of the United Nations and major international human rights organisations have issued repeated and consistent reports of widespread and systematic human rights violations in Myanmar. The United Nations General Assembly has repeatedly[171] called on the Burmese Military Junta to respect human rights and in November 2009 the General Assembly adopted a resolution "strongly condemning the ongoing systematic violations of human rights and fundamental freedoms" and calling on the Burmese Military Regime "to take urgent measures to put an end to violations of international human rights and humanitarian law."[172]
+
+International human rights organisations including Human Rights Watch,[173] Amnesty International[174] and the American Association for the Advancement of Science[175] have repeatedly documented and condemned widespread human rights violations in Myanmar. The Freedom in the World 2011 report by Freedom House notes, "The military junta has ... suppressed nearly all basic rights; and committed human rights abuses with impunity." In July 2013, the Assistance Association for Political Prisoners indicated that there were approximately 100 political prisoners being held in Burmese prisons.[110][111][176][177]
+
+Evidence gathered by a British researcher was published in 2005 regarding the extermination or 'Burmisation' of certain ethnic minorities, such as the Karen, Karenni and Shan.[179]
+
+Child soldiers had played a major part in the Burmese Army until around 2012. The Independent reported in June 2012 that "Children are being sold as conscripts into the Burmese military for as little as $40 and a bag of rice or a can of petrol."[180] The UN's Special Representative of the Secretary-General for Children and Armed Conflict, Radhika Coomaraswamy, who stepped down from her position a week later, met representatives of the Government of Myanmar on 5 July 2012 and stated that she hoped the government's signing of an action plan would "signal a transformation."[181] In September 2012, the Myanmar Armed Forces released 42 child soldiers and the International Labour Organization met with representatives of the government as well as the Kachin Independence Army to secure the release of more child soldiers.[182] According to Samantha Power, a US delegation raised the issue of child soldiers with the government in October 2012. However, she did not comment on the government's progress towards reform in this area.[94]
+
+A Bangkok Post article on 23 December 2012 reported that the Myanmar Armed Forces continued to use child soldiers including during the army's large offensive against the KIA in December 2012.
+
+Forced labour, human trafficking, and child labour are common in Myanmar.[183] The military is also notorious for rampant use of sexual violence, a practice continuing as of 2012[update].[10] In 2007 the international movement to defend women's human rights issues in Myanmar was said to be gaining speed.[184] Human trafficking happens to most women who are unemployed and have low incomes. They are mainly targeted or deceived by brokers into making them believe that better opportunities and wages exist for them abroad.[185] In 2017, the government reported investigating 185 trafficking cases. The government of Burma makes little effort to eliminate human trafficking. Burmese armed forces (Tatmadaw) compel troops to acquire labour and supplies from local communities. The U.S. State Department reported that both the government and Tatmadaw were complicit in sex and labour trafficking.[186]
+
+A number of women and girls from all ethnic groups and foreigners have been victims of sex trafficking in Myanmar. They are forced into prostitution, marriages, and or pregnancies.[187][188]
+
+The Rohingya people have consistently faced human rights abuses by the Burmese regime that has refused to acknowledge them as Burmese citizens (despite some of them having lived in Burma for over three generations)—the Rohingya have been denied Burmese citizenship since the enactment of a 1982 citizenship law.[191] The law created three categories of citizenship: citizenship, associate citizenship, and naturalised citizenship. Citizenship is given to those who belong to one of the national races such as Kachin, Kayah (Karenni), Karen, Chin, Burman, Mon, Rakhine, Shan, Kaman, or Zerbadee. Associate citizenship is given to those who cannot prove their ancestors settled in Myanmar before 1823, but can prove they have one grandparent, or pre-1823 ancestor, who was a citizen of another country, as well as people who applied for citizenship in 1948 and qualified then by those laws. Naturalised citizenship is only given to those who have at least one parent with one of these types of Burmese citizenship or can provide "conclusive evidence" that their parents entered and resided in Burma prior to independence in 1948.[192] The Burmese regime has attempted to forcibly expel Rohingya and bring in non-Rohingyas to replace them[193]—this policy has resulted in the expulsion of approximately half of the 800,000[194] Rohingya from Burma, while the Rohingya people have been described as "among the world's least wanted"[195] and "one of the world's most persecuted minorities."[193][196][197] But the origin of 'most persecuted minority' statement is unclear.[198]
+
+Rohingya are also not allowed to travel without official permission, are banned from owning land and are required to sign a commitment to have no more than two children.[191] As of July 2012, the Myanmar Government does not include the Rohingya minority group—classified as stateless Bengali Muslims from Bangladesh since 1982—on the government's list of more than 130 ethnic races and, therefore, the government states that they have no claim to Myanmar citizenship.[199]
+
+In 2007 the German professor Bassam Tibi suggested that the Rohingya conflict may be driven by an Islamist political agenda to impose religious laws,[200] while non-religious causes have also been raised, such as a lingering resentment over the violence that occurred during the Japanese occupation of Burma in World War II—during this time period the British allied themselves with the Rohingya[201] and fought against the puppet government of Burma (composed mostly of Bamar Japanese) that helped to establish the Tatmadaw military organisation that remains in power as of March 2013.
+
+Since the democratic transition began in 2011, there has been continuous violence as 280 people have been killed and 140,000 forced to flee from their homes in the Rakhine state.[202] A UN envoy reported in March 2013 that unrest had re-emerged between Myanmar's Buddhist and Muslim communities, with violence spreading to towns that are located closer to Yangon.[203]
+
+The Rohingya have been leaving the Rakhine State by boat in search for jobs in Malaysia these recent years. Often, the boats are very small and dangerous on the open seas. An estimated 100,000 Rohingya have fled Myanmar in the last two years in fear of persecution and violence.[204] They have been fleeing to Thailand, Malaysia, or even Australia for refuge. Over 200 have died in recent years and over 7,000 have been held in detention centres even after surviving the boat trip.[205][206]
+
+Starting in late 2016, Myanmar's military and police started large-scale persecutions of Rohingya peoples in Rakhine state.[207] This has driven over 742,000 Rohingya to cross the border to overloaded refugee camps in Bangladesh.[208] Widespread violence, including evidence of indiscriminate killings and ethnic cleansing has been reported.[209] The International Criminal Court has authorised a criminal prosecution of Myanmar under the Rome Statute.[210]
+
+A widely publicised Burmese conflict was the 2012 Rakhine State riots, a series of conflicts that primarily involved the ethnic Rakhine Buddhist people and the Rohingya Muslim people in the northern Rakhine State—an estimated 90,000 people were displaced as a result of the riots.[211]
+
+The immediate cause of the riots is unclear, with many commentators citing the killing of ten Burmese Muslims by ethnic Rakhine after the rape and murder of a Rakhine woman as the main cause.[212] Whole villages have been "decimated".[212] Over 300 houses and a number of public buildings have been razed. According to Tun Khin, the president of the Burmese Rohingya Organisation UK (BROUK), as of 28 June 2012, 650 Rohingyas have been killed, 1,200 are missing, and more than 80,000 have been displaced.[211][213][214] According to the Myanmar authorities, the violence, between ethnic Rakhine Buddhists and Rohingya Muslims, left 78 people dead, 87 injured, and thousands of homes destroyed. It displaced more than 52,000 people.[214]
+
+The government has responded by imposing curfews and by deploying troops in the regions. On 10 June 2012, a state of emergency was declared in Rakhine, allowing the military to participate in administration of the region.[215][216] The Burmese army and police have been accused of targeting Rohingya Muslims through mass arrests and arbitrary violence.[213][217] A number of monks' organisations that played a vital role in Myanmar's struggle for democracy have taken measures to block any humanitarian assistance to the Rohingya community.[218]
+
+Media censorship was significantly eased in August 2012 following demonstrations by hundreds of protesters who wore shirts demanding that the government "Stop Killing the Press."[219] The most significant change has come in the form that media organisations will no longer have to submit their content to a censorship board before publication. However, as explained by one editorial in the exiled press The Irrawaddy, this new "freedom" has caused some Burmese journalists to simply see the new law as an attempt to create an environment of self-censorship as journalists "are required to follow 16 guidelines towards protecting the three national causes:
+
+and "journalistic ethics" to ensure their stories are accurate and do not jeopardise national security."[219]
+
+In July 2014 five journalists were sentenced to 10 years in jail after publishing a report saying the country was planning to build a new chemical weapons plant. Journalists described the jailings as a blow to the recently-won news media freedoms that had followed five decades of censorship and persecution.[220] Two Reuters journalists were charged and imprisoned on 12 December 2017, for violating state secrets law when they were covering the mass exodus of the Rohingya Muslim minority.[221]
+
+According to the Crisis Group,[222] since Myanmar transitioned to a new government in August 2011, the country's human rights record has been improving. Previously giving Myanmar its lowest rating of 7, the 2012 Freedom in the World report also notes improvement, giving Myanmar a 6 for improvements in civil liberties and political rights, the release of political prisoners, and a loosening of restrictions.[223] In 2013, Myanmar improved yet again, receiving a score of five in civil liberties and a six in political freedoms.[224]
+
+The government has assembled a National Human Rights Commission that consists of 15 members from various backgrounds.[225] Several activists in exile, including Thee Lay Thee Anyeint members, have returned to Myanmar after President Thein Sein's invitation to expatriates to return home to work for national development.[226] In an address to the United Nations Security Council on 22 September 2011, Myanmar's Foreign Minister Wunna Maung Lwin confirmed the government's intention to release prisoners in the near future.[227]
+
+The government has also relaxed reporting laws, but these remain highly restrictive.[228] In September 2011, several banned websites, including YouTube, Democratic Voice of Burma and Voice of America, were unblocked.[229] A 2011 report by the Hauser Center for Nonprofit Organizations found that, while contact with the Myanmar government was constrained by donor restrictions, international humanitarian non-governmental organisations (NGOs) see opportunities for effective advocacy with government officials, especially at the local level. At the same time, international NGOs are mindful of the ethical quandary of how to work with the government without bolstering or appeasing it.[230]
+
+Following Thein Sein's first ever visit to the UK and a meeting with Prime Minister David Cameron, the Myanmar president declared that all of his nation's political prisoners will be released by the end of 2013, in addition to a statement of support for the well-being of the Rohingya Muslim community. In a speech at Chatham House, he revealed that "We [Myanmar government] are reviewing all cases. I guarantee to you that by the end of this year, there will be no prisoners of conscience in Myanmar.", in addition to expressing a desire to strengthen links between the UK and Myanmar's military forces.[231]
+
+Homosexual acts are illegal in Myanmar and can be punishable by life imprisonment.[232][233]
+
+In 2016, Myanmar leader Aung San Suu Kyi was accused of failing to protect Myanmar's Muslim minority.[234] Since August 2017 Doctors Without Borders have treated 113 Rohingya refugee females for sexual assault with all but one describing military assailants.[235] The 2017 persecution against the Rohingya Muslims has been termed as ethnic cleansing and genocide by various UN agencies, International Criminal Court officials, and governments.[236][237] More than 700,000 Rohingya refugees have fled to Bangladesh since August 2017.[238]
+
+There has been speculation that Myanmar is interested in developing nuclear weapons, and that North Korea was planning to export nuclear technology to Myanmar.[239] These reports are based on evidence gathered from anti-government Burmese.[239] Myanmar is a signatory to a special ASEAN treaty that bans all types of nuclear weapons in signatory states in Southeast Asia.[240]  As of 2019, the United States Bureau of Arms Control assessed that Myanmar is not in violation of its obligations under the Non-Proliferation Treaty but that the Myanmar government had a history of non-transparency on its nuclear programs and aims.[241]
+
+Previously and currently analysed data, as well as future projections on changes caused by climate change predict serious consequences to development for all economic, productive, social, and environmental sectors in Myanmar.[242] In order to combat the hardships ahead and do its part to help combat climate change Myanmar has displayed interest in expanding its use of renewable energy and lowering its level of carbon emissions. Groups involved in helping Myanmar with the transition and move forward include the UN Environment Programme, Myanmar Climate Change Alliance, and the Ministry of Natural Resources and Environmental Conservation which directed in producing  the final draft of the Myanmar national climate change policy that was presented to various sectors of the Myanmar government for review.[243]
+
+In April 2015, it was announced that the World Bank and Myanmar would enter a full partnership framework aimed to better access to electricity and other basic services for about six million people and expected to benefit three million pregnant woman and children through improved health services.[244] Acquired funding and proper planning has allowed Myanmar to better prepare for the impacts of climate change by enacting programs which teach its people new farming methods, rebuild its infrastructure with materials resilient to natural disasters, and transition various sectors towards reducing greenhouse gas emissions.[245]
+
+Myanmar is one of the poorest nations in Southeast Asia, suffering from decades of stagnation, mismanagement and isolation. The lack of an educated workforce skilled in modern technology hinders Myanmar's economy, although recent reforms and developments carried out by the new government, in collaboration with foreign countries and organisations, aim to make this a thing of the past.[246] The informal economy's share in Myanmar is one of the biggest in the world and is closely linked to corruption, smuggling and illegal trade activities.[247]
+
+Myanmar lacks adequate infrastructure. Goods travel primarily across the Thai border (where most illegal drugs are exported) and along the Irrawaddy River. Railways are old and rudimentary, with few repairs since their construction in the late 19th century.[248] Highways are normally unpaved, except in the major cities.[248]
+
+In 2010–2011, Bangladesh exported products worth $9.65 million to Myanmar against its import of $179 million.[249] The annual import of medicine and medical equipment to Myanmar during the 2000s was 160 million USD.[250]
+
+In recent years, both China and India have attempted to strengthen ties with the government for economic benefit. Many nations, including the United States and Canada, and the European Union, have imposed investment and trade sanctions on Myanmar. The United States and European Union eased most of their sanctions in 2012.[251] Foreign investment comes primarily from China, Singapore, the Philippines, South Korea, India, and Thailand.[252]
+
+Under British administration, Myanmar was the second-wealthiest country in South-East Asia. It had been the world's largest exporter of rice. Myanmar also had a wealth of natural and labour resources. British Burma began exporting crude oil in 1853, making it one of the earliest petroleum producers in the world.[253] It produced 75% of the world's teak and had a highly literate population.[21] The wealth was however, mainly concentrated in the hands of Europeans. In the 1930s, agricultural production fell dramatically as international rice prices declined, and did not recover for several decades.[254] Plans to broaden the new prosperity and extend the reach of modern civilisation were halted by the outbreak of the Second World War.
+
+During the Japanese invasion of the area in World War II, the British followed a scorched earth policy. They destroyed the major government buildings, oil wells and mines for tungsten, tin, lead and silver to keep them from the Japanese. Myanmar was bombed extensively by both sides. After independence, the country was in ruins with its major infrastructure completely destroyed. The British then granted independence to the colony, and handed over their plans to rebuild to the new government. After a parliamentary government was formed in 1948, Prime Minister U Nu embarked upon a policy of nationalisation and the state was declared the owner of all land. The government also tried to implement a poorly considered Eight-Year plan. By the 1950s, rice exports had fallen by two-thirds and mineral exports by over 96% (as compared to the pre-World War II period). Plans were partly financed by printing money, which led to inflation.[255]
+
+The 1962 coup d'état was followed by an economic scheme called the Burmese Way to Socialism, a plan to nationalise all industries, with the exception of agriculture. The catastrophic programme turned Myanmar into one of the world's most impoverished countries.[77] Myanmar's admittance to least developed country status by the UN in 1987 highlighted its economic bankruptcy.[256]
+
+In Myanmar, political and economic ideological struggles have affected living standards. Decades of civil war and unrest have contributed to Myanmar's current levels of poverty and lack of economic progress. Improving basic human, social and economic infrastructure required to advance individual living standards have not received focused government efforts.[257]
+
+The major agricultural product is rice, which covers about 60% of the country's total cultivated land area. Rice accounts for 97% of total food grain production by weight. Through collaboration with the International Rice Research Institute 52 modern rice varieties were released in the country between 1966 and 1997, helping increase national rice production to 14 million tons in 1987 and to 19 million tons in 1996. By 1988, modern varieties were planted on half of the country's ricelands, including 98 per cent of the irrigated areas.[258] In 2008 rice production was estimated at 50 million tons.[259]
+
+Myanmar is also the world's second largest producer of opium, accounting for 25% of entire world production and is a major source of illegal drugs, including amphetamines.[260]
+Opium bans implemented since 2002 after international pressure have left ex-poppy farmers without sustainable sources of income in the Kokang and Wa regions. They depend on casual labour for income.[261]
+
+Myanmar produces precious stones such as rubies, sapphires, pearls, and jade. Rubies are the biggest earner; 90% of the world's rubies come from the country, whose red stones are prized for their purity and hue. Thailand buys the majority of the country's gems. Myanmar's "Valley of Rubies", the mountainous Mogok area, 200 km (120 mi) north of Mandalay, is noted for its rare pigeon's blood rubies and blue sapphires.[262]
+
+Many US and European jewellery companies, including Bulgari, Tiffany and Cartier, refuse to import these stones based on reports of deplorable working conditions in the mines. Human Rights Watch has encouraged a complete ban on the purchase of Burmese gems based on these reports and because nearly all profits go to the ruling junta, as the majority of mining activity in the country is government-run.[263] The government of Myanmar controls the gem trade by direct ownership or by joint ventures with private owners of mines.[264]
+
+Other industries include agricultural goods, textiles, wood products, construction materials, gems, metals, oil and natural gas.
+
+Myanmar Engineering Society has identified at least 39 locations capable of geothermal power production and some of these hydrothermal reservoirs lie quite close to Yangon which is a significant underutilised resource for electrical production.[265]
+
+Since 1992, the government has encouraged tourism in the country; however, fewer than 270,000 tourists entered the country in 2006 according to the Myanmar Tourism Promotion Board.[266] Myanmar's Minister of Hotels and Tourism Saw Lwin has stated that the government receives a significant percentage of the income of private sector tourism services.[267]
+
+The most popular available tourist destinations in Myanmar include big cities such as Yangon and Mandalay; religious sites in Mon State, Pindaya, Bago and Hpa-An; nature trails in Inle Lake, Kengtung, Putao, Pyin Oo Lwin; ancient cities such as Bagan and Mrauk-U; as well as beaches in Nabule,[268] Ngapali, Ngwe-Saung, Mergui.[269] Nevertheless, much of the country is off-limits to tourists, and interactions between foreigners and the people of Myanmar, particularly in the border regions, are subject to police scrutiny. They are not to discuss politics with foreigners, under penalty of imprisonment and, in 2001, the Myanmar Tourism Promotion Board issued an order for local officials to protect tourists and limit "unnecessary contact" between foreigners and ordinary Burmese people.[270]
+
+The most common way for travellers to enter the country seems to be by air.[271] According to the website Lonely Planet, getting into Myanmar is problematic: "No bus or train service connects Myanmar with another country, nor can you travel by car or motorcycle across the border – you must walk across."  They further state that "It is not possible for foreigners to go to/from Myanmar by sea or river."[271] There are a small number of border crossings that allow the passage of private vehicles, such as the border between Ruili (China) to Mu-se, the border between Htee Kee (Myanmar) and Phu Nam Ron (Thailand)—the most direct border between Dawei and Kanchanaburi, and the border between Myawaddy (Myanmar) and Mae Sot (Thailand). At least one tourist company has successfully run commercial overland routes through these borders since 2013.[272] "From Mae Sai (Thailand) you can cross to Tachileik, but can only go as far as Kengtung. Those in Thailand on a visa run can cross to Kawthaung but cannot venture farther into Myanmar."[271]
+
+Flights are available from most countries, though direct flights are limited to mainly Thai and other ASEAN airlines. According to Eleven magazine, "In the past, there were only 15 international airlines and increasing numbers of airlines have begun launching direct flights from Japan, Qatar, Taiwan, South Korea, Germany and Singapore."[273] Expansions were expected in September 2013, but yet again are mainly Thai and other Asian-based airlines according to Eleven Media Group's Eleven, "Thailand-based Nok Air and Business Airlines and Singapore-based Tiger Airline".[273]
+
+The Government of Myanmar was under economic sanctions by the US Treasury Department (31 CFR Part 537, 16 August 2005)[274] and by Executive orders 13047 (1997),[275] 13310 (2003),[275] 13448 (2007),[275] 13464 (2008),[275] and the most recent, 13619 (2012).[276] There exists debate as to the extent to which the American-led sanctions have had more adverse effects on the civilian population than on the military rulers.[277][278]
+
+From May 2012 to February 2013, the United States began to lift its economic sanctions on Myanmar "in response to the historic reforms that have been taking place in that country."[279] Sanctions remain in place for blocked banks[280] and for any business entities that are more than 50% owned by persons on "OFAC's Specially Designated Nationals and Blocked Persons list (SDN list)".[281]
+
+During her first official visit to Washington, D.C., in September 2016, Myanmar's State Counsellor Aung San Suu Kyi met with US President Barack Obama, who announced that long-standing trade sanctions against Myanmar are to be lifted, adding, "It is the right thing to do to ensure the people of Burma see rewards from a new way of doing business, and a new government."[282]
+
+The military has the majority stakeholder position in all of the major industrial corporations of the country (from oil production and consumer goods to transportation and tourism).[283][284]
+
+In March 2012, a draft foreign investment law emerged, the first in more than 2 decades. Foreigners will no longer need a local partner to start a business in the country, and will be able to legally lease but not own property.[285] The draft law also stipulates that Burmese citizens must constitute at least 25% of the firm's skilled workforce, and with subsequent training, up to 50–75%.[285]
+
+In 2012, the Asian Development Bank formally began re-engaging with the country, to finance infrastructure and development projects in the country.[286] The United States, Japan, and the European Union countries have also begun to reduce or eliminate economic sanctions to allow foreign direct investment which will provide the Burmese government with additional tax revenue.[287]
+
+In December 2014, Myanmar signed an agreement to set up its first stock exchange. The Yangon Stock Exchange Joint Venture Co. Ltd will be set up with Myanma Economic Bank sharing 51%, Japan's Daiwa Institute of Research Ltd 30.25% and Japan Exchange Group 18.75%. The Yangon Stock Exchange (YSX) officially opened for business on Friday, 25 March 2016. First Myanmar Investment Co., Ltd. (FMI) became the first stock to be traded after receiving approval for an opening price of 26,000 kyats ($22).[288]
+
+According to The World Factbook, Myanmar is one of three countries along with Liberia and the United States that has not adopted the International System of Units (SI) metric system as their official system of weights and measures.[289] The common units of measure are unique to Myanmar, but the government web pages generally use both imperial units[290] and metric units.[291]
+
+In June 2011, the Burmese government's Ministry of Commerce began discussing proposals to reform the measurement system and adopt the International System of Units used by most of its trading partners.[292] In October 2013 it was reported that Dr. Pwint San, Deputy Minister for Commerce, had announced that the country was preparing to adopt the International System of Units.[293]
+
+The provisional results of the 2014 Myanmar Census show that the total population is 51,419,420.[296] This figure includes an estimated 1,206,353 persons in parts of northern Rakhine State, Kachin State and Kayin State who were not counted.[297] People who were out of the country at the time of the census are not included in these figures. There are over 600,000 registered migrant workers from Myanmar in Thailand, and millions more work illegally. Burmese citizens account for 80% of all migrant workers in Thailand.[298] The national population density is 76 per square kilometre (200/sq mi), among the lowest in Southeast Asia.
+
+Myanmar's fertility rate as of 2011[update] is 2.23, which is slightly above replacement level[299] and is low compared to Southeast Asian countries of similar economic standing, such as Cambodia (3.18) and Laos (4.41).[299] There has been a significant decline in fertility in recent years, from a rate of 4.7 children per woman in 1983, down to 2.4 in 2001, despite the absence of any national population policy.[299][300][301] The fertility rate is much lower in urban areas.
+
+The relatively rapid decline in fertility is attributed to several factors, including extreme delays in marriage (almost unparalleled among developing countries in the region), the prevalence of illegal abortions, and the high proportion of single, unmarried women of reproductive age, with 25.9% of women aged 30–34 and 33.1% of men and women aged 25–34 being single.[301][302]
+
+These patterns stem from economic dynamics, including high income inequality, which results in residents of reproductive age opting for delay of marriage and family-building in favour of attempting to find employment and establish some form of wealth;[301] the average age of marriage in Myanmar is 27.5 for men, 26.4 for women.[301][302]
+
+Myanmar is ethnically diverse. The government recognises 135 distinct ethnic groups. There are at least 108 different ethnolinguistic groups in Myanmar, consisting mainly of distinct Tibeto-Burman peoples, but with sizeable populations of Tai–Kadai, Hmong–Mien, and Austroasiatic (Mon–Khmer) peoples.[303]
+
+The Bamar form an estimated 68% of the population.[304] 10% of the population are Shan.[304] The Kayin make up 7% of the population.[304] The Rakhine people constitute 4% of the population. Overseas Chinese form approximately 3% of the population.[304][305] Myanmar's ethnic minority groups prefer the term "ethnic nationality" over "ethnic minority" as the term "minority" furthers their sense of insecurity in the face of what is often described as "Burmanisation"—the proliferation and domination of the dominant Bamar culture over minority cultures.
+
+Mon, who form 2% of the population, are ethno-linguistically related to the Khmer.[304] Overseas Indians are 2%.[304] The remainder are Kachin, Chin, Rohingya, Anglo-Indians, Gurkha, Nepali and other ethnic minorities. Included in this group are the Anglo-Burmese. Once forming a large and influential community, the Anglo-Burmese left the country in steady streams from 1958 onwards, principally to Australia and the UK. It is estimated that 52,000 Anglo-Burmese remain in Myanmar. As of 2009[update], 110,000 Burmese refugees were living in refugee camps in Thailand.[306]
+
+Refugee camps exist along Indian, Bangladeshi and Thai borders while several thousand are in Malaysia. Conservative estimates state that there are over 295,800 minority refugees from Myanmar, with the majority being Rohingya, Karen, and Karenni are principally located along the Thai-Myanmar border.[307] There are nine permanent refugee camps along the Thai-Myanmar border, most of which were established in the mid-1980s. The refugee camps are under the care of the Thai-Burma Border Consortium (TBBC). Since 2006,[308] over 55,000 Burmese refugees have been resettled in the United States.[309]
+
+The persecution of Burmese Indians, Burmese Chinese and other ethnic groups after the military coup headed by General Ne Win in 1962 led to the expulsion or emigration of 300,000 people.[310] They migrated to escape racial discrimination and the wholesale nationalisation of private enterprise that took place in 1964.[311] The Anglo-Burmese at this time either fled the country or changed their names and blended in with the broader Burmese society.
+
+Many Rohingya Muslims have fled Myanmar. Many refugees headed to neighbouring Bangladesh, including 200,000 in 1978 as a result of the King Dragon operation in Arakan.[312] 250,000 more left in 1991.[313]
+
+Myanmar is home to four major language families: Sino-Tibetan, Tai–Kadai, Austro-Asiatic, and Indo-European.[314] Sino-Tibetan languages are most widely spoken. They include Burmese, Karen, Kachin, Chin, and Chinese (mainly Hokkien). The primary Tai–Kadai language is Shan. Mon, Palaung, and Wa are the major Austroasiatic languages spoken in Myanmar. The two major Indo-European languages are Pali, the liturgical language of Theravada Buddhism, and English.[315] More than a hundred languages are spoken in total. Since many of them are known only within small tribes around the country, they may have been lost (many if not all) after a few generations.
+
+Burmese, the mother tongue of the Bamar and official language of Myanmar, is related to Tibetan and Chinese.[315] It is written in a script consisting of circular and semi-circular letters, which were adapted from the Mon script, which in turn was developed from a southern Indian script in the 5th century. The earliest known inscriptions in the Burmese script date from the 11th century. It is also used to write Pali, the sacred language of Theravada Buddhism, as well as several ethnic minority languages, including Shan, several Karen dialects, and Kayah (Karenni), with the addition of specialised characters and diacritics for each language.[316]
+
+The Burmese language incorporates widespread usage of honorifics and is age-oriented.[317] Burmese society has traditionally stressed the importance of education. In villages, secular schooling often takes place in monasteries. Secondary and tertiary education take place at government schools.
+
+Many religions are practised in Myanmar. Religious edifices and orders have been in existence for many years. The Christian and Muslim populations do, however, face religious persecution and it is hard, if not impossible, for non-Buddhists to join the army or get government jobs, the main route to success in the country.[319] Such persecution and targeting of civilians is particularly notable in Eastern Myanmar, where over 3000 villages have been destroyed in the past ten years.[320][321][322] More than 200,000 Muslims have fled to Bangladesh over the last 20 years to escape persecution.[323][324]
+
+A large majority of the population practices Buddhism; estimates range from 80%[325] to 89%.[326] According to 2014 Myanmar Census, 87.9% of the population identifies as Buddhists.[318] Theravāda Buddhism is the most widespread.[326] There are some 500,000 Buddhist monks and 75,000 nuns in this country of 54 million.[327] Other religions are practised largely without obstruction, with the notable exception of some religious minorities such as the Rohingya people, who have continued to have their citizenship status denied and treated as illegal immigrants instead,[191] and Christians in Chin State.[328]
+
+According to 2014 census, 6.2% of the population identifies as Christian; 4.3% as Muslim; 0.8% as followers of tribal religions; 0.5% as Hindus; 0.2% as followers of other religions; and 0.1% follow no religion.[318] According to the 2010 estimates of the Pew Research Center, 7% of the population is Christian; 4% is Muslim; 1% follows traditional animistic beliefs; and 2% follow other religions, including Mahayana Buddhism, Hinduism, and East Asian religions.[329][330] Jehovah's Witnesses have been present since 1914[331] and have about 80 congregations around the country and a branch office in Yangon publishing in 16 languages.[332]
+A tiny Jewish community in Yangon had a synagogue but no resident rabbi to conduct services.[333]
+
+Although Hinduism is practised by 0.5% of the population, it was a major religion in Myanmar's past. Several strains of Hinduism existed alongside both Theravada Buddhism and Mahayana Buddhism in the Mon and Pyu period in the first millennium,[334] and down to the Pagan period (9th to 13th centuries) when "Saivite and Vaishana elements enjoyed greater elite influence than they would later do."[335] Burmese folk religion is practised by many Bamars alongside Buddhism.
+
+The general state of health care in Myanmar is poor. The government spends anywhere from 0.5% to 3% of the country's GDP on health care, consistently ranking among the lowest in the world.[336][337] Although health care is nominally free, in reality, patients have to pay for medicine and treatment, even in public clinics and hospitals. Public hospitals lack many of the basic facilities and equipment.
+
+The 2010 maternal mortality rate per 100,000 births for Myanmar is 240. This is compared with 219.3 in 2008 and 662 in 1990. The under 5 mortality rate, per 1,000 births is 73 and the neonatal mortality as a percentage of under 5's mortality is 47.
+
+Myanmar's government spends the least percentage of its GDP on health care of any country in the world, and international donor organisations give less to Myanmar, per capita, than any other country except India.[338] According to the report named "Preventable Fate", published by Doctors without Borders, 25,000 Burmese AIDS patients died in 2007, deaths that could largely have been prevented by antiretroviral therapy drugs and proper treatment.[338]
+
+HIV/AIDS, recognised as a disease of concern by the Burmese Ministry of Health, is most prevalent among sex workers and intravenous drug users. In 2005, the estimated adult HIV prevalence rate in Myanmar was 1.3% (200,000–570,000 people), according to UNAIDS, and early indicators of any progress against the HIV epidemic are inconsistent.[339][340][341] However, the National AIDS Programme Myanmar found that 32% of sex workers and 43% of intravenous drug users in Myanmar have HIV.[341]
+
+According to the UNESCO Institute of Statistics, Myanmar's official literacy rate as of 2000 was 90%.[342] Historically, Myanmar has had high literacy rates. To qualify for least developed country status by the UN to receive debt relief, Myanmar lowered its official literacy rate from 79% to 19% in 1987.[343][page needed][clarification needed]
+
+The educational system of Myanmar is operated by the government agency, the Ministry of Education. The education system is based on the United Kingdom's system due to nearly a century of British and Christian presences in Myanmar. Nearly all schools are government-operated, but there has been a recent increase in privately funded English language schools. Schooling is compulsory until the end of elementary school, approximately about 9 years old, while the compulsory schooling age is 15 or 16 at international level.
+
+There are 101 universities, 12 institutes, 9-degree colleges and 24 colleges in Myanmar, a total of 146 higher education institutions.[344] There are 10 Technical Training Schools, 23 nursing training schools, 1 sport academy and 20 midwifery schools. There are 2047 Basic Education High Schools, 2605 Basic Education Middle Schools, 29944 Basic Education Primary Schools and 5952 Post Primary Schools. 1692 multimedia classrooms exist within this system.
+
+There are four international schools acknowledged by WASC and College Board—The International School Yangon (ISY), Myanmar International School (MIS), Yangon International School (YIS) and International School of Myanmar (ISM) in Yangon.
+
+Myanmar had a murder rate of 15.2 per 100,000 population with a total of 8,044 murders in 2012.[345] Factors influencing Myanmar's high murder rate include communal violence and armed conflict.[346] Myanmar is one of the world's most corrupt nations. The 2012 Transparency International Corruption Perceptions Index ranked the country at number 171, out of 176 countries in total.[347]
+
+Myanmar is the world's second largest producer of opium after Afghanistan, producing some 25% of the world's opium, and forms part of the Golden Triangle. The opium industry was a monopoly during colonial times and has since been illegally operated by corrupt officials in the Burmese military and rebel fighters,[348] primarily as the basis for heroin manufacture.
+
+Myanmar is the largest producer of methamphetamines in the world, with the majority of Ya ba found in Thailand produced in Myanmar, particularly in the Golden Triangle and Northeastern Shan State, which borders Thailand, Laos and China.[349] Burmese-produced ya ba is typically trafficked to Thailand via Laos, before being transported through the northeastern Thai region of Isan.[350]
+
+A diverse range of indigenous cultures exist in Myanmar, with majority culture primarily Buddhist and Bamar. Bamar culture has been influenced by the cultures of neighbouring countries, manifested in its language, cuisine, music, dance and theatre. The arts, particularly literature, have historically been influenced by the local form of Theravada Buddhism. Considered the national epic of Myanmar, the Yama Zatdaw, an adaptation of India's Ramayana, has been influenced greatly by Thai, Mon, and Indian versions of the play.[351] Buddhism is practised along with nat worship, which involves elaborate rituals to propitiate one from a pantheon of 37 nats.[352][353]
+
+In a traditional village, the monastery is the centre of cultural life. Monks are venerated and supported by the lay people. A novitiation ceremony called shinbyu is the most important coming of age events for a boy, during which he enters the monastery for a short time.[354] All male children in Buddhist families are encouraged to be a novice (beginner for Buddhism) before the age of twenty and to be a monk after the age of twenty. Girls have ear-piercing ceremonies (နားသ) at the same time.[354] Burmese culture is most evident in villages where local festivals are held throughout the year, the most important being the pagoda festival.[317][355] Many villages have a guardian nat, and superstition and taboos are commonplace.
+
+British colonial rule introduced Western elements of culture to Myanmar. Myanmar's education system is modelled after that of the United Kingdom. Colonial architectural influences are most evident in major cities such as Yangon.[356] Many ethnic minorities, particularly the Karen in the southeast and the Kachin and Chin who populate the north and northeast, practice Christianity.[357] According to The World Factbook, the Burman population is 68% and the ethnic groups constitute 32%. However, the exiled leaders and organisations claims that ethnic population is 40%, which is implicitly contrasted with CIA report (official US report).
+
+Burmese cuisine is characterised by extensive use of fish products such as fish sauce, ngapi (fermented seafood) and dried prawn.
+
+Mohinga is the traditional breakfast dish and is Myanmar's national dish. Seafood is a common ingredient in coastal cities such as Sittwe, Kyaukpyu, Mawlamyaing (formerly Moulmein), Mergui (Myeik) and Dawei, while meat and poultry are more commonly used in landlocked cities like Mandalay. Freshwater fish and shrimp have been incorporated into inland cooking as a primary source of protein and are used in a variety of ways, fresh, salted whole or filleted, salted and dried, made into a salty paste, or fermented sour and pressed.
+
+Burmese cuisine also includes a variety of salads (a thoke), centred on one major ingredient, ranging from starches like rice, wheat and rice noodles, glass noodles and vermicelli, to potato, ginger, tomato, kaffir lime, long bean, lahpet (pickled tea leaves), and ngapi (fish paste).
+
+The Lethwei, Bando, Banshay, and Pongyi thaing martial arts and chinlone are traditional sports in Myanmar.[358] Football is played all over the country, even in villages, and its national team is ruled by the Myanmar Football Federation.
+
+The 2013 Southeast Asian Games took place in Naypyidaw, Yangon, Mandalay and Ngwesaung Beach in December representing the third occasion that the event has been staged in Myanmar. Myanmar previously hosted the Games in 1961 and 1969.[359]
+
+Burmese traditional art concepts is popular and respected by the Burmese people and people from abroad.
+
+Burmese contemporary art has developed quite rapidly on its own terms. Artists born after the 1980s have had greater chances of art practice outside the country.
+
+One of the first to study western art was Ba Nyan. Together with Ngwe Gaing and a handful of other artists, they were the pioneers of western painting style. Later on most young children learned the concepts from them. Some well known contemporary artists are Lun Gywe, Aung Kyaw Htet, MPP Yei Myint, Myint Swe, Min Wai Aung, Aung Myint, Kin Maung Yin, Po Po and Zaw Zaw Aung.
+
+Due to Myanmar's political climate, there are not many media companies in relation to the country's population, although a certain number exists. Some are privately owned. All programming must meet with the approval of the censorship board.
+
+The Burmese government announced on 20 August 2012 that it would stop censoring media before publication. Following the announcement, newspapers and other outlets no longer required approved by state censors; however, journalists in the country can still face consequences for what they write and say.[360]
+
+In April 2013, international media reports were published to relay the enactment of the media liberalisation reforms that we announced in August 2012. For the first time in numerous decades, the publication of privately owned newspapers commenced in the country.[361]
+
+Internet use is estimated to be relatively low compared to other countries.[362] Myanmar's internet used to be subject to censorship, and authorities viewed e-mails and posts on Internet blogs until 2012 when the government removed media censorship. During the strict censorship days, activity at internet cafes was regulated, and one blogger named Zarganar was sentenced to prison for publishing a video of destruction caused by Cyclone Nargis in 2008; Zarganar was released in October 2011.
+
+In regards to communications infrastructure, Myanmar is the last ranked Asian country in the World Economic Forum's Network Readiness Index (NRI) – an indicator for determining the development level of a country's information and communication technologies. With 139 countries reported on, Myanmar ranked number 133 overall in the 2016 NRI ranking.[363]
+
+Myanmar's first film was a documentary of the funeral of Tun Shein—a leading politician of the 1910s, who campaigned for Burmese independence in London. The first Burmese silent film Myitta Ne Thuya (Love and Liquor) in 1920 which proved a major success, despite its poor quality due to a fixed camera position and inadequate film accessories. During the 1920s and 1930s, many Burmese-owned film companies made and produced several films. The first Burmese sound film was produced in 1932 in Bombay, India with the title Ngwe Pay Lo Ma Ya (Money Can't Buy It). After World War II, Burmese cinema continued to address political themes. Many of the films produced in the early Cold War era had a strong propaganda element to them.
+
+In the era that followed the political events of 1988, the film industry has been increasingly controlled by the government. Film stars who had been involved in the political activities were banned from appearing in films. The government issues strict rules on censorship and largely determines who produces films, as well as who gets academy awards.[364]
+
+Over the years, the movie industry has also shifted to producing many lower-budget direct-to-video films.
+
+Most of the movies produced nowadays are comedies.[365] In 2008, only 12 films worthy of being considered for an Academy Award were made, although at least 800 VCDs were produced.[366]
+
+Myanmar is the primary subject of a 2007 graphic novel titled Chroniques Birmanes by Québécois author and animator, Guy Delisle. The graphic novel was translated into English under the title Burma Chronicles in 2008. In 2009, a documentary about Burmese videojournalists called Burma VJ was released.[367] This film was nominated for Best Documentary Feature at the 2010 Academy Awards.[368] The Lady had its world premiere on 12 September 2011 at the 36th Toronto International Film Festival.[369]
+
+Government
+
+General information
+
+Economy
+
+Agriculture
+
+Trade
+
+Environment
+
+Coordinates: 22°N 96°E / 22°N 96°E / 22; 96

en/679.html.txt

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+A leap year (also known as an intercalary year or bissextile year) is a calendar year that contains an additional day (or, in the case of a lunisolar calendar, a month) added to keep the calendar year synchronized with the astronomical year or seasonal year.[1] Because astronomical events and seasons do not repeat in a whole number of days, calendars that have the same number of days in each year drift over time with respect to the event that the year is supposed to track. By inserting (called intercalating in technical terminology) an additional day or month into the year, the drift can be corrected. A year that is not a leap year is a common year.
+
+For example, in the Gregorian calendar, each leap year has 366 days instead of 365, by extending February to 29 days rather than the common 28. These extra days occur in each year which is an integer multiple of 4 (except for years evenly divisible by 100, which are not leap years unless evenly divisible by 400). Similarly, in the lunisolar Hebrew calendar, Adar Aleph, a 13th lunar month, is added seven times every 19 years to the twelve lunar months in its common years to keep its calendar year from drifting through the seasons. In the Bahá'í Calendar, a leap day is added when needed to ensure that the following year begins on the March equinox.
+
+The term leap year probably comes from the fact that a fixed date in the Gregorian calendar normally advances one day of the week from one year to the next, but the day of the week in the 12 months following the leap day (from March 1 through February 28 of the following year) will advance two days due to the extra day, thus leaping over one day in the week.[2][3] For example, Christmas Day (December 25) fell on a Sunday in 2016, Monday in 2017, Tuesday in 2018 and Wednesday in 2019, but then will leap over Thursday to fall on a Friday in 2020.
+
+The length of a day is also occasionally corrected by inserting a leap second into Coordinated Universal Time (UTC) because of variations in Earth's rotation period. Unlike leap days, leap seconds are not introduced on a regular schedule because variations in the length of the day are not entirely predictable.
+
+Leap years can present a problem in computing, known as the leap year bug, when a year is not correctly identified as a leap year or when February 29 is not handled correctly in logic that accepts or manipulates dates.
+
+In the Gregorian calendar, the standard calendar in most of the world, most years that are multiples of 4 are leap years. In each leap year, the month of February has 29 days instead of 28. Adding one extra day in the calendar every four years compensates for the fact that a period of 365 days is shorter than a tropical year by almost 6 hours.[4] Some exceptions to this basic rule are required since the duration of a tropical year is slightly less than 365.25 days. The Gregorian reform modified the Julian calendar's scheme of leap years as follows:
+
+Every year that is exactly divisible by four is a leap year, except for years that are exactly divisible by 100, but these centurial years are leap years if they are exactly divisible by 400. For example, the years 1700, 1800, and 1900 are not leap years, but the years 1600 and 2000 are.[5]
+
+Over a period of four centuries, the accumulated error of adding a leap day every four years amounts to about three extra days. The Gregorian calendar therefore drops three leap days every 400 years, which is the length of its leap cycle. This is done by dropping February 29 in the three century years (multiples of 100) that cannot be exactly divided by 400.[6][7] The years 1600, 2000 and 2400 are leap years, while 1700, 1800, 1900, 2100, 2200 and 2300 are not leap years. By this rule, the average number of days per year is 365 + ​1⁄4 − ​1⁄100 + ​1⁄400 = 365.2425.[8] The rule can be applied to years before the Gregorian reform (the proleptic Gregorian calendar), if astronomical year numbering is used.[9]
+
+The Gregorian calendar was designed to keep the vernal equinox on or close to March 21, so that the date of Easter (celebrated on the Sunday after the ecclesiastical full moon that falls on or after March 21) remains close to the vernal equinox.[10][8] The "Accuracy" section of the "Gregorian calendar" article discusses how well the Gregorian calendar achieves this design goal, and how well it approximates the tropical year.
+
+The following pseudocode determines whether a year is a leap year or a common year in the Gregorian calendar (and in the proleptic Gregorian calendar before 1582). The year variable being tested is the integer representing the number of the year in the Gregorian calendar.
+
+if (year is not divisible by 4) then (it is a common year)
+else if (year is not divisible by 100) then (it is a leap year)
+else if (year is not divisible by 400) then (it is a common year)
+else (it is a leap year)
+
+The algorithm applies to proleptic Gregorian calendar years before 1, but only if the year is expressed with astronomical year numbering. It is not valid for the BC or BCE notation. The algorithm is not necessarily valid for years in the Julian calendar, such as years before 1752 in the British Empire. The year 1700 was a leap year in the Julian calendar, but not in the Gregorian calendar.
+
+February 29 is a date that usually occurs every four years, and is called the leap day. This day is added to the calendar in leap years as a corrective measure, because the Earth does not orbit the sun in precisely 365 days.
+
+The Gregorian calendar is a modification of the Julian calendar first used by the Romans. The Roman calendar originated as a lunisolar calendar and named many of its days after the syzygies of the moon: the new moon (Kalendae or calends, hence "calendar") and the full moon (Idus or ides). The Nonae or nones was not the first quarter moon but was exactly one nundina or Roman market week of nine days before the ides, inclusively counting the ides as the first of those nine days. This is what we would call a period of eight days. In 1825, Ideler believed that the lunisolar calendar was abandoned about 450 BC by the decemvirs, who implemented the Roman Republican calendar, used until 46 BC. The days of these calendars were counted down (inclusively) to the next named day, so February 24 was ante diem sextum Kalendas Martias ("the sixth day before the calends of March") often abbreviated a. d. VI Kal. Mart. The Romans counted days inclusively in their calendars, so this was actually the fifth day before March 1 when counted in the modern exclusive manner (not including the starting day).[11]
+
+The Republican calendar's intercalary month was inserted on the first or second day after the Terminalia (a. d. VII Kal. Mar., February 23). The remaining days of Februarius were dropped. This intercalary month, named Intercalaris or Mercedonius, contained 27 days. The religious festivals that were normally celebrated in the last five days of February were moved to the last five days of Intercalaris. Because only 22 or 23 days were effectively added, not a full lunation, the calends and ides of the Roman Republican calendar were no longer associated with the new moon and full moon.
+
+The Julian calendar, which was developed in 46 BC by Julius Caesar, and became effective in 45 BC, distributed an extra ten days among the months of the Roman Republican calendar. Caesar also replaced the intercalary month by a single intercalary day, located where the intercalary month used to be. To create the intercalary day, the existing ante diem sextum Kalendas Martias (February 24) was doubled, producing ante diem bis sextum Kalendas Martias. Hence, the year containing the doubled day was a bissextile (bis sextum, "twice sixth") year. For legal purposes, the two days of the bis sextum were considered to be a single day, with the second half being intercalated; but in common practice by 238, when Censorinus wrote, the intercalary day was followed by the last five days of February, a. d. VI, V, IV, III and pridie Kal. Mart. (the days numbered 24, 25, 26, 27, and 28 from the beginning of February in a common year), so that the intercalated day was the first half of the doubled day. Thus the intercalated day was effectively inserted between the 23rd and 24th days of February. All later writers, including Macrobius about 430, Bede in 725, and other medieval computists (calculators of Easter), continued to state that the bissextum (bissextile day) occurred before the last five days of February.
+
+Until 1970, the Roman Catholic Church always celebrated the feast of Saint Matthias on a. d. VI Kal. Mart., so if the days were numbered from the beginning of the month, it was named February 24 in common years, but the presence of the bissextum in a bissextile year immediately before a. d. VI Kal. Mart. shifted the latter day to February 25 in leap years, with the Vigil of St. Matthias shifting from February 23 to the leap day of February 24. This shift did not take place in pre-Reformation Norway and Iceland; Pope Alexander III ruled that either practice was lawful (Liber Extra, 5. 40. 14. 1). Other feasts normally falling on February 25–28 in common years are also shifted to the following day in a leap year (although they would be on the same day according to the Roman notation). The practice is still observed by those who use the older calendars.
+
+The Revised Bengali Calendar of Bangladesh and the Indian National Calendar organise their leap years so that the every leap day is close to a February 29 in the Gregorian calendar and vice versa. This makes it easy to convert dates to or from Gregorian.
+
+The Thai solar calendar uses the Buddhist Era (BE), but has been synchronized with the Gregorian since AD 1941.
+
+The Julian calendar was instituted in 45 BC at the order of Julius Caesar, and the original intent was to make every fourth year a leap year, but this was not carried out correctly. Augustus ordered some leap years to be omitted to correct the problem, and by AD 8 the leap years were being observed every fourth year, and the observances were consistent up to and including modern times.
+
+From AD 8 the Julian calendar received an extra day added to February in years that are multiples of 4 (although the AD year numbering system was not introduced until AD 525).
+
+The Coptic calendar and Ethiopian calendar also add an extra day to the end of the year once every four years before a Julian 29-day February.
+
+This rule gives an average year length of 365.25 days. However, it is 11 minutes longer than a tropical year. This means that the vernal equinox moves a day earlier in the calendar about every 131 years.
+
+The Revised Julian calendar adds an extra day to February in years that are multiples of four, except for years that are multiples of 100 that do not leave a remainder of 200 or 600 when divided by 900. This rule agrees with the rule for the Gregorian calendar until 2799. The first year that dates in the Revised Julian calendar will not agree with those in the Gregorian calendar will be 2800, because it will be a leap year in the Gregorian calendar but not in the Revised Julian calendar.
+
+This rule gives an average year length of 365.242222 days. This is a very good approximation to the mean tropical year, but because the vernal equinox year is slightly longer, the Revised Julian calendar for the time being does not do as good a job as the Gregorian calendar at keeping the vernal equinox on or close to March 21.
+
+The Chinese calendar is lunisolar, so a leap year has an extra month, often called an embolismic month after the Greek word for it. In the Chinese calendar the leap month is added according to a rule which ensures that month 11 is always the month that contains the northern winter solstice. The intercalary month takes the same number as the preceding month; for example, if it follows the second month (二月) then it is simply called "leap second month" i.e. simplified Chinese: 闰二月; traditional Chinese: 閏二月; pinyin: rùn'èryuè.
+
+The Hebrew calendar is lunisolar with an embolismic month. This extra month is called Adar Alef (first Adar) and is added before Adar, which then becomes Adar Bet (second Adar). According to the Metonic cycle, this is done seven times every nineteen years (specifically, in years 3, 6, 8, 11, 14, 17, and 19). This is to ensure that Passover (Pesah) is always in the spring as required by the Torah (Pentateuch) in many verses[12] relating to Passover.
+
+In addition, the Hebrew calendar has postponement rules that postpone the start of the year by one or two days. These postponement rules reduce the number of different combinations of year length and starting days of the week from 28 to 14, and regulate the location of certain religious holidays in relation to the Sabbath. In particular, the first day of the Hebrew year can never be Sunday, Wednesday or Friday. This rule is known in Hebrew as "lo adu rosh" (לא אד״ו ראש), i.e., "Rosh [ha-Shanah, first day of the year] is not Sunday, Wednesday or Friday" (as the Hebrew word adu is written by three Hebrew letters signifying Sunday, Wednesday and Friday). Accordingly, the first day of Passover is never Monday, Wednesday or Friday. This rule is known in Hebrew as "lo badu Pesah" (לא בד״ו פסח), which has a double meaning — "Passover is not a legend", but also "Passover is not Monday, Wednesday or Friday" (as the Hebrew word badu is written by three Hebrew letters signifying Monday, Wednesday and Friday).
+
+One reason for this rule is that Yom Kippur, the holiest day in the Hebrew calendar and the tenth day of the Hebrew year, now must never be adjacent to the weekly Sabbath (which is Saturday), i.e., it must never fall on Friday or Sunday, in order not to have two adjacent Sabbath days. However, Yom Kippur can still be on Saturday. A second reason is that Hoshana Rabbah, the 21st day of the Hebrew year, will never be on Saturday. These rules for the Feasts do not apply to the years from the Creation to the deliverance of the Hebrews from Egypt under Moses. It was at that time (cf. Exodus 13) that the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob gave the Hebrews their "Law" including the days to be kept holy and the feast days and Sabbaths.
+
+Years consisting of 12 months have between 353 and 355 days. In a k'sidra ("in order") 354-day year, months have alternating 30 and 29 day lengths. In a chaser ("lacking") year, the month of Kislev is reduced to 29 days. In a malei ("filled") year, the month of Marcheshvan is increased to 30 days. 13-month years follow the same pattern, with the addition of the 30-day Adar Alef, giving them between 383 and 385 days.
+
+The observed and calculated versions of the Islamic calendar do not have regular leap days, even though both have lunar months containing 29 or 30 days, generally in alternating order. However, the tabular Islamic calendar used by Islamic astronomers during the Middle Ages and still used by some Muslims does have a regular leap day added to the last month of the lunar year in 11 years of a 30-year cycle.[13] This additional day is found at the end of the last month, Dhu 'l-Hijja, which is also the month of the Hajj.[14]
+
+The Hijri-Shamsi calendar, also adopted by the Ahmadiyya Community, is based on solar calculations and is similar to the Gregorian calendar in its structure with the exception that the first year starts with Hijra.[15]
+
+The Bahá'í calendar is a solar calendar composed of 19 months of 19 days each (361 days). Years begin at Naw-Rúz, on the vernal equinox, on or about March 21. A period of "Intercalary Days", called Ayyam-i-Ha, are inserted before the 19th month. This period normally has 4 days, but an extra day is added when needed to ensure that the following year starts on the vernal equinox. This is calculated and known years in advance.
+
+The Iranian calendar is an observational calendar that starts on the spring equinox and adds a single intercalated day to the last month (Esfand) once every four or five years; the first leap year occurs as the fifth year of the typical 33-year cycle and the remaining leap years occur every four years through the remainder of the 33-year cycle. This system has less periodic deviation or jitter from its mean year than the Gregorian calendar, and operates on the simple rule that the vernal equinox always falls in the 24-hour period ending at noon on New Year's Day.[16] The 33-year period is not completely regular; every so often the 33-year cycle will be broken by a cycle of 29 years.[17] A similar rule has been proposed to simplify the Gregorian calendar.[18] The centennial leap years would be spaced so that in years giving remainder 3 on division by 100 the dynamic mean sun[19] passes through the equinox in the 24-hour period ending at 1 PM GMT on 19 March. The system would be introduced when for the first time the dynamic mean sun is due to pass through the equinox before 1 PM GMT on 18 March in a year giving remainder 3 on division by 400. The immediately preceding centennial leap year will be cancelled. The first cancellation will probably be AD 8400 and the next two centennial leap years thereafter will probably be AD 8800 and AD 9700.[20]
+
+
+
+In Ireland and Britain, it is a tradition that women may propose marriage only in leap years. While it has been claimed that the tradition was initiated by Saint Patrick or Brigid of Kildare in 5th century Ireland, this is dubious, as the tradition has not been attested before the 19th century.[21] Supposedly, a 1288 law by Queen Margaret of Scotland (then age five and living in Norway), required that fines be levied if a marriage proposal was refused by the man; compensation was deemed to be a pair of leather gloves, a single rose, £1 and a kiss.[22] In some places the tradition was tightened to restricting female proposals to the modern leap day, February 29, or to the medieval (bissextile) leap day, February 24.
+
+According to Felten: "A play from the turn of the 17th century, 'The Maydes Metamorphosis,' has it that 'this is leape year/women wear breeches.' A few hundred years later, breeches wouldn't do at all: Women looking to take advantage of their opportunity to pitch woo were expected to wear a scarlet petticoat — fair warning, if you will."[23]
+
+In Finland, the tradition is that if a man refuses a woman's proposal on leap day, he should buy her the fabrics for a skirt.[24]
+
+In France, since 1980, a satirical newspaper entitled La Bougie du Sapeur is published only on leap year, on February 29.
+
+In Greece, marriage in a leap year is considered unlucky.[25] One in five engaged couples in Greece will plan to avoid getting married in a leap year.[26]
+
+In February 1988 the town of Anthony in Texas, declared itself "leap year capital of the world", and an international leapling birthday club was started.[27]
+
+Woman capturing man with butterfly-net
+
+Women anxiously awaiting January 1
+
+Histrionically preparing
+
+A person born on February 29 may be called a "leapling" or a "leaper".[28] In common years, they usually celebrate their birthdays on February 28. In some situations, March 1 is used as the birthday in a non-leap year, since it is the day following February 28.
+
+Technically, a leapling will have fewer birthday anniversaries than their age in years. This phenomenon is exploited when a person claims to be only a quarter of their actual age, by counting their leap-year birthday anniversaries only: for example, in Gilbert and Sullivan's 1879 comic opera The Pirates of Penzance, Frederic the pirate apprentice discovers that he is bound to serve the pirates until his 21st birthday (that is, when he turns 88 years old, since 1900 was not a leap year) rather than until his 21st year.
+
+For legal purposes, legal birthdays depend on how local laws count time intervals.
+
+The Civil Code of the Taiwan since October 10, 1929,[29] implies that the legal birthday of a leapling is February 28 in common years:
+
+If a period fixed by weeks, months, and years does not commence from the beginning of a week, month, or year, it ends with the ending of the day which precedes the day of the last week, month, or year which corresponds to that on which it began to commence. But if there is no corresponding day in the last month, the period ends with the ending of the last day of the last month.[30]
+
+Since 1990 non-retroactively, Hong Kong considers the legal birthday of a leapling March 1 in common years:[31]

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+Africa is the world's second-largest and second-most populous continent, after Asia. At about 30.3 million km2 (11.7 million square miles) including adjacent islands, it covers 6% of Earth's total surface area and 20% of its land area.[4] With 1.3 billion people[1][2] as of 2018, it accounts for about 16% of the world's human population. Africa's average population is the youngest amongst all the continents;[5][6] the median age in 2012 was 19.7, when the worldwide median age was 30.4.[7] Despite a wide range of natural resources, the continent is the least wealthy per capita, possibly due in part to the legacies of European colonization in Africa. Despite this low concentration of wealth, recent economic expansion and the large and young population make Africa an important economic market in the broader global context.
+
+The continent is surrounded by the Mediterranean Sea to the north, the Isthmus of Suez and the Red Sea to the northeast, the Indian Ocean to the southeast and the Atlantic Ocean to the west. The continent includes Madagascar and various archipelagos. It contains 54 fully recognised sovereign states (countries), eight territories and two de facto independent states with limited or no recognition. Algeria is Africa's largest country by area, and Nigeria is its largest by population.  African nations cooperate through the establishment of the African Union, which is headquartered in Addis Ababa.
+
+Africa straddles the Equator and encompasses numerous climate areas; it is the only continent to stretch from the northern temperate to southern temperate zones.[8] The majority of the continent and its countries are in the Northern Hemisphere, with a substantial portion and number of countries in the Southern Hemisphere. Africa is home to much biodiversity; it is the continent with the largest number of megafauna species, as it was least affected by the extinction of the Pleistocene megafauna. However, Africa also is heavily affected by a wide range of environmental issues, including desertification, deforestation, water scarcity, and other issues. These entrenched environmental concerns are expected to worsen as climate change impacts Africa. The UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has identified Africa as the most vulnerable continent to climate change.[9][10]
+
+Africa, particularly Eastern Africa, is widely accepted as the place of origin of humans and the Hominidae clade (great apes), meaning that Africa has a long and complex history. The earliest hominids and their ancestors have been dated to around 7 million years ago, including Sahelanthropus tchadensis, Australopithecus africanus, A. afarensis, Homo erectus, H. habilis and H. ergaster— the earliest Homo sapiens (modern human) remains, found in Ethiopia, South Africa, and Morocco, date to circa 200,000, 259,000, and 300,000 years ago respectively, and Homo sapiens is believed to have orignated in Africa around 350,000-260,000 years ago.[11][12][13][14][15] Early human civilizations, such as Ancient Egypt and Phoenicia emerged in North Africa. Following a subsequent long and complex history of civilizations, migration and trade, Africa hosts a large diversity of ethnicities, cultures and languages. The last 400 years have witnessed an increasing European influence on the continent. Starting in the 16th century, this was driven by trade, including the Trans-Atlantic slave trade, which created large African diaspora populations in the Americas. In the late 19th century, European countries colonized almost all of Africa, extracting resources from the continent and exploiting local communities; most present states in Africa emerged from a process of decolonisation in the 20th century.
+
+Afri was a Latin name used to refer to the inhabitants of then-known northern Africa to the west of the Nile river, and in its widest sense referred to all lands south of the Mediterranean (Ancient Libya).[16][17] This name seems to have originally referred to a native Libyan tribe, an ancestor of modern Berbers; see Terence for discussion. The name had usually been connected with the Phoenician word ʿafar meaning "dust",[18] but a 1981 hypothesis[19] has asserted that it stems from the Berber word ifri (plural ifran) meaning "cave", in reference to cave dwellers.[20] The same word[20] may be found in the name of the Banu Ifran from Algeria and Tripolitania, a Berber tribe originally from Yafran (also known as Ifrane) in northwestern Libya.[21]
+
+Under Roman rule, Carthage became the capital of the province it then named Africa Proconsularis, following its defeat of the Carthaginians in the Third Punic War in 146 BC, which also included the coastal part of modern Libya.[22] The Latin suffix -ica can sometimes be used to denote a land (e.g., in Celtica from Celtae, as used by Julius Caesar). The later Muslim region of Ifriqiya, following its conquest of the Byzantine (Eastern Roman) Empire's Exarchatus Africae, also preserved a form of the name.
+
+According to the Romans, Africa lay to the west of Egypt, while "Asia" was used to refer to Anatolia and lands to the east. A definite line was drawn between the two continents by the geographer Ptolemy (85–165 AD), indicating Alexandria along the Prime Meridian and making the isthmus of Suez and the Red Sea the boundary between Asia and Africa. As Europeans came to understand the real extent of the continent, the idea of "Africa" expanded with their knowledge.
+
+Other etymological hypotheses have been postulated for the ancient name "Africa":
+
+Africa is considered by most paleoanthropologists to be the oldest inhabited territory on Earth, with the human species originating from the continent.[29][30] During the mid-20th century, anthropologists discovered many fossils and evidence of human occupation perhaps as early as 7 million years ago (BP=before present). Fossil remains of several species of early apelike humans thought to have evolved into modern man, such as Australopithecus afarensis (radiometrically dated to approximately 3.9–3.0 million years BP,[31] Paranthropus boisei (c. 2.3–1.4 million years BP)[32] and Homo ergaster (c. 1.9 million–600,000 years BP) have been discovered.[4]
+
+After the evolution of Homo sapiens approximately 350,000 to 260,000 years BP in Africa.[12][13][14][15] the continent was mainly populated by groups of hunter-gatherers.[33][34][35] These first modern humans left Africa and populated the rest of the globe during the Out of Africa II migration dated to approximately 50,000 years BP, exiting the continent either across Bab-el-Mandeb over the Red Sea,[36][37] the Strait of Gibraltar in Morocco,[38][39] or the Isthmus of Suez in Egypt.[40]
+
+Other migrations of modern humans within the African continent have been dated to that time, with evidence of early human settlement found in Southern Africa, Southeast Africa, North Africa, and the Sahara.[41]
+
+The size of the Sahara has historically been extremely variable, with its area rapidly fluctuating and at times disappearing depending on global climatic conditions.[42] At the end of the Ice ages, estimated to have been around 10,500 BC, the Sahara had again become a green fertile valley, and its African populations returned from the interior and coastal highlands in Sub-Saharan Africa, with rock art paintings depicting a fertile Sahara and large populations discovered in Tassili n'Ajjer dating back perhaps 10 millennia.[43] However, the warming and drying climate meant that by 5000 BC, the Sahara region was becoming increasingly dry and hostile. Around 3500 BC, due to a tilt in the earth's orbit, the Sahara experienced a period of rapid desertification.[44] The population trekked out of the Sahara region towards the Nile Valley below the Second Cataract where they made permanent or semi-permanent settlements. A major climatic recession occurred, lessening the heavy and persistent rains in Central and Eastern Africa. Since this time, dry conditions have prevailed in Eastern Africa and, increasingly during the last 200 years, in Ethiopia.
+
+The domestication of cattle in Africa preceded agriculture and seems to have existed alongside hunter-gatherer cultures. It is speculated that by 6000 BC, cattle were domesticated in North Africa.[45] In the Sahara-Nile complex, people domesticated many animals, including the donkey and a small screw-horned goat which was common from Algeria to Nubia.
+
+Around 4000 BC, the Saharan climate started to become drier at an exceedingly fast pace.[46] This climate change caused lakes and rivers to shrink significantly and caused increasing desertification. This, in turn, decreased the amount of land conducive to settlements and helped to cause migrations of farming communities to the more tropical climate of West Africa.[46]
+
+By the first millennium BC, ironworking had been introduced in Northern Africa and around that time also became established in parts of sub-Saharan Africa either through independent invention there or diffusion from the north[47] and by 500 BC, metalworking began to become commonplace in West Africa. Ironworking was fully established by roughly 500 BC in many areas of East and West Africa, although other regions didn't begin ironworking until the early centuries AD. Copper objects from Egypt, North Africa, Nubia, and Ethiopia dating from around 500 BC have been excavated in West Africa, suggesting that Trans-Saharan trade networks had been established by this date.[46]
+
+At about 3300 BC, the historical record opens in Northern Africa with the rise of literacy in the Pharaonic civilization of Ancient Egypt.[48] One of the world's earliest and longest-lasting civilizations, the Egyptian state continued, with varying levels of influence over other areas, until 343 BC.[49][50] Egyptian influence reached deep into modern-day Libya and Nubia, and, according to Martin Bernal, as far north as Crete.[51]
+
+An independent centre of civilization with trading links to Phoenicia was established by Phoenicians from Tyre on the north-west African coast at Carthage.[52][53][54]
+
+European exploration of Africa began with Ancient Greeks and Romans.[55][56] In 332 BC, Alexander the Great was welcomed as a liberator in Persian-occupied Egypt. He founded Alexandria in Egypt, which would become the prosperous capital of the Ptolemaic dynasty after his death.[57]
+
+Following the conquest of North Africa's Mediterranean coastline by the Roman Empire, the area was integrated economically and culturally into the Roman system. Roman settlement occurred in modern Tunisia and elsewhere along the coast. The first Roman emperor native to North Africa was Septimius Severus, born in Leptis Magna in present-day Libya—his mother was Italian Roman and his father was Punic.[58]
+
+Christianity spread across these areas at an early date, from Judaea via Egypt and beyond the borders of the Roman world into Nubia;[59] by AD 340 at the latest, it had become the state religion of the Aksumite Empire. Syro-Greek missionaries, who arrived by way of the Red Sea, were responsible for this theological development.[60]
+
+In the early 7th century, the newly formed Arabian Islamic Caliphate expanded into Egypt, and then into North Africa. In a short while, the local Berber elite had been integrated into Muslim Arab tribes. When the Umayyad capital Damascus fell in the 8th century, the Islamic centre of the Mediterranean shifted from Syria to Qayrawan in North Africa. Islamic North Africa had become diverse, and a hub for mystics, scholars, jurists, and philosophers. During the above-mentioned period, Islam spread to sub-Saharan Africa, mainly through trade routes and migration.[61]
+
+In West Africa, Dhar Tichitt and Oualata in present-day Mauritania figure prominently among the early urban centers, dated to 2,000 BC. About 500 stone settlements litter the region in the former savannah of the Sahara. Its inhabitants fished and grew millet. It has been found by Augustin Holl that the Soninke of the Mandé peoples were likely responsible for constructing such settlements. Around 300 BC the region became more desiccated and the settlements began to decline, most likely relocating to Koumbi Saleh.[62] Architectural evidence and the comparison of pottery styles suggest that Dhar Tichitt was related to the subsequent Ghana Empire. Djenné-Djenno (in present-day Mali) was settled around 300 BC, and the town grew to house a sizable Iron Age population, as evidenced by crowded cemeteries. Living structures were made of sun-dried mud. By 250 BC Djenné-Djenno had become a large, thriving market town.[63][64]
+
+Farther south, in central Nigeria, around 1,000 BC, the Nok culture developed on the Jos Plateau. It was a highly centralized community. The Nok people produced lifelike representations in terracotta, including human heads and human figures, elephants, and other animals. By 500 BC they were smelting iron. By 200 AD the Nok culture had vanished. Based on stylistic similarities with the Nok terracottas, the bronze figurines of the Yoruba kingdom of Ife and those of the Bini kingdom of Benin are now[when?] believed[by whom?] to be continuations of the traditions of the earlier Nok culture.[65]
+
+Pre-colonial Africa possessed perhaps as many as 10,000 different states and polities[67] characterized by many different sorts of political organization and rule. These included small family groups of hunter-gatherers such as the San people of southern Africa; larger, more structured groups such as the family clan groupings of the Bantu-speaking peoples of central, southern, and eastern Africa; heavily structured clan groups in the Horn of Africa; the large Sahelian kingdoms; and autonomous city-states and kingdoms such as those of the Akan; Edo, Yoruba, and Igbo people in West Africa; and the Swahili coastal trading towns of Southeast Africa.
+
+By the ninth century AD, a string of dynastic states, including the earliest Hausa states, stretched across the sub-Saharan savannah from the western regions to central Sudan. The most powerful of these states were Ghana, Gao, and the Kanem-Bornu Empire.  Ghana declined in the eleventh century, but was succeeded by the Mali Empire which consolidated much of western Sudan in the thirteenth century. Kanem accepted Islam in the eleventh century.
+
+In the forested regions of the West African coast, independent kingdoms grew with little influence from the Muslim north. The Kingdom of Nri was established around the ninth century and was one of the first. It is also one of the oldest kingdoms in present-day Nigeria and was ruled by the Eze Nri. The Nri kingdom is famous for its elaborate bronzes, found at the town of Igbo-Ukwu. The bronzes have been dated from as far back as the ninth century.[68]
+
+The Kingdom of Ife, historically the first of these Yoruba city-states or kingdoms, established government under a priestly oba ('king' or 'ruler' in the Yoruba language), called the Ooni of Ife. Ife was noted as a major religious and cultural centre in West Africa, and for its unique naturalistic tradition of bronze sculpture. The Ife model of government was adapted at the Oyo Empire, where its obas or kings, called the Alaafins of Oyo, once controlled a large number of other Yoruba and non-Yoruba city-states and kingdoms; the Fon Kingdom of Dahomey was one of the non-Yoruba domains under Oyo control.
+
+The Almoravids were a Berber dynasty from the Sahara that spread over a wide area of northwestern Africa and the Iberian peninsula during the eleventh century.[69] The Banu Hilal and Banu Ma'qil were a collection of Arab Bedouin tribes from the Arabian Peninsula who migrated westwards via Egypt between the eleventh and thirteenth centuries. Their migration resulted in the fusion of the Arabs and Berbers, where the locals were Arabized,[70] and Arab culture absorbed elements of the local culture, under the unifying framework of Islam.[71]
+
+Following the breakup of Mali, a local leader named Sonni Ali (1464–1492) founded the Songhai Empire in the region of middle Niger and the western Sudan and took control of the trans-Saharan trade. Sonni Ali seized Timbuktu in 1468 and Jenne in 1473, building his regime on trade revenues and the cooperation of Muslim merchants. His successor Askia Mohammad I (1493–1528) made Islam the official religion, built mosques, and brought to Gao Muslim scholars, including al-Maghili (d.1504), the founder of an important tradition of Sudanic African Muslim scholarship.[72] By the eleventh century, some Hausa states – such as Kano, jigawa, Katsina, and Gobir – had developed into walled towns engaging in trade, servicing caravans, and the manufacture of goods. Until the fifteenth century, these small states were on the periphery of the major Sudanic empires of the era, paying tribute to Songhai to the west and Kanem-Borno to the east.
+
+Mansa Musa ruled the Mali Empire in the 14th century.
+
+Slavery had long been practiced in Africa.[73][74] Between the 7th and 20th centuries, the Arab slave trade (also known as "slavery in the east") took 18 million slaves from Africa via trans-Saharan and Indian Ocean routes. Between the 15th and the 19th centuries, the Atlantic slave trade took an estimated 7–12 million slaves to the New World.[75][76][77] In addition, more than 1 million Europeans were captured by Barbary pirates and sold as slaves in North Africa between the 16th and 19th centuries.[78]
+
+In West Africa, the decline of the Atlantic slave trade in the 1820s caused dramatic economic shifts in local polities. The gradual decline of slave-trading, prompted by a lack of demand for slaves in the New World, increasing anti-slavery legislation in Europe and America, and the British Royal Navy's increasing presence off the West African coast, obliged African states to adopt new economies. Between 1808 and 1860, the British West Africa Squadron seized approximately 1,600 slave ships and freed 150,000 Africans who were aboard.[79]
+
+Action was also taken against African leaders who refused to agree to British treaties to outlaw the trade, for example against "the usurping King of Lagos", deposed in 1851. Anti-slavery treaties were signed with over 50 African rulers.[80] The largest powers of West Africa (the Asante Confederacy, the Kingdom of Dahomey, and the Oyo Empire) adopted different ways of adapting to the shift. Asante and Dahomey concentrated on the development of "legitimate commerce" in the form of palm oil, cocoa, timber and gold, forming the bedrock of West Africa's modern export trade. The Oyo Empire, unable to adapt, collapsed into civil wars.[81]
+
+The Scramble for Africa, also called the Partition of Africa or the Conquest of Africa, was the invasion, occupation, division, and colonisation of African territory by European powers during a short period known to historians as the New Imperialism (between 1881 and 1914). In 1870, only 10 percent of Africa was under formal European control; by 1914 this had increased to almost 90 percent of the continent, with only Ethiopia (Abyssinia), the Dervish state (a portion of present-day Somalia)[82] and Liberia remaining independent, and the latter was a former United States colony. The European colonialists had several motives: a desire for valuable natural resources, the quest for national prestige, rivalry between European powers, and religious missionary zeal. Internal African native politics also played a role.
+
+Imperial rule by Europeans would continue until after the conclusion of World War II, when almost all remaining colonial territories gradually obtained formal independence. Independence movements in Africa gained momentum following World War II, which left the major European powers weakened. In 1951, Libya, a former Italian colony, gained independence. In 1956, Tunisia and Morocco won their independence from France.[86] Ghana followed suit the next year (March 1957),[87] becoming the first of the sub-Saharan colonies to be granted independence. Most of the rest of the continent became independent over the next decade.
+
+Portugal's overseas presence in Sub-Saharan Africa (most notably in Angola, Cape Verde, Mozambique, Guinea-Bissau and São Tomé and Príncipe) lasted from the 16th century to 1975, after the Estado Novo regime was overthrown in a military coup in Lisbon. Rhodesia unilaterally declared independence from the United Kingdom in 1965, under the white minority government of Ian Smith, but was not internationally recognized as an independent state (as Zimbabwe) until 1980, when black nationalists gained power after a bitter guerrilla war. Although South Africa was one of the first African countries to gain independence, the state remained under the control of the country's white minority through a system of racial segregation known as apartheid until 1994.
+
+Today, Africa contains 54 sovereign countries, most of which have borders that were drawn during the era of European colonialism. Since colonialism, African states have frequently been hampered by instability, corruption, violence, and authoritarianism. The vast majority of African states are republics that operate under some form of the presidential system of rule. However, few of them have been able to sustain democratic governments on a permanent basis, and many have instead cycled through a series of coups, producing military dictatorships.
+
+Great instability was mainly the result of marginalization of ethnic groups, and graft under these leaders. For political gain, many leaders fanned ethnic conflicts, some of which had been exacerbated, or even created, by colonial rule. In many countries, the military was perceived as being the only group that could effectively maintain order, and it ruled many nations in Africa during the 1970s and early 1980s. During the period from the early 1960s to the late 1980s, Africa had more than 70 coups and 13 presidential assassinations. Border and territorial disputes were also common, with the European-imposed borders of many nations being widely contested through armed conflicts.
+
+Cold War conflicts between the United States and the Soviet Union, as well as the policies of the International Monetary Fund,[88] also played a role in instability. When a country became independent for the first time, it was often expected to align with one of the two superpowers. Many countries in Northern Africa received Soviet military aid, while others in Central and Southern Africa were supported by the United States, France or both. The 1970s saw an escalation of Cold War intrigues, as newly independent Angola and Mozambique aligned themselves with the Soviet Union, and the West and South Africa sought to contain Soviet influence by supporting friendly regimes or insurgency movements. In Rhodesia, Soviet and Chinese-backed leftist guerrillas of the Zimbabwe Patriotic Front waged a brutal guerrilla war against the country's white government. There was a major famine in Ethiopia, when hundreds of thousands of people starved. Some claimed that Marxist economic policies made the situation worse.[89][90][91] The most devastating military conflict in modern independent Africa has been the Second Congo War; this conflict and its aftermath has killed an estimated 5.5 million people.[92] Since 2003 there has been an ongoing conflict in Darfur which has become a humanitarian disaster. Another notable tragic event is the 1994 Rwandan genocide in which an estimated 800,000 people were murdered. AIDS in post-colonial Africa has also been a prevalent issue.
+
+In the 21st century, however, the number of armed conflicts in Africa has steadily declined. For instance, the civil war in Angola came to an end in 2002 after nearly 30 years. This coincided with many countries abandoning communist-style command economies and opening up for market reforms. The improved stability and economic reforms have led to a great increase in foreign investment into many African nations, mainly from China,[93] which has spurred quick economic growth in many countries, seemingly ending decades of stagnation and decline. Several African economies are among the world's fastest growing as of 2016[update]. A significant part of this growth, which is sometimes referred to as Africa Rising, can also be attributed to the facilitated diffusion of information technologies and specifically the mobile telephone.[94] Migration from African nations has increased dramatically in the last decade.[95]
+
+Africa is the largest of the three great southward projections from the largest landmass of the Earth. Separated from Europe by the Mediterranean Sea, it is joined to Asia at its northeast extremity by the Isthmus of Suez (transected by the Suez Canal), 163 km (101 mi) wide.[96] (Geopolitically, Egypt's Sinai Peninsula east of the Suez Canal is often considered part of Africa, as well.)[97]
+
+The coastline is 26,000 km (16,000 mi) long, and the absence of deep indentations of the shore is illustrated by the fact that Europe, which covers only 10,400,000 km2 (4,000,000 sq mi) – about a third of the surface of Africa – has a coastline of 32,000 km (20,000 mi).[98] From the most northerly point, Ras ben Sakka in Tunisia (37°21' N), to the most southerly point, Cape Agulhas in South Africa (34°51'15" S), is a distance of approximately 8,000 km (5,000 mi).[99] Cape Verde, 17°33'22" W, the westernmost point, is a distance of approximately 7,400 km (4,600 mi) to Ras Hafun, 51°27'52" E, the most easterly projection that neighbours Cape Guardafui, the tip of the Horn of Africa.[98]
+
+Africa's largest country is Algeria, and its smallest country is Seychelles, an archipelago off the east coast.[100] The smallest nation on the continental mainland is The Gambia.
+
+The African Plate is a major tectonic plate straddling the equator as well as the prime meridian. It includes much of the continent of Africa, as well as oceanic crust which lies between the continent and various surrounding ocean ridges. Between 60 million years ago and 10 million years ago, the Somali Plate began rifting from the African Plate along the East African Rift.[102] Since the continent of Africa consists of crust from both the African and the Somali plates, some literature refers to the African Plate as the Nubian Plate to distinguish it from the continent as a whole.[103]
+
+Geologically, Africa includes the Arabian Peninsula; the Zagros Mountains of Iran and the Anatolian Plateau of Turkey mark where the African Plate collided with Eurasia. The Afrotropical realm and the Saharo-Arabian desert to its north unite the region biogeographically, and the Afro-Asiatic language family unites the north linguistically.
+
+The climate of Africa ranges from tropical to subarctic on its highest peaks. Its northern half is primarily desert, or arid, while its central and southern areas contain both savanna plains and dense jungle (rainforest) regions. In between, there is a convergence, where vegetation patterns such as sahel and steppe dominate. Africa is the hottest continent on Earth and 60% of the entire land surface consists of drylands and deserts.[105] The record for the highest-ever recorded temperature, in Libya in 1922 (58 °C (136 °F)), was discredited in 2013.[106][107]
+
+Africa boasts perhaps the world's largest combination of density and "range of freedom" of wild animal populations and diversity, with wild populations of large carnivores (such as lions, hyenas, and cheetahs) and herbivores (such as buffalo, elephants, camels, and giraffes) ranging freely on primarily open non-private plains. It is also home to a variety of "jungle" animals including snakes and primates and aquatic life such as crocodiles and amphibians. In addition, Africa has the largest number of megafauna species, as it was least affected by the extinction of the Pleistocene megafauna.
+
+Africa has over 3,000 protected areas, with 198 marine protected areas, 50 biosphere reserves, and 80 wetlands reserves. Significant habitat destruction, increases in human population and poaching are reducing Africa's biological diversity and arable land. Human encroachment, civil unrest and the introduction of non-native species threaten biodiversity in Africa. This has been exacerbated by administrative problems, inadequate personnel and funding problems.[105]
+
+Deforestation is affecting Africa at twice the world rate, according to the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP).[108] According to the University of Pennsylvania African Studies Center, 31% of Africa's pasture lands and 19% of its forests and woodlands are classified as degraded, and Africa is losing over four million hectares of forest per year, which is twice the average deforestation rate for the rest of the world.[105] Some sources claim that approximately 90% of the original, virgin forests in West Africa have been destroyed.[109] Over 90% of Madagascar's original forests have been destroyed since the arrival of humans 2000 years ago.[110] About 65% of Africa's agricultural land suffers from soil degradation.[111]
+
+Anthropogenic climate change is already a reality in Africa, as it is elsewhere in the world. According to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, Africa is among the most vulnerable continents to climate change.[113][114] The vulnerability of Africa to climate change is driven by a range of factors that includes weak adaptive capacity, high dependence on ecosystem goods for livelihoods, and less developed agricultural production systems.[115] The risks of climate change on agricultural production, food security, water resources and ecosystem services will likely have increasingly severe consequences on lives and sustainable development prospects in Africa.[116] Managing this risk requires integration of mitigation and adaptation strategies in the management of ecosystem goods and services, and the agriculture production systems in Africa.[117]
+
+Over the coming decades, warming from climate change is expected across almost all the earth's surface, and global mean rainfall will increase.[118] Regional effects on rainfall in the tropics are expected to be much more spatially variable and the sign of change at any one location is often less certain, although changes are expected. Consistent with this, observed surface temperatures have generally increased over Africa since the late 19th century to the early 21st century by about  1 °C,  but locally as much as 3 °C for minimum temperature in the Sahel at the end of the dry season.[119]  Observed precipitation trends indicate spatial and temporal discrepancies as expected.[120][114] The observed changes in temperature and precipitation vary regionally.[121][120]
+
+In terms of adaptation efforts, regional-level actors are making some progress. This includes the development and adoption of several regional climate change adaptation strategies[122] e.g. SADC Policy Paper Climate Change,[123] and the adaptation strategy for the water sector.[124] In addition, there has been other efforts to enhance climate change adaptation, such as the tripatite Programme on Climate Change Adaptation and Mitigation in Eastern and Southern Africa (COMESA-EAC-SADC).[125]
+
+The African Union (AU) is a 55-member federation consisting of all of Africa's states. The union was formed, with Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, as its headquarters, on 26 June 2001. The union was officially established on 9 July 2002[127] as a successor to the Organisation of African Unity (OAU). In July 2004, the African Union's Pan-African Parliament (PAP) was relocated to Midrand, in South Africa, but the African Commission on Human and Peoples' Rights remained in Addis Ababa. There is a policy in effect to decentralize the African Federation's institutions so that they are shared by all the states.
+
+The African Union, not to be confused with the AU Commission, is formed by the Constitutive Act of the African Union, which aims to transform the African Economic Community, a federated commonwealth, into a state under established international conventions. The African Union has a parliamentary government, known as the African Union Government, consisting of legislative, judicial and executive organs. It is led by the African Union President and Head of State, who is also the President of the Pan-African Parliament. A person becomes AU President by being elected to the PAP, and subsequently gaining majority support in the PAP. The powers and authority of the President of the African Parliament derive from the Constitutive Act and the Protocol of the Pan-African Parliament, as well as the inheritance of presidential authority stipulated by African treaties and by international treaties, including those subordinating the Secretary General of the OAU Secretariat (AU Commission) to the PAP. The government of the AU consists of all-union (federal), regional, state, and municipal authorities, as well as hundreds of institutions, that together manage the day-to-day affairs of the institution.
+
+Political associations such as the African Union offer hope for greater co-operation and peace between the continent's many countries. Extensive human rights abuses still occur in several parts of Africa, often under the oversight of the state. Most of such violations occur for political reasons, often as a side effect of civil war. Countries where major human rights violations have been reported in recent times include the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Sierra Leone, Liberia, Sudan, Zimbabwe, and Côte d'Ivoire.
+
+Although it has abundant natural resources, Africa remains the world's poorest and least-developed continent, the result of a variety of causes that may include corrupt governments that have often committed serious human rights violations, failed central planning, high levels of illiteracy, lack of access to foreign capital, and frequent tribal and military conflict (ranging from guerrilla warfare to genocide).[128] Its total nominal GDP remains behind that of the United States, China, Japan, Germany, the United Kingdom, India and France. According to the United Nations' Human Development Report in 2003, the bottom 24 ranked nations (151st to 175th) were all African.[129]
+
+Poverty, illiteracy, malnutrition and inadequate water supply and sanitation, as well as poor health, affect a large proportion of the people who reside in the African continent. In August 2008, the World Bank[130] announced revised global poverty estimates based on a new international poverty line of $1.25 per day (versus the previous measure of $1.00). 81% of the Sub-Saharan Africa population was living on less than $2.50 (PPP) per day in 2005, compared with 86% for India.[131]
+
+Sub-Saharan Africa is the least successful region of the world in reducing poverty ($1.25 per day); some 50% of the population living in poverty in 1981 (200 million people), a figure that rose to 58% in 1996 before dropping to 50% in 2005 (380 million people). The average poor person in sub-Saharan Africa is estimated to live on only 70 cents per day, and was poorer in 2003 than in 1973,[132] indicating increasing poverty in some areas. Some of it is attributed to unsuccessful economic liberalization programmes spearheaded by foreign companies and governments, but other studies have cited bad domestic government policies more than external factors.[133][134][135]
+
+Africa is now at risk of being in debt once again, particularly in Sub-Saharan African countries.  The last debt crisis in 2005 was resolved with help from the heavily indebted poor countries scheme (HIPC).  The HIPC resulted in some positive and negative effects on the economy in Africa.  About ten years after the 2005 debt crisis in Sub-Saharan Africa was resolved, Zambia fell back into debt.  A small reason was due to the fall in copper prices in 2011, but the bigger reason was that a large amount of the money Zambia borrowed was wasted or pocketed by the elite.[136]
+
+From 1995 to 2005, Africa's rate of economic growth increased, averaging 5% in 2005. Some countries experienced still higher growth rates, notably Angola, Sudan and Equatorial Guinea, all of which had recently begun extracting their petroleum reserves or had expanded their oil extraction capacity.
+
+In a recently published analysis based on World Values Survey data, the Austrian political scientist Arno Tausch maintained that several African countries, most notably Ghana, perform quite well on scales of mass support for democracy and the market economy.[137]
+
+Tausch's global value comparison based on the World Values Survey derived the following factor analytical scales: 1. The non-violent and law-abiding society 2. Democracy movement 3. Climate of personal non-violence 4. Trust in institutions 5. Happiness, good health 6. No redistributive religious fundamentalism 7. Accepting the market 8. Feminism 9. Involvement in politics 10. Optimism and engagement 11. No welfare mentality, acceptancy of the Calvinist work ethics. The spread in the performance of African countries with complete data, Tausch concluded "is really amazing". While one should be especially hopeful about the development of future democracy and the market economy in Ghana, the article suggests pessimistic tendencies for Egypt and Algeria, and especially for Africa's leading economy, South Africa. High Human Inequality, as measured by the UNDP's Human Development Report's Index of Human Inequality, further impairs the development of Human Security. Tausch also maintains that the certain recent optimism, corresponding to economic and human rights data, emerging from Africa, is reflected in the development of a civil society.
+
+The continent is believed to hold 90% of the world's cobalt, 90% of its platinum, 50% of its gold, 98% of its chromium, 70% of its tantalite,[138] 64% of its manganese and one-third of its uranium.[139] The Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) has 70% of the world's coltan, a mineral used in the production of tantalum capacitors for electronic devices such as cell phones. The DRC also has more than 30% of the world's diamond reserves.[140] Guinea is the world's largest exporter of bauxite.[141] As the growth in Africa has been driven mainly by services and not manufacturing or agriculture, it has been growth without jobs and without reduction in poverty levels. In fact, the food security crisis of 2008 which took place on the heels of the global financial crisis pushed 100 million people into food insecurity.[142]
+
+In recent years, the People's Republic of China has built increasingly stronger ties with African nations and is Africa's largest trading partner. In 2007, Chinese companies invested a total of US$1 billion in Africa.[93]
+
+A Harvard University study led by professor Calestous Juma showed that Africa could feed itself by making the transition from importer to self-sufficiency. "African agriculture is at the crossroads; we have come to the end of a century of policies that favoured Africa's export of raw materials and importation of food. Africa is starting to focus on agricultural innovation as its new engine for regional trade and prosperity."[143]
+
+During US President Barack Obama's visit to Africa in July 2013, he announced a US$7 billion plan to further develop infrastructure and work more intensively with African heads of state. He also announced a new programme named Trade Africa, designed to boost trade within the continent as well as between Africa and the US.[144]
+
+Africa's population has rapidly increased over the last 40 years, and consequently, it is relatively young. In some African states, more than half the population is under 25 years of age.[146] The total number of people in Africa increased from 229 million in 1950 to 630 million in 1990.[147] As of 2018, the population of Africa is estimated at 1.3 billion [1][2]. Africa's total population surpassing other continents is fairly recent; African population surpassed Europe in the 1990s, while the Americas was overtaken sometime around the year 2000; Africa's rapid population growth is expected to overtake the only two nations currently larger than its population, at roughly the same time – India and China's 1.4 billion people each will swap ranking around the year 2022.[148] This increase in number of babies born in Africa compared to the rest of the world is expected to reach approximately 37% in the year 2050, an increase of 21% since 1990 alone.[149]
+
+Speakers of Bantu languages (part of the Niger–Congo family) are the majority in southern, central and southeast Africa. The Bantu-speaking peoples from the Sahel progressively expanded over most of Sub-Saharan Africa.[150] But there are also several Nilotic groups in South Sudan and East Africa, the mixed Swahili people on the Swahili Coast, and a few remaining indigenous Khoisan ("San" or "Bushmen") and Pygmy peoples in southern and central Africa, respectively. Bantu-speaking Africans also predominate in Gabon and Equatorial Guinea, and are found in parts of southern Cameroon. In the Kalahari Desert of Southern Africa, the distinct people known as the Bushmen (also "San", closely related to, but distinct from "Hottentots") have long been present. The San are physically distinct from other Africans and are the indigenous people of southern Africa. Pygmies are the pre-Bantu indigenous peoples of central Africa.[151]
+
+The peoples of West Africa primarily speak Niger–Congo languages, belonging mostly to its non-Bantu branches, though some Nilo-Saharan and Afro-Asiatic speaking groups are also found. The Niger–Congo-speaking Yoruba, Igbo, Fulani, Akan and Wolof ethnic groups are the largest and most influential. In the central Sahara, Mandinka or Mande groups are most significant. Chadic-speaking groups, including the Hausa, are found in more northerly parts of the region nearest to the Sahara, and Nilo-Saharan communities, such as the Songhai, Kanuri and Zarma, are found in the eastern parts of West Africa bordering Central Africa.
+
+The peoples of North Africa consist of three main indigenous groups: Berbers in the northwest, Egyptians in the northeast, and Nilo-Saharan-speaking peoples in the east. The Arabs who arrived in the 7th century AD introduced the Arabic language and Islam to North Africa. The Semitic Phoenicians (who founded Carthage) and Hyksos, the Indo-Iranian Alans, the Indo- European Greeks, Romans, and Vandals settled in North Africa as well. Significant Berber communities remain within Morocco and Algeria in the 21st century, while, to a lesser extent, Berber speakers are also present in some regions of Tunisia and Libya.[152] The Berber-speaking Tuareg and other often-nomadic peoples are the principal inhabitants of the Saharan interior of North Africa. In Mauritania, there is a small but near-extinct Berber community in the north and Niger–Congo-speaking peoples in the south, though in both regions Arabic and Arab culture predominates. In Sudan, although Arabic and Arab culture predominate, it is mostly inhabited by groups that originally spoke Nilo-Saharan, such as the Nubians, Fur, Masalit and Zaghawa, who, over the centuries, have variously intermixed with migrants from the Arabian peninsula. Small communities of Afro-Asiatic-speaking Beja nomads can also be found in Egypt and Sudan.[153][citation needed]
+
+In the Horn of Africa, some Ethiopian and Eritrean groups (like the Amhara and Tigrayans, collectively known as Habesha) speak languages from the Semitic branch of the Afro-Asiatic language family, while the Oromo and Somali speak languages from the Cushitic branch of Afro-Asiatic.
+
+Prior to the decolonization movements of the post-World War II era, Europeans were represented in every part of Africa.[154] Decolonization during the 1960s and 1970s often resulted in the mass emigration of white settlers – especially from Algeria and Morocco (1.6 million pieds-noirs in North Africa),[155] Kenya, Congo,[156] Rhodesia, Mozambique and Angola.[157] Between 1975 and 1977, over a million colonials returned to Portugal alone.[158] Nevertheless, white Africans remain an important minority in many African states, particularly Zimbabwe, Namibia, Réunion, and the Republic of South Africa.[159] The country with the largest white African population is South Africa.[160] Dutch and British diasporas represent the largest communities of European ancestry on the continent today.[161]
+
+European colonization also brought sizable groups of Asians, particularly from the Indian subcontinent, to British colonies. Large Indian communities are found in South Africa, and smaller ones are present in Kenya, Tanzania, and some other southern and southeast African countries. The large Indian community in Uganda was expelled by the dictator Idi Amin in 1972, though many have since returned. The islands in the Indian Ocean are also populated primarily by people of Asian origin, often mixed with Africans and Europeans. The Malagasy people of Madagascar are an Austronesian people, but those along the coast are generally mixed with Bantu, Arab, Indian and European origins. Malay and Indian ancestries are also important components in the group of people known in South Africa as Cape Coloureds (people with origins in two or more races and continents). During the 20th century, small but economically important communities of Lebanese and Chinese[93] have also developed in the larger coastal cities of West and East Africa, respectively.[162]
+
+By most estimates, well over a thousand languages (UNESCO has estimated around two thousand) are spoken in Africa.[163] Most are of African origin, though some are of European or Asian origin. Africa is the most multilingual continent in the world, and it is not rare for individuals to fluently speak not only multiple African languages, but one or more European ones as well. There are four major language families indigenous to Africa:
+
+Following the end of colonialism, nearly all African countries adopted official languages that originated outside the continent, although several countries also granted legal recognition to indigenous languages (such as Swahili, Yoruba, Igbo and Hausa). In numerous countries, English and French (see African French) are used for communication in the public sphere such as government, commerce, education and the media. Arabic, Portuguese, Afrikaans and Spanish are examples of languages that trace their origin to outside of Africa, and that are used by millions of Africans today, both in the public and private spheres. Italian is spoken by some in former Italian colonies in Africa. German is spoken in Namibia, as it was a former German protectorate.
+
+Some aspects of traditional African cultures have become less practised in recent years as a result of neglect and suppression by colonial and post-colonial regimes. For example, African customs were discouraged, and African languages were prohibited in mission schools.[165] Leopold II of Belgium attempted to "civilize" Africans by discouraging polygamy and witchcraft.[165]
+
+Obidoh Freeborn posits that colonialism is one element that has created the character of modern African art.[166] According to authors Douglas Fraser and Herbert M. Cole, "The precipitous alterations in the power structure wrought by colonialism were quickly followed by drastic iconographic changes in the art." [167] Fraser and Cole assert that, in Igboland, some art objects "lack the vigor and careful craftsmanship of the earlier art objects that served traditional functions.[167] Author Chika Okeke-Agulu states that "the racist infrastructure of British imperial enterprise forced upon the political and cultural guardians of empire a denial and suppression of an emergent sovereign Africa and modernist art." [168] Editors F. Abiola Irele and Simon Gikandi comment that the current identity of African literature had its genesis in the "traumatic encounter between Africa and Europe."[169] On the other hand, Mhoze Chikowero believes that Africans deployed music, dance, spirituality, and other performative cultures to (re)asset themselves as active agents and indigenous intellectuals, to unmake their colonial marginalization and reshape their own destinies." [170]
+
+There is now a resurgence in the attempts to rediscover and revalue African traditional cultures, under such movements as the African Renaissance, led by Thabo Mbeki, Afrocentrism, led by a group of scholars, including Molefi Asante, as well as the increasing recognition of traditional spiritualism through decriminalization of Vodou and other forms of spirituality.
+
+African art and architecture reflect the diversity of African cultures. The region's oldest known beads were made from Nassarius shells and worn as personal ornaments 72,000 years ago.[171] The Great Pyramid of Giza in Egypt was the world's tallest structure for 4,000 years, until the completion of Lincoln Cathedral around the year 1300. The stone ruins of Great Zimbabwe are also noteworthy for their architecture, as are the monolithic churches at Lalibela, Ethiopia, such as the Church of Saint George.
+
+Egypt has long been a cultural focus of the Arab world, while remembrance of the rhythms of sub-Saharan Africa, in particular West Africa, was transmitted through the Atlantic slave trade to modern samba, blues, jazz, reggae, hip hop, and rock. The 1950s through the 1970s saw a conglomeration of these various styles with the popularization of Afrobeat and Highlife music. Modern music of the continent includes the highly complex choral singing of southern Africa and the dance rhythms of the musical genre of soukous, dominated by the music of the Democratic Republic of Congo. Indigenous musical and dance traditions of Africa are maintained by oral traditions, and they are distinct from the music and dance styles of North Africa and Southern Africa. Arab influences are visible in North African music and dance and, in Southern Africa, Western influences are apparent due to colonization.
+
+Fifty-four African countries have football (soccer) teams in the Confederation of African Football. Egypt has won the African Cup seven times, and a record-making three times in a row. Cameroon, Nigeria, Senegal, Ghana, and Algeria have advanced to the knockout stage of recent FIFA World Cups. South Africa hosted the 2010 World Cup tournament, becoming the first African country to do so.
+
+Cricket is popular in some African nations. South Africa and Zimbabwe have Test status, while Kenya is the leading non-test team and previously had One-Day International cricket (ODI) status (from 10 October 1997, until 30 January 2014). The three countries jointly hosted the 2003 Cricket World Cup. Namibia is the other African country to have played in a World Cup. Morocco in northern Africa has also hosted the 2002 Morocco Cup, but the national team has never qualified for a major tournament. Rugby is a popular sport in South Africa, Namibia, and Zimbabwe.
+
+Africans profess a wide variety of religious beliefs, and statistics on religious affiliation are difficult to come by since they are often a sensitive topic for governments with mixed religious populations.[172][173] According to the World Book Encyclopedia, Islam and Christianity are the two largest religions in Africa. According to Encyclopædia Britannica, 45% of the population are Christians, 40% are Muslims, and 10% follow traditional religions. A small number of Africans are Hindu, Buddhist, Confucianist, Baha'i, or Jewish. There is also a minority of people in Africa who are irreligious.
+
+The Holy Trinity Cathedral, in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia
+
+The Great Mosque of Kairouan, Tunisia, founded in 670, is the oldest mosque in North Africa;[174]
+
+Vodun altar in Abomey, Benin
+
+National Church of Nigeria, Abuja
+
+A map showing religious distribution in Africa
+
+The countries in this table are categorized according to the scheme for geographic subregions used by the United Nations, and data included are per sources in cross-referenced articles. Where they differ, provisos are clearly indicated.
+
+Africa
+
+Antarctica
+
+Asia
+
+Australia
+
+Europe
+
+North America
+
+South America
+
+Afro-Eurasia
+
+America
+
+Eurasia
+
+Oceania

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+The bit is a basic unit of information in computing and digital communications. The name is a portmanteau of binary digit.[1] The bit represents a logical state with one of two possible values. These values are most commonly represented as either 0or1, but other representations such as true/false, yes/no, +/−, or on/off are common.
+
+The correspondence between these values and the physical states of the underlying storage or device is a matter of convention, and different assignments may be used even within the same device or program. It may be physically implemented with a two-state device.
+
+The symbol for the binary digit is either bit per recommendation by the IEC 80000-13:2008 standard, or the lowercase character b, as recommended by the IEEE 1541-2002 and IEEE Std 260.1-2004 standards. A group of eight binary digits is commonly called one byte, but historically the size of the byte is not strictly defined.
+
+In information theory, one bit is the information entropy of a binary random variable that is 0 or 1 with equal probability,[2] or the information that is gained when the value of such a variable becomes known.[3][4] As a unit of information, the bit is also known as a shannon,[5] named after Claude E. Shannon.
+
+The encoding of data by discrete bits was used in the punched cards invented by Basile Bouchon and Jean-Baptiste Falcon (1732), developed by Joseph Marie Jacquard (1804), and later adopted by Semyon Korsakov, Charles Babbage, Hermann Hollerith, and early computer manufacturers like IBM. Another variant of that idea was the perforated paper tape. In all those systems, the medium (card or tape) conceptually carried an array of hole positions; each position could be either punched through or not, thus carrying one bit of information. The encoding of text by bits was also used in Morse code (1844) and early digital communications machines such as teletypes and stock ticker machines (1870).
+
+Ralph Hartley suggested the use of a logarithmic measure of information in 1928.[6] Claude E. Shannon first used the word "bit" in his seminal 1948 paper "A Mathematical Theory of Communication".[7][8][9] He attributed its origin to John W. Tukey, who had written a Bell Labs memo on 9 January 1947 in which he contracted "binary information digit" to simply "bit".[7] Vannevar Bush had written in 1936 of "bits of information" that could be stored on the punched cards used in the mechanical computers of that time.[10] The first programmable computer, built by Konrad Zuse, used binary notation for numbers.
+
+A bit can be stored by a digital device or other physical system that exists in either of two possible distinct states. These may be the two stable states of a flip-flop, two positions of an electrical switch, two distinct voltage or current levels allowed by a circuit, two distinct levels of light intensity, two directions of magnetization or polarization, the orientation of reversible double stranded DNA, etc.
+
+Bits can be implemented in several forms. In most modern computing devices, a bit is usually represented by an electrical voltage or current pulse, or by the electrical state of a flip-flop circuit.
+
+For devices using positive logic, a digit value of 1 (or a logical value of true) is represented by a more positive voltage relative to the representation of 0. The specific voltages are different for different logic families and variations are permitted to allow for component aging and noise immunity. For example, in transistor–transistor logic (TTL) and compatible circuits, digit values 0 and 1 at the output of a device are represented by no higher than 0.4 volts and no lower than 2.6 volts, respectively; while TTL inputs are specified to recognize 0.8 volts or below as 0 and 2.2 volts or above as 1.
+
+Bits are transmitted one at a time in serial transmission, and by a multiple number of bits in parallel transmission. A bitwise operation optionally processes bits one at a time. Data transfer rates are usually measured in decimal SI multiples of the unit bit per second (bit/s), such as kbit/s.
+
+In the earliest non-electronic information processing devices, such as Jacquard's loom or Babbage's Analytical Engine, a bit was often stored as the position of a mechanical lever or gear, or the presence or absence of a hole at a specific point of a paper card or tape. The first electrical devices for discrete logic (such as elevator and traffic light control circuits, telephone switches, and Konrad Zuse's computer) represented bits as the states of electrical relays which could be either "open" or "closed". When relays were replaced by vacuum tubes, starting in the 1940s, computer builders experimented with a variety of storage methods, such as pressure pulses traveling down a mercury delay line, charges stored on the inside surface of a cathode-ray tube, or opaque spots printed on glass discs by photolithographic techniques.
+
+In the 1950s and 1960s, these methods were largely supplanted by magnetic storage devices such as magnetic core memory, magnetic tapes, drums, and disks, where a bit was represented by the polarity of magnetization of a certain area of a ferromagnetic film, or by a change in polarity from one direction to the other. The same principle was later used in the magnetic bubble memory developed in the 1980s, and is still found in various magnetic strip items such as metro tickets and some credit cards.
+
+In modern semiconductor memory, such as dynamic random-access memory, the two values of a bit may be represented by two levels of electric charge stored in a capacitor. In certain types of programmable logic arrays and read-only memory, a bit may be represented by the presence or absence of a conducting path at a certain point of a circuit. In optical discs, a bit is encoded as the presence or absence of a microscopic pit on a reflective surface. In one-dimensional bar codes, bits are encoded as the thickness of alternating black and white lines.
+
+The bit is not defined in the International System of Units (SI). However, the International Electrotechnical Commission issued standard IEC 60027, which specifies that the symbol for binary digit should be bit, and this should be used in all multiples, such as kbit, for kilobit.[11] However, the lower-case letter b is widely used as well and was recommended by the IEEE 1541 Standard (2002). In contrast, the upper case letter B is the standard and customary symbol for byte.
+
+Multiple bits may be expressed and represented in several ways. For convenience of representing commonly reoccurring groups of bits in information technology, several units of information have traditionally been used. The most common is the unit byte, coined by Werner Buchholz in June 1956, which historically was used to represent the group of bits used to encode a single character of text (until UTF-8 multibyte encoding took over) in a computer[12][13][14][15][16] and for this reason it was used as the basic addressable element in many computer architectures. The trend in hardware design converged on the most common implementation of using eight bits per byte, as it is widely used today. However, because of the ambiguity of relying on the underlying hardware design, the unit octet was defined to explicitly denote a sequence of eight bits.
+
+Computers usually manipulate bits in groups of a fixed size, conventionally named "words". Like the byte, the number of bits in a word also varies with the hardware design, and is typically between 8 and 80 bits, or even more in some specialized computers. In the 21st century, retail personal or server computers have a word size of 32 or 64 bits.
+
+The International System of Units defines a series of decimal prefixes for multiples of standardized units which are commonly also used with the bit and the byte. The prefixes kilo (103) through yotta (1024) increment by multiples of 1000, and the corresponding units are the kilobit (kbit) through the yottabit (Ybit).
+
+When the information capacity of a storage system or a communication channel is presented in bits or bits per second, this often refers to binary digits, which is a computer hardware capacity to store binary data (0 or 1, up or down, current or not, etc.).[17] Information capacity of a storage system is only an upper bound to the quantity of information stored therein. If the two possible values of one bit of storage are not equally likely, that bit of storage contains less than one bit of information. Indeed, if the value is completely predictable, then the reading of that value provides no information at all (zero entropic bits, because no resolution of uncertainty occurs and therefore no information is available). If a computer file that uses n bits of storage contains only m < n bits of information, then that information can in principle be encoded in about m bits, at least on the average. This principle is the basis of data compression technology. Using an analogy, the hardware binary digits refer to the amount of storage space available (like the number of buckets available to store things), and the information content the filling, which comes in different levels of granularity (fine or coarse, that is, compressed or uncompressed information). When the granularity is finer—when information is more compressed—the same bucket can hold more.
+
+For example, it is estimated that the combined technological capacity of the world to store information provides 1,300 exabytes of hardware digits in 2007. However, when this storage space is filled and the corresponding content is optimally compressed, this only represents 295 exabytes of information.[18] When optimally compressed, the resulting carrying capacity approaches Shannon information or information entropy.[17]
+
+Certain bitwise computer processor instructions (such as bit set) operate at the level of manipulating bits rather than manipulating data interpreted as an aggregate of bits.
+
+In the 1980s, when bitmapped computer displays became popular, some computers provided specialized bit block transfer instructions to set or copy the bits that corresponded to a given rectangular area on the screen.
+
+In most computers and programming languages, when a bit within a group of bits, such as a byte or word, is referred to, it is usually specified by a number from 0 upwards corresponding to its position within the byte or word. However, 0 can refer to either the most or least significant bit depending on the context.
+
+Similar to torque and energy in physics; information-theoretic information and data storage size have the same dimensionality of units of measurement, but there is in general no meaning to adding, subtracting or otherwise combining the units mathematically.
+
+Other units of information, sometimes used in information theory, include the natural digit also called a nat or nit and defined as log2 e (≈ 1.443) bits, where e is the base of the natural logarithms; and the dit, ban, or hartley, defined as log2 10 (≈ 3.322) bits.[6] This value, slightly less than 10/3, may be understood because 103 = 1000 ≈ 1024 = 210: three decimal digits are slightly less information than ten binary digits, so one decimal digit is slightly less than 10/3 binary digits. Conversely, one bit of information corresponds to about ln 2 (≈ 0.693) nats, or log10 2 (≈ 0.301) hartleys. As with the inverse ratio, this value, approximately 3/10, but slightly more, corresponds to the fact that 210 = 1024 ~ 1000 = 103: ten binary digits are slightly more information than three decimal digits, so one binary digit is slightly more than 3/10 decimal digits. Some authors also define a binit as an arbitrary information unit equivalent to some fixed but unspecified number of bits.[19]

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+Blaise Pascal (/pæˈskæl/ pask-AL, also UK: /-ˈskɑːl, ˈpæskəl, -skæl/ -⁠AHL, PASK-əl, -⁠al, US: /pɑːˈskɑːl/ pah-SKAHL,[3][4][5][6][7] French: [blɛz paskal]; 19 June 1623 – 19 August 1662) was a French mathematician, physicist, inventor, writer and Catholic theologian. He was a child prodigy who was educated by his father, a tax collector in Rouen. Pascal's earliest work was in the natural and applied sciences, where he made important contributions to the study of fluids, and clarified the concepts of pressure and vacuum by generalising the work of Evangelista Torricelli. Pascal also wrote in defence of the scientific method.
+
+In 1642, while still a teenager, he started some pioneering work on calculating machines. After three years of effort and 50 prototypes,[8] he built 20 finished machines (called Pascal's calculators and later Pascalines) over the following 10 years,[9] establishing him as one of the first two inventors of the mechanical calculator.[10][11]
+
+Pascal was an important mathematician, helping create two major new areas of research: he wrote a significant treatise on the subject of projective geometry at the age of 16, and later corresponded with Pierre de Fermat on probability theory, strongly influencing the development of modern economics and social science. Following Galileo Galilei and Torricelli, in 1647, he rebutted Aristotle's followers who insisted that nature abhors a vacuum. Pascal's results caused many disputes before being accepted.
+
+In 1646, he and his sister Jacqueline identified with the religious movement within Catholicism known by its detractors as Jansenism.[12] Following a religious experience in late 1654, he began writing influential works on philosophy and theology. His two most famous works date from this period: the Lettres provinciales and the Pensées, the former set in the conflict between Jansenists and Jesuits. In that year, he also wrote an important treatise on the arithmetical triangle. Between 1658 and 1659, he wrote on the cycloid and its use in calculating the volume of solids.
+
+Throughout his life, Pascal was in frail health, especially after the age of 18; he died just two months after his 39th birthday.[13]
+
+Pascal was born in Clermont-Ferrand, which is in France's Auvergne region. He lost his mother, Antoinette Begon, at the age of three.[14] His father, Étienne Pascal (1588–1651), who also had an interest in science and mathematics, was a local judge and member of the "Noblesse de Robe". Pascal had two sisters, the younger Jacqueline and the elder Gilberte.
+
+In 1631, five years after the death of his wife,[2] Étienne Pascal moved with his children to Paris. The newly arrived family soon hired Louise Delfault, a maid who eventually became an instrumental member of the family. Étienne, who never remarried, decided that he alone would educate his children, for they all showed extraordinary intellectual ability, particularly his son Blaise. The young Pascal showed an amazing aptitude for mathematics and science.
+
+Particularly of interest to Pascal was a work of Desargues on conic sections. Following Desargues' thinking, the 16-year-old Pascal produced, as a means of proof, a short treatise on what was called the "Mystic Hexagram", Essai pour les coniques ("Essay on Conics") and sent it—his first serious work of mathematics—to Père Mersenne in Paris; it is known still today as Pascal's theorem. It states that if a hexagon is inscribed in a circle (or conic) then the three intersection points of opposite sides lie on a line (called the Pascal line).
+
+Pascal's work was so precocious that Descartes was convinced that Pascal's father had written it. When assured by Mersenne that it was, indeed, the product of the son and not the father, Descartes dismissed it with a sniff: "I do not find it strange that he has offered demonstrations about conics more appropriate than those of the ancients," adding, "but other matters related to this subject can be proposed that would scarcely occur to a 16-year-old child."[15]
+
+In France at that time offices and positions could be—and were—bought and sold. In 1631, Étienne sold his position as second president of the Cour des Aides for 65,665 livres.[16] The money was invested in a government bond which provided, if not a lavish, then certainly a comfortable income which allowed the Pascal family to move to, and enjoy, Paris. But in 1638 Richelieu, desperate for money to carry on the Thirty Years' War, defaulted on the government's bonds. Suddenly Étienne Pascal's worth had dropped from nearly 66,000 livres to less than 7,300.
+
+Like so many others, Étienne was eventually forced to flee Paris because of his opposition to the fiscal policies of Cardinal Richelieu, leaving his three children in the care of his neighbour Madame Sainctot, a great beauty with an infamous past who kept one of the most glittering and intellectual salons in all France. It was only when Jacqueline performed well in a children's play with Richelieu in attendance that Étienne was pardoned. In time, Étienne was back in good graces with the cardinal and in 1639 had been appointed the king's commissioner of taxes in the city of Rouen—a city whose tax records, thanks to uprisings, were in utter chaos.
+
+In 1642, in an effort to ease his father's endless, exhausting calculations, and recalculations, of taxes owed and paid (into which work the young Pascal had been recruited), Pascal, not yet 19, constructed a mechanical calculator capable of addition and subtraction, called Pascal's calculator or the Pascaline. Of the eight Pascalines known to have survived, four are held by the Musée des Arts et Métiers in Paris and one more by the Zwinger museum in Dresden, Germany, exhibit two of his original mechanical calculators.[17] Although these machines are pioneering forerunners to a further 400 years of development of mechanical methods of calculation, and in a sense to the later field of computer engineering, the calculator failed to be a great commercial success. Partly because it was still quite cumbersome to use in practice, but probably primarily because it was extraordinarily expensive, the Pascaline became little more than a toy, and a status symbol, for the very rich both in France and elsewhere in Europe. Pascal continued to make improvements to his design through the next decade, and he refers to some 50 machines that were built to his design.
+
+Pascal continued to influence mathematics throughout his life. His Traité du triangle arithmétique ("Treatise on the Arithmetical Triangle") of 1654 described a convenient tabular presentation for binomial coefficients, now called Pascal's triangle. The triangle can also be represented:
+
+He defines the numbers in the triangle by recursion: Call the number in the (m + 1)th row and (n + 1)th column tmn. Then tmn = tm–1,n + tm,n–1, for m = 0, 1, 2, ... and n = 0, 1, 2, ...  The boundary conditions are tm,−1 = 0, t−1,n = 0 for m = 1, 2, 3, ... and n = 1, 2, 3, ...  The generator t00 = 1.  Pascal concludes with the proof,
+
+In 1654, he proved Pascal's identity relating the sums of the p-th powers of the first n positive integers for p = 0, 1, 2, ..., k.[18]
+
+In 1654, prompted by his friend the Chevalier de Méré, he corresponded with Pierre de Fermat on the subject of gambling problems, and from that collaboration was born the mathematical theory of probabilities.[19] The specific problem was that of two players who want to finish a game early and, given the current circumstances of the game, want to divide the stakes fairly, based on the chance each has of winning the game from that point. From this discussion, the notion of expected value was introduced. Pascal later (in the Pensées) used a probabilistic argument, Pascal's Wager, to justify belief in God and a virtuous life. The work done by Fermat and Pascal into the calculus of probabilities laid important groundwork for Leibniz' formulation of the calculus.[20]
+
+After a religious experience in 1654, Pascal mostly gave up work in mathematics.
+
+Pascal's major contribution to the philosophy of mathematics came with his De l'Esprit géométrique ("Of the Geometrical Spirit"), originally written as a preface to a geometry textbook for one of the famous "Petites-Ecoles de Port-Royal" ("Little Schools of Port-Royal"). The work was unpublished until over a century after his death. Here, Pascal looked into the issue of discovering truths, arguing that the ideal of such a method would be to found all propositions on already established truths. At the same time, however, he claimed this was impossible because such established truths would require other truths to back them up—first principles, therefore, cannot be reached. Based on this, Pascal argued that the procedure used in geometry was as perfect as possible, with certain principles assumed and other propositions developed from them. Nevertheless, there was no way to know the assumed principles to be true.
+
+Pascal also used De l'Esprit géométrique to develop a theory of definition. He distinguished between definitions which are conventional labels defined by the writer and definitions which are within the language and understood by everyone because they naturally designate their referent. The second type would be characteristic of the philosophy of essentialism. Pascal claimed that only definitions of the first type were important to science and mathematics, arguing that those fields should adopt the philosophy of formalism as formulated by Descartes.
+
+In De l'Art de persuader ("On the Art of Persuasion"), Pascal looked deeper into geometry's axiomatic method, specifically the question of how people come to be convinced of the axioms upon which later conclusions are based. Pascal agreed with Montaigne that achieving certainty in these axioms and conclusions through human methods is impossible. He asserted that these principles can be grasped only through intuition, and that this fact underscored the necessity for submission to God in searching out truths.
+
+Pascal's work in the fields of the study of hydrodynamics and hydrostatics centered on the principles of hydraulic fluids. His inventions include the hydraulic press (using hydraulic pressure to multiply force) and the syringe. He proved that hydrostatic pressure depends not on the weight of the fluid but on the elevation difference. He demonstrated this principle by attaching a thin tube to a barrel full of water and filling the tube with water up to the level of the third floor of a building. This caused the barrel to leak, in what became known as Pascal's barrel experiment.
+
+By 1647, Pascal had learned of Evangelista Torricelli's experimentation with barometers. Having replicated an experiment that involved placing a tube filled with mercury upside down in a bowl of mercury, Pascal questioned what force kept some mercury in the tube and what filled the space above the mercury in the tube. At the time, most scientists contended that, rather than a vacuum, some invisible matter was present. This was based on the Aristotelian notion that creation was a thing of substance, whether visible or invisible; and that this substance was forever in motion. Furthermore, "Everything that is in motion must be moved by something," Aristotle declared.[21] Therefore, to the Aristotelian trained scientists of Pascal's time, a vacuum was an impossibility. How so? As proof it was pointed out:
+
+Following more experimentation in this vein, in 1647 Pascal produced Experiences nouvelles touchant le vide ("New experiments with the vacuum"), which detailed basic rules describing to what degree various liquids could be supported by air pressure. It also provided reasons why it was indeed a vacuum above the column of liquid in a barometer tube. This work was followed by Récit de la grande expérience de l'équilibre des liqueurs ("Account of the great experiment on equilibrium in liquids") published in 1648.
+
+The Torricellian vacuum found that air pressure is equal to the weight of 30 inches of mercury. If air has a finite weight, Earth's atmosphere must have a maximum height. Pascal reasoned that if true, air pressure on a high mountain must be less than at a lower altitude. He lived near the Puy de Dôme mountain, 4,790 feet (1,460 m) tall, but his health was poor so could not climb it.[22] On 19 September 1648, after many months of Pascal's friendly but insistent prodding, Florin Périer, husband of Pascal's elder sister Gilberte, was finally able to carry out the fact-finding mission vital to Pascal's theory. The account, written by Périer, reads:
+
+The weather was chancy last Saturday...[but] around five o'clock that morning...the Puy-de-Dôme was visible...so I decided to give it a try. Several important people of the city of Clermont had asked me to let them know when I would make the ascent...I was delighted to have them with me in this great work...
+
+...at eight o'clock we met in the gardens of the Minim Fathers, which has the lowest elevation in town....First I poured 16 pounds of quicksilver...into a vessel...then took several glass tubes...each four feet long and hermetically sealed at one end and opened at the other...then placed them in the vessel [of quicksilver]...I found the quick silver stood at 26" and 3​1⁄2 lines above the quicksilver in the vessel...I repeated the experiment two more times while standing in the same spot...[they] produced the same result each time...
+
+I attached one of the tubes to the vessel and marked the height of the quicksilver and...asked Father Chastin, one of the Minim Brothers...to watch if any changes should occur through the day...Taking the other tube and a portion of the quick silver...I walked to the top of Puy-de-Dôme, about 500 fathoms higher than the monastery, where upon experiment...found that the quicksilver reached a height of only 23" and 2 lines...I repeated the experiment five times with care...each at different points on the summit...found the same height of quicksilver...in each case...[23]
+
+Pascal replicated the experiment in Paris by carrying a barometer up to the top of the bell tower at the church of Saint-Jacques-de-la-Boucherie, a height of about 50 metres. The mercury dropped two lines.
+
+In the face of criticism that some invisible matter must exist in Pascal's empty space, Pascal, in his reply to Estienne Noel, gave one of the 17th century's major statements on the scientific method, which is a striking anticipation of the idea popularised by Karl Popper that scientific theories are characterised by their falsifiability: "In order to show that a hypothesis is evident, it does not suffice that all the phenomena follow from it; instead, if it leads to something contrary to a single one of the phenomena, that suffices to establish its falsity."[24] His insistence on the existence of the vacuum also led to conflict with other prominent scientists, including Descartes.
+
+Pascal introduced a primitive form of roulette and the roulette wheel in his search for a perpetual motion machine.[25]
+
+Catholicism portal
+
+For after all what is man in nature? A nothing in relation to infinity, all in relation to nothing, a central point between nothing and all and infinitely far from understanding either. The ends of things and their beginnings are impregnably concealed from him in an impenetrable secret. He is equally incapable of seeing the nothingness out of which he was drawn and the infinite in which he is engulfed.
+
+In the winter of 1646, Pascal's 58-year-old father broke his hip when he slipped and fell on an icy street of Rouen; given the man's age and the state of medicine in the 17th century, a broken hip could be a very serious condition, perhaps even fatal. Rouen was home to two of the finest doctors in France: Monsieur Doctor Deslandes and Monsieur Doctor de La Bouteillerie. The elder Pascal "would not let anyone other than these men attend him...It was a good choice, for the old man survived and was able to walk again..."[26] But treatment and rehabilitation took three months, during which time La Bouteillerie and Deslandes had become regular visitors.
+
+Both men were followers of Jean Guillebert, proponent of a splinter group from Catholic teaching known as Jansenism. This still fairly small sect was making surprising inroads into the French Catholic community at that time. It espoused rigorous Augustinism. Blaise spoke with the doctors frequently, and after their successful treatment of his father, borrowed from them works by Jansenist authors. In this period, Pascal experienced a sort of "first conversion" and began to write on theological subjects in the course of the following year.
+
+Pascal fell away from this initial religious engagement and experienced a few years of what some biographers have called his "worldly period" (1648–54). His father died in 1651 and left his inheritance to Pascal and his sister Jacqueline, for whom Pascal acted as conservator. Jacqueline announced that she would soon become a postulant in the Jansenist convent of Port-Royal. Pascal was deeply affected and very sad, not because of her choice, but because of his chronic poor health; he needed her just as she had needed him.
+
+Suddenly there was war in the Pascal household. Blaise pleaded with Jacqueline not to leave, but she was adamant. He commanded her to stay, but that didn't work, either. At the heart of this was...Blaise's fear of abandonment...if Jacqueline entered Port-Royal, she would have to leave her inheritance behind...[but] nothing would change her mind.[27]
+
+By the end of October in 1651, a truce had been reached between brother and sister. In return for a healthy annual stipend, Jacqueline signed over her part of the inheritance to her brother.  Gilberte had already been given her inheritance in the form of a dowry. In early January, Jacqueline left for Port-Royal. On that day, according to Gilberte concerning her brother, "He retired very sadly to his rooms without seeing Jacqueline, who was waiting in the little parlor..."[28]
+In early June 1653, after what must have seemed like endless badgering from Jacqueline,
+Pascal formally signed over the whole of his sister's inheritance to Port-Royal, which, to him, "had begun to smell like a cult."[29] With two-thirds of his father's estate now gone, the 29-year-old Pascal was now consigned to genteel poverty.
+
+For a while, Pascal pursued the life of a bachelor. During visits to his sister at Port-Royal in 1654, he displayed contempt for affairs of the world but was not drawn to God.[30]
+
+On the 23 of November, 1654, between 10:30 and 12:30 at night, Pascal had an intense religious experience and immediately wrote a brief note to himself which began: "Fire. God of Abraham, God of Isaac, God of Jacob, not of the philosophers and the scholars..." and concluded by quoting Psalm 119:16: "I will not forget thy word. Amen." He seems to have carefully sewn this document into his coat and always transferred it when he changed clothes; a servant discovered it only by chance after his death.[31] This piece is now known as the Memorial. The story of a carriage accident as having led to the experience described in the Memorial is disputed by some scholars.[32]
+His belief and religious commitment revitalized, Pascal visited the older of two convents at Port-Royal for a two-week retreat in January 1655. For the next four years, he regularly travelled between Port-Royal and Paris. It was at this point immediately after his conversion when he began writing his first major literary work on religion, the Provincial Letters.
+
+Beginning in 1656–57, Pascal published his memorable attack on casuistry, a popular ethical method used by Catholic thinkers in the early modern period (especially the Jesuits, and in particular Antonio Escobar). Pascal denounced casuistry as the mere use of complex reasoning to justify moral laxity and all sorts of sins. The 18-letter series was published between 1656 and 1657 under the pseudonym Louis de Montalte and incensed Louis XIV. The king ordered that the book be shredded and burnt in 1660. In 1661, in the midsts of the formulary controversy, the Jansenist school at Port-Royal was condemned and closed down; those involved with the school had to sign a 1656 papal bull condemning the teachings of Jansen as heretical. The final letter from Pascal, in 1657, had defied Alexander VII himself. Even Pope Alexander, while publicly opposing them, nonetheless was persuaded by Pascal's arguments.
+
+Aside from their religious influence, the Provincial Letters were popular as a literary work. Pascal's use of humor, mockery, and vicious satire in his arguments made the letters ripe for public consumption, and influenced the prose of later French writers like Voltaire and Jean-Jacques Rousseau.
+
+It is in the Provincial Letters that Pascal made his oft-quoted apology for writing a long letter, as he had not had time to write a shorter one.
+From Letter XVI, as translated by Thomas M'Crie:
+'Reverend fathers, my letters were not wont either to be so prolix, or to follow so closely on
+one another. Want of time must plead my excuse for both of these faults. The present letter is
+a very long one, simply because I had no leisure to make it shorter.'
+
+Charles Perrault wrote of the Letters: "Everything is there—purity of language, nobility of thought, solidity in reasoning, finesse in raillery, and throughout an agrément not to be found anywhere else."[33]
+
+Pascal's most influential theological work, referred to posthumously as the Pensées ("Thoughts"), was not completed before his death. It was to have been a sustained and coherent examination and defense of the Christian faith, with the original title Apologie de la religion Chrétienne ("Defense of the Christian Religion"). The first version of the numerous scraps of paper found after his death appeared in print as a book in 1669 titled Pensées de M. Pascal sur la religion, et sur quelques autres sujets ("Thoughts of M. Pascal on religion, and on some other subjects") and soon thereafter became a classic. One of the Apologie's main strategies was to use the contradictory philosophies of Pyrrhonism and Stoicism, personalized by Montaigne on one hand, and Epictetus on the other, in order to bring the unbeliever to such despair and confusion that he would embrace God.
+
+Pascal's Pensées is widely considered to be a masterpiece, and a landmark in French prose. When commenting on one particular section (Thought #72), Sainte-Beuve praised it as the finest pages in the French language.[34] Will Durant hailed the Pensées as "the most eloquent book in French prose".[35]
+
+T. S. Eliot described him during this phase of his life as "a man of the world among ascetics, and an ascetic among men of the world." Pascal's ascetic lifestyle derived from a belief that it was natural and necessary for a person to suffer. In 1659, Pascal fell seriously ill. During his last years, he frequently tried to reject the ministrations of his doctors, saying, "Sickness is the natural state of Christians."[36]
+
+Louis XIV suppressed the Jansenist movement at Port-Royal in 1661. In response, Pascal wrote one of his final works, Écrit sur la signature du formulaire ("Writ on the Signing of the Form"), exhorting the Jansenists not to give in. Later that year, his sister Jacqueline died, which convinced Pascal to cease his polemics on Jansenism. Pascal's last major achievement, returning to his mechanical genius, was inaugurating perhaps the first bus line, the carrosses à cinq sols, moving passengers within Paris in a carriage with many seats.
+
+In 1662, Pascal's illness became more violent, and his emotional condition had severely worsened since his sister's death. Aware that his health was fading quickly, he sought a move to the hospital for incurable diseases, but his doctors declared that he was too unstable to be carried. In Paris on 18 August 1662, Pascal went into convulsions and received extreme unction. He died the next morning, his last words being "May God never abandon me," and was buried in the cemetery of Saint-Étienne-du-Mont.[36]
+
+An autopsy performed after his death revealed grave problems with his stomach and other organs of his abdomen, along with damage to his brain. Despite the autopsy, the cause of his poor health was never precisely determined, though speculation focuses on tuberculosis, stomach cancer, or a combination of the two.[37] The headaches which afflicted Pascal are generally attributed to his brain lesion.
+
+In honour of his scientific contributions, the name Pascal has been given to the SI unit of pressure, to a programming language, and Pascal's law (an important principle of hydrostatics), and as mentioned above, Pascal's triangle and Pascal's wager still bear his name.
+
+Pascal's development of probability theory was his most influential contribution to mathematics. Originally applied to gambling, today it is extremely important in economics, especially in actuarial science. John Ross writes, "Probability theory and the discoveries following it changed the way we regard uncertainty, risk, decision-making, and an individual's and society's ability to influence the course of future events."[38] However, Pascal and Fermat, though doing important early work in probability theory, did not develop the field very far. Christiaan Huygens, learning of the subject from the correspondence of Pascal and Fermat, wrote the first book on the subject. Later figures who continued the development of the theory include Abraham de Moivre and Pierre-Simon Laplace.
+
+In literature, Pascal is regarded as one of the most important authors of the French Classical Period and is read today as one of the greatest masters of French prose. His use of satire and wit influenced later polemicists. The content of his literary work is best remembered for its strong opposition to the rationalism of René Descartes and simultaneous assertion that the main countervailing philosophy, empiricism, was also insufficient for determining major truths.
+
+In France, prestigious annual awards, Blaise Pascal Chairs are given to outstanding international scientists to conduct their research in the Ile de France region.[39] One of the Universities of Clermont-Ferrand, France – Université Blaise Pascal – is named after him. The University of Waterloo, Ontario, Canada, holds an annual math contest named in his honour.[40]
+
+Pascalian theology has grown out of his perspective that humans are, according to Wood, "born into a duplicitous world that shapes us into duplicitous subjects and so we find it easy to reject God continually and deceive ourselves about our own sinfulness".[41]
+
+The 1969 Eric Rohmer film My Night at Maud's is based on the work of Pascal. Roberto Rossellini directed a filmed biopic, Blaise Pascal, which originally aired on Italian television in 1971.[42] Pascal was a subject of the first edition of the 1984 BBC Two documentary, Sea of Faith, presented by Don Cupitt.
+
+In 2014, Nvidia announced its new Pascal microarchitecture, which is named for Pascal. The first graphics cards featuring Pascal were released in 2016.
+
+The 2017 game Nier: Automata has multiple characters named after famous philosophers; one of these is a sentient pacifistic machine named Pascal, who serves as a major supporting character. Pascal creates a village for machines to live peacefully with the androids they're at war with and acts as a parental figure for other machines trying to adapt to their newly-found individuality.
+
+Établissement scolaire français Blaise-Pascal in Lubumbashi, Democratic Republic of the Congo is named after Pascal.

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+
+
+The egg is the organic vessel containing the zygote in which an embryo develops until it can survive on its own, at which point the animal hatches. An egg results from fertilization of an egg cell. Most arthropods, vertebrates (excluding live-bearing mammals), and mollusks lay eggs, although some, such as scorpions, do not.
+
+Reptile eggs, bird eggs, and monotreme eggs are laid out of water and are surrounded by a protective shell, either flexible or inflexible. Eggs laid on land or in nests are usually kept within a warm and favorable temperature range while the embryo grows. When the embryo is adequately developed it hatches, i.e., breaks out of the egg's shell. Some embryos have a temporary egg tooth they use to crack, pip, or break the eggshell or covering.
+
+The largest recorded egg is from a whale shark and was 30 cm × 14 cm × 9 cm (11.8 in × 5.5 in × 3.5 in) in size.[1] Whale shark eggs typically hatch within the mother. At 1.5 kg (3.3 lb) and up to 17.8 cm × 14 cm (7.0 in × 5.5 in), the ostrich egg is the largest egg of any living bird,[2] though the extinct elephant bird and some non-avian dinosaurs laid larger eggs. The bee hummingbird produces the smallest known bird egg, which weighs half of a gram (around 0.02 oz). Some eggs laid by reptiles and most fish, amphibians, insects, and other invertebrates can be even smaller.
+
+Reproductive structures similar to the egg in other kingdoms are termed "spores," or in spermatophytes "seeds," or in gametophytes "egg cells".
+
+Several major groups of animals typically have readily distinguishable eggs.
+
+The most common reproductive strategy for fish is known as oviparity, in which the female lays undeveloped eggs that are externally fertilized by a male. Typically large numbers of eggs are laid at one time (an adult female cod can produce 4–6 million eggs in one spawning) and the eggs are then left to develop without parental care. When the larvae hatch from the egg, they often carry the remains of the yolk in a yolk sac which continues to nourish the larvae for a few days as they learn how to swim. Once the yolk is consumed, there is a critical point after which they must learn how to hunt and feed or they will die.
+
+A few fish, notably the rays and most sharks use ovoviviparity in which the eggs are fertilized and develop internally. However, the larvae still grow inside the egg consuming the egg's yolk and without any direct nourishment from the mother. The mother then gives birth to relatively mature young. In certain instances, the physically most developed offspring will devour its smaller siblings for further nutrition while still within the mother's body. This is known as intrauterine cannibalism.
+
+In certain scenarios, some fish such as the hammerhead shark and reef shark are viviparous, with the egg being fertilized and developed internally, but with the mother also providing direct nourishment.
+
+The eggs of fish and amphibians are jellylike. Cartilaginous fish (sharks, skates, rays, chimaeras) eggs are fertilized internally and exhibit a wide variety of both internal and external embryonic development. Most fish species spawn eggs that are fertilized externally, typically with the male inseminating the eggs after the female lays them. These eggs do not have a shell and would dry out in the air. Even air-breathing amphibians lay their eggs in water, or in protective foam as with the Coast foam-nest treefrog, Chiromantis xerampelina.
+
+Bird eggs are laid by females and incubated for a time that varies according to the species; a single young hatches from each egg. Average clutch sizes range from one (as in condors) to about 17 (the grey partridge). Some birds lay eggs even when not fertilized (e.g. hens); it is not uncommon for pet owners to find their lone bird nesting on a clutch of unfertilized eggs, which are sometimes called wind-eggs.
+
+The default color of vertebrate eggs is the white of the calcium carbonate from which the shells are made, but some birds, mainly passerines, produce colored eggs. The pigment biliverdin and its zinc chelate give a green or blue ground color, and protoporphyrin produces reds and browns as a ground color or as spotting.
+
+Non-passerines typically have white eggs, except in some ground-nesting groups such as the Charadriiformes, sandgrouse and nightjars, where camouflage is necessary, and some parasitic cuckoos which have to match the passerine host's egg. Most passerines, in contrast, lay colored eggs, even if there is no need of cryptic colors.
+
+However some have suggested that the protoporphyrin markings on passerine eggs actually act to reduce brittleness by acting as a solid-state lubricant.[10] If there is insufficient calcium available in the local soil, the egg shell may be thin, especially in a circle around the broad end. Protoporphyrin speckling compensates for this, and increases inversely to the amount of calcium in the soil.[11]
+
+For the same reason, later eggs in a clutch are more spotted than early ones as the female's store of calcium is depleted.
+
+The color of individual eggs is also genetically influenced, and appears to be inherited through the mother only, suggesting that the gene responsible for pigmentation is on the sex-determining W chromosome (female birds are WZ, males ZZ).
+
+It used to be thought that color was applied to the shell immediately before laying, but subsequent research shows that coloration is an integral part of the development of the shell, with the same protein responsible for depositing calcium carbonate, or protoporphyrins when there is a lack of that mineral.
+
+In species such as the common guillemot, which nest in large groups, each female's eggs have very different markings, making it easier for females to identify their own eggs on the crowded cliff ledges on which they breed.
+
+Bird eggshells are diverse. For example:
+
+Tiny pores in bird eggshells allow the embryo to breathe. The domestic hen's egg has around 7000 pores.[12]
+
+Some bird eggshells have a coating of vaterite spherules, which is a rare polymorph of calcium carbonate. In Greater Ani Crotophaga major this vaterite coating is thought to act as a shock absorber, protecting the calcite shell from fracture during incubation, such as colliding with other eggs in the nest.[13]
+
+Most bird eggs have an oval shape, with one end rounded and the other more pointed. This shape results from the egg being forced through the oviduct. Muscles contract the oviduct behind the egg, pushing it forward. The egg's wall is still shapeable, and the pointed end develops at the back. Long, pointy eggs are an incidental consequence of having a streamlined body typical of birds with strong flying abilities; flight narrows the oviduct, which changes the type of egg a bird can lay.[14] Cliff-nesting birds often have highly conical eggs. They are less likely to roll off, tending instead to roll around in a tight circle; this trait is likely to have arisen due to evolution via natural selection. In contrast, many hole-nesting birds have nearly spherical eggs.[15]
+
+Many animals feed on eggs. For example, principal predators of the black oystercatcher's eggs include raccoons, skunks, mink, river and sea otters, gulls, crows and foxes. The stoat (Mustela erminea) and long-tailed weasel (M. frenata) steal ducks' eggs. Snakes of the genera Dasypeltis and Elachistodon specialize in eating eggs.
+
+Brood parasitism occurs in birds when one species lays its eggs in the nest of another. In some cases, the host's eggs are removed or eaten by the female, or expelled by her chick. Brood parasites include the cowbirds and many Old World cuckoos.
+
+An average whooping crane egg is 102 mm (4.0 in) long and weighs 208 g (7.3 oz)
+
+Eurasian oystercatcher eggs camouflaged in the nest
+
+Egg of a senegal parrot, a bird that nests in tree holes, on a 1 cm (0.39 in) grid
+
+Eggs of ostrich, emu, kiwi and chicken
+
+Finch egg next to American dime
+
+Eggs of duck, goose, guineafowl and chicken
+
+Eggs of ostrich, cassowary, chicken, flamingo, pigeon and blackbird
+
+Egg of an emu
+
+Egg from a chicken compared to a 1 euro coin, great tit egg and a corn grain
+
+Bird nest with brown marbling eggs of a robin
+
+Like amphibians, amniotes are air-breathing vertebrates, but they have complex eggs or embryos, including an amniotic membrane. Amniotes include reptiles (including dinosaurs and their descendants, birds) and mammals.
+
+Reptile eggs are often rubbery and are always initially white. They are able to survive in the air. Often the sex of the developing embryo is determined by the temperature of the surroundings, with cooler temperatures favouring males. Not all reptiles lay eggs; some are viviparous ("live birth").
+
+Dinosaurs laid eggs, some of which have been preserved as petrified fossils.
+
+Among mammals, early extinct species laid eggs, as do platypuses and echidnas (spiny anteaters). Platypuses and two genera of echidna are Australian monotremes. Marsupial and placental mammals do not lay eggs, but their unborn young do have the complex tissues that identify amniotes.
+
+The eggs of the egg-laying mammals (the platypus and the echidnas) are macrolecithal eggs very much like those of reptiles. The eggs of marsupials are likewise macrolecithal, but rather small, and develop inside the body of the female, but do not form a placenta. The young are born at a very early stage, and can be classified as a "larva" in the biological sense.[16]
+
+In placental mammals, the egg itself is void of yolk, but develops an umbilical cord from structures that in reptiles would form the yolk sac. Receiving nutrients from the mother, the fetus completes the development while inside the uterus.
+
+Eggs are common among invertebrates, including insects, spiders, mollusks, and crustaceans.
+
+All sexually reproducing life, including both plants and animals, produces gametes. The male gamete cell, sperm, is usually motile whereas the female gamete cell, the ovum, is generally larger and sessile. The male and female gametes combine to produce the zygote cell. In multicellular organisms the zygote subsequently divides in an organised manner into smaller more specialised cells, so that this new individual develops into an embryo. In most animals the embryo is the sessile initial stage of the individual life cycle, and is followed by the emergence (that is, the hatching) of a motile stage. The zygote or the ovum itself or the sessile organic vessel containing the developing embryo may be called the egg.
+
+A recent proposal suggests that the phylotypic animal body plans originated in cell aggregates before the existence of an egg stage of development. Eggs, in this view, were later evolutionary innovations, selected for their role in ensuring genetic uniformity among the cells of incipient multicellular organisms.[17]
+
+Scientists often classify animal reproduction according to the degree of development that occurs before the new individuals are expelled from the adult body, and by the yolk which the egg provides to nourish the embryo.
+
+Vertebrate eggs can be classified by the relative amount of yolk. Simple eggs with little yolk are called microlecithal, medium-sized eggs with some yolk are called mesolecithal, and large eggs with a large concentrated yolk are called macrolecithal.[7] This classification of eggs is based on the eggs of chordates, though the basic principle extends to the whole animal kingdom.
+
+Small eggs with little yolk are called microlecithal. The yolk is evenly distributed, so the cleavage of the egg cell cuts through and divides the egg into cells of fairly similar sizes. In sponges and cnidarians the dividing eggs develop directly into a simple larva, rather like a morula with cilia. In cnidarians, this stage is called the planula, and either develops directly into the adult animals or forms new adult individuals through a process of budding.[18]
+
+Microlecithal eggs require minimal yolk mass. Such eggs are found in flatworms, roundworms, annelids, bivalves, echinoderms, the lancelet and in most marine arthropods.[19] In anatomically simple animals, such as cnidarians and flatworms, the fetal development can be quite short, and even microlecithal eggs can undergo direct development. These small eggs can be produced in large numbers. In animals with high egg mortality, microlecithal eggs are the norm, as in bivalves and marine arthropods. However, the latter are more complex anatomically than e.g. flatworms, and the small microlecithal eggs do not allow full development. Instead, the eggs hatch into larvae, which may be markedly different from the adult animal.
+
+In placental mammals, where the embryo is nourished by the mother throughout the whole fetal period, the egg is reduced in size to essentially a naked egg cell.
+
+Mesolecithal eggs have comparatively more yolk than the microlecithal eggs. The yolk is concentrated in one part of the egg (the vegetal pole), with the cell nucleus and most of the cytoplasm in the other (the animal pole). The cell cleavage is uneven, and mainly concentrated in the cytoplasma-rich animal pole.[3]
+
+The larger yolk content of the mesolecithal eggs allows for a longer fetal development. Comparatively anatomically simple animals will be able to go through the full development and leave the egg in a form reminiscent of the adult animal. This is the situation found in hagfish and some snails.[4][19] Animals with smaller size eggs or more advanced anatomy will still have a distinct larval stage, though the larva will be basically similar to the adult animal, as in lampreys, coelacanth and the salamanders.[3]
+
+Eggs with a large yolk are called macrolecithal. The eggs are usually few in number, and the embryos have enough food to go through full fetal development in most groups.[7] Macrolecithal eggs are only found in selected representatives of two groups: Cephalopods and vertebrates.[7][20]
+
+Macrolecithal eggs go through a different type of development than other eggs. Due to the large size of the yolk, the cell division can not split up the yolk mass. The fetus instead develops as a plate-like structure on top of the yolk mass, and only envelopes it at a later stage.[7] A portion of the yolk mass is still present as an external or semi-external yolk sac at hatching in many groups. This form of fetal development is common in bony fish, even though their eggs can be quite small. Despite their macrolecithal structure, the small size of the eggs does not allow for direct development, and the eggs hatch to a larval stage ("fry"). In terrestrial animals with macrolecithal eggs, the large volume to surface ratio necessitates structures to aid in transport of oxygen and carbon dioxide, and for storage of waste products so that the embryo does not suffocate or get poisoned from its own waste while inside the egg, see amniote.[9]
+
+In addition to bony fish and cephalopods, macrolecithal eggs are found in cartilaginous fish, reptiles, birds and monotreme mammals.[3] The eggs of the coelacanths can reach a size of 9 cm (3.5 in) in diameter, and the young go through full development while in the uterus, living on the copious yolk.[21]
+
+Animals are commonly classified by their manner of reproduction, at the most general level distinguishing egg-laying (Latin. oviparous) from live-bearing (Latin. viviparous).
+
+These classifications are divided into more detail according to the development that occurs before the offspring are expelled from the adult's body. Traditionally:[22]
+
+The term hemotropic derives from the Latin for blood-feeding, contrasted with histotrophic for tissue-feeding.[27]
+
+Eggs laid by many different species, including birds, reptiles, amphibians, and fish, have probably been eaten by mankind for millennia. Popular choices for egg consumption are chicken, duck, roe, and caviar, but by a wide margin the egg most often humanly consumed is the chicken egg, typically unfertilized.
+
+According to the Kashrut, that is the set of Jewish dietary laws, kosher food may be consumed according to halakha (Jewish law). Kosher meat and milk (or derivatives) cannot be mixed (Deuteronomy 14:21) or stored together. Eggs are considered pareve (neither meat nor dairy) despite being an animal product and can be mixed with either milk or kosher meat. Mayonnaise, for instance, is usually marked "pareve" despite by definition containing egg.[28]
+
+Many vaccines for infectious diseases are produced in fertile chicken eggs. The basis of this technology was the discovery in 1931 by Alice Miles Woodruff and Ernest William Goodpasture at Vanderbilt University that the rickettsia and viruses that cause a variety of diseases will grow in chicken embryos. This enabled the development of vaccines against influenza, chicken pox, smallpox, yellow fever, typhus, Rocky mountain spotted fever and other diseases.
+
+The egg is a symbol of new life and rebirth in many cultures around the world. Christians view Easter eggs as symbolic of the resurrection of Jesus Christ.[29] A popular Easter tradition in some parts of the world is the decoration of hard-boiled eggs (usually by dyeing, but often by hand-painting or spray-painting). Adults often hide the eggs for children to find, an activity known as an Easter egg hunt. A similar tradition of egg painting exists in areas of the world influenced by the culture of Persia. Before the spring equinox in the Persian New Year tradition (called Norouz), each family member decorates a hard-boiled egg and sets them together in a bowl. The tradition of a dancing egg is held during the feast of Corpus Christi in Barcelona and other Catalan cities since the 16th century. It consists of an emptied egg, positioned over the water jet from a fountain, which starts turning without falling.[30]
+
+Although a food item, raw eggs are sometimes thrown at houses, cars, or people. This act, known commonly as "egging" in the various English-speaking countries, is a minor form of vandalism and, therefore, usually a criminal offense and is capable of damaging property (egg whites can degrade certain types of vehicle paint) as well as potentially causing serious eye injury. On Halloween, for example, trick or treaters have been known to throw eggs (and sometimes flour) at property or people from whom they received nothing.[citation needed] Eggs are also often thrown in protests, as they are inexpensive and nonlethal, yet very messy when broken.[31]
+
+Egg collecting was a popular hobby in some cultures, including among the first Australians. Traditionally, the embryo would be removed before a collector stored the egg shell.[32]
+
+Collecting eggs of wild birds is now banned by many jurisdictions, as the practice can threaten rare species. In the United Kingdom, the practice is prohibited by the Protection of Birds Act 1954 and Wildlife and Countryside Act 1981.[33] On the other hand, ongoing underground trading is becoming a serious issue.[34]
+
+Since the protection of wild bird eggs was regulated, early collections have come to the museums as curiosities. For example, the Australian Museum hosts a collection of about 20,000 registered clutches of eggs,[35] and the collection in Western Australia Museum has been archived in a gallery.[36] Scientists regard egg collections as a good natural-history data, as the details recorded in the collectors' notes have helped them to understand birds' nesting behaviors.[37]
+
+Insect eggs, in this case those of the Emperor gum moth, are often laid on the underside of leaves.
+
+Fish eggs, such as these herring eggs are often transparent and fertilized after laying.
+
+Skates and some sharks have a uniquely shaped egg case called a mermaid's purse.
+
+A Testudo hermanni emerging fully developed from a reptilian egg.
+
+A Schistosoma mekongi egg.
+
+Eggs of Huffmanela hamo, a nematode parasite in a fish
+
+Eggs of various parasites (mainly nematodes) from wild primates

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+
+
+White is the lightest color and is achromatic (having no hue). It is the color of fresh snow, chalk and milk, and is the opposite of black. White objects fully reflect and scatter all the visible wavelengths of light.  White on television and computer screens is created by a mixture of red, blue and green light.  In everyday life, whiteness is often conferred with white pigments, especially titanium dioxide, of which is produced more than 3,000,000 tons/y.[1]
+
+In ancient Egypt and ancient Rome, priestesses wore white as a symbol of purity, and Romans wore a white toga as a symbol of citizenship. In the Middle Ages and Renaissance a white unicorn symbolized chastity, and a white lamb sacrifice and purity. It was the royal color of the kings of France, and of the monarchist movement that opposed the Bolsheviks during the Russian Civil War (1917–1922). Greek and Roman temples were faced with white marble, and beginning in the 18th century, with the advent of neoclassical architecture, white became the most common color of new churches, capitols and other government buildings, especially in the United States. It was also widely used in 20th century modern architecture as a symbol of modernity and simplicity.
+
+According to surveys in Europe and the United States, white is the color most often associated with perfection, the good, honesty, cleanliness, the beginning, the new, neutrality, and exactitude.[2] White is an important color for almost all world religions. The pope, the head of the Roman Catholic Church, has worn white since 1566, as a symbol of purity and sacrifice.  In Islam, and in the Shinto religion of Japan, it is worn by pilgrims. In Western cultures and in Japan, white is the most common color for wedding dresses, symbolizing purity and virginity. In many Asian cultures, white is also the color of mourning.[3]
+
+The word white continues Old English hwīt, ultimately from a Common Germanic *χwītaz also reflected in OHG (h)wîz, ON hvítr, Goth. ƕeits. The root is ultimately from Proto-Indo-European language *kwid-, surviving also in Sanskrit śveta "to be white or bright"[4] and Slavonic světŭ "light".[5][6] The Icelandic word for white, hvítur, is directly derived from the Old Norse form of the word hvítr. Common Germanic also had the word *blankaz ("white, bright, blinding"), borrowed into Late Latin as *blancus, which provided the source for Romance words for "white" (Catalan, Occitan and French blanc, Spanish blanco, Italian bianco, Galician-Portuguese branco, etc.). The antonym of white is black.
+
+Some non-European languages have a wide variety of terms for white. The Inuit language has seven different words for seven different nuances of white. Sanskrit has specific words for bright white, the white of teeth, the white of sandalwood, the white of the autumn moon, the white of silver, the white of cow's milk, the white of pearls, the white of a ray of sunlight, and the white of stars.  Japanese has six different words, depending upon brilliance or dullness, or if the color is inert or dynamic.[7]
+
+White was one of the first colors used in art. The Lascaux Cave in France contains drawings of bulls and other animals drawn by paleolithic artists between 18,000 and 17,000 years ago. Paleolithic artists used calcite or chalk, sometimes as a background, sometimes as a highlight, along with charcoal and red and yellow ochre in their vivid cave paintings.[8][9]
+
+In ancient Egypt, white was connected with the goddess Isis. The priests and priestesses of Isis dressed only in white linen, and it was used to wrap mummies.[10]
+
+In Greece and other ancient civilizations, white was often associated with mother's milk. In Greek mythology, the chief god Zeus was nourished at the breast of the nymph Amalthea.  In the Talmud, milk was one of four sacred substances, along with wine, honey, and the rose.[11]
+
+The ancient Greeks saw the world in terms of darkness and light, so white was a fundamental color.  According to Pliny the Elder in his Natural History, Apelles (4th century BC) and the other famous painters of ancient Greece used only four colors in their paintings; white, red, yellow and black;[12] For painting, the Greeks used the highly toxic pigment lead white, made by a long and laborious process.[13]
+
+A plain white toga, known as a toga virilis, was worn for ceremonial occasions by all Roman citizens over the age of 14–18. Magistrates and certain priests wore a toga praetexta, with a broad purple stripe.
+In the time of the Emperor Augustus, no Roman man was allowed to appear in the Roman forum without a toga.
+
+The ancient Romans had two words for white; albus, a plain white, (the source of the word albino); and candidus, a brighter white. A man who wanted public office in Rome wore a white toga brightened with chalk, called a toga candida, the origin of the word candidate. The Latin word candere meant to shine, to be bright. It was the origin of the words candle and candid.[14]
+
+In ancient Rome, the priestesses of the goddess Vesta dressed in white linen robes, a white palla or shawl, and a white veil. They protected the sacred fire and the penates of Rome. White symbolized their purity, loyalty, and chastity.[10]
+
+Prehistoric paintings in Chauvet Cave, France (30,000 to 32,000 BC)
+
+Painting of the goddess Isis (1380–1385 BC). The priests of her cult wore white linen.
+
+Paintings of women in white from a tomb (1448–1422 BC).
+
+Statue of the chief Vestal Virgin, wearing a white palla and a white veil.
+
+The early Christian church adopted the Roman symbolism of white as the color of purity, sacrifice and virtue. It became the color worn by priests during Mass, the color worn by monks of the Cistercian Order, and, under Pope Pius V, a former monk of the Dominican Order, it became the official color worn by the pope himself. Monks of the Order of Saint Benedict dressed in the white or gray of natural undyed wool, but later changed to black, the color of humility and penitence.
+
+Postclassical history art, the white lamb became the symbol of the sacrifice of Christ on behalf of mankind. John the Baptist described Christ as the lamb of God, who took the sins of the world upon himself. The white lamb was the center of one of the most famous paintings of the Medieval period, the Ghent Altarpiece by Jan van Eyck.[15]
+
+White was also the symbolic color of the transfiguration. The Gospel of Saint Mark describes Jesus' clothing in this event as "shining, exceeding white as snow." Artists such as Fra Angelico used their skill to capture the whiteness of his garments. In his painting of the transfiguration at the Convent of Saint Mark in Florence, Fra Angelico emphasized the white garment by using a light gold background, placed in an almond-shaped halo.[16]
+
+The white unicorn was a common subject of Postclassical history manuscripts, paintings and tapestries. It was a symbol of purity, chastity and grace, which could only be captured by a virgin. It was often portrayed in the lap of the Virgin Mary.[17]
+
+During the Postclassical history, painters rarely ever mixed colors; but in the Renaissance, the influential humanist and scholar Leon Battista Alberti encouraged artists to add white to their colors to make them lighter, brighter, and to add hilaritas, or gaiety. Many painters followed his advice, and the palette of the Renaissance was considerably brighter.[18]
+
+Until the 16th century, white was commonly worn by widows as a color of mourning. The widows of the kings of France wore white until Anne of Brittany in the 16th century. A white tunic was also worn by many knights, along with a red cloak, which showed the knights were willing to give their blood for the king or Church.
+
+The monks of the order of Saint Benedict (circa 480–542) first dressed in undyed white or gray wool robes, here shown in painting by Sodoma on the life of Saint Benedict (1504). They later changed to black robes, the color of humility and penitence.
+
+Under Pope Pius V (1504–1572), a former monk of the Dominican Order, white became the official color worn by the Pope.
+
+The white lamb in the Ghent Altarpiece by Jan van Eyck. (1432)
+
+The Transfiguration by Fra Angelico (1440–1442)
+
+Mary Stuart wore white in mourning for her husband, King Francis II of France, who died in 1560.
+
+White was the dominant color of architectural interiors in the Baroque period and especially the Rococo style that followed it in the 18th century. Church interiors were designed to show the power, glory and wealth of the church. They seemed to be alive, filled with curves, asymmetry, mirrors, gilding, statuary and reliefs, unified by white.
+
+White was also a fashionable color for both men and women in the 18th century. Men in the aristocracy and upper classes wore powdered white wigs and white stockings, and women wore elaborate embroidered white and pastel gowns.
+
+After the French Revolution, a more austere white (blanc cassé) became the most fashionable color in women's costumes which were modeled after the outfits of Ancient Greece and Republican Rome. Because of the rather revealing design of these dresses, the ladies wearing them were called les merveilleuses (the marvellous) by French men of that era.[19] The Empire style under Emperor Napoléon I was modeled after the more conservative outfits of Ancient Imperial Rome. The dresses were high in fashion but low in warmth considering the more severe weather conditions of northern France; in 1814 the former wife of Napoleon, Joséphine de Beauharnais, caught pneumonia and died after taking a walk in the cold night air with Tsar Alexander I of Russia.[20]
+
+White was the universal color of both men and women's underwear and of sheets in the 18th and 19th centuries. It was unthinkable to have sheets or underwear of any other color. The reason was simple; the manner of washing linen in boiling water caused colors to fade. When linen was worn out, it was collected and turned into high-quality paper.[21]
+
+The 19th-century American painter James McNeill Whistler (1834–1903), working at the same time as the French impressionists, created a series of paintings with musical titles where he used color to create moods, the way composers used music. His painting Symphony in White No. 1 – The White Girl, which used his mistress Joanna Hiffernan as a model, used delicate colors to portray innocence and fragility, and a moment of uncertainty.[22]
+
+A highly theatrical white Rococo interior from the 18th century, at the Basilica at Ottobeuren, in Bavaria.
+
+White gown of Marie Antoinette, painted by Elisabeth Vigée-Lebrun in 1783.
+
+President George Washington in a white powdered wig. The first five Presidents of the United States wore dark suits with powdered wigs for formal occasions.
+
+Portrait of Joséphine de Beauharnais in a classic Empire gown, modeled after the clothing of ancient Rome. (1801), by François Gérard. (The State Hermitage Museum).
+
+Symphony in White No. 1 – The White Girl, by James McNeill Whistler (1862).
+
+The White movement was the opposition that formed against the Bolsheviks during the Russian Civil War, which followed the Russian Revolution in 1917. It was finally defeated by the Bolsheviks in 1921–22, and many of its members emigrated to Europe.
+
+At the end of the 19th century, lead white was still the most popular pigment; but between 1916 and 1918, chemical companies in Norway and the United States began to produce titanium white, made from titanium oxide. It had first been identified in the 18th century by the German chemist Martin Klaproth, who also discovered uranium. It had twice the covering power of lead white, and was the brightest white pigment known. By 1945, 80 percent of the white pigments sold were titanium white.[23]
+
+The absoluteness of white appealed to modernist painters. It was used in its simplest form by the Russian suprematist painter Kazimir Malevich in his 1917 painting 'the white square,' the companion to his earlier 'black square.' It was also used by the Dutch modernist painter Piet Mondrian. His most famous paintings consisted of a pure white canvas with grid of vertical and horizontal black lines and rectangles of primary colors.
+
+Black and white also appealed to modernist architects, such as Le Corbusier (1887–1965). He said a house was "a machine for living in" and called for a "calm and powerful architecture" built of reinforced concrete and steel, without any ornament or frills.[24] Almost all the buildings of contemporary architect Richard Meier, such as his museum in Rome to house the ancient Roman Ara Pacis, or Altar of Peace, are stark white, in the tradition of Le Corbusier.
+
+Poster for the White Army during the Russian Civil War (1917–22). The poster says: "for a United Russia."
+
+The Villa Savoye (1928–31) by Le Corbusier; Le Corbusier called for a "calm and powerful" architecture built of steel and reinforced concrete, without color or ornament.
+
+Light is perceived by the human visual system as white when the incoming light to the eye stimulates all three types of color sensitive cone cells in the eye in roughly equal amounts.[25] Materials that do not emit light themselves appear white if their surfaces reflect back most of the light that strikes them in a diffuse way.
+
+In the RGB color model, used to create colors on TV and computer screens, white is made by mixing red, blue and green light at full intensity.
+
+White light refracted in a prism revealing the color components.
+
+In 1666, Isaac Newton demonstrated that white light could be broken up into its composite colors by passing it through a prism, then using a second prism to reassemble them.  Before Newton, most scientists believed that white was the fundamental color of light.[26]
+
+White light can be generated by the sun, by stars, or by earthbound sources such as fluorescent lamps, white LEDs and incandescent bulbs. On the screen of a color television or computer, white is produced by mixing the primary colors of light: red, green and blue (RGB) at full intensity, a process called additive mixing (see image below). White light can be fabricated using light with only two wavelengths, for instance by mixing light from a red and cyan laser or yellow and blue lasers. This light will however have very few practical applications since color rendering of objects will be greatly distorted.
+
+The fact that light sources with vastly different spectral power distributions can result in a similar sensory experience is due to the way the light is processed by the visual system. One color that arises from two different spectral power distributions is called a metamerism.
+
+Many of the light sources that emit white light emit light at almost all visible wavelengths (sun light, incandescent lamps of various Color temperatures). This has led to the notion that white light can be defined as a mixture of "all colors" or "all visible wavelengths".[27][28] This widespread idea is a misconception,[citation needed]  and might originally stem from the fact that Newton discovered that sunlight is composed of light with wavelengths across the visible spectrum. Concluding that since "all colors" produce white light then white must be made up of "all colors" is a common logical error called affirming the consequent, which might be the cause of the misunderstanding.
+
+A range of spectral distributions of light sources can be perceived as white—there is no single, unique specification of "white light".  For example, when you buy a "white" light bulb, you might buy one labeled 2700K, 6000K, etc., which produce light having very different spectral distributions, and yet this will not prevent you from identifying the color of objects that they illuminate.[29]
+
+Color vision allows us to distinguish different objects by their color. In order to do so, color constancy can keep the perceived color of an object relatively unchanged when the illumination changes among various broad (whitish) spectral distributions of light.[29]
+
+The same principle is used in photography and cinematography where the choice of white point determines a transformation of all other color stimuli. Changes in or manipulation of the white point can be used to explain some optical illusions such as The dress.
+
+While there is no single, unique specification of "white light", there is indeed a unique specification of "white object", or, more specifically, "white surface".
+A perfectly white surface diffusely reflects (scatters) all visible light that strikes it, without absorbing any, irrespective of the light's wavelength or spectral distribution.[30][31]
+Since it does not absorb any of the incident light, white is the lightest possible color.
+If the reflection is not diffuse but rather specular, this describes a mirror rather than a white surface.[32][30]
+
+Reflection of 100% of incident light at all wavelengths is a form of uniform reflectance, so white is an achromatic color, meaning a color without hue.[33][34] The color stimulus produced by the perfect diffuser is usually considered to be an achromatic stimulus for all illuminants, except for those whose light sources appear to be highly chromatic.[35]
+
+Color constancy is achieved by chromatic adaptation.  The International Commission on Illumination defines white (adapted) as "a color stimulus that an observer who is [chromatically] adapted to the viewing environment would judge to be perfectly achromatic and to have a luminance factor of unity.  The color stimulus that is considered to be the adapted white may be different at different locations within a scene.[36]
+
+Snow is composed of ice and air; it scatters or reflects sunlight without absorbing other colors of the spectrum.
+
+Cumulus clouds look white because the water droplets reflect and scatter the sunlight without absorbing other colors.
+
+The White Cliffs of Dover, made of limestone
+
+Hyams Beach, New South Wales appears white because the sunlight is reflected or scattered by the quartz or limestone sand
+
+Beaches with sand containing high amounts of quartz or eroded limestone also appear white, since quartz and limestone reflect or scatter sunlight, rather than absorbing it. Tropical white sand beaches may also have a high quantity of white calcium carbonate from tiny bits of seashells ground to fine sand by the action of the waves.[37]
+
+The White Cliffs of Dover take their white color from the large amount of chalk, made of limestone, which they contain, which reflects the sunlight.
+
+Snow is a mixture of air and tiny ice crystals. When white sunlight enters snow, very little of the spectrum is absorbed; almost all of the light is reflected or scattered by the air and water molecules, so the snow appears to be the color of sunlight, white. Sometimes the light bounces around inside the ice crystals before being scattered, making the snow seem to sparkle.[38]
+
+In the case of glaciers, the ice is more tightly pressed together and contains little air. As sunlight enters the ice, more light of the red spectrum is absorbed, so the light scattered will be bluish.[39]
+
+Clouds are white for the same reason as ice. They are composed of water droplets or ice crystals mixed with air, very little light that strikes them is absorbed, and most of the light is scattered, appearing to the eye as white. Shadows of other clouds above can make clouds look gray, and some clouds have their own shadow on the bottom of the cloud.[40]
+
+Many mountains with winter or year-round snow cover are named accordingly: Mauna Kea means white mountain in Hawaiian, Mont Blanc means white mountain in French. Changbai Mountains literally meaning perpetually white mountains, marks the border between China and Korea.
+
+Titanium white, made with titanium dioxide, is the brightest white paint available. It also colors most toothpaste and sunscreen.
+
+Zinc white is made from zinc oxide. Zinc oxide is used in paints, suntan lotion, and some foods.
+
+Chalk is a kind of limestone, made of the mineral calcite, or calcium carbonate. It was originally deposited under the sea as the scales or plates of tiny micro-organisms called Coccolithophore. It was the first white pigment used by prehistoric artists in cave paintings. The chalk used on blackboards today is usually made of gypsum or calcium sulphate, a powder pressed into sticks.
+
+Bianco di San Giovanni is a pigment used in the Renaissance, which was described by the painter Cennino Cennini in the 15th century. It is similar to chalk, made of calcium carbonate with calcium hydroxide. It was made of dried lime which was made into a powder, then soaked in water for eight days, with the water changed each day. It was then made into cakes and dried in the sun.[41]
+
+Lead white was being produced during the 4th century BC; the process is described is Pliny the Elder, Vitruvius and the ancient Greek author Theophrastus. Pieces of lead were put into clay pots which had a separate compartment filled with vinegar. The pots in turn were piled on shelves close to cow dung. The combined fumes of the vinegar and the cow dung caused the lead to corrode into lead carbonate. It was a slow process which could take a month or more. It made an excellent white and was used by artists for centuries, but it was also toxic. It was replaced in the 19th century by zinc white and titanium white.[42]
+
+Titanium white is the most popular white for artists today; it is the brightest available white pigment, and has twice the coverage of lead white. It first became commercially available in 1921. It is made out of titanium dioxide, from the minerals brookite, anatase, rutile, or ilmenite, currently the major source. Because of its brilliant whiteness, it is used as a colorant for most toothpaste and sunscreen.[43]
+
+Zinc white is made from zinc oxide. It is similar to but not as opaque as titanium white. It is added to some foods to enrich them with zinc, an important nutrient.[44] Chinese white is a variety of zinc white made for artists.[45]
+
+Some materials can be made to look "whiter than white", this is achieved using optical brightener agents (OBA). These are chemical compounds that absorb light in the ultraviolet and violet region (usually 340–370 nm) of the electromagnetic spectrum, and re-emit light in the blue region (typically 420–470 nm). OBAs are often used in paper and clothing to create an impression of very bright white. This is due to the fact that the materials actually send out more visible light than they receive.
+
+Bleaching is a process for whitening fabrics which has been practiced for thousands of years. Sometimes it was simply a matter of leaving the fabric in the sun, to be faded by the bright light. In the 18th century several scientists developed varieties of chlorine bleach, including sodium hypochlorite and calcium hypochlorite (bleaching powder).[46] Bleaching agents that do not contain chlorine most often are based on peroxides, such as hydrogen peroxide, sodium percarbonate and sodium perborate. While most bleaches are oxidizing agents, a fewer number are reducing agents such as sodium dithionite.
+
+Bleaches attack the chromophores, the part of a molecule which absorbs light and causes fabrics to have different colors. An oxidizing bleach works by breaking the chemical bonds that make up the chromophore. This changes the molecule into a different substance that either does not contain a chromophore, or contains a chromophore that does not absorb visible light. A reducing bleach works by converting double bonds in the chromophore into single bonds. This eliminates the ability of the chromophore to absorb visible light.[47]
+
+Sunlight acts as a bleach through a similar process. High energy photons of light, often in the violet or ultraviolet range, can disrupt the bonds in the chromophore, rendering the resulting substance colorless.[48]
+
+Some detergents go one step further; they contain fluorescent chemicals which glow, making the fabric look literally whiter than white.[49]
+
+A white dwarf is a stellar remnant composed mostly of electron-degenerate matter. They are very dense; a white dwarf's mass is comparable to that of the Sun and its volume is comparable to that of the Earth. Its faint luminosity comes from the emission of stored thermal energy. A white dwarf is very hot when it is formed, but since it has no source of energy, it will gradually radiate away its energy and cool down. This means that its radiation, which initially has a high color temperature, will lessen and redden with time. Over a very long time, a white dwarf will cool to temperatures at which it will no longer emit significant heat or light, and it will become a cold black dwarf.[50] However, since no white dwarf can be older than the Age of the universe (approximately 13.8 billion years),[51] even the oldest white dwarfs still radiate at temperatures of a few thousand kelvins, and no black dwarfs are thought to exist yet.
+
+An A-type main-sequence star (A V) or A dwarf star is a main-sequence (hydrogen-burning) star of spectral type A and luminosity class V. These stars have spectra which are defined by strong hydrogen Balmer absorption lines.[52][53] They have masses from 1.4 to 2.1 times the mass of the Sun and surface temperatures between 7600 and 11 500  K.[54]
+
+White animals use their color as a form of camouflage in winter.
+
+The dove is an international symbol of peace.
+
+The ermine, or stoat. Once considered the most noble of animals because it would rather die than dirty its fur.
+
+The Beluga whale lives in Arctic and sub-arctic waters, where its color is an effective camouflage
+
+A Polar Bear in Alaska.  Its color is a form of camouflage
+
+Thousands of pilgrims in white gather in Mecca for the beginning of their pilgrimage, or Hajj.
+
+Pope Francis at the Vatican.  Popes have traditionally worn white since 1566.
+
+A pilgrim in Japan.
+
+In the Shinto religion of Japan brides traditionally wear a white wedding kimono.
+
+The Buddhist deity Tara is often depicted with white skin.
+
+White is an important symbolic color in most religions and cultures, usually because of its association with purity.
+
+In the Roman Catholic Church, white is associated with Jesus Christ, innocence and sacrifice. Since the Middle Ages, priests wear a white cassock in many of the most important ceremonies and religious services connected with events in the life of Christ. White is worn by priests at Christmas, during Easter, and during celebrations connected with the other events of the life of Christ, such as Corpus Christi Sunday, and Trinity Sunday. It is also worn at the services dedicated to the Virgin Mary, and to those Saints who were not martyred, as well as other special occasions, such as the ordination of priests and the installation of new bishops. Within the hierarchy of the church, the lighter the color, the higher the rank. Ordinary priests wear black; bishops wear violet, cardinals wear red, and outside a church, only the Pope will wear white.[55] Popes occasionally wore white in the Middle Ages, but usually wore red. Popes have worn white regularly since 1566, when Pope Pius V, a member of the Dominican Order, began the practice.  White is the color of the Dominican Order.
+
+In Islam, white clothing is worn during required pilgrimage to Mecca, or Ihram pilgrimage (Hajj).Hajj. Called Ihram clothing, men's garments often consist of two white un-hemmed sheets (usually towelling material). The top (the riḍā) is draped over the torso and the bottom (the izār) is secured by a belt; plus a pair of sandals. Women's clothing varies considerably and reflects regional as well as religious influences. Ihram is typically worn during Dhu al-Hijjah, the last month in the Islamic calendar.
+
+White also has a long history of use as a religious and political symbol in Islam, beginning with the white banner that tradition ascribes to the Quraysh, the tribe to which Muhammad belonged. The Umayyad dynasty also used white as its dynastic color, following the personal banner of its founder, Mu'awiya I, while the Shi'ite Fatimids also chose white to highlight their opposition to the Sunni Abbasid Caliphate, whose color was black.[56]
+
+In Judaism, during the rituals of Yom Kippur, the ceremony of atonement, the rabbi dresses in white, as do the members of the congregation, to restore the bonds between God and his followers.
+
+In the traditional Japanese religion of Shinto, an area of white gravel or stones marks a sacred place, called a niwa. These places were dedicated to the kami, spirits which had descended from the heavens or had come across the sea. Later, temples of Zen Buddhism in Japan often featured a Zen garden, where white sand or gravel was carefully raked to resemble rivers or streams, designed as objects of meditation.[57]
+
+In the temples of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (LDS Church or also known as Mormon), White clothing is worn inside once they have been officially dedicated, due to white symbolizing purity.[58]
+
+Many religions symbolize heaven by using a sky with white clouds. This phenomenon is not limited to western culture; in Yoruba religion, the orisha Obatala in the Ifá tradition is represented by white. Obatala is associated with calmness, morality, old age, and purity.
+
+In Theosophy and similar religions, the deities called the Great White Brotherhood are said to have white auras.[59]
+
+In some Asian and Slavic cultures, white is considered to be a color that represents death.[60] White also represented death in ancient Egypt, representing the lifeless desert that covered much of the country; black was held to be the color of life, representing the mud-covered fertile lands created by the flooding of the Nile and giving the country its name (Kemet, or "black land").
+
+In China, Korea, and some other Asian countries, white, or more precisely, the whitish color of undyed linen, is the color of mourning and funerals.[61]
+
+In traditional China, undyed linen clothing is worn at funerals. As time passes, the bereaved can gradually wear clothing dyed with colors, then with darker colors. Small sacks of quicklime, one for each year of the life of the deceased are placed around the body to protect it against impurity in the next world, and white paper flowers are placed around the body.[62]
+
+In China and other Asian countries, white is the color of reincarnation, showing that death is not a permanent separation from the world.[63]
+
+In China, white is associated with the masculine (the yang of the yin and yang); with the unicorn and tiger; with the fur of an animal; with the direction of west; with the element metal; and with the autumn season.[64]
+
+In Japan, undyed linen white robes are worn by pilgrims for rituals of purification, and bathing in sacred rivers. In the mountains, pilgrims wear costumes of undyed jute to symbolize purity. A white kimono is often placed in the casket with the deceased for the journey to the other world, as white represents death sometimes.[65] Condolence gifts, or kooden, are tied with black and white ribbons and wrapped in white paper, protecting the contents from the impurities of the other world.[66]
+
+In India, it is the color of purity, divinity, detachment and serenity. In Hindi, the name Sweta means white.
+
+In Tibetan Buddhism, white robes were reserved for the lama of a monastery.
+
+In the Bedouin and some other pastoral cultures, there is a strong connection between milk and white, which is considered the color of gratitude, esteem, joy, good fortune and fertility.[67]
+
+White is often associated with monarchism. The association originally came from the white flag of the Bourbon dynasty of France. White became the banner of the royalist rebellions against the French Revolution (see Revolt in the Vendée).
+
+During the Civil War which followed the Russian Revolution of 1917, the White Army, a coalition of monarchists, nationalists and liberals, fought unsuccessfully against the Red Army of the Bolsheviks. A similar battle between reds and whites took place during the Civil War in Finland in the same period.
+
+The Ku Klux Klan is a racist and anti-immigrant organization which flourished in the Southern United States after the American Civil War. They wore white robes and hoods, burned crosses and violently attacked and murdered black Americans.
+
+In Iran, the White Revolution was a series of social and political reforms launched in 1963 by the last Shah of Iran before his downfall.
+
+White is also associated with peace and passive resistance. The white ribbon is worn by movements denouncing violence against women and the White Rose was a non-violent resistance group in Nazi Germany.
+
+White is a common color in national flags, though its symbolism varies widely.  The white in the flag of the United States and flag of the United Kingdom comes from traditional red St George's Cross on a white background of the historic flag of England. The white in the flag of France represents either the monarchy or "white, the ancient French color" according to the Marquis de Lafayette.
+
+Many flags in the Arab world use the colors of the flag of the Arab Revolt of 1916; red, white, green and black. These include the flags of Egypt, Palestine, Jordan, Syria, Kuwait and Iraq.
+
+Philippines also use white as their symbol for unity in their flag.
+
+Flag of the Bourbons, royal family of France until the French Revolution and during the restoration of the monarchy afterwards.
+
+The Flag of Vatican City (1929).  The white and gold colors symbolize the colors of the keys to heaven given by Jesus Christ to Saint Peter: the gold of spiritual power, the white of worldly power. The keys have been the Papal symbol since the 13th century.
+
+The flag of the Netherlands (1572) was the first red, white and blue national flag. Peter the Great adopted the colors for the flag of Russia.
+
+The flag of India (1947).  White represents "light, the path of truth".[68]
+
+The flag of Ireland. According to the Irish government press office, "The green represents the older Gaelic tradition while the orange represents the supporters of William of Orange. The white in the centre signifies a lasting truce between the 'Orange' and the 'Green'. "[69]
+
+In Western culture, white is the color most often associated with innocence, or purity.[74] In Biblical times, lambs and other white animals were sacrificed to expiate sins.  In Christianity Christ is considered the "lamb of God," who died for the sins of mankind. The white lily is considered the flower of purity and innocence, and is often associated with the Virgin Mary.
+
+White is the color in Western culture most often associated with beginnings. In Christianity, children are baptized and first take communion wearing white. Christ after the Resurrection is traditionally portrayed dressed in white.
+
+Queen Elizabeth II wears white when she opens each session of British Parliament. In high society, debutantes traditionally wear white for their first ball.
+
+White has long been the traditional color worn by brides at royal weddings, but the white wedding gown for ordinary people appeared in the 19th century. Before that time, most brides wore their best Sunday clothing, of whatever color.[75] The white lace wedding gown of Queen Victoria in 1840 had a large impact on the color and fashion of wedding dresses in both Europe and America down to the present day.
+
+The wedding dress of Queen Victoria (1840) set the fashion for wedding dresses of the Victorian era and for the 20th century.
+
+The Barong Tagalog is a traditional folk costume of the Philippines; this attire is worn on formal gatherings and weddings.
+
+White is the color most associated with cleanliness. Objects which are expected to be clean, such as refrigerators and dishes, toilets and sinks, bed linen and towels, are traditionally white. White was the traditional color of the coats of doctors, nurses, scientists and laboratory technicians, though nowadays a pale blue or green is often used. White is also the color most often worn by chefs, bakers, and butchers, and the color of the aprons of waiters in French restaurants.[76]
+
+White is the color associated with ghosts and phantoms. In the past the dead were traditionally buried in a white shroud.  Ghosts are said to be the spirits of the dead who, for various reasons, are unable to rest or enter heaven, and so walk the earth in their white shrouds. White is also connected with the paleness of death. A common expression in English is "pale as a ghost."[77]
+
+The woman in white, Weiße Frau, or dame blanche is a familiar figure in English, German and French ghost stories. She is a spectral apparition of a female clad in white, in most cases the ghost of an ancestor, sometimes giving warning about death and disaster. The most notable Weiße Frau is the legendary ghost of the German Hohenzollern dynasty.
+
+Seeing a white horse in a dream is said to be presentiment of death.[78] In the Book of Revelation, the last book in the New Testament of the Bible, the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse are supposed to announce the Apocalypse before the Last Judgement. The man on a white horse with a bow and arrow. according to different interpretations, represents either War and Conquest, the Antichrist, or Christ himself, cleansing the world of sin. Death rides a horse whose color is described in ancient Greek as khlōros (χλωρός) in the original Koine Greek,[79] which can mean either green/greenish-yellow or pale/pallid.[80]
+
+Black and white often represent the contrast between light and darkness, day and night, male and female, good and evil.
+
+In taoism, the two complementary natures of the universe, yin and yang, are often symbolized in black and white, Ancient games of strategy, such as go and chess, use black and white to represent the two sides.
+
+In the French monarchy, white symbolized the King and his power par la grâce de Dieu ("by the grace of God") and in contrast black was the color of the queen who according to the Salic Law which excluded women from the throne (and thus from power) could never become the ruling monarch.
+
+Black and white also often represent formality and seriousness, as in the costumes of judges and priests, business suits, of formal evening dress. Monks of the Dominican Order wear a black cloak over a white habit. Until 1972 agents of the Federal Bureau of Investigation were informally required by FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover to wear white shirts with their suits, to project the correct image of the FBI.[81]
+
+White is the source of more names for women in western countries than any other color.[82] Names taken from white include Alba, Albine (Latin). Blandine, Blanche and Blanchette (French); Bianca (Italian); Jennifer (Celt); Genevieve, Candice (from Latin Candida); Fenela, Fiona and Finola (Irish); Gwendoline, Gwenael, Nol(g)wen (white woman) (Celt), Nives (Spanish) and Zuria (Basque).[83]
+
+In addition many names come from white flowers: Camille, Daisy, Lily, Lili, Magnolie, Jasmine, Yasemine, Leila, Marguerite, Rosalba, and others.
+
+Other names come from the white pearl; Pearl, Margarita (Latin), Margaret, Margarethe, Marga, Grete, Rita, Gitta, Marjorie, Margot.
+
+Since ancient times, temples, churches, and many government buildings in many countries have traditionally been white, the color associated with religious and civic virtue. The Parthenon and other ancient temples of Greece, and the buildings of the Roman Forum were mostly made of or clad in white marble, though it is now known that some of these ancient buildings were actually brightly painted.[84] The Roman tradition of using white stone for government buildings and churches was revived in the Renaissance and especially in the neoclassic style of the 18th and 19th centuries. White stone became the material of choice for government buildings in Washington D.C. and other American cities. European cathedrals were also usually built of white or light-colored stone, though many darkened over the centuries from smoke and soot.
+
+The Renaissance architect and scholar Leon Battista Alberti wrote in 1452 that churches should be plastered white on the inside, since white was the only appropriate color for reflection and meditation.[85] After the Reformation, Calvinist churches in the Netherlands were whitewashed and sober inside, a tradition that was also followed in the Protestant churches of New England, such as Old North Church in Boston.
+
+Although the Parthenon in Athens (5th century BC) is white today, it was originally painted with many colors
+
+The Cathedral of Milan (1386–1965)
+
+Dutch Reformed Church interior in Delft, the Netherlands (16th century)
+
+Interior of Old North Church, Boston (1723)
+
+The White House (1801), Washington D.C.
+
+People of the Caucasian race are often referred to simply as white. The United States Census Bureau defines white people as those "having origins in any of the original peoples of Europe, the Middle East, or North Africa. It includes people who reported "white" or wrote in entries such as Irish, German, Italian, Lebanese, Near Easterner, Arab, or Polish."[86] White people constitute the majority of the U.S. population, with a total of 223,553,265 or 72% of the population in the 2010 United States Census.
+
+A white flag has long been used to represent either surrender or a request for a truce. It is believed to have originated in the 15th century, during the Hundred Years' War between France and England, when multicolored flags, as well as firearms, came into common use by European armies. The white flag was officially recognized as a request to cease hostilities by the Geneva Convention of 1949.[87]
+
+In English heraldry, white or silver signified brightness, purity, virtue, and innocence.[88]

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+
+References:  Serial No. 42236 ITIS 2002-09-22
+
+Wheat is a grass widely cultivated for its seed, a cereal grain which is a worldwide staple food.[2][3][4] The many species of wheat together make up the genus Triticum; the most widely grown is common wheat (T. aestivum).  The archaeological record suggests that wheat was first cultivated in the regions of the Fertile Crescent around 9600 BCE. Botanically, the wheat kernel is a type of fruit called a caryopsis.
+
+Wheat is grown on more land area than any other food crop (220.4 million hectares, 2014).[5] World trade in wheat is greater than for all other crops combined.[6] In 2017, world production of wheat was 772 million tonnes, with a forecast of 2019 production at 766 million tonnes,[7] making it the second most-produced cereal after maize.[7][8] Since 1960, world production of wheat and other grain crops has tripled and is expected to grow further through the middle of the 21st century.[9] Global demand for wheat is increasing due to the unique viscoelastic and adhesive properties of gluten proteins, which facilitate the production of processed foods, whose consumption is increasing as a result of the worldwide industrialization process and the westernization of the diet.[10][11]
+
+Wheat is an important source of carbohydrates.[10] Globally, it is the leading source of vegetable protein in human food, having a protein content of about 13%, which is relatively high compared to other major cereals[12] but relatively low in protein quality for supplying essential amino acids.[13][14] When eaten as the whole grain, wheat is a source of multiple nutrients and dietary fiber.[10]
+
+In a small part of the general population, gluten – the major part of wheat protein – can trigger coeliac disease, noncoeliac gluten sensitivity, gluten ataxia, and dermatitis herpetiformis.[15]
+
+Cultivation and repeated harvesting and sowing of the grains of wild grasses led to the creation of domestic strains, as mutant forms ('sports') of wheat were preferentially chosen by farmers. In domesticated wheat, grains are larger, and the seeds (inside the spikelets) remain attached to the ear by a toughened rachis during harvesting.[16] In wild strains, a more fragile rachis allows the ear to easily shatter and disperse the spikelets.[17] Selection for these traits by farmers might not have been deliberately intended, but simply have occurred because these traits made gathering the seeds easier; nevertheless such 'incidental' selection was an important part of crop domestication. As the traits that improve wheat as a food source also involve the loss of the plant's natural seed dispersal mechanisms, highly domesticated strains of wheat cannot survive in the wild.
+
+Archaeological analysis of wild emmer indicates that it was first cultivated in the southern Levant, with finds dating back as far as 9600 BCE.[18][19] Genetic analysis of wild einkorn wheat suggests that it was first grown in the Karacadag Mountains in southeastern Turkey. Dated archeological remains of einkorn wheat in settlement sites near this region, including those at Abu Hureyra in Syria, suggest the domestication of einkorn near the Karacadag Mountain Range.[20] With the anomalous exception of two grains from Iraq ed-Dubb, the earliest carbon-14 date for einkorn wheat remains at Abu Hureyra is 7800 to 7500 years BCE.[21]
+
+Remains of harvested emmer from several sites near the Karacadag Range have been dated to between 8600 (at Cayonu)  and 8400 BCE (Abu Hureyra), that is, in the Neolithic period. With the exception of Iraq ed-Dubb, the earliest carbon-14 dated remains of domesticated emmer wheat were found in the earliest levels of Tell Aswad, in the Damascus basin, near Mount Hermon in Syria. These remains were dated by Willem van Zeist and his assistant Johanna Bakker-Heeres to 8800 BCE. They also concluded that the settlers of Tell Aswad did not develop this form of emmer themselves, but brought the domesticated grains with them from an as yet unidentified location elsewhere.[22]
+
+The cultivation of emmer reached Greece, Cyprus and Indian subcontinent by 6500 BCE, Egypt shortly after 6000 BCE, and Germany and Spain by 5000 BCE.[23]  "The early Egyptians were developers of bread and the use of the oven and developed baking into one of the first large-scale food production industries."[24] By 4000 BCE, wheat had reached the British Isles and Scandinavia.[25][26][27] About two millennia later it reached China.[citation needed]
+
+The oldest evidence for hexaploid wheat has been confirmed through DNA analysis of wheat seeds, dating to around 6400-6200 BCE, recovered from Çatalhöyük.[28] The first identifiable bread wheat (Triticum aestivum) with sufficient gluten for yeasted breads has been identified using DNA analysis in samples from a granary dating to approximately 1350 BCE at Assiros in Macedonia.[29]
+
+From Asia, wheat continued to spread across Europe. In the British Isles, wheat straw (thatch) was used for roofing in the Bronze Age, and was in common use until the late 19th century.[30][31]
+
+Technological advances in soil preparation and seed placement at planting time, use of crop rotation and fertilizers to improve plant growth, and advances in harvesting methods have all combined to promote wheat as a viable crop. When the use of seed drills replaced broadcasting sowing of seed in the 18th century, another great increase in productivity occurred.
+
+Yields of pure wheat per unit area increased as methods of crop rotation were applied to long cultivated land, and the use of fertilizers became widespread. Improved agricultural husbandry has more recently included threshing machines, reaper-binder machines (the 'combine harvester'), tractor-drawn cultivators and planters, and better varieties (see Green Revolution and Norin 10 wheat). Great expansion of wheat production occurred as new arable land was farmed in the Americas and Australia in the 19th and 20th centuries.
+
+A combine harvester threshes the wheat, crushes the chaff, then blows chaff across the field. The combine loads the threshed wheat onto a trailer while moving
+
+Green wheat a month before harvest
+
+Wheat crop near Solapur, India
+
+Leaves emerge from the shoot apical meristem in a telescoping fashion until the transition to reproduction ie. flowering.[32] The last leaf produced by a wheat plant is known as the flag leaf. It is denser and has a higher photosynthetic rate than other leaves, to supply carbohydrate to the developing ear. In temperate countries the flag leaf, along with the second and third highest leaf on the plant, supply the majority of carbohydrate in the grain and their condition is paramount to yield formation.[33][34] Wheat is unusual among plants in having more stomata on the upper (adaxial) side of the leaf, than on the under (abaxial) side.[35] It has been theorised that this might be an effect of it having been domesticated and cultivated longer than any other plant.[36] Winter wheat generally produces up to 15 leaves per shoot and spring wheat up to 9[37] and winter crops may have up to 35 tillers (shoots) per plant (depending on cultivar).[37]
+
+Wheat roots are among the deepest of arable crops, extending as far down as 2m.[38] While the roots of a wheat plant are growing, the plant also accumulates an energy store in its stem, in the form of fructans,[39] which helps the plant to yield under drought and disease pressure,[40] but it has been observed that there is a trade-off between root growth and stem non-structural carbohydrate reserves.[41] Root growth is likely to be prioritised in drought-adapted crops, while stem non-structural carbohydrate is prioritised in varieties developed for countries where disease is a bigger issue. Depending on variety, wheat may be awned or not awned. Producing awns incurs a cost in grain number,[42] but wheat awns photosynthesise more water-use-efficiently than their leaves,[43] so awns are much more frequent in varieties of wheat grown in hot drought-prone countries than those generally seen in temperate countries. For this reason, awned varieties could become more widely grown due to climate change. In Europe, however, a decline in climate resilience of wheat has been observed.[44]
+
+In traditional agricultural systems wheat populations often consist of landraces, informal farmer-maintained populations that often maintain high levels of morphological diversity. Although landraces of wheat are no longer grown in Europe and North America, they continue to be important elsewhere. The origins of formal wheat breeding lie in the nineteenth century, when single line varieties were created through selection of seed from a single plant noted to have desired properties. Modern wheat breeding developed in the first years of the twentieth century and was closely linked to the development of Mendelian genetics. The standard method of breeding inbred wheat cultivars is by crossing two lines using hand emasculation, then selfing or inbreeding the progeny. Selections are identified (shown to have the genes responsible for the varietal differences) ten or more generations before release as a variety or cultivar.[45]
+
+Major breeding objectives include high grain yield, good quality, disease and insect resistance and tolerance to abiotic stresses, including mineral, moisture and heat tolerance. The major diseases in temperate environments include the following, arranged in a rough order of their significance from cooler to warmer climates: eyespot, Stagonospora nodorum blotch (also known as glume blotch), yellow or stripe rust, powdery mildew, Septoria tritici blotch (sometimes known as leaf blotch), brown or leaf rust, Fusarium head blight, tan spot and stem rust. In tropical areas, spot blotch (also known as Helminthosporium leaf blight) is also important.
+
+Wheat has also been the subject of mutation breeding, with the use of gamma, x-rays, ultraviolet light, and sometimes harsh chemicals. The varieties of wheat created through these methods are in the hundreds (going as far back as 1960), more of them being created in higher populated countries such as China.[46] Bread wheat with high grain iron and zinc content was developed through gamma radiation breeding.[47]
+
+International wheat breeding is led by CIMMYT in Mexico. ICARDA is another major public sector international wheat breeder, but it was forced to relocate from Syria in the Syrian Civil War.[citation needed]
+
+The presence of certain versions of wheat genes has been important for crop yields. Genes for the 'dwarfing' trait, first used by Japanese wheat breeders to produce short-stalked wheat, have had a huge effect on wheat yields worldwide, and were major factors in the success of the Green Revolution in Mexico and Asia, an initiative led by Norman Borlaug. Dwarfing genes enable the carbon that is fixed in the plant during photosynthesis to be diverted towards seed production, and they also help prevent the problem of lodging. 'Lodging' occurs when an ear stalk falls over in the wind and rots on the ground, and heavy nitrogenous fertilization of wheat makes the grass grow taller and become more susceptible to this problem. By 1997, 81% of the developing world's wheat area was planted to semi-dwarf wheats, giving both increased yields and better response to nitrogenous fertilizer.[citation needed]
+
+The world record wheat yield is about 17t/ha, reached in New Zealand in 2017.[48] A project in the UK, led by Rothamsted Research has aimed to raise wheat yields in the country to 20t/ha by 2020, but in 2018 the UK record stood at 16t/ha, and the average yield was just 8t/ha.[49][50]
+
+Wild grasses in the genus Triticum and related genera, and grasses such as rye have been a source of many disease-resistance traits for cultivated wheat breeding since the 1930s.[51]
+
+Because wheat self-pollinates, creating hybrid varieties is extremely labor-intensive; the high cost of hybrid wheat seed relative to its moderate benefits have kept farmers from adopting them widely[52][53] despite nearly 90 years of effort.[54]
+
+F1 hybrid wheat cultivars should not be confused with wheat cultivars deriving from standard plant breeding. Heterosis or hybrid vigor (as in the familiar F1 hybrids of maize) occurs in common (hexaploid) wheat, but it is difficult to produce seed of hybrid cultivars on a commercial scale as is done with maize because wheat flowers are perfect in the botanical sense, meaning they have both male and female parts, and normally self-pollinate.[45] Commercial hybrid wheat seed has been produced using chemical hybridizing agents, plant growth regulators that selectively interfere with pollen development, or naturally occurring cytoplasmic male sterility systems. Hybrid wheat has been a limited commercial success in Europe (particularly France), the United States and South Africa.[55]
+
+Synthetic hexaploids made by crossing the wild goatgrass wheat ancestor Aegilops tauschii and various durum wheats are now being deployed, and these increase the genetic diversity of cultivated wheats.[56][57][58]
+
+Modern bread wheat varieties have been cross-bred to contain greater amounts of gluten,[59] which affords significant advantages for improving the quality of breads and pastas from a functional point of view.[60]
+
+Stomata (or leaf pores) are involved in both uptake of carbon dioxide gas from the atmosphere and water vapor losses from the leaf due to water transpiration. Basic physiological investigation of these gas exchange processes has yielded valuable carbon isotope based methods that are used for breeding wheat varieties with improved water-use efficiency. These varieties can improve crop productivity in rain-fed dry-land wheat farms.[61]
+
+In 2010, a team of UK scientists funded by BBSRC announced they had decoded the wheat genome for the first time (95% of the genome of a variety of wheat known as Chinese Spring line 42).[62] This genome was released in a basic format for scientists and plant breeders to use but was not a fully annotated sequence which was reported in some of the media.[63] On 29 November 2012, an essentially complete gene set of bread wheat was published.[64] Random shotgun libraries of total DNA and cDNA from the T. aestivum cv. Chinese Spring (CS42) were sequenced in Roche 454 pyrosequencer using GS FLX Titanium and GS FLX+ platforms to generate 85 Gb of sequence (220 million reads) and identified between 94,000 and 96,000 genes.[64] The implications of the research in cereal genetics and breeding includes the examination of genome variation, analysis of population genetics and evolutionary biology, and further studying epigenetic modifications.[65]
+
+There are around 30,000 wheat varieties of 14 species grown throughout the world. Of these about 1,000 are commercially significant. In the United States over 500 varieties are available. In Canada different varieties are blended prior to sale. "Identity preserved" wheat that has been stored and transported separately (at extra cost) usually fetches a higher price.[66]
+
+Apart from mutant versions of genes selected in antiquity during domestication, there has been more recent deliberate selection of alleles that affect growth characteristics. Some wheat species are diploid, with two sets of chromosomes, but many are stable polyploids, with four sets of chromosomes (tetraploid) or six (hexaploid).[67]
+
+Einkorn wheat (T. monococcum) is diploid (AA, two complements of seven chromosomes, 2n=14).[4]
+
+Most tetraploid wheats (e.g. emmer and durum wheat) are derived from wild emmer, T. dicoccoides. Wild emmer is itself the result of a hybridization between two diploid wild grasses, T. urartu and a wild goatgrass such as Aegilops searsii or Ae. speltoides. The unknown grass has never been identified among non extinct wild grasses, but the closest living relative is Aegilops speltoides.[68] The hybridization that formed wild emmer (AABB) occurred in the wild, long before domestication,[67] and was driven by natural selection.
+
+Hexaploid wheats evolved in farmers' fields. Either domesticated emmer or durum wheat hybridized with yet another wild diploid grass (Aegilops tauschii) to make the hexaploid wheats, spelt wheat and bread wheat.[67] These have three sets of paired chromosomes, three times as many as in diploid wheat.
+
+Hexaploid species
+
+Tetraploid species
+
+Diploid species
+
+The four wild species of wheat, along with the domesticated varieties einkorn,[69] emmer[70] and spelt,[71] have hulls. This more primitive morphology (in evolutionary terms) consists of toughened glumes that tightly enclose the grains, and (in domesticated wheats) a semi-brittle rachis that breaks easily on threshing.
+
+The result is that when threshed, the wheat ear breaks up into spikelets. To obtain the grain, further processing, such as milling or pounding, is needed to remove the hulls or husks. Hulled wheats are often stored as spikelets because the toughened glumes give good protection against pests of stored grain.[69]
+
+In free-threshing (or naked) forms, such as durum wheat and common wheat, the glumes are fragile and the rachis tough. On threshing, the chaff breaks up, releasing the grains.[citation needed]
+
+There are many botanical classification systems used for wheat species, discussed in a separate article on wheat taxonomy. The name of a wheat species from one information source may not be the name of a wheat species in another.
+
+Within a species, wheat cultivars are further classified by wheat breeders and farmers in terms of:
+
+The named classes of wheat in English are more or less the same in Canada as in the US, as broadly the same commercial cash crop strains can be found in both.
+
+The classes used in the United States are :[73][74]
+
+Red wheats may need bleaching; therefore, white wheats usually command higher prices than red wheats on the commodities market.
+
+Raw wheat can be ground into flour or, using hard durum wheat only, can be ground into semolina; germinated and dried creating malt; crushed or cut into cracked wheat; parboiled (or steamed), dried, crushed and de-branned into bulgur also known as groats.[citation needed] If the raw wheat is broken into parts at the mill, as is usually done, the outer husk or bran can be used several ways
+
+Wheat is a major ingredient in such foods as bread, porridge, crackers, biscuits, muesli, pancakes, pasta and noodles, pies, pastries, pizza, polenta and semolina, cakes, cookies, muffins, rolls, doughnuts, gravy, beer, vodka, boza (a fermented beverage), and breakfast cereals.[76]
+
+In manufacturing wheat products, gluten is valuable to impart viscoelastic functional qualities in dough,[77] enabling the preparation of diverse processed foods such as breads, noodles, and pasta that facilitate wheat consumption.[78][10]
+
+In 100 grams, wheat provides 1,370 kilojoules (327 kilocalories) of food energy and is a rich source (20% or more of the Daily Value, DV) of multiple essential nutrients, such as protein, dietary fiber, manganese, phosphorus and niacin (table). Several B vitamins and other dietary minerals are in significant content. Wheat is 13% water, 71% carbohydrates,  and 1.5% fat. Its 13% protein content is mostly gluten (75-80% of the protein in wheat).[77]
+
+Wheat proteins have a low quality for human nutrition, according to the new protein quality method (DIAAS) promoted by the Food and Agriculture Organization.[14][79] Though they contain adequate amounts of the other essential amino acids, at least for adults, wheat proteins are deficient in the essential amino acid, lysine.[10][80] Because the proteins present in the wheat endosperm (gluten proteins) are particularly poor in lysine, white flours are more deficient in lysine compared with whole grains.[10] Significant efforts in plant breeding are being made to develop lysine-rich wheat varieties, without success as of 2017.[81] Supplementation with proteins from other food sources (mainly legumes) is commonly used to compensate for this deficiency,[13] since the limitation of a single essential amino acid causes the others to break down and become excreted, which is especially important during the period of growth.[10]
+
+Note: All nutrient values including protein and fiber are in %DV per 100 grams of the food item. Significant values are highlighted in light Gray color and bold letters. [82][83]
+Cooking reduction = % Maximum typical reduction in nutrients due to boiling without draining for ovo-lacto-vegetables group[84][85]
+Q = Quality of Protein in terms of completeness without adjusting for digestability.[85]
+
+100 g (3.5 oz) of hard red winter wheat contain about 12.6 g (0.44 oz) of protein, 1.5 g (0.053 oz) of total fat, 71 g (2.5 oz) of carbohydrate (by difference), 12.2 g (0.43 oz) of dietary fiber, and 3.2 mg (0.00011 oz) of iron (17% of the daily requirement); the same weight of hard red spring wheat contains about 15.4 g (0.54 oz) of protein, 1.9 g (0.067 oz) of total fat, 68 g (2.4 oz) of carbohydrate (by difference), 12.2 g (0.43 oz) of dietary fiber, and 3.6 mg (0.00013 oz) of iron (20% of the daily requirement).[86]
+
+Wheat is grown on more than 218,000,000 hectares (540,000,000 acres).[87]
+
+The most common forms of wheat are white and red wheat. However, other natural forms of wheat exist. Other commercially minor but nutritionally promising species of naturally evolved wheat species include black, yellow and blue wheat.[6][88][89]
+
+Consumed worldwide by billions of people, wheat is a significant food for human nutrition, particularly in the least developed countries where wheat products are primary foods.[2][10] When eaten as the whole grain, wheat is a healthy food source of multiple nutrients and dietary fiber recommended for children and adults, in several daily servings containing a variety of foods that meet whole grain-rich criteria.[10][78][90][91] Dietary fiber may also help people feel full and therefore help with a healthy weight.[92] Further, wheat is a major source for natural and biofortified nutrient supplementation, including dietary fiber, protein and dietary minerals.[93]
+
+Manufacturers of foods containing wheat as a whole grain in specified amounts are allowed a health claim for marketing purposes in the United States, stating: "low fat diets rich in fiber-containing grain products, fruits, and vegetables may reduce the risk of some types of cancer, a disease associated with many factors" and "diets low in saturated fat and cholesterol and rich in fruits, vegetables, and grain products that contain some types of dietary fiber, particularly soluble fiber, may reduce the risk of heart disease, a disease associated with many factors".[94][95] The scientific opinion of the European Food Safety Authority (EFSA) related to health claims on gut health/bowel function, weight control, blood glucose/insulin levels, weight management, blood cholesterol, satiety, glycaemic index, digestive function and cardiovascular health is "that the food constituent, whole grain, (...) is not sufficiently characterised in relation to the claimed health effects" and "that a cause and effect relationship cannot be established between the consumption of whole grain and the claimed effects considered in this opinion."[78][96]
+
+In genetically susceptible people, gluten – a major part of wheat protein – can trigger coeliac disease.[77][97] Coeliac disease affects about 1% of the general population in developed countries.[98][97] There is evidence that most cases remain undiagnosed and untreated.[97] The only known effective treatment is a strict lifelong gluten-free diet.[97]
+
+While coeliac disease is caused by a reaction to wheat proteins, it is not the same as a wheat allergy.[98][97] Other diseases triggered by eating wheat are non-coeliac gluten sensitivity[98][15] (estimated to affect 0.5% to 13% of the general population[99]), gluten ataxia, and dermatitis herpetiformis.[15]
+
+It has been speculated that FODMAPs present in wheat (mainly fructans) are the cause of non-coeliac gluten sensitivity. As of 2019, reviews have concluded that FODMAPs only explain certain gastrointestinal symptoms, such as bloating, but not the extra-digestive symptoms that people with non-coeliac gluten sensitivity may develop, such as neurological disorders, fibromyalgia, psychological disturbances, and dermatitis.[100][101][102]
+
+Other proteins present in wheat called amylase-trypsin inhibitors (ATIs) have been identified as the possible activator of the innate immune system in coeliac disease and non-coeliac gluten sensitivity.[102][101] ATIs are part of the plant's natural defense against insects and may  cause toll-like receptor 4 (TLR4)-mediated intestinal inflammation in humans.[101][103][104] These TLR4-stimulating activities of ATIs are limited to gluten-containing cereals.[102] A 2017 study in mice demonstrated that ATIs exacerbate preexisting inflammation and might also worsen it at extraintestinal sites. This may explain why there is an increase of inflammation in people with preexisting diseases upon ingestion of ATIs-containing grains.[101]
+
+The following table shows the nutrient content of wheat and other major staple foods in a raw form.[105]
+
+Raw forms of these staples, however, are not edible and cannot be digested. These must be sprouted, or prepared and cooked as appropriate for human consumption. In sprouted or cooked form, the relative nutritional and anti-nutritional contents of each of these grains is remarkably different from that of raw form of these grains reported in this table.
+
+In cooked form, the nutrition value for each staple depends on the cooking method (for example: baking, boiling, steaming, frying, etc.).
+
+A  raw yellow dent corn
+B  raw unenriched long-grain white rice
+C  raw hard red winter wheat
+D  raw potato with flesh and skin
+E  raw cassava
+F  raw green soybeans
+G  raw sweet potato
+H  raw sorghum
+Y  raw yam
+Z  raw plantains
+/*  unofficial
+
+Harvested wheat grain that enters trade is classified according to grain properties for the purposes of the commodity markets. Wheat buyers use these to decide which wheat to buy, as each class has special uses, and producers use them to decide which classes of wheat will be most profitable to cultivate.
+
+Wheat is widely cultivated as a cash crop because it produces a good yield per unit area, grows well in a temperate climate even with a moderately short growing season, and yields a versatile, high-quality flour that is widely used in baking. Most breads are made with wheat flour, including many breads named for the other grains they contain, for example, most rye and oat breads. The popularity of foods made from wheat flour creates a large demand for the grain, even in economies with significant food surpluses.
+
+In recent years, low international wheat prices have often encouraged farmers in the United States to change to more profitable crops. In 1998, the price at harvest of a 60 pounds (27 kg) bushel[107] was $2.68 per.[108] Some information providers, following CBOT practice, quote the wheat market in per ton denomination.[109]  A USDA report revealed that in 1998, average operating costs were $1.43 per bushel and total costs were $3.97 per bushel.[108] In that study, farm wheat yields averaged 41.7 bushels per acre (2.2435 metric ton/hectare), and typical total wheat production value was $31,900 per farm, with total farm production value (including other crops) of $173,681 per farm, plus $17,402 in government payments. There were significant profitability differences between low- and high-cost farms, due to crop yield differences, location, and farm size.
+
+Annual agricultural production of wheat, measured in tonnes in 2014.[110]
+
+Average wheat yields, measured in tonnes per hectare in 2014.[111]
+
+In 2017, global wheat production was 772 million tonnes, led by China, India, and Russia, collectively providing 41% of the world total.[112]
+
+In the 20th century, global wheat output expanded by about 5-fold, but until about 1955 most of this reflected increases in wheat crop area, with lesser (about 20%) increases in crop yields per unit area. After 1955 however, there was a ten-fold increase in the rate of wheat yield improvement per year, and this became the major factor allowing global wheat production to increase. Thus technological innovation and scientific crop management with synthetic nitrogen fertilizer, irrigation and wheat breeding were the main drivers of wheat output growth in the second half of the century. There were some significant decreases in wheat crop area, for instance in North America.[114]
+
+Better seed storage and germination ability (and hence a smaller requirement to retain harvested crop for next year's seed) is another 20th-century technological innovation. In Medieval England, farmers saved one-quarter of their wheat harvest as seed for the next crop, leaving only three-quarters for food and feed consumption. By 1999, the global average seed use of wheat was about 6% of output.
+
+Several factors are currently slowing the rate of global expansion of wheat production: population growth rates are falling while wheat yields continue to rise. There is evidence, however, that rising temperatures associated with climate change are reducing wheat yield in several locations.[115] In addition, the better economic profitability of other crops such as soybeans and maize, linked with investment in modern genetic technologies, has promoted shifts to other crops.
+
+In 2014, the most productive crop yields for wheat were in Ireland, producing 10 tonnes per hectare.[8] In addition to gaps in farming system technology and knowledge, some large wheat grain-producing countries have significant losses after harvest at the farm and because of poor roads, inadequate storage technologies, inefficient supply chains and farmers' inability to bring the produce into retail markets dominated by small shopkeepers. Various studies in India, for example, have concluded that about 10% of total wheat production is lost at farm level, another 10% is lost because of poor storage and road networks, and additional amounts lost at the retail level.[116]
+
+In the Punjab region of the Indian subcontinent, as well as North China, irrigation has been a major contributor to increased grain output. More widely over the last 40 years, a massive increase in fertilizer use together with the increased availability of semi-dwarf varieties in developing countries, has greatly increased yields per hectare.[9] In developing countries, use of (mainly nitrogenous) fertilizer increased 25-fold in this period. However, farming systems rely on much more than fertilizer and breeding to improve productivity. A good illustration of this is Australian wheat growing in the southern winter cropping zone, where, despite low rainfall (300 mm), wheat cropping is successful even with relatively little use of nitrogenous fertilizer. This is achieved by 'rotation cropping' (traditionally called the ley system) with leguminous pastures and, in the last decade, including a canola crop in the rotations has boosted wheat yields by a further 25%.[117] In these low rainfall areas, better use of available soil-water (and better control of soil erosion) is achieved by retaining the stubble after harvesting and by minimizing tillage.[118]
+
+There are substantial differences in wheat farming, trading, policy, sector growth, and wheat uses in different regions of the world.[7] The largest exporters of wheat in 2016 were, in order of exported quantities: Russian Federation (25.3 million tonnes), United States (24.0 million tonnes), Canada (19.7 million tonnes), France (18.3 million tonnes), and the Australia (16.1 million tonnes).[119] The largest importers of wheat in 2016 were, in order of imported quantities: Indonesia (10.5 million tonnes), Egypt (8.7 million tonnes), Algeria (8.2 million tonnes), Italy (7.7 million tonnes) and Spain (7.0 million tonnes).[119]
+
+In the rapidly developing countries of Asia and Africa, westernization of diets associated with increasing prosperity is leading to growth in per capita demand for wheat at the expense of the other food staples.[7][9]
+
+The average annual world farm yield for wheat in 2014 was 3.3 tonnes per hectare (330 grams per square meter).[8] Ireland wheat farms were the most productive in 2014, with a nationwide average of 10.0 tonnes per hectare, followed by the Netherlands (9.2), and Germany, New Zealand and the United Kingdom (each with 8.6).[8]
+
+Wheat futures are traded on the Chicago Board of Trade, Kansas City Board of Trade, and Minneapolis Grain Exchange, and have delivery dates in March (H), May (K), July (N), September (U), and December (Z).[120]
+
+Wheat normally needs between 110 and 130 days between sowing and harvest, depending upon climate, seed type, and soil conditions (winter wheat lies dormant during a winter freeze). Optimal crop management requires that the farmer have a detailed understanding of each stage of development in the growing plants. In particular, spring fertilizers, herbicides, fungicides, and growth regulators are typically applied only at specific stages of plant development. For example, it is currently recommended that the second application of nitrogen is best done when the ear (not visible at this stage) is about 1 cm in size (Z31 on Zadoks scale). Knowledge of stages is also important to identify periods of higher risk from the climate. For example, pollen formation from the mother cell, and the stages between anthesis and maturity, are susceptible to high temperatures, and this adverse effect is made worse by water stress.[121] Farmers also benefit from knowing when the 'flag leaf' (last leaf) appears, as this leaf represents about 75% of photosynthesis reactions during the grain filling period, and so should be preserved from disease or insect attacks to ensure a good yield.
+
+Several systems exist to identify crop stages, with the Feekes and Zadoks scales being the most widely used. Each scale is a standard system which describes successive stages reached by the crop during the agricultural season.
+
+There are many wheat diseases, mainly caused by fungi, bacteria, and viruses.[122] Plant breeding to develop new disease-resistant varieties, and sound crop management practices are important for preventing disease. Fungicides, used to prevent the significant crop losses from fungal disease, can be a significant variable cost in wheat production. Estimates of the amount of wheat production lost owing to plant diseases vary between 10–25% in Missouri.[123] A wide range of organisms infect wheat, of which the most important are viruses and fungi.[124]
+
+The main wheat-disease categories are:
+
+Wheat is used as a food plant by the larvae of some Lepidoptera (butterfly and moth) species including the flame, rustic shoulder-knot, setaceous Hebrew character and turnip moth.
+Early in the season, many species of birds, including the long-tailed widowbird, and rodents feed upon wheat crops. These animals can cause significant damage to a crop by digging up and eating newly planted seeds or young plants. They can also damage the crop late in the season by eating the grain from the mature spike. Recent post-harvest losses in cereals amount to billions of dollars per year in the United States alone, and damage to wheat by various borers, beetles and weevils is no exception.[126] Rodents can also cause major losses during storage, and in major grain growing regions, field mice numbers can sometimes build up explosively to plague proportions because of the ready availability of food.[127] To reduce the amount of wheat lost to post-harvest pests, Agricultural Research Service scientists have developed an "insect-o-graph," which can detect insects in wheat that are not visible to the naked eye. The device uses electrical signals to detect the insects as the wheat is being milled. The new technology is so precise that it can detect 5–10 infested seeds out of 300,000 good ones.[128] Tracking insect infestations in stored grain is critical for food safety as well as for the marketing value of the crop.
+
+This article incorporates material from the Citizendium article "Wheat", which is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License but not under the GFDL.

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+Blue is one of the three primary colours of pigments in painting and traditional colour theory, as well as in the RGB colour model. It lies between violet and green on the spectrum of visible light. The eye perceives blue when observing light with a dominant wavelength between approximately 450 and 495 nanometres. Most blues contain a slight mixture of other colours; azure contains some green, while ultramarine contains some violet. The clear daytime sky and the deep sea appear blue because of an optical effect known as Rayleigh scattering. An optical effect called Tyndall scattering explains blue eyes. Distant objects appear more blue because of another optical effect called aerial perspective.
+
+Blue has been an important colour in art and decoration since ancient times. The semi-precious stone lapis lazuli was used in ancient Egypt for jewellery and ornament and later, in the Renaissance, to make the pigment ultramarine, the most expensive of all pigments. In the eighth century Chinese artists used cobalt blue to colour fine blue and white porcelain. In the Middle Ages, European artists used it in the windows of cathedrals. Europeans wore clothing coloured with the vegetable dye woad until it was replaced by the finer indigo from America. In the 19th century, synthetic blue dyes and pigments gradually replaced mineral pigments and synthetic dyes. Dark blue became a common colour for military uniforms and later, in the late 20th century, for business suits. Because blue has commonly been associated with harmony, it was chosen as the colour of the flags of the United Nations and the European Union.[2]
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+Surveys in the US and Europe show that blue is the colour most commonly associated with harmony, faithfulness, confidence, distance, infinity, the imagination, cold, and sometimes with sadness.[3] In US and European public opinion polls it is the most popular colour, chosen by almost half of both men and women as their favourite colour.[4] The same surveys also showed that blue was the colour most associated with the masculine, just ahead of black, and was also the colour most associated with intelligence, knowledge, calm and concentration.[3]
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+Blue is the colour of light between violet and green on the visible spectrum. Hues of blue include indigo and ultramarine, closer to violet; pure blue, without any mixture of other colours; Cyan, which is midway in the spectrum between blue and green, and the other blue-greens turquoise, teal, and aquamarine.
+
+Blue also varies in shade or tint; darker shades of blue contain black or grey, while lighter tints contain white. Darker shades of blue include ultramarine, cobalt blue, navy blue, and Prussian blue; while lighter tints include sky blue, azure, and Egyptian blue. (For a more complete list see the List of colours).
+
+Blue pigments were originally made from minerals such as lapis lazuli, cobalt and azurite, and blue dyes were made from plants; usually woad in Europe, and Indigofera tinctoria, or true indigo, in Asia and Africa. Today most blue pigments and dyes are made by a chemical process.
+
+Pure blue, also known as high blue, is not mixed with any other colours
+
+Navy blue, here worn by Admiral Horatio Nelson, is the darkest shade of pure blue
+
+Sky blue or pale azure, mid-way on the RBG colour wheel between blue and cyan
+
+Egyptian blue goblet from Mesopotamia, 1500–1300 BC. This was the first synthetic blue, first made in about 2500 BC.
+
+Extract of natural indigo, the most popular blue dye before the invention of synthetic indigo
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+A block of lapis lazuli, originally used to make ultramarine
+
+Ultramarine, slightly violet-blue, in a painting by Giovanni Bellini. It was the most expensive pigment of Renaissance.
+
+Cobalt coloured the stained glass windows of Sainte-Chapelle in Paris (1250)
+
+Prussian blue, the colour of the uniforms of the army of Prussia, was invented in about 1706
+
+The modern English word blue comes from Middle English bleu or blewe, from the Old French bleu, a word of Germanic origin, related to the Old High German word blao (meaning shimmering, lustrous).[5] In heraldry, the word azure is used for blue.[6]
+
+In Russian and some other languages, there is no single word for blue, but rather different words for light blue (голубой, goluboy) and dark blue (синий, siniy). See Colour term.
+
+Several languages, including Japanese, Thai, Korean, and Lakota Sioux, use the same word to describe blue and green. For example, in Vietnamese the colour of both tree leaves and the sky is xanh. In Japanese, the word for blue (青 ao) is often used for colours that English speakers would refer to as green, such as the colour of a traffic signal meaning "go". (For more on this subject, see Distinguishing blue from green in language)
+
+Linguistic research indicates that languages do not begin by having a word for the colour blue.[7] Colour names often developed individually in natural languages, typically beginning with black and white (or dark and light), and then adding red, and only much later – usually as the last main category of colour accepted in a language – adding the colour blue, probably when blue pigments could be manufactured reliably in the culture using that language.[7]
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+Human eyes perceive blue when observing light which has a dominant wavelength of roughly 450–495 nanometres. Blues with a higher frequency and thus a shorter wavelength gradually look more violet, while those with a lower frequency and a longer wavelength gradually appear more green. Pure blue, in the middle, has a wavelength of 470 nanometres.
+
+Isaac Newton included blue as one of the seven colours in his first description the visible spectrum. He chose seven colours because that was the number of notes in the musical scale, which he believed was related to the optical spectrum. He included indigo, the hue between blue and violet, as one of the separate colours, though today it is usually considered a hue of blue.[8]
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+In painting and traditional colour theory, blue is one of the three primary colours of pigments (red, yellow, blue), which can be mixed to form a wide gamut of colours. Red and blue mixed together form violet, blue and yellow together form green. Mixing all three primary colours together produces a dark grey. From the Renaissance onwards, painters used this system to create their colours. (See RYB colour system.)
+
+The RYB model was used for colour printing by Jacob Christoph Le Blon as early as 1725. Later, printers discovered that more accurate colours could be created by using combinations of magenta, cyan, yellow and black ink, put onto separate inked plates and then overlaid one at a time onto paper. This method could produce almost all the colours in the spectrum with reasonable accuracy.
+
+In the 19th century the Scottish physicist James Clerk Maxwell found a new way of explaining colours, by the wavelength of their light. He showed that white light could be created by combining red, blue and green light, and that virtually all colours could be made by different combinations of these three colours. His idea, called additive colour or the RGB colour model, is used today to create colours on televisions and computer screens. The screen is covered by tiny pixels, each with three fluorescent elements for creating red, green and blue light. If the red, blue and green elements all glow at once, the pixel looks white. As the screen is scanned from behind with electrons, each pixel creates its own designated colour, composing a complete picture on the screen.
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+Additive colour mixing. The projection of primary colour lights on a screen shows secondary colours where two overlap; the combination red, green, and blue each in full intensity makes white.
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+Blue and orange pixels on an LCD television screen. Closeup of the red, green and blue sub-pixels on left.
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+On the HSV colour wheel, the complement of blue is yellow; that is, a colour corresponding to an equal mixture of red and green light. On a colour wheel based on traditional colour theory (RYB) where blue was considered a primary colour, its complementary colour is considered to be orange (based on the Munsell colour wheel).[9]
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+Blue pigments were made from minerals, especially lapis lazuli and azurite (Cu3(CO3)2(OH)2). These minerals were crushed, ground into powder, and then mixed with a quick-drying binding agent, such as egg yolk (tempera painting); or with a slow-drying oil, such as linseed oil, for oil painting. To make blue stained glass, cobalt blue (cobalt(II) aluminate: CoAl2O4)pigment was mixed with the glass. Other common blue pigments made from minerals are ultramarine (Na8–10Al6Si6O24S2–4), cerulean blue (primarily cobalt (II) stanate: Co2SnO4), and Prussian blue (milori blue: primarily Fe7(CN)18).
+
+Natural dyes to colour cloth and tapestries were made from plants. Woad and true indigo were used to produce indigo dye used to colour fabrics blue or indigo. Since the 18th century, natural blue dyes have largely been replaced by synthetic dyes.
+
+"Reflex blue" used to be the name of a common blue pigment in ink manufacturing.
+In the 1960s, the name was adopted into the proprietary Pantone Matching System (PMS) to refer to this specific pigment. Pantone "Reflex Blue" has the particularity of being identified only by this name, and not by a number code.[10]
+
+Lapis lazuli, mined in Afghanistan for more than three thousand years, was used for jewellery and ornaments, and later was crushed and powdered and used as a pigment. The more it was ground, the lighter the blue colour became.
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+Azurite, a common mineral, was used as a pigment from ancient times, although it degrades readily and thus inferior.
+
+Natural ultramarine, made by grinding and purifying lapis lazuli, was the finest available blue pigment in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. It was extremely expensive, and in Italian Renaissance art, it was often reserved for the robes of the Virgin Mary.
+
+Egyptian blue, the first artificial pigment, produced in the third millennium BC in Ancient Egypt by grinding sand, copper and natron, and then heating them. It was often used in tomb paintings and funereal objects to protect the dead in their afterlife.
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+Ground azurite was often in Renaissance used as a substitute for the much more expensive lapis lazuli. It made a rich blue, but was unstable and could turn dark green over time.
+
+Cerulean, produced by combining  copper and cobalt oxide, is used to make a sky blue colour. Like azurite, it is not a long-lived pigment.
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+Cobalt blue. Cobalt is used to make the deep blue stained glass windows, such as those in Gothic cathedrals.  It is used in Chinese porcelain beginning in the T'ang Dynasty. In 1799 a French chemist, Louis Jacques Thénard, made a synthetic cobalt blue pigment which became immensely popular with painters.
+
+Indigo dye originally isolated from the woad, Indigofera tinctoria, a plant common in Asia and Africa but little known in Europe until the 15th century. Its importation into Europe revolutionised the colour of clothing. It also became the colour used in blue denim and jeans. Nearly all indigo dye produced today is synthetic.
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+Chemical structure of indigo dye, a widely produced blue dye. Blue jeans consist of 1–3% by weight of this organic compound.
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+Synthetic ultramarine pigment, invented in 1826, has the same chemical composition as natural ultramarine but is more vivid.
+
+First produced in the 1930s, the intensely blue copper phthalocyanine is widely used for making blue ink, dye, and pigment.
+
+Prussian blue, FeIII4[FeII(CN)6]3, is the blue of blueprints.
+
+Of the colours in the visible spectrum of light, blue has a very short wavelength, while red has the longest wavelength. When sunlight passes through the atmosphere, the blue wavelengths are scattered more widely by the oxygen and nitrogen molecules, and more blue comes to our eyes. This effect is called Rayleigh scattering, after Lord Rayleigh, the British physicist who discovered it. It was confirmed by Albert Einstein in 1911.[11]
+
+Near sunrise and sunset, most of the light we see comes in nearly tangent to the Earth's surface, so that the light's path through the atmosphere is so long that much of the blue and even green light is scattered out, leaving the sun rays and the clouds it illuminates red. Therefore, when looking at the sunset and sunrise, the colour red is more perceptible than any of the other colours.[12]
+
+The sea is seen as blue for largely the same reason: the water absorbs the longer wavelengths of red and reflects and scatters the blue, which comes to the eye of the viewer. The colour of the sea is also affected by the colour of the sky, reflected by particles in the water; and by algae and plant life in the water, which can make it look green; or by sediment, which can make it look brown.[13]
+
+The farther away an object is, the more blue it often appears to the eye. For example, mountains in the distance often appear blue. This is the effect of atmospheric perspective; the farther an object is away from the viewer, the less contrast there is between the object and its background colour, which is usually blue. In a painting where different parts of the composition are blue, green and red, the blue will appear to be more distant, and the red closer to the viewer. The cooler a colour is, the more distant it seems.[14]
+
+Blue light is scattered more than other wavelengths by the gases in the atmosphere, giving the Earth a blue halo when seen from space.
+
+An example of aerial, or atmospheric perspective. Objects become more blue and lighter in colour the farther they are from the viewer, because of Rayleigh scattering.
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+Under the sea, red and other light with longer wavelengths is absorbed, so white objects appear blue. The deeper the observer goes, the darker the blue becomes. In the open sea, only about one per cent of light penetrates to a depth of 200 metres. (See underwater and euphotic depth)
+
+Blue giants are hot and luminous stars with surface temperatures exceeding 10,000 K. The largest blue supergiant stars are extremely massive and energetic, and are usually unstable. They are generally short-lived, either exploding in a supernova or periodically shedding their outer layers to become red giants.
+
+Blue eyes do not actually contain any blue pigment. Eye colour is determined by two factors: the pigmentation of the eye's iris[15][16] and the scattering of light by the turbid medium in the stroma of the iris.[17] In humans, the pigmentation of the iris varies from light brown to black. The appearance of blue, green, and hazel eyes results from the Tyndall scattering of light in the stroma, an optical effect similar to what accounts for the blueness of the sky.[17][18] The irises of the eyes of people with blue eyes contain less dark melanin than those of people with brown eyes, which means that they absorb less short-wavelength blue light, which is instead reflected out to the viewer. Eye colour also varies depending on the lighting conditions, especially for lighter-coloured eyes.
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+Blue eyes are most common in Ireland, the Baltic Sea area and Northern Europe,[19] and are also found in Eastern, Central, and Southern Europe. Blue eyes are also found in parts of Western Asia, most notably in Afghanistan, Syria, Iraq, and Iran.[20] In Estonia, 99% of people have blue eyes.[21][22] In Denmark 30 years ago, only 8% of the population had brown eyes, though through immigration, today that number is about 11%. In Germany, about 75% have blue eyes.[22]
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+In the United States, as of 2006, one out of every six people, or 16.6% of the total population, and 22.3% of the white population, have blue eyes, compared with about half of Americans born in 1900, and a third of Americans born in 1950. Blue eyes are becoming less common among American children. In the US, boys are 3–5 per cent more likely to have blue eyes than girls.[19]
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+Lasers emitting in the blue region of the spectrum became widely available to the public in 2010 with the release of inexpensive high-powered 445–447 nm laser diode technology.[23] Previously the blue wavelengths were accessible only through DPSS which are comparatively expensive and inefficient, however these technologies are still widely used by the scientific community for applications including optogenetics, Raman spectroscopy, and particle image velocimetry, due to their superior beam quality.[24] Blue gas lasers are also still commonly used for holography, DNA sequencing, optical pumping, and other scientific and medical applications.
+
+Blue was a latecomer among colours used in art and decoration, as well as language and literature.[25] Reds, blacks, browns, and ochres are found in cave paintings from the Upper Paleolithic period, but not blue. Blue was also not used for dyeing fabric until long after red, ochre, pink and purple. This is probably due to the perennial difficulty of making good blue dyes and pigments.[26] The earliest known blue dyes were made from plants – woad in Europe, indigo in Asia and Africa, while blue pigments were made from minerals, usually either lapis lazuli or azurite.
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+Lapis lazuli, a semi-precious stone, has been mined in Afghanistan for more than three thousand years, and was exported to all parts of the ancient world.[27] In Iran and Mesopotamia, it was used to make jewellery and vessels. In Egypt, it was used for the eyebrows on the funeral mask of King Tutankhamun (1341–1323 BC).[28] Importing lapis lazuli by caravan across the desert from Afghanistan to Egypt was very expensive. Beginning in about 2500 BC, the ancient Egyptians began to produce their own blue pigment known as Egyptian blue by grinding silica, lime, copper, and alkalai, and heating it to 800 or 900 °C (1,470 or 1,650 °F). This is considered the first synthetic pigment.[29] Egyptian blue was used to paint wood, papyrus and canvas, and was used to colour a glaze to make faience beads, inlays, and pots. It was particularly used in funeral statuary and figurines and in tomb paintings. Blue was considered a beneficial colour which would protect the dead against evil in the afterlife. Blue dye was also used to colour the cloth in which mummies were wrapped.[30]
+
+In Egypt blue was associated with the sky and with divinity. The Egyptian god Amun could make his skin blue so that he could fly, invisible, across the sky. Blue could also protect against evil; many people around the Mediterranean still wear a blue amulet, representing the eye of God, to protect them from misfortune.[31] Blue glass was manufactured in Mesopotamia and Egypt as early as 2500 BC, using the same copper ingredients as Egyptian blue pigment. They also added cobalt, which produced a deeper blue, the same blue produced in the Middle Ages in the stained glass windows of the cathedrals of Saint-Denis and Chartres.[32] The Ishtar Gate of ancient Babylon (604–562 BC) was decorated with deep blue glazed bricks used as a background for pictures of lions, dragons and aurochs.[33]
+
+The ancient Greeks classified colours by whether they were light or dark, rather than by their hue. The Greek word for dark blue, kyaneos, could also mean dark green, violet, black or brown. The ancient Greek word for a light blue, glaukos, also could mean light green, grey, or yellow.[34] The Greeks imported indigo dye from India, calling it indikon. They used Egyptian blue in the wall paintings of Knossos, in Crete, (2100 BC). It was not one of the four primary colours for Greek painting described by Pliny the Elder (red, yellow, black, and white), but nonetheless it was used as a background colour behind the friezes on Greek temples and to colour the beards of Greek statues.[35]
+
+The Romans also imported indigo dye, but blue was the colour of working class clothing; the nobles and rich wore white, black, red or violet. Blue was considered the colour of mourning, and the colour of barbarians. Julius Caesar reported that the Celts and Germans dyed their faces blue to frighten their enemies, and tinted their hair blue when they grew old.[36] Nonetheless, the Romans made extensive use of blue for decoration. According to Vitruvius, they made dark blue pigment from indigo, and imported Egyptian blue pigment. The walls of Roman villas in Pompeii had frescoes of brilliant blue skies, and blue pigments were found in the shops of colour merchants.[35] The Romans had many different words for varieties of blue, including caeruleus, caesius, glaucus, cyaneus, lividus, venetus, aerius, and ferreus, but two words, both of foreign origin, became the most enduring; blavus, from the Germanic word blau, which eventually became bleu or blue; and azureus, from the Arabic word lazaward, which became azure.[37]
+
+Lapis lazuli pendant from Mesopotamia (c. 2900 BC).
+
+A lapis lazuli bowl from Iran (End of 3rd, beginning 2nd millennium BC)
+
+A hippopotamus decorated with aquatic plants, made of faience with a blue glaze, made to resemble lapis lazuli. (2033–1710 BC)
+
+Egyptian blue colour in a tomb painting (c. 1500 BC)
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+Egyptian faience bowl (c. 1550 and 1450 BC)
+
+a decorated cobalt glass vessel from Ancient Egypt (1450–1350 BC)
+
+Figure of a servant from the tomb of King Seth I (1244–1279 BC). The figure is made of faience with a blue glaze, designed to resemble turquoise.
+
+A lion against a blue background from the Ishtar Gate of ancient Babylon. (575 BC)
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+A Roman wall painting of Venus and her son Eros, from Pompeii (about 30 BC)
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+Mural in the bedroom of the villa of Fannius Synestor in Boscoreale, (50–40 BC) in the Metropolitan Museum.
+
+A painted pottery pot coloured with Han blue from the Han Dynasty in China (206 BC to 220 AD).
+
+A tomb painting from the eastern Han Dynasty (25–220 AD) in Henan Province, China.
+
+Dark blue was widely used in the decoration of churches in the Byzantine Empire. In Byzantine art Christ and the Virgin Mary usually wore dark blue or purple. Blue was used as a background colour representing the sky in the magnificent mosaics which decorated Byzantine churches.[38]
+
+In the Islamic world, blue was of secondary importance to green, believed to be the favourite colour of the Prophet Mohammed. At certain times in Moorish Spain and other parts of the Islamic world, blue was the colour worn by Christians and Jews, because only Muslims were allowed to wear white and green.[39] Dark blue and turquoise decorative tiles were widely used to decorate the facades and interiors of mosques and palaces from Spain to Central Asia. Lapis lazuli pigment was also used to create the rich blues in Persian miniatures.
+
+Blue Byzantine mosaic ceiling representing the night sky in the Mausoleum of Galla Placidia in Ravenna, Italy (5th century).
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+Blue mosaic in the cloak of Christ in the Hagia Sophia church in Istanbul (13th century).
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+Glazed stone-paste bowl from Persia (12th century).
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+Blue tile on the facade of the Friday Mosque in Herat, Afghanistan (15th century).
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+Persian miniature from the 16th century.
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+Decoration in the Murat III hall of the Topkapi Palace in Istanbul (16th century).
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+Flower-pattern tile from Iznik, Turkey, from the second half of the 16th century.
+
+In the art and life of Europe during the early Middle Ages, blue played a minor role. The nobility wore red or purple, while only the poor wore blue clothing, coloured with poor-quality dyes made from the woad plant. Blue played no part in the rich costumes of the clergy or the architecture or decoration of churches. This changed dramatically between 1130 and 1140 in Paris, when the Abbe Suger rebuilt the Saint Denis Basilica. He installed stained glass windows coloured with cobalt, which, combined with the light from the red glass, filled the church with a bluish violet light. The church became the marvel of the Christian world, and the colour became known as the "bleu de Saint-Denis". In the years that followed even more elegant blue stained glass windows were installed in other churches, including at Chartres Cathedral and Sainte-Chapelle in Paris.[40]
+
+Another important factor in the increased prestige of the colour blue in the 12th century was the veneration of the Virgin Mary, and a change in the colours used to depict her clothing. In earlier centuries her robes had usually been painted in sombre black, grey, violet, dark green or dark blue. In the 12th century the Roman Catholic Church dictated that painters in Italy (and the rest of Europe consequently) to paint the Virgin Mary with the new most expensive pigment imported from Asia; ultramarine.[citation needed] Blue became associated with holiness, humility and virtue.
+
+Ultramarine was made from lapis lazuli, from the mines of Badakshan, in the mountains of Afghanistan, near the source of the Oxus River. The mines were visited by Marco Polo in about 1271; he reported, "here is found a high mountain from which they extract the finest and most beautiful of blues." Ground lapis was used in Byzantine manuscripts as early as the 6th century, but it was impure and varied greatly in colour. Ultramarine refined out the impurities through a long and difficult process, creating a rich and deep blue. It was called bleu outremer in French and blu oltremare in Italian, since it came from the other side of the sea. It cost far more than any other colour, and it became the luxury colour for the Kings and Princes of Europe.[41]
+
+King Louis IX of France, better known as Saint Louis (1214–1270), became the first king of France to regularly dress in blue. This was copied by other nobles. Paintings of the mythical King Arthur began to show him dressed in blue. The coat of arms of the kings of France became an azure or light blue shield, sprinkled with golden fleur-de-lis or lilies. Blue had come from obscurity to become the royal colour.[42]
+
+Once blue became the colour of the king, it also became the colour of the wealthy and powerful in Europe. In the Middle Ages in France and to some extent in Italy, the dyeing of blue cloth was subject to license from the crown or state. In Italy, the dyeing of blue was assigned to a specific guild, the tintori di guado, and could not be done by anyone else without severe penalty. The wearing of blue implied some dignity and some wealth.[43]
+
+Besides ultramarine, several other blues were widely used in the Middle Ages and later in the Renaissance. Azurite, a form of copper carbonate, was often used as a substitute for ultramarine. The Romans used it under the name lapis armenius, or Armenian stone. The British called it azure of Amayne, or German azure. The Germans themselves called it bergblau, or mountain stone. It was mined in France, Hungary, Spain and Germany, and it made a pale blue with a hint of green, which was ideal for painting skies. It was a favourite background colour of the German painter Albrecht Dürer.[44]
+
+Another blue often used in the Middle Ages was called tournesol or folium. It was made from the plant Crozophora tinctoria, which grew in the south of France. It made a fine transparent blue valued in medieval manuscripts.[45]
+
+Another common blue pigment was smalt, which was made by grinding blue cobalt glass into a fine powder. It made a deep violet blue similar to ultramarine, and was vivid in frescoes, but it lost some of its brilliance in oil paintings. It became especially popular in the 17th century, when ultramarine was difficult to obtain. It was employed at times by Titian, Tintoretto, Veronese, El Greco, Van Dyck, Rubens and Rembrandt.[46]
+
+Stained glass windows of the Basilica of Saint Denis (1141–1144).
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+Notre Dame de la Belle Verrière window, Chartres Cathedral. (1180–1225).
+
+Detail of the windows at Sainte-Chapelle (1250).
+
+The Maesta by Duccio (1308) showed the Virgin Mary in a robe painted with ultramarine. Blue became the colour of holiness, virtue and humility.
+
+In the 12th century blue became part of the royal coat of arms of France.
+
+The Wilton Diptych, made for King Richard II of England, made lavish use of ultramarine. (About 1400)
+
+The Coronation of King Louis VIII of France in 1223 showed that blue had become the royal colour. (painted in 1450).
+
+In the Renaissance, a revolution occurred in painting; artists began to paint the world as it was actually seen, with perspective, depth, shadows, and light from a single source. Artists had to adapt their use of blue to the new rules. In medieval paintings, blue was used to attract the attention of the viewer to the Virgin Mary, and identify her. In Renaissance paintings, artists tried to create harmonies between blue and red, lightening the blue with lead white paint and adding shadows and highlights. Raphael was a master of this technique, carefully balancing the reds and the blues so no one colour dominated the picture.[47]
+
+Ultramarine was the most prestigious blue of the Renaissance, and patrons sometimes specified that it be used in paintings they commissioned. The contract for the Madone des Harpies by Andrea del Sarto (1514) required that the robe of the Virgin Mary be coloured with ultramarine costing "at least five good florins an ounce."[48] Good ultramarine was more expensive than gold; in 1508 the German painter Albrecht Dürer reported in a letter that he had paid twelve ducats – the equivalent of forty-one grams of gold – for just thirty grams of ultramarine.[49]
+
+Often painters or clients saved money by using less expensive blues, such as azurite smalt, or pigments made with indigo, but this sometimes caused problems. Pigments made from azurite were less expensive, but tended to turn dark and green with time. An example is the robe of the Virgin Mary in The Madonna and Child Enthroned with Saints by Raphael in the Metropolitan Museum in New York. The Virgin Mary's azurite blue robe has degraded into a greenish-black.[50]
+
+The introduction of oil painting changed the way colours looked and how they were used. Ultramarine pigment, for instance, was much darker when used in oil painting than when used in tempera painting, in frescoes. To balance their colours, Renaissance artists like Raphael added white to lighten the ultramarine. The sombre dark blue robe of the Virgin Mary became a brilliant sky blue.[51] Titian created his rich blues by using many thin glazes of paint of different blues and violets which allowed the light to pass through, which made a complex and luminous colour, like stained glass. He also used layers of finely ground or coarsely ground ultramarine, which gave subtle variations to the blue.[52]
+
+Giotto was one of the first Italian Renaissance painters to use ultramarine, here in the murals of the Arena Chapel in Padua (circa 1305).
+
+Throughout the 14th and 15th centuries, the robes of the Virgin Mary were painted with ultramarine. This is The Virgin of Humility by Fra Angelico (about 1430). Blue fills the picture.
+
+In the Madonna of the Meadow (1506), Raphael used white to soften the ultramarine blue of Virgin Mary's robes to balance the red and blue, and to harmonise with the rest of the picture.
+
+Titian used an ultramarine sky and robes to give depth and brilliance to his Bacchus and Ariadne (1520–1523)
+
+In this painting of The Madonna and Child Enthroned with Saints an early work by Raphael in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the blue cloak of the Virgin Mary has turned a green-black. It was painted with less-expensive azurite.
+
+Glazed Terracotta of The Virgin Adoring the Christ Child, from the workshop of Andrea della Robbia (1483)
+
+The Très Riches Heures du Duc de Berry was the most important illuminated manuscript of the 15th century. The blue was the extravagantly expensive ultramarine.
+
+In about the 9th century, Chinese artisans abandoned the Han blue colour they had used for centuries, and began to use cobalt blue, made with cobalt salts of alumina, to manufacture fine blue and white porcelain, The plates and vases were shaped, dried, the paint applied with a brush, covered with a clear glaze, then fired at a high temperature. Beginning in the 14th century, this type of porcelain was exported in large quantity to Europe where it inspired a whole style of art, called Chinoiserie. European courts tried for many years to imitate Chinese blue and white porcelain, but only succeeded in the 18th century after a missionary brought the secret back from China.
+
+Other famous white and blue patterns appeared in Delft, Meissen, Staffordshire, and Saint Petersburg, Russia.
+
+Chinese blue and white porcelain from about 1335, made in Jingdezhen, the porcelain centre of China. Exported to Europe, this porcelain launched the style of Chinoiserie.
+
+A soft-paste porcelain vase made in Rouen, France, at the end of the 17th century, imitating Chinese blue and white.
+
+Eighteenth century blue and white pottery from Delft, in the Netherlands.
+
+Russian porcelain of the cobalt net pattern, made with cobalt blue pigment. The Imperial Porcelain Factory in Saint Petersburg was founded in 1744. This pattern, first produced in 1949, was copied after a design made for Catherine the Great.
+
+While blue was an expensive and prestigious colour in European painting, it became a common colour for clothing during the Renaissance. The rise of the colour blue in fashion in the 12th and 13th centuries led to a blue dye industry in several cities, notably Amiens, Toulouse, and Erfurt. They made a dye called pastel from woad, a plant common in Europe, which had been used to make blue dye by the Celts and German tribes. Blue became a colour worn by domestics and artisans, not just nobles. In 1570, when Pope Pius V listed the colours that could be used for ecclesiastical dress and for altar decoration, he excluded blue, because he considered it too common.[54]
+
+The process of making blue with woad was long and noxious – it involved soaking the leaves of the plant for from three days to a week in human urine, ideally urine from men who had been drinking a great deal of alcohol, which was said to improve the colour. The fabric was then soaked for a day in the resulting mixture, then put out in the sun, where as it dried it turned blue.[54]
+
+The pastel industry was threatened in the 15th century by the arrival from India of the same dye (indigo), obtained from a shrub widely grown in Asia. The Asian indigo dye precursors is more readily obtained. In 1498, Vasco da Gama opened a trade route to import indigo from India to Europe. In India, the indigo leaves were soaked in water, fermented, pressed into cakes, dried into bricks, then carried to the ports London, Marseille, Genoa, and Bruges. Later, in the 17th century, the British, Spanish, and Dutch established indigo plantations in Jamaica, South Carolina, the Virgin Islands and South America, and began to import American indigo to Europe.
+
+The countries with large and prosperous pastel industries tried to block the use of indigo. One government in Germany outlawed the use of indigo in 1577, describing it as a "pernicious, deceitful and corrosive substance, the Devil's dye."[55][56] In France, Henry IV, in an edict of 1609, forbade under pain of death the use of "the false and pernicious Indian drug".[57] It was forbidden in England until 1611, when British traders established their own indigo industry in India and began to import it into Europe.[58]
+
+The efforts to block indigo were in vain; the quality of indigo blue was too high and the price too low for pastel made from woad to compete. In 1737 both the French and German governments finally allowed the use of indigo. This ruined the dye industries in Toulouse and the other cities that produced pastel, but created a thriving new indigo commerce to seaports such as Bordeaux, Nantes and Marseille.[59]
+
+Another war of the blues took place at the end of the 19th century, between indigo and synthetic indigo, discovered in 1868 by the German chemist Johann Friedrich Wilhelm Adolf von Baeyer. The German chemical firm BASF put the new dye on the market in 1897, in direct competition with the British-run indigo industry in India, which produced most of the world's indigo. In 1897 Britain sold ten thousand tons of natural indigo on the world market, while BASF sold six hundred tons of synthetic indigo. The British industry cut prices and reduced the salaries of its workers, but it was unable to compete; the synthetic indigo was more pure, made a more lasting blue, and was not dependent upon good or bad harvests. In 1911, India sold only 660 tons of natural indigo, while BASF sold 22,000 tons of synthetic indigo. In 2002, more than 38,000 tons of synthetic indigo was produced, often for the production of blue jeans.[60]
+
+Isatis tinctoria, or woad, was the main source of blue dye in Europe from ancient times until the arrival of indigo from Asia and America. It was processed into a paste called pastel.
+
+A woad mill in Thuringia, in Germany, in 1752. The woad industry was already on its way to extinction, unable to compete with indigo blue.
+
+A Dutch tapestry from 1495 to 1505. The blue colour comes from woad.
+
+Indigofera tinctoria, a tropical shrub, is the main source of indigo dye. The chemical composition of indigo dye is the same as that of woad, but the colour is more intense.
+
+Cakes of indigo. The leaf has been soaked in water, fermented, mixed with lye or another base, then pressed into cakes and dried, ready for export.
+
+In the 17th century, Frederick William, Elector of Brandenburg, was one of the first rulers to give his army blue uniforms. The reasons were economic; the German states were trying to protect their pastel dye industry against competition from imported indigo dye. When Brandenburg became the Kingdom of Prussia in 1701, the uniform colour was adopted by the Prussian army. Most German soldiers wore dark blue uniforms until the First World War, with the exception of the Bavarians, who wore light blue.[61]
+
+Thanks in part to the availability of indigo dye, the 18th century saw the widespread use of blue military uniforms. Prior to 1748, British naval officers simply wore upper-class civilian clothing and wigs. In 1748, the British uniform for naval officers was officially established as an embroidered coat of the colour then called marine blue, now known as navy blue.[62] When the Continental Navy of the United States was created in 1775, it largely copied the British uniform and colour.
+
+In the late 18th century, the blue uniform became a symbol of liberty and revolution. In October 1774, even before the United States declared its independence, George Mason and one hundred Virginia neighbours of George Washington organised a voluntary militia unit (the Fairfax County Independent Company of Volunteers) and elected Washington the honorary commander. For their uniforms they chose blue and buff, the colours of the Whig Party, the opposition party in England, whose policies were supported by George Washington and many other patriots in the American colonies.[63][64]
+
+When the Continental Army was established in 1775 at the outbreak of the American Revolution, the first Continental Congress declared that the official uniform colour would be brown, but this was not popular with many militias, whose officers were already wearing blue. In 1778 the Congress asked George Washington to design a new uniform, and in 1779 Washington made the official colour of all uniforms blue and buff. Blue continued to be the colour of the field uniform of the US Army until 1902, and is still the colour of the dress uniform.[65]
+
+In France the Gardes Françaises, the elite regiment which protected Louis XVI, wore dark blue uniforms with red trim. In 1789, the soldiers gradually changed their allegiance from the king to the people, and they played a leading role in the storming of the Bastille. After the fall of Bastille, a new armed force, the Garde Nationale, was formed under the command of the Marquis de Lafayette, who had served with George Washington in America. Lafayette gave the Garde Nationale dark blue uniforms similar to those of the Continental Army. Blue became the colour of the revolutionary armies, opposed to the white uniforms of the Royalists and the Austrians.[66]
+
+Napoleon Bonaparte abandoned many of the doctrines of the French Revolution but he kept blue as the uniform colour for his army, although he had great difficulty obtaining the blue dye, since the British controlled the seas and blocked the importation of indigo to France. Napoleon was forced to dye uniforms with woad, which had an inferior blue colour.[67] The French army wore a dark blue uniform coat with red trousers until 1915, when it was found to be a too visible target on the battlefields of World War I. It was replaced with uniforms of a light blue-grey colour called horizon blue.
+
+Blue was the colour of liberty and revolution in the 18th century, but in the 19th it increasingly became the colour of government authority, the uniform colour of policemen and other public servants. It was considered serious and authoritative, without being menacing. In 1829, when Robert Peel created the first London Metropolitan Police, he made the colour of the uniform jacket a dark, almost black blue, to make the policemen look different from the red coated soldiers, who had on occasion been used to enforce order. The traditional blue jacket with silver buttons of the London "bobbie" was not abandoned until the mid-1990s, when it was replaced for all but formal occasions by a jumper or sweater of the colour officially known as NATO blue.[68]
+
+The New York City Police Department, modelled after the London Metropolitan Police, was created in 1844, and in 1853, they were officially given a navy blue uniform, the colour they wear today.[69]
+
+Navy blue is one of the most popular school uniform colours, with the Toronto Catholic District School Board adopting a dress code policy which requires students system-wide to wear white tops and navy blue bottoms.
+
+Elector Frederic William of Brandenburg gave his soldiers blue uniforms (engraving from 1698). When Brandenburg became the Kingdom of Prussia in 1701, blue became the uniform colour of the Prussian Army.
+
+Uniform of a lieutenant in the Royal Navy (1777). Marine blue became the official colour of the Royal Navy uniform coat in 1748.
+
+George Washington chose blue and buff as the colours of the Continental Army uniform. They were the colours of the English Whig Party, which Washington admired.
+
+The Marquis de Lafayette in the uniform of the Garde Nationale during the French Revolution (1790).
+
+The cadets of the Ecole Spéciale Militaire de Saint-Cyr, the French military academy, still wear the blue and red uniform of the French army before 1915.
+
+Metropolitan Police officers in Soho, London (2007).
+
+New York City police officers on Times Square (2010)
+
+During the 17th and 18th centuries, chemists in Europe tried to discover a way to create synthetic blue pigments, avoiding the expense of importing and grinding lapis lazuli, azurite and other minerals. The Egyptians had created a synthetic colour, Egyptian blue, three thousand years BC, but the formula had been lost. The Chinese had also created synthetic pigments, but the formula was not known in the west.
+
+In 1709 a German druggist and pigment maker named Johann Jacob Diesbach accidentally discovered a new blue while experimenting with potassium and iron sulphides. The new colour was first called Berlin blue, but later became known as Prussian blue. By 1710 it was being used by the French painter Antoine Watteau, and later his successor Nicolas Lancret. It became immensely popular for the manufacture of wallpaper, and in the 19th century was widely used by French impressionist painters.[70]
+
+Beginning in the 1820s, Prussian blue was imported into Japan through the port of Nagasaki. It was called bero-ai, or Berlin blue, and it became popular because it did not fade like traditional Japanese blue pigment, ai-gami, made from the dayflower. Prussian blue was used by both Hokusai, in his famous wave paintings, and Hiroshige.[71]
+
+In 1824 the Societé pour l'Encouragement d'Industrie in France offered a prize for the invention of an artificial ultramarine which could rival the natural colour made from lapis lazuli. The prize was won in 1826 by a chemist named Jean Baptiste Guimet, but he refused to reveal the formula of his colour. In 1828, another scientist, Christian Gmelin then a professor of chemistry in Tübingen, found the process and published his formula. This was the beginning of new industry to manufacture artificial ultramarine, which eventually almost completely replaced the natural product.[72]
+
+In 1878 a German chemist named a. Von Baeyer discovered a synthetic substitute for indigotine, the active ingredient of indigo. This product gradually replaced natural indigo, and after the end of the First World War, it brought an end to the trade of indigo from the East and West Indies.
+
+In 1901 a new synthetic blue dye, called Indanthrone blue, was invented, which had even greater resistance to fading during washing or in the sun. This dye gradually replaced artificial indigo, whose production ceased in about 1970. Today almost all blue clothing is dyed with an indanthrone blue.[73]
+
+Thomas Gainsborough's The Blue Boy includes "the lavish lapis lazuli, the darker indigo pigment and the paler cobalt."[74]
+
+The 19th-century Japanese woodblock artist Hokusai used Prussian blue, a synthetic colour imported from Europe, in his wave paintings, such as in The Great Wave off Kanagawa.
+
+A synthetic indigo dye factory in Germany in 1890. The manufacture of this dye ended the trade in indigo from America and India that had begun in the 15th century.
+
+The invention of new synthetic pigments in the 18th and 19th centuries considerably brightened and expanded the palette of painters. J. M. W. Turner experimented with the new cobalt blue, and of the twenty colours most used by the Impressionists, twelve were new and synthetic colours, including cobalt blue, ultramarine and cerulean blue.[75]
+
+Another important influence on painting in the 19th century was the theory of complementary colours, developed by the French chemist Michel Eugene Chevreul in 1828 and published in 1839. He demonstrated that placing complementary colours, such as blue and yellow-orange or ultramarine and yellow, next to each other heightened the intensity of each colour "to the apogee of their tonality."[76] In 1879 an American physicist, Ogden Rood, published a book charting the complementary colours of each colour in the spectrum.[77] This principle of painting was used by Claude Monet in his Impression – Sunrise – Fog (1872), where he put a vivid blue next to a bright orange sun, (1872) and in Régate à Argenteuil (1872), where he painted an orange sun against blue water. The colours brighten each other. Renoir used the same contrast of cobalt blue water and an orange sun in Canotage sur la Seine (1879–1880). Both Monet and Renoir liked to use pure colours, without any blending.[75]
+
+Monet and the impressionists were among the first to observe that shadows were full of colour. In his La Gare Saint-Lazare, the grey smoke, vapour and dark shadows are actually composed of mixtures of bright pigment, including cobalt blue, cerulean blue, synthetic ultramarine, emerald green, Guillet green, chrome yellow, vermilion and ecarlate red.[78] Blue was a favourite colour of the impressionist painters, who used it not just to depict nature but to create moods, feelings and atmospheres. Cobalt blue, a pigment of cobalt oxide-aluminium oxide, was a favourite of Auguste Renoir and Vincent van Gogh. It was similar to smalt, a pigment used for centuries to make blue glass, but it was much improved by the French chemist Louis Jacques Thénard, who introduced it in 1802. It was very stable but extremely expensive. Van Gogh wrote to his brother Theo, "'Cobalt [blue] is a divine colour and there is nothing so beautiful for putting atmosphere around things ..."[79]
+
+Van Gogh described to his brother Theo how he composed a sky: "The dark blue sky is spotted with clouds of an even darker blue than the fundamental blue of intense cobalt, and others of a lighter blue, like the bluish white of the Milky Way ... the sea was very dark ultramarine, the shore a sort of violet and of light red as I see it, and on the dunes, a few bushes of prussian blue."[80]
+
+Claude Monet used several recently invented colours in his Gare Saint-Lazare (1877). He used cobalt blue, invented in 1807, cerulean blue invented in 1860, and French ultramarine, first made in 1828.
+
+The Umbrellas, by Pierre Auguste-Renoir. (1881 and 1885). Renoir used cobalt blue for right side of the picture, but used the new synthetic ultramarine introduced in the 1870s, when he added two figures to left of the picture a few years later.
+
+In Vincent van Gogh's Irises, the blue irises are placed against their complementary colour, yellow-orange.
+
+Van Gogh's Starry Night Over the Rhône (1888). Blue used to create a mood or atmosphere. A cobalt blue sky, and cobalt or ultramarine water.
+
+Wheatfield Under Thunderclouds (July 1890), one of the last paintings by Vincent van Gogh. He wrote of cobalt blue, "there is nothing so beautiful for putting atmosphere around things."
+
+Blue had first become the high fashion colour of the wealthy and powerful in Europe in the 13th century, when it was worn by Louis IX of France, better known as Saint Louis (1214–1270). Wearing blue implied dignity and wealth, and blue clothing was restricted to the nobility.[81] However, blue was replaced by black as the power colour in the 14th century, when European princes, and then merchants and bankers, wanted to show their seriousness, dignity and devoutness (see Black).
+
+Blue gradually returned to court fashion in the 17th century, as part of a palette of peacock-bright colours shown off in extremely elaborate costumes. The modern blue business suit has its roots in England in the middle of the 17th century. Following the London plague of 1665 and the London fire of 1666, King Charles II of England ordered that his courtiers wear simple coats, waistcoats and breeches, and the palette of colours became blue, grey, white and buff. Widely imitated, this style of men's fashion became almost a uniform of the London merchant class and the English country gentleman.[82]
+
+During the American Revolution, the leader of the Whig Party in England, Charles James Fox, wore a blue coat and buff waistcoat and breeches, the colours of the Whig Party and of the uniform of George Washington, whose principles he supported. The men's suit followed the basic form of the military uniforms of the time, particularly the uniforms of the cavalry.[82]
+
+In the early 19th century, during the Regency of the future King George IV, the blue suit was revolutionised by a courtier named George Beau Brummel. Brummel created a suit that closely fitted the human form. The new style had a long tail coat cut to fit the body and long tight trousers to replace the knee-length breeches and stockings of the previous century. He used plain colours, such as blue and grey, to concentrate attention on the form of the body, not the clothes. Brummel observed, "If people turn to look at you in the street, you are not well dressed."[83] This fashion was adopted by the Prince Regent, then by London society and the upper classes. Originally the coat and trousers were different colours, but in the 19th century the suit of a single colour became fashionable. By the late 19th century the black suit had become the uniform of businessmen in England and America. In the 20th century, the black suit was largely replaced by the dark blue or grey suit.[82]
+
+King Louis IX of France (on the right, with Pope Innocent) was the first European king to wear blue. It quickly became the colour of the nobles and wealthy.
+
+Joseph Leeson, later 1st Earl of Milltown, in the typical dress of the English country gentleman in the 1730s.
+
+Charles James Fox, a leader of the Whig Party in England, wore a blue suit in Parliament in support of George Washington and the American Revolution. Portrait by Joshua Reynolds (1782).
+
+Beau Brummel introduced the ancestor of the modern blue suit, shaped to the body. (1805).
+
+Man's suit, 1826. Dark blue suits were still rare; this one is blue-green or teal.
+
+Man's blue suit in the 1870s, Paris. Painting by Caillebotte.
+
+President John F. Kennedy popularised the blue two-button business suit, less formal than the suits of his predecessors. (1961)
+
+In the 21st century, the dark blue business suit is the most common style worn by world leaders, seen here at the 2011 G-20 Summit in Cannes, France.
+
+At the beginning of the 20th century, many artists recognised the emotional power of blue, and made it the central element of paintings. During his Blue Period (1901–1904) Pablo Picasso used blue and green, with hardly any warm colours, to create a melancholy mood. In Russia, the symbolist painter Pavel Kuznetsov and the Blue Rose art group (1906–1908) used blue to create a fantastic and exotic atmosphere. In Germany, Wassily Kandinsky and other Russian émigrés formed the art group called Der Blaue Reiter (The Blue Rider), and used blue to symbolise spirituality and eternity.[84] Henri Matisse used intense blues to express the emotions he wanted viewers to feel. Matisse wrote, "A certain blue penetrates your soul."[85]
+
+In the art of the second half of the 20th century, painters of the abstract expressionist movement began to use blue and other colours in pure form, without any attempt to represent anything, to inspire ideas and emotions. Painter Mark Rothko observed that colour was "only an instrument;" his interest was "in expressing human emotions tragedy, ecstasy, doom, and so on."[86]
+
+In fashion blue, particularly dark blue, was seen as a colour which was serious but not grim. In the mid-20th century, blue passed black as the most common colour of men's business suits, the costume usually worn by political and business leaders. Public opinion polls in the United States and Europe showed that blue was the favourite colour of over fifty per cent of respondents. Green was far behind with twenty per cent, while white and red received about eight per cent each.[87]
+
+In 1873, a German immigrant in San Francisco, Levi Strauss, invented a sturdy kind of work trousers, made of denim fabric and coloured with indigo dye, called blue jeans. In 1935, they were raised to the level of high fashion by Vogue magazine. Beginning in the 1950s, they became an essential part of uniform of young people in the United States, Europe, and around the world.
+
+Blue was also seen as a colour which was authoritative without being threatening. Following the Second World War, blue was adopted as the colour of important international organisations, including the United Nations, the Council of Europe, UNESCO, the European Union, and NATO. United Nations peacekeepers wear blue helmets to stress their peacekeeping role. Blue is used by the NATO Military Symbols for Land Based Systems to denote friendly forces, hence the term "blue on blue" for friendly fire, and Blue Force Tracking for location of friendly units. The People's Liberation Army of China (formerly known as the "Red Army") uses the term "Blue Army" to refer to hostile forces during exercises.[88]
+
+The 20th century saw the invention of new ways of creating blue, such as chemiluminescence, making blue light through a chemical reaction.
+
+In the 20th century, it also became possible for one to own a shade of blue. The French artist Yves Klein, with the help of a French paint dealer, created a specific blue called International Klein blue, which he patented. It was made of ultramarine combined with a resin called Rhodopa, which gave it a particularly brilliant colour. The baseball team the Los Angeles Dodgers developed its own blue, called Dodger blue, and several American universities invented new blues for their colours.
+
+With the dawn of the World Wide Web, blue has become the standard colour for hyperlinks in graphic browsers (in most browsers, links turn purple after visiting their target), to make their presence within text obvious to readers.
+
+During his Blue Period, Pablo Picasso used blue as the colour of melancholy, as in The Old Guitarist.
+
+The Blue Rider (1903), by Wassily Kandinsky, For Kandinsky, blue was the colour of spirituality: the darker the blue, the more it awakened human desire for the eternal.[84]
+
+The Russian avant-garde painter Pavel Kuznetsov and his group, the Blue Rose, used blue to symbolise fantasy and exoticism. This is In the Steppe – Mirage (1911).
+
+Blue jeans, made of denim coloured with indigo dye, patented by Levi Strauss in 1873, became an essential part of the wardrobe of young people beginning in the 1950s.
+
+Vivid blues can be created by chemical reactions, called chemiluminescence. This is luminol, a chemical used in crime scene investigations. Luminol glows blue when it contacts even a tiny trace of blood.
+
+Blue neon lighting, first used in commercial advertising, is now used in works of art. This is Zwei Pferde für Münster (Two horses for Münster), a neon sculpture by Stephan Huber (2002), in Munster, Germany.
+
+The Story Bridge in Brisbane, Australia illuminated in blue light for ovarian cancer awareness.
+
+A man of the Tuareg people of North Africa wears a tagelmust or turban dyed with indigo. The indigo stains their skin blue; they were known by early visitors as "the blue men" of the desert.
+
+Various shades of blue are used as the national colours for many nations.
+
+A painting by William Hogarth from 1854 shows a polling station with the blue flag of the Tory party and the orange flag of the Whigs.
+
+The blue necktie of former British Prime Minister David Cameron represented his Conservative Party.
+
+A map of the US showing the blue states, which voted for the Democratic candidate in all the last four Presidential elections, and the red states, which voted for the Republican.
+
+Blue stripes on a traditional Jewish tallit. The blue stripes are also featured in the flag of Israel.
+
+Vishnu, the supreme god of Hinduism, is often portrayed as being blue, or more precisely having skin the colour of rain-filled clouds.
+
+In Catholicism, blue became the traditional colour of the robes of the Virgin Mary in the 13th century.
+
+The Bhaisajyaguru, or "Medicine Master of Lapis Lazuli Light", is the Buddha of healing and medicine in Mahayana Buddhism. He traditionally holds a lapis lazuli jar of medicine.
+
+In the Islamic World, blue and turquoise tile traditionally decorates the facades and exteriors of mosques and other religious buildings. This mosque is in Isfahan, Iran.
+
+Blue was first used as a gender signifier just prior to World War I (for either girls or boys), and first established as a male gender signifier in the 1940s.[116]
+
+Madame Pompadour, the mistress of King Louis XV of France, wore blue myosotis, or forget-me-not flowers in her hair and on her gowns as a symbol of faithfulness to the king.
+
+Many sporting teams make blue their official colour, or use it as detail on kit of a different colour. In addition, the colour is present on the logos of many sports associations. Along with red, blue is the most commonly used non-white colours for teams.
+
+In international association football, blue is a common colour on kits, as a majority of nations wear the colours of their national flag. A notable exception to this link is four-time FIFA World Cup winners Italy, who wear a blue kit based on the Azzuro Savoia (Savoy blue) of the royal House of Savoy which unified the Italian states, despite the italian national flag being green, white and red.[127] The team themselves are known as Gli Azzurri (the Azures). Another World Cup winning nation with a blue shirt is France, who are known as Les Bleus (the Blues). Two neighbouring countries with two World Cup victories each, Argentina and Uruguay wear a light blue shirt, the former with white stripes. Uruguay are known as the La Celeste, Spanish for 'the sky blue one', while Argentina are known as Los Albicelestes, Spanish for 'the sky blue and whites'.[128]
+
+Blue features on the logo of football's governing body FIFA, as well as featuring highly in the design of their website.[129] The European governing body of football, UEFA, uses two tones of blue to create a map of Europe in the centre of their logo. The Asian Football Confederation, Oceania Football Confederation and CONCACAF (the governing body of football in North and Central America and the Caribbean) use blue text on their logos.
+
+In Major League Baseball, the premier baseball league in the United States and Canada, blue is one of the three colours, along with white and red, on the league's official logo. A team from Toronto, Ontario are nicknamed the Blue Jays. Sixteen other teams either regularly feature blue hats or utilise the colour in their uniforms.
+
+The National Basketball Association, the premier basketball league in the United States and Canada, also has blue as one of the colours on their logo, along with red and white also, as did its female equivalent, the WNBA, until March 28, 2011, when the latter adopted an orange and white logo. Former NBA player Theodore Edwards was nicknamed "Blue". Fifteen NBA teams feature the colour in their uniforms.
+
+The National Football League, the premier American football league in the United States, also uses blue as one of three colours, along with white and red, on their official logo. Thirteen NFL teams prominently feature the colour.
+
+The National Hockey League, the premier Ice hockey league in Canada and the United States, uses blue on its official logo. Ten teams prominently feature the colour, with two teams (Columbus Blue Jackets and St. Louis Blues) featuring the colour in their nicknames. The team in St. Louis is primarily nicknamed after the eponymous music genre.
+
+The Italian national football team wear blue in honour of the royal House of Savoy which unified the country.

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+Blue is one of the three primary colours of pigments in painting and traditional colour theory, as well as in the RGB colour model. It lies between violet and green on the spectrum of visible light. The eye perceives blue when observing light with a dominant wavelength between approximately 450 and 495 nanometres. Most blues contain a slight mixture of other colours; azure contains some green, while ultramarine contains some violet. The clear daytime sky and the deep sea appear blue because of an optical effect known as Rayleigh scattering. An optical effect called Tyndall scattering explains blue eyes. Distant objects appear more blue because of another optical effect called aerial perspective.
+
+Blue has been an important colour in art and decoration since ancient times. The semi-precious stone lapis lazuli was used in ancient Egypt for jewellery and ornament and later, in the Renaissance, to make the pigment ultramarine, the most expensive of all pigments. In the eighth century Chinese artists used cobalt blue to colour fine blue and white porcelain. In the Middle Ages, European artists used it in the windows of cathedrals. Europeans wore clothing coloured with the vegetable dye woad until it was replaced by the finer indigo from America. In the 19th century, synthetic blue dyes and pigments gradually replaced mineral pigments and synthetic dyes. Dark blue became a common colour for military uniforms and later, in the late 20th century, for business suits. Because blue has commonly been associated with harmony, it was chosen as the colour of the flags of the United Nations and the European Union.[2]
+
+Surveys in the US and Europe show that blue is the colour most commonly associated with harmony, faithfulness, confidence, distance, infinity, the imagination, cold, and sometimes with sadness.[3] In US and European public opinion polls it is the most popular colour, chosen by almost half of both men and women as their favourite colour.[4] The same surveys also showed that blue was the colour most associated with the masculine, just ahead of black, and was also the colour most associated with intelligence, knowledge, calm and concentration.[3]
+
+Blue is the colour of light between violet and green on the visible spectrum. Hues of blue include indigo and ultramarine, closer to violet; pure blue, without any mixture of other colours; Cyan, which is midway in the spectrum between blue and green, and the other blue-greens turquoise, teal, and aquamarine.
+
+Blue also varies in shade or tint; darker shades of blue contain black or grey, while lighter tints contain white. Darker shades of blue include ultramarine, cobalt blue, navy blue, and Prussian blue; while lighter tints include sky blue, azure, and Egyptian blue. (For a more complete list see the List of colours).
+
+Blue pigments were originally made from minerals such as lapis lazuli, cobalt and azurite, and blue dyes were made from plants; usually woad in Europe, and Indigofera tinctoria, or true indigo, in Asia and Africa. Today most blue pigments and dyes are made by a chemical process.
+
+Pure blue, also known as high blue, is not mixed with any other colours
+
+Navy blue, here worn by Admiral Horatio Nelson, is the darkest shade of pure blue
+
+Sky blue or pale azure, mid-way on the RBG colour wheel between blue and cyan
+
+Egyptian blue goblet from Mesopotamia, 1500–1300 BC. This was the first synthetic blue, first made in about 2500 BC.
+
+Extract of natural indigo, the most popular blue dye before the invention of synthetic indigo
+
+A block of lapis lazuli, originally used to make ultramarine
+
+Ultramarine, slightly violet-blue, in a painting by Giovanni Bellini. It was the most expensive pigment of Renaissance.
+
+Cobalt coloured the stained glass windows of Sainte-Chapelle in Paris (1250)
+
+Prussian blue, the colour of the uniforms of the army of Prussia, was invented in about 1706
+
+The modern English word blue comes from Middle English bleu or blewe, from the Old French bleu, a word of Germanic origin, related to the Old High German word blao (meaning shimmering, lustrous).[5] In heraldry, the word azure is used for blue.[6]
+
+In Russian and some other languages, there is no single word for blue, but rather different words for light blue (голубой, goluboy) and dark blue (синий, siniy). See Colour term.
+
+Several languages, including Japanese, Thai, Korean, and Lakota Sioux, use the same word to describe blue and green. For example, in Vietnamese the colour of both tree leaves and the sky is xanh. In Japanese, the word for blue (青 ao) is often used for colours that English speakers would refer to as green, such as the colour of a traffic signal meaning "go". (For more on this subject, see Distinguishing blue from green in language)
+
+Linguistic research indicates that languages do not begin by having a word for the colour blue.[7] Colour names often developed individually in natural languages, typically beginning with black and white (or dark and light), and then adding red, and only much later – usually as the last main category of colour accepted in a language – adding the colour blue, probably when blue pigments could be manufactured reliably in the culture using that language.[7]
+
+Human eyes perceive blue when observing light which has a dominant wavelength of roughly 450–495 nanometres. Blues with a higher frequency and thus a shorter wavelength gradually look more violet, while those with a lower frequency and a longer wavelength gradually appear more green. Pure blue, in the middle, has a wavelength of 470 nanometres.
+
+Isaac Newton included blue as one of the seven colours in his first description the visible spectrum. He chose seven colours because that was the number of notes in the musical scale, which he believed was related to the optical spectrum. He included indigo, the hue between blue and violet, as one of the separate colours, though today it is usually considered a hue of blue.[8]
+
+In painting and traditional colour theory, blue is one of the three primary colours of pigments (red, yellow, blue), which can be mixed to form a wide gamut of colours. Red and blue mixed together form violet, blue and yellow together form green. Mixing all three primary colours together produces a dark grey. From the Renaissance onwards, painters used this system to create their colours. (See RYB colour system.)
+
+The RYB model was used for colour printing by Jacob Christoph Le Blon as early as 1725. Later, printers discovered that more accurate colours could be created by using combinations of magenta, cyan, yellow and black ink, put onto separate inked plates and then overlaid one at a time onto paper. This method could produce almost all the colours in the spectrum with reasonable accuracy.
+
+In the 19th century the Scottish physicist James Clerk Maxwell found a new way of explaining colours, by the wavelength of their light. He showed that white light could be created by combining red, blue and green light, and that virtually all colours could be made by different combinations of these three colours. His idea, called additive colour or the RGB colour model, is used today to create colours on televisions and computer screens. The screen is covered by tiny pixels, each with three fluorescent elements for creating red, green and blue light. If the red, blue and green elements all glow at once, the pixel looks white. As the screen is scanned from behind with electrons, each pixel creates its own designated colour, composing a complete picture on the screen.
+
+Additive colour mixing. The projection of primary colour lights on a screen shows secondary colours where two overlap; the combination red, green, and blue each in full intensity makes white.
+
+Blue and orange pixels on an LCD television screen. Closeup of the red, green and blue sub-pixels on left.
+
+On the HSV colour wheel, the complement of blue is yellow; that is, a colour corresponding to an equal mixture of red and green light. On a colour wheel based on traditional colour theory (RYB) where blue was considered a primary colour, its complementary colour is considered to be orange (based on the Munsell colour wheel).[9]
+
+Blue pigments were made from minerals, especially lapis lazuli and azurite (Cu3(CO3)2(OH)2). These minerals were crushed, ground into powder, and then mixed with a quick-drying binding agent, such as egg yolk (tempera painting); or with a slow-drying oil, such as linseed oil, for oil painting. To make blue stained glass, cobalt blue (cobalt(II) aluminate: CoAl2O4)pigment was mixed with the glass. Other common blue pigments made from minerals are ultramarine (Na8–10Al6Si6O24S2–4), cerulean blue (primarily cobalt (II) stanate: Co2SnO4), and Prussian blue (milori blue: primarily Fe7(CN)18).
+
+Natural dyes to colour cloth and tapestries were made from plants. Woad and true indigo were used to produce indigo dye used to colour fabrics blue or indigo. Since the 18th century, natural blue dyes have largely been replaced by synthetic dyes.
+
+"Reflex blue" used to be the name of a common blue pigment in ink manufacturing.
+In the 1960s, the name was adopted into the proprietary Pantone Matching System (PMS) to refer to this specific pigment. Pantone "Reflex Blue" has the particularity of being identified only by this name, and not by a number code.[10]
+
+Lapis lazuli, mined in Afghanistan for more than three thousand years, was used for jewellery and ornaments, and later was crushed and powdered and used as a pigment. The more it was ground, the lighter the blue colour became.
+
+Azurite, a common mineral, was used as a pigment from ancient times, although it degrades readily and thus inferior.
+
+Natural ultramarine, made by grinding and purifying lapis lazuli, was the finest available blue pigment in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. It was extremely expensive, and in Italian Renaissance art, it was often reserved for the robes of the Virgin Mary.
+
+Egyptian blue, the first artificial pigment, produced in the third millennium BC in Ancient Egypt by grinding sand, copper and natron, and then heating them. It was often used in tomb paintings and funereal objects to protect the dead in their afterlife.
+
+Ground azurite was often in Renaissance used as a substitute for the much more expensive lapis lazuli. It made a rich blue, but was unstable and could turn dark green over time.
+
+Cerulean, produced by combining  copper and cobalt oxide, is used to make a sky blue colour. Like azurite, it is not a long-lived pigment.
+
+Cobalt blue. Cobalt is used to make the deep blue stained glass windows, such as those in Gothic cathedrals.  It is used in Chinese porcelain beginning in the T'ang Dynasty. In 1799 a French chemist, Louis Jacques Thénard, made a synthetic cobalt blue pigment which became immensely popular with painters.
+
+Indigo dye originally isolated from the woad, Indigofera tinctoria, a plant common in Asia and Africa but little known in Europe until the 15th century. Its importation into Europe revolutionised the colour of clothing. It also became the colour used in blue denim and jeans. Nearly all indigo dye produced today is synthetic.
+
+Chemical structure of indigo dye, a widely produced blue dye. Blue jeans consist of 1–3% by weight of this organic compound.
+
+Synthetic ultramarine pigment, invented in 1826, has the same chemical composition as natural ultramarine but is more vivid.
+
+First produced in the 1930s, the intensely blue copper phthalocyanine is widely used for making blue ink, dye, and pigment.
+
+Prussian blue, FeIII4[FeII(CN)6]3, is the blue of blueprints.
+
+Of the colours in the visible spectrum of light, blue has a very short wavelength, while red has the longest wavelength. When sunlight passes through the atmosphere, the blue wavelengths are scattered more widely by the oxygen and nitrogen molecules, and more blue comes to our eyes. This effect is called Rayleigh scattering, after Lord Rayleigh, the British physicist who discovered it. It was confirmed by Albert Einstein in 1911.[11]
+
+Near sunrise and sunset, most of the light we see comes in nearly tangent to the Earth's surface, so that the light's path through the atmosphere is so long that much of the blue and even green light is scattered out, leaving the sun rays and the clouds it illuminates red. Therefore, when looking at the sunset and sunrise, the colour red is more perceptible than any of the other colours.[12]
+
+The sea is seen as blue for largely the same reason: the water absorbs the longer wavelengths of red and reflects and scatters the blue, which comes to the eye of the viewer. The colour of the sea is also affected by the colour of the sky, reflected by particles in the water; and by algae and plant life in the water, which can make it look green; or by sediment, which can make it look brown.[13]
+
+The farther away an object is, the more blue it often appears to the eye. For example, mountains in the distance often appear blue. This is the effect of atmospheric perspective; the farther an object is away from the viewer, the less contrast there is between the object and its background colour, which is usually blue. In a painting where different parts of the composition are blue, green and red, the blue will appear to be more distant, and the red closer to the viewer. The cooler a colour is, the more distant it seems.[14]
+
+Blue light is scattered more than other wavelengths by the gases in the atmosphere, giving the Earth a blue halo when seen from space.
+
+An example of aerial, or atmospheric perspective. Objects become more blue and lighter in colour the farther they are from the viewer, because of Rayleigh scattering.
+
+Under the sea, red and other light with longer wavelengths is absorbed, so white objects appear blue. The deeper the observer goes, the darker the blue becomes. In the open sea, only about one per cent of light penetrates to a depth of 200 metres. (See underwater and euphotic depth)
+
+Blue giants are hot and luminous stars with surface temperatures exceeding 10,000 K. The largest blue supergiant stars are extremely massive and energetic, and are usually unstable. They are generally short-lived, either exploding in a supernova or periodically shedding their outer layers to become red giants.
+
+Blue eyes do not actually contain any blue pigment. Eye colour is determined by two factors: the pigmentation of the eye's iris[15][16] and the scattering of light by the turbid medium in the stroma of the iris.[17] In humans, the pigmentation of the iris varies from light brown to black. The appearance of blue, green, and hazel eyes results from the Tyndall scattering of light in the stroma, an optical effect similar to what accounts for the blueness of the sky.[17][18] The irises of the eyes of people with blue eyes contain less dark melanin than those of people with brown eyes, which means that they absorb less short-wavelength blue light, which is instead reflected out to the viewer. Eye colour also varies depending on the lighting conditions, especially for lighter-coloured eyes.
+
+Blue eyes are most common in Ireland, the Baltic Sea area and Northern Europe,[19] and are also found in Eastern, Central, and Southern Europe. Blue eyes are also found in parts of Western Asia, most notably in Afghanistan, Syria, Iraq, and Iran.[20] In Estonia, 99% of people have blue eyes.[21][22] In Denmark 30 years ago, only 8% of the population had brown eyes, though through immigration, today that number is about 11%. In Germany, about 75% have blue eyes.[22]
+
+In the United States, as of 2006, one out of every six people, or 16.6% of the total population, and 22.3% of the white population, have blue eyes, compared with about half of Americans born in 1900, and a third of Americans born in 1950. Blue eyes are becoming less common among American children. In the US, boys are 3–5 per cent more likely to have blue eyes than girls.[19]
+
+Lasers emitting in the blue region of the spectrum became widely available to the public in 2010 with the release of inexpensive high-powered 445–447 nm laser diode technology.[23] Previously the blue wavelengths were accessible only through DPSS which are comparatively expensive and inefficient, however these technologies are still widely used by the scientific community for applications including optogenetics, Raman spectroscopy, and particle image velocimetry, due to their superior beam quality.[24] Blue gas lasers are also still commonly used for holography, DNA sequencing, optical pumping, and other scientific and medical applications.
+
+Blue was a latecomer among colours used in art and decoration, as well as language and literature.[25] Reds, blacks, browns, and ochres are found in cave paintings from the Upper Paleolithic period, but not blue. Blue was also not used for dyeing fabric until long after red, ochre, pink and purple. This is probably due to the perennial difficulty of making good blue dyes and pigments.[26] The earliest known blue dyes were made from plants – woad in Europe, indigo in Asia and Africa, while blue pigments were made from minerals, usually either lapis lazuli or azurite.
+
+Lapis lazuli, a semi-precious stone, has been mined in Afghanistan for more than three thousand years, and was exported to all parts of the ancient world.[27] In Iran and Mesopotamia, it was used to make jewellery and vessels. In Egypt, it was used for the eyebrows on the funeral mask of King Tutankhamun (1341–1323 BC).[28] Importing lapis lazuli by caravan across the desert from Afghanistan to Egypt was very expensive. Beginning in about 2500 BC, the ancient Egyptians began to produce their own blue pigment known as Egyptian blue by grinding silica, lime, copper, and alkalai, and heating it to 800 or 900 °C (1,470 or 1,650 °F). This is considered the first synthetic pigment.[29] Egyptian blue was used to paint wood, papyrus and canvas, and was used to colour a glaze to make faience beads, inlays, and pots. It was particularly used in funeral statuary and figurines and in tomb paintings. Blue was considered a beneficial colour which would protect the dead against evil in the afterlife. Blue dye was also used to colour the cloth in which mummies were wrapped.[30]
+
+In Egypt blue was associated with the sky and with divinity. The Egyptian god Amun could make his skin blue so that he could fly, invisible, across the sky. Blue could also protect against evil; many people around the Mediterranean still wear a blue amulet, representing the eye of God, to protect them from misfortune.[31] Blue glass was manufactured in Mesopotamia and Egypt as early as 2500 BC, using the same copper ingredients as Egyptian blue pigment. They also added cobalt, which produced a deeper blue, the same blue produced in the Middle Ages in the stained glass windows of the cathedrals of Saint-Denis and Chartres.[32] The Ishtar Gate of ancient Babylon (604–562 BC) was decorated with deep blue glazed bricks used as a background for pictures of lions, dragons and aurochs.[33]
+
+The ancient Greeks classified colours by whether they were light or dark, rather than by their hue. The Greek word for dark blue, kyaneos, could also mean dark green, violet, black or brown. The ancient Greek word for a light blue, glaukos, also could mean light green, grey, or yellow.[34] The Greeks imported indigo dye from India, calling it indikon. They used Egyptian blue in the wall paintings of Knossos, in Crete, (2100 BC). It was not one of the four primary colours for Greek painting described by Pliny the Elder (red, yellow, black, and white), but nonetheless it was used as a background colour behind the friezes on Greek temples and to colour the beards of Greek statues.[35]
+
+The Romans also imported indigo dye, but blue was the colour of working class clothing; the nobles and rich wore white, black, red or violet. Blue was considered the colour of mourning, and the colour of barbarians. Julius Caesar reported that the Celts and Germans dyed their faces blue to frighten their enemies, and tinted their hair blue when they grew old.[36] Nonetheless, the Romans made extensive use of blue for decoration. According to Vitruvius, they made dark blue pigment from indigo, and imported Egyptian blue pigment. The walls of Roman villas in Pompeii had frescoes of brilliant blue skies, and blue pigments were found in the shops of colour merchants.[35] The Romans had many different words for varieties of blue, including caeruleus, caesius, glaucus, cyaneus, lividus, venetus, aerius, and ferreus, but two words, both of foreign origin, became the most enduring; blavus, from the Germanic word blau, which eventually became bleu or blue; and azureus, from the Arabic word lazaward, which became azure.[37]
+
+Lapis lazuli pendant from Mesopotamia (c. 2900 BC).
+
+A lapis lazuli bowl from Iran (End of 3rd, beginning 2nd millennium BC)
+
+A hippopotamus decorated with aquatic plants, made of faience with a blue glaze, made to resemble lapis lazuli. (2033–1710 BC)
+
+Egyptian blue colour in a tomb painting (c. 1500 BC)
+
+Egyptian faience bowl (c. 1550 and 1450 BC)
+
+a decorated cobalt glass vessel from Ancient Egypt (1450–1350 BC)
+
+Figure of a servant from the tomb of King Seth I (1244–1279 BC). The figure is made of faience with a blue glaze, designed to resemble turquoise.
+
+A lion against a blue background from the Ishtar Gate of ancient Babylon. (575 BC)
+
+A Roman wall painting of Venus and her son Eros, from Pompeii (about 30 BC)
+
+Mural in the bedroom of the villa of Fannius Synestor in Boscoreale, (50–40 BC) in the Metropolitan Museum.
+
+A painted pottery pot coloured with Han blue from the Han Dynasty in China (206 BC to 220 AD).
+
+A tomb painting from the eastern Han Dynasty (25–220 AD) in Henan Province, China.
+
+Dark blue was widely used in the decoration of churches in the Byzantine Empire. In Byzantine art Christ and the Virgin Mary usually wore dark blue or purple. Blue was used as a background colour representing the sky in the magnificent mosaics which decorated Byzantine churches.[38]
+
+In the Islamic world, blue was of secondary importance to green, believed to be the favourite colour of the Prophet Mohammed. At certain times in Moorish Spain and other parts of the Islamic world, blue was the colour worn by Christians and Jews, because only Muslims were allowed to wear white and green.[39] Dark blue and turquoise decorative tiles were widely used to decorate the facades and interiors of mosques and palaces from Spain to Central Asia. Lapis lazuli pigment was also used to create the rich blues in Persian miniatures.
+
+Blue Byzantine mosaic ceiling representing the night sky in the Mausoleum of Galla Placidia in Ravenna, Italy (5th century).
+
+Blue mosaic in the cloak of Christ in the Hagia Sophia church in Istanbul (13th century).
+
+Glazed stone-paste bowl from Persia (12th century).
+
+Blue tile on the facade of the Friday Mosque in Herat, Afghanistan (15th century).
+
+Persian miniature from the 16th century.
+
+Decoration in the Murat III hall of the Topkapi Palace in Istanbul (16th century).
+
+Flower-pattern tile from Iznik, Turkey, from the second half of the 16th century.
+
+In the art and life of Europe during the early Middle Ages, blue played a minor role. The nobility wore red or purple, while only the poor wore blue clothing, coloured with poor-quality dyes made from the woad plant. Blue played no part in the rich costumes of the clergy or the architecture or decoration of churches. This changed dramatically between 1130 and 1140 in Paris, when the Abbe Suger rebuilt the Saint Denis Basilica. He installed stained glass windows coloured with cobalt, which, combined with the light from the red glass, filled the church with a bluish violet light. The church became the marvel of the Christian world, and the colour became known as the "bleu de Saint-Denis". In the years that followed even more elegant blue stained glass windows were installed in other churches, including at Chartres Cathedral and Sainte-Chapelle in Paris.[40]
+
+Another important factor in the increased prestige of the colour blue in the 12th century was the veneration of the Virgin Mary, and a change in the colours used to depict her clothing. In earlier centuries her robes had usually been painted in sombre black, grey, violet, dark green or dark blue. In the 12th century the Roman Catholic Church dictated that painters in Italy (and the rest of Europe consequently) to paint the Virgin Mary with the new most expensive pigment imported from Asia; ultramarine.[citation needed] Blue became associated with holiness, humility and virtue.
+
+Ultramarine was made from lapis lazuli, from the mines of Badakshan, in the mountains of Afghanistan, near the source of the Oxus River. The mines were visited by Marco Polo in about 1271; he reported, "here is found a high mountain from which they extract the finest and most beautiful of blues." Ground lapis was used in Byzantine manuscripts as early as the 6th century, but it was impure and varied greatly in colour. Ultramarine refined out the impurities through a long and difficult process, creating a rich and deep blue. It was called bleu outremer in French and blu oltremare in Italian, since it came from the other side of the sea. It cost far more than any other colour, and it became the luxury colour for the Kings and Princes of Europe.[41]
+
+King Louis IX of France, better known as Saint Louis (1214–1270), became the first king of France to regularly dress in blue. This was copied by other nobles. Paintings of the mythical King Arthur began to show him dressed in blue. The coat of arms of the kings of France became an azure or light blue shield, sprinkled with golden fleur-de-lis or lilies. Blue had come from obscurity to become the royal colour.[42]
+
+Once blue became the colour of the king, it also became the colour of the wealthy and powerful in Europe. In the Middle Ages in France and to some extent in Italy, the dyeing of blue cloth was subject to license from the crown or state. In Italy, the dyeing of blue was assigned to a specific guild, the tintori di guado, and could not be done by anyone else without severe penalty. The wearing of blue implied some dignity and some wealth.[43]
+
+Besides ultramarine, several other blues were widely used in the Middle Ages and later in the Renaissance. Azurite, a form of copper carbonate, was often used as a substitute for ultramarine. The Romans used it under the name lapis armenius, or Armenian stone. The British called it azure of Amayne, or German azure. The Germans themselves called it bergblau, or mountain stone. It was mined in France, Hungary, Spain and Germany, and it made a pale blue with a hint of green, which was ideal for painting skies. It was a favourite background colour of the German painter Albrecht Dürer.[44]
+
+Another blue often used in the Middle Ages was called tournesol or folium. It was made from the plant Crozophora tinctoria, which grew in the south of France. It made a fine transparent blue valued in medieval manuscripts.[45]
+
+Another common blue pigment was smalt, which was made by grinding blue cobalt glass into a fine powder. It made a deep violet blue similar to ultramarine, and was vivid in frescoes, but it lost some of its brilliance in oil paintings. It became especially popular in the 17th century, when ultramarine was difficult to obtain. It was employed at times by Titian, Tintoretto, Veronese, El Greco, Van Dyck, Rubens and Rembrandt.[46]
+
+Stained glass windows of the Basilica of Saint Denis (1141–1144).
+
+Notre Dame de la Belle Verrière window, Chartres Cathedral. (1180–1225).
+
+Detail of the windows at Sainte-Chapelle (1250).
+
+The Maesta by Duccio (1308) showed the Virgin Mary in a robe painted with ultramarine. Blue became the colour of holiness, virtue and humility.
+
+In the 12th century blue became part of the royal coat of arms of France.
+
+The Wilton Diptych, made for King Richard II of England, made lavish use of ultramarine. (About 1400)
+
+The Coronation of King Louis VIII of France in 1223 showed that blue had become the royal colour. (painted in 1450).
+
+In the Renaissance, a revolution occurred in painting; artists began to paint the world as it was actually seen, with perspective, depth, shadows, and light from a single source. Artists had to adapt their use of blue to the new rules. In medieval paintings, blue was used to attract the attention of the viewer to the Virgin Mary, and identify her. In Renaissance paintings, artists tried to create harmonies between blue and red, lightening the blue with lead white paint and adding shadows and highlights. Raphael was a master of this technique, carefully balancing the reds and the blues so no one colour dominated the picture.[47]
+
+Ultramarine was the most prestigious blue of the Renaissance, and patrons sometimes specified that it be used in paintings they commissioned. The contract for the Madone des Harpies by Andrea del Sarto (1514) required that the robe of the Virgin Mary be coloured with ultramarine costing "at least five good florins an ounce."[48] Good ultramarine was more expensive than gold; in 1508 the German painter Albrecht Dürer reported in a letter that he had paid twelve ducats – the equivalent of forty-one grams of gold – for just thirty grams of ultramarine.[49]
+
+Often painters or clients saved money by using less expensive blues, such as azurite smalt, or pigments made with indigo, but this sometimes caused problems. Pigments made from azurite were less expensive, but tended to turn dark and green with time. An example is the robe of the Virgin Mary in The Madonna and Child Enthroned with Saints by Raphael in the Metropolitan Museum in New York. The Virgin Mary's azurite blue robe has degraded into a greenish-black.[50]
+
+The introduction of oil painting changed the way colours looked and how they were used. Ultramarine pigment, for instance, was much darker when used in oil painting than when used in tempera painting, in frescoes. To balance their colours, Renaissance artists like Raphael added white to lighten the ultramarine. The sombre dark blue robe of the Virgin Mary became a brilliant sky blue.[51] Titian created his rich blues by using many thin glazes of paint of different blues and violets which allowed the light to pass through, which made a complex and luminous colour, like stained glass. He also used layers of finely ground or coarsely ground ultramarine, which gave subtle variations to the blue.[52]
+
+Giotto was one of the first Italian Renaissance painters to use ultramarine, here in the murals of the Arena Chapel in Padua (circa 1305).
+
+Throughout the 14th and 15th centuries, the robes of the Virgin Mary were painted with ultramarine. This is The Virgin of Humility by Fra Angelico (about 1430). Blue fills the picture.
+
+In the Madonna of the Meadow (1506), Raphael used white to soften the ultramarine blue of Virgin Mary's robes to balance the red and blue, and to harmonise with the rest of the picture.
+
+Titian used an ultramarine sky and robes to give depth and brilliance to his Bacchus and Ariadne (1520–1523)
+
+In this painting of The Madonna and Child Enthroned with Saints an early work by Raphael in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the blue cloak of the Virgin Mary has turned a green-black. It was painted with less-expensive azurite.
+
+Glazed Terracotta of The Virgin Adoring the Christ Child, from the workshop of Andrea della Robbia (1483)
+
+The Très Riches Heures du Duc de Berry was the most important illuminated manuscript of the 15th century. The blue was the extravagantly expensive ultramarine.
+
+In about the 9th century, Chinese artisans abandoned the Han blue colour they had used for centuries, and began to use cobalt blue, made with cobalt salts of alumina, to manufacture fine blue and white porcelain, The plates and vases were shaped, dried, the paint applied with a brush, covered with a clear glaze, then fired at a high temperature. Beginning in the 14th century, this type of porcelain was exported in large quantity to Europe where it inspired a whole style of art, called Chinoiserie. European courts tried for many years to imitate Chinese blue and white porcelain, but only succeeded in the 18th century after a missionary brought the secret back from China.
+
+Other famous white and blue patterns appeared in Delft, Meissen, Staffordshire, and Saint Petersburg, Russia.
+
+Chinese blue and white porcelain from about 1335, made in Jingdezhen, the porcelain centre of China. Exported to Europe, this porcelain launched the style of Chinoiserie.
+
+A soft-paste porcelain vase made in Rouen, France, at the end of the 17th century, imitating Chinese blue and white.
+
+Eighteenth century blue and white pottery from Delft, in the Netherlands.
+
+Russian porcelain of the cobalt net pattern, made with cobalt blue pigment. The Imperial Porcelain Factory in Saint Petersburg was founded in 1744. This pattern, first produced in 1949, was copied after a design made for Catherine the Great.
+
+While blue was an expensive and prestigious colour in European painting, it became a common colour for clothing during the Renaissance. The rise of the colour blue in fashion in the 12th and 13th centuries led to a blue dye industry in several cities, notably Amiens, Toulouse, and Erfurt. They made a dye called pastel from woad, a plant common in Europe, which had been used to make blue dye by the Celts and German tribes. Blue became a colour worn by domestics and artisans, not just nobles. In 1570, when Pope Pius V listed the colours that could be used for ecclesiastical dress and for altar decoration, he excluded blue, because he considered it too common.[54]
+
+The process of making blue with woad was long and noxious – it involved soaking the leaves of the plant for from three days to a week in human urine, ideally urine from men who had been drinking a great deal of alcohol, which was said to improve the colour. The fabric was then soaked for a day in the resulting mixture, then put out in the sun, where as it dried it turned blue.[54]
+
+The pastel industry was threatened in the 15th century by the arrival from India of the same dye (indigo), obtained from a shrub widely grown in Asia. The Asian indigo dye precursors is more readily obtained. In 1498, Vasco da Gama opened a trade route to import indigo from India to Europe. In India, the indigo leaves were soaked in water, fermented, pressed into cakes, dried into bricks, then carried to the ports London, Marseille, Genoa, and Bruges. Later, in the 17th century, the British, Spanish, and Dutch established indigo plantations in Jamaica, South Carolina, the Virgin Islands and South America, and began to import American indigo to Europe.
+
+The countries with large and prosperous pastel industries tried to block the use of indigo. One government in Germany outlawed the use of indigo in 1577, describing it as a "pernicious, deceitful and corrosive substance, the Devil's dye."[55][56] In France, Henry IV, in an edict of 1609, forbade under pain of death the use of "the false and pernicious Indian drug".[57] It was forbidden in England until 1611, when British traders established their own indigo industry in India and began to import it into Europe.[58]
+
+The efforts to block indigo were in vain; the quality of indigo blue was too high and the price too low for pastel made from woad to compete. In 1737 both the French and German governments finally allowed the use of indigo. This ruined the dye industries in Toulouse and the other cities that produced pastel, but created a thriving new indigo commerce to seaports such as Bordeaux, Nantes and Marseille.[59]
+
+Another war of the blues took place at the end of the 19th century, between indigo and synthetic indigo, discovered in 1868 by the German chemist Johann Friedrich Wilhelm Adolf von Baeyer. The German chemical firm BASF put the new dye on the market in 1897, in direct competition with the British-run indigo industry in India, which produced most of the world's indigo. In 1897 Britain sold ten thousand tons of natural indigo on the world market, while BASF sold six hundred tons of synthetic indigo. The British industry cut prices and reduced the salaries of its workers, but it was unable to compete; the synthetic indigo was more pure, made a more lasting blue, and was not dependent upon good or bad harvests. In 1911, India sold only 660 tons of natural indigo, while BASF sold 22,000 tons of synthetic indigo. In 2002, more than 38,000 tons of synthetic indigo was produced, often for the production of blue jeans.[60]
+
+Isatis tinctoria, or woad, was the main source of blue dye in Europe from ancient times until the arrival of indigo from Asia and America. It was processed into a paste called pastel.
+
+A woad mill in Thuringia, in Germany, in 1752. The woad industry was already on its way to extinction, unable to compete with indigo blue.
+
+A Dutch tapestry from 1495 to 1505. The blue colour comes from woad.
+
+Indigofera tinctoria, a tropical shrub, is the main source of indigo dye. The chemical composition of indigo dye is the same as that of woad, but the colour is more intense.
+
+Cakes of indigo. The leaf has been soaked in water, fermented, mixed with lye or another base, then pressed into cakes and dried, ready for export.
+
+In the 17th century, Frederick William, Elector of Brandenburg, was one of the first rulers to give his army blue uniforms. The reasons were economic; the German states were trying to protect their pastel dye industry against competition from imported indigo dye. When Brandenburg became the Kingdom of Prussia in 1701, the uniform colour was adopted by the Prussian army. Most German soldiers wore dark blue uniforms until the First World War, with the exception of the Bavarians, who wore light blue.[61]
+
+Thanks in part to the availability of indigo dye, the 18th century saw the widespread use of blue military uniforms. Prior to 1748, British naval officers simply wore upper-class civilian clothing and wigs. In 1748, the British uniform for naval officers was officially established as an embroidered coat of the colour then called marine blue, now known as navy blue.[62] When the Continental Navy of the United States was created in 1775, it largely copied the British uniform and colour.
+
+In the late 18th century, the blue uniform became a symbol of liberty and revolution. In October 1774, even before the United States declared its independence, George Mason and one hundred Virginia neighbours of George Washington organised a voluntary militia unit (the Fairfax County Independent Company of Volunteers) and elected Washington the honorary commander. For their uniforms they chose blue and buff, the colours of the Whig Party, the opposition party in England, whose policies were supported by George Washington and many other patriots in the American colonies.[63][64]
+
+When the Continental Army was established in 1775 at the outbreak of the American Revolution, the first Continental Congress declared that the official uniform colour would be brown, but this was not popular with many militias, whose officers were already wearing blue. In 1778 the Congress asked George Washington to design a new uniform, and in 1779 Washington made the official colour of all uniforms blue and buff. Blue continued to be the colour of the field uniform of the US Army until 1902, and is still the colour of the dress uniform.[65]
+
+In France the Gardes Françaises, the elite regiment which protected Louis XVI, wore dark blue uniforms with red trim. In 1789, the soldiers gradually changed their allegiance from the king to the people, and they played a leading role in the storming of the Bastille. After the fall of Bastille, a new armed force, the Garde Nationale, was formed under the command of the Marquis de Lafayette, who had served with George Washington in America. Lafayette gave the Garde Nationale dark blue uniforms similar to those of the Continental Army. Blue became the colour of the revolutionary armies, opposed to the white uniforms of the Royalists and the Austrians.[66]
+
+Napoleon Bonaparte abandoned many of the doctrines of the French Revolution but he kept blue as the uniform colour for his army, although he had great difficulty obtaining the blue dye, since the British controlled the seas and blocked the importation of indigo to France. Napoleon was forced to dye uniforms with woad, which had an inferior blue colour.[67] The French army wore a dark blue uniform coat with red trousers until 1915, when it was found to be a too visible target on the battlefields of World War I. It was replaced with uniforms of a light blue-grey colour called horizon blue.
+
+Blue was the colour of liberty and revolution in the 18th century, but in the 19th it increasingly became the colour of government authority, the uniform colour of policemen and other public servants. It was considered serious and authoritative, without being menacing. In 1829, when Robert Peel created the first London Metropolitan Police, he made the colour of the uniform jacket a dark, almost black blue, to make the policemen look different from the red coated soldiers, who had on occasion been used to enforce order. The traditional blue jacket with silver buttons of the London "bobbie" was not abandoned until the mid-1990s, when it was replaced for all but formal occasions by a jumper or sweater of the colour officially known as NATO blue.[68]
+
+The New York City Police Department, modelled after the London Metropolitan Police, was created in 1844, and in 1853, they were officially given a navy blue uniform, the colour they wear today.[69]
+
+Navy blue is one of the most popular school uniform colours, with the Toronto Catholic District School Board adopting a dress code policy which requires students system-wide to wear white tops and navy blue bottoms.
+
+Elector Frederic William of Brandenburg gave his soldiers blue uniforms (engraving from 1698). When Brandenburg became the Kingdom of Prussia in 1701, blue became the uniform colour of the Prussian Army.
+
+Uniform of a lieutenant in the Royal Navy (1777). Marine blue became the official colour of the Royal Navy uniform coat in 1748.
+
+George Washington chose blue and buff as the colours of the Continental Army uniform. They were the colours of the English Whig Party, which Washington admired.
+
+The Marquis de Lafayette in the uniform of the Garde Nationale during the French Revolution (1790).
+
+The cadets of the Ecole Spéciale Militaire de Saint-Cyr, the French military academy, still wear the blue and red uniform of the French army before 1915.
+
+Metropolitan Police officers in Soho, London (2007).
+
+New York City police officers on Times Square (2010)
+
+During the 17th and 18th centuries, chemists in Europe tried to discover a way to create synthetic blue pigments, avoiding the expense of importing and grinding lapis lazuli, azurite and other minerals. The Egyptians had created a synthetic colour, Egyptian blue, three thousand years BC, but the formula had been lost. The Chinese had also created synthetic pigments, but the formula was not known in the west.
+
+In 1709 a German druggist and pigment maker named Johann Jacob Diesbach accidentally discovered a new blue while experimenting with potassium and iron sulphides. The new colour was first called Berlin blue, but later became known as Prussian blue. By 1710 it was being used by the French painter Antoine Watteau, and later his successor Nicolas Lancret. It became immensely popular for the manufacture of wallpaper, and in the 19th century was widely used by French impressionist painters.[70]
+
+Beginning in the 1820s, Prussian blue was imported into Japan through the port of Nagasaki. It was called bero-ai, or Berlin blue, and it became popular because it did not fade like traditional Japanese blue pigment, ai-gami, made from the dayflower. Prussian blue was used by both Hokusai, in his famous wave paintings, and Hiroshige.[71]
+
+In 1824 the Societé pour l'Encouragement d'Industrie in France offered a prize for the invention of an artificial ultramarine which could rival the natural colour made from lapis lazuli. The prize was won in 1826 by a chemist named Jean Baptiste Guimet, but he refused to reveal the formula of his colour. In 1828, another scientist, Christian Gmelin then a professor of chemistry in Tübingen, found the process and published his formula. This was the beginning of new industry to manufacture artificial ultramarine, which eventually almost completely replaced the natural product.[72]
+
+In 1878 a German chemist named a. Von Baeyer discovered a synthetic substitute for indigotine, the active ingredient of indigo. This product gradually replaced natural indigo, and after the end of the First World War, it brought an end to the trade of indigo from the East and West Indies.
+
+In 1901 a new synthetic blue dye, called Indanthrone blue, was invented, which had even greater resistance to fading during washing or in the sun. This dye gradually replaced artificial indigo, whose production ceased in about 1970. Today almost all blue clothing is dyed with an indanthrone blue.[73]
+
+Thomas Gainsborough's The Blue Boy includes "the lavish lapis lazuli, the darker indigo pigment and the paler cobalt."[74]
+
+The 19th-century Japanese woodblock artist Hokusai used Prussian blue, a synthetic colour imported from Europe, in his wave paintings, such as in The Great Wave off Kanagawa.
+
+A synthetic indigo dye factory in Germany in 1890. The manufacture of this dye ended the trade in indigo from America and India that had begun in the 15th century.
+
+The invention of new synthetic pigments in the 18th and 19th centuries considerably brightened and expanded the palette of painters. J. M. W. Turner experimented with the new cobalt blue, and of the twenty colours most used by the Impressionists, twelve were new and synthetic colours, including cobalt blue, ultramarine and cerulean blue.[75]
+
+Another important influence on painting in the 19th century was the theory of complementary colours, developed by the French chemist Michel Eugene Chevreul in 1828 and published in 1839. He demonstrated that placing complementary colours, such as blue and yellow-orange or ultramarine and yellow, next to each other heightened the intensity of each colour "to the apogee of their tonality."[76] In 1879 an American physicist, Ogden Rood, published a book charting the complementary colours of each colour in the spectrum.[77] This principle of painting was used by Claude Monet in his Impression – Sunrise – Fog (1872), where he put a vivid blue next to a bright orange sun, (1872) and in Régate à Argenteuil (1872), where he painted an orange sun against blue water. The colours brighten each other. Renoir used the same contrast of cobalt blue water and an orange sun in Canotage sur la Seine (1879–1880). Both Monet and Renoir liked to use pure colours, without any blending.[75]
+
+Monet and the impressionists were among the first to observe that shadows were full of colour. In his La Gare Saint-Lazare, the grey smoke, vapour and dark shadows are actually composed of mixtures of bright pigment, including cobalt blue, cerulean blue, synthetic ultramarine, emerald green, Guillet green, chrome yellow, vermilion and ecarlate red.[78] Blue was a favourite colour of the impressionist painters, who used it not just to depict nature but to create moods, feelings and atmospheres. Cobalt blue, a pigment of cobalt oxide-aluminium oxide, was a favourite of Auguste Renoir and Vincent van Gogh. It was similar to smalt, a pigment used for centuries to make blue glass, but it was much improved by the French chemist Louis Jacques Thénard, who introduced it in 1802. It was very stable but extremely expensive. Van Gogh wrote to his brother Theo, "'Cobalt [blue] is a divine colour and there is nothing so beautiful for putting atmosphere around things ..."[79]
+
+Van Gogh described to his brother Theo how he composed a sky: "The dark blue sky is spotted with clouds of an even darker blue than the fundamental blue of intense cobalt, and others of a lighter blue, like the bluish white of the Milky Way ... the sea was very dark ultramarine, the shore a sort of violet and of light red as I see it, and on the dunes, a few bushes of prussian blue."[80]
+
+Claude Monet used several recently invented colours in his Gare Saint-Lazare (1877). He used cobalt blue, invented in 1807, cerulean blue invented in 1860, and French ultramarine, first made in 1828.
+
+The Umbrellas, by Pierre Auguste-Renoir. (1881 and 1885). Renoir used cobalt blue for right side of the picture, but used the new synthetic ultramarine introduced in the 1870s, when he added two figures to left of the picture a few years later.
+
+In Vincent van Gogh's Irises, the blue irises are placed against their complementary colour, yellow-orange.
+
+Van Gogh's Starry Night Over the Rhône (1888). Blue used to create a mood or atmosphere. A cobalt blue sky, and cobalt or ultramarine water.
+
+Wheatfield Under Thunderclouds (July 1890), one of the last paintings by Vincent van Gogh. He wrote of cobalt blue, "there is nothing so beautiful for putting atmosphere around things."
+
+Blue had first become the high fashion colour of the wealthy and powerful in Europe in the 13th century, when it was worn by Louis IX of France, better known as Saint Louis (1214–1270). Wearing blue implied dignity and wealth, and blue clothing was restricted to the nobility.[81] However, blue was replaced by black as the power colour in the 14th century, when European princes, and then merchants and bankers, wanted to show their seriousness, dignity and devoutness (see Black).
+
+Blue gradually returned to court fashion in the 17th century, as part of a palette of peacock-bright colours shown off in extremely elaborate costumes. The modern blue business suit has its roots in England in the middle of the 17th century. Following the London plague of 1665 and the London fire of 1666, King Charles II of England ordered that his courtiers wear simple coats, waistcoats and breeches, and the palette of colours became blue, grey, white and buff. Widely imitated, this style of men's fashion became almost a uniform of the London merchant class and the English country gentleman.[82]
+
+During the American Revolution, the leader of the Whig Party in England, Charles James Fox, wore a blue coat and buff waistcoat and breeches, the colours of the Whig Party and of the uniform of George Washington, whose principles he supported. The men's suit followed the basic form of the military uniforms of the time, particularly the uniforms of the cavalry.[82]
+
+In the early 19th century, during the Regency of the future King George IV, the blue suit was revolutionised by a courtier named George Beau Brummel. Brummel created a suit that closely fitted the human form. The new style had a long tail coat cut to fit the body and long tight trousers to replace the knee-length breeches and stockings of the previous century. He used plain colours, such as blue and grey, to concentrate attention on the form of the body, not the clothes. Brummel observed, "If people turn to look at you in the street, you are not well dressed."[83] This fashion was adopted by the Prince Regent, then by London society and the upper classes. Originally the coat and trousers were different colours, but in the 19th century the suit of a single colour became fashionable. By the late 19th century the black suit had become the uniform of businessmen in England and America. In the 20th century, the black suit was largely replaced by the dark blue or grey suit.[82]
+
+King Louis IX of France (on the right, with Pope Innocent) was the first European king to wear blue. It quickly became the colour of the nobles and wealthy.
+
+Joseph Leeson, later 1st Earl of Milltown, in the typical dress of the English country gentleman in the 1730s.
+
+Charles James Fox, a leader of the Whig Party in England, wore a blue suit in Parliament in support of George Washington and the American Revolution. Portrait by Joshua Reynolds (1782).
+
+Beau Brummel introduced the ancestor of the modern blue suit, shaped to the body. (1805).
+
+Man's suit, 1826. Dark blue suits were still rare; this one is blue-green or teal.
+
+Man's blue suit in the 1870s, Paris. Painting by Caillebotte.
+
+President John F. Kennedy popularised the blue two-button business suit, less formal than the suits of his predecessors. (1961)
+
+In the 21st century, the dark blue business suit is the most common style worn by world leaders, seen here at the 2011 G-20 Summit in Cannes, France.
+
+At the beginning of the 20th century, many artists recognised the emotional power of blue, and made it the central element of paintings. During his Blue Period (1901–1904) Pablo Picasso used blue and green, with hardly any warm colours, to create a melancholy mood. In Russia, the symbolist painter Pavel Kuznetsov and the Blue Rose art group (1906–1908) used blue to create a fantastic and exotic atmosphere. In Germany, Wassily Kandinsky and other Russian émigrés formed the art group called Der Blaue Reiter (The Blue Rider), and used blue to symbolise spirituality and eternity.[84] Henri Matisse used intense blues to express the emotions he wanted viewers to feel. Matisse wrote, "A certain blue penetrates your soul."[85]
+
+In the art of the second half of the 20th century, painters of the abstract expressionist movement began to use blue and other colours in pure form, without any attempt to represent anything, to inspire ideas and emotions. Painter Mark Rothko observed that colour was "only an instrument;" his interest was "in expressing human emotions tragedy, ecstasy, doom, and so on."[86]
+
+In fashion blue, particularly dark blue, was seen as a colour which was serious but not grim. In the mid-20th century, blue passed black as the most common colour of men's business suits, the costume usually worn by political and business leaders. Public opinion polls in the United States and Europe showed that blue was the favourite colour of over fifty per cent of respondents. Green was far behind with twenty per cent, while white and red received about eight per cent each.[87]
+
+In 1873, a German immigrant in San Francisco, Levi Strauss, invented a sturdy kind of work trousers, made of denim fabric and coloured with indigo dye, called blue jeans. In 1935, they were raised to the level of high fashion by Vogue magazine. Beginning in the 1950s, they became an essential part of uniform of young people in the United States, Europe, and around the world.
+
+Blue was also seen as a colour which was authoritative without being threatening. Following the Second World War, blue was adopted as the colour of important international organisations, including the United Nations, the Council of Europe, UNESCO, the European Union, and NATO. United Nations peacekeepers wear blue helmets to stress their peacekeeping role. Blue is used by the NATO Military Symbols for Land Based Systems to denote friendly forces, hence the term "blue on blue" for friendly fire, and Blue Force Tracking for location of friendly units. The People's Liberation Army of China (formerly known as the "Red Army") uses the term "Blue Army" to refer to hostile forces during exercises.[88]
+
+The 20th century saw the invention of new ways of creating blue, such as chemiluminescence, making blue light through a chemical reaction.
+
+In the 20th century, it also became possible for one to own a shade of blue. The French artist Yves Klein, with the help of a French paint dealer, created a specific blue called International Klein blue, which he patented. It was made of ultramarine combined with a resin called Rhodopa, which gave it a particularly brilliant colour. The baseball team the Los Angeles Dodgers developed its own blue, called Dodger blue, and several American universities invented new blues for their colours.
+
+With the dawn of the World Wide Web, blue has become the standard colour for hyperlinks in graphic browsers (in most browsers, links turn purple after visiting their target), to make their presence within text obvious to readers.
+
+During his Blue Period, Pablo Picasso used blue as the colour of melancholy, as in The Old Guitarist.
+
+The Blue Rider (1903), by Wassily Kandinsky, For Kandinsky, blue was the colour of spirituality: the darker the blue, the more it awakened human desire for the eternal.[84]
+
+The Russian avant-garde painter Pavel Kuznetsov and his group, the Blue Rose, used blue to symbolise fantasy and exoticism. This is In the Steppe – Mirage (1911).
+
+Blue jeans, made of denim coloured with indigo dye, patented by Levi Strauss in 1873, became an essential part of the wardrobe of young people beginning in the 1950s.
+
+Vivid blues can be created by chemical reactions, called chemiluminescence. This is luminol, a chemical used in crime scene investigations. Luminol glows blue when it contacts even a tiny trace of blood.
+
+Blue neon lighting, first used in commercial advertising, is now used in works of art. This is Zwei Pferde für Münster (Two horses for Münster), a neon sculpture by Stephan Huber (2002), in Munster, Germany.
+
+The Story Bridge in Brisbane, Australia illuminated in blue light for ovarian cancer awareness.
+
+A man of the Tuareg people of North Africa wears a tagelmust or turban dyed with indigo. The indigo stains their skin blue; they were known by early visitors as "the blue men" of the desert.
+
+Various shades of blue are used as the national colours for many nations.
+
+A painting by William Hogarth from 1854 shows a polling station with the blue flag of the Tory party and the orange flag of the Whigs.
+
+The blue necktie of former British Prime Minister David Cameron represented his Conservative Party.
+
+A map of the US showing the blue states, which voted for the Democratic candidate in all the last four Presidential elections, and the red states, which voted for the Republican.
+
+Blue stripes on a traditional Jewish tallit. The blue stripes are also featured in the flag of Israel.
+
+Vishnu, the supreme god of Hinduism, is often portrayed as being blue, or more precisely having skin the colour of rain-filled clouds.
+
+In Catholicism, blue became the traditional colour of the robes of the Virgin Mary in the 13th century.
+
+The Bhaisajyaguru, or "Medicine Master of Lapis Lazuli Light", is the Buddha of healing and medicine in Mahayana Buddhism. He traditionally holds a lapis lazuli jar of medicine.
+
+In the Islamic World, blue and turquoise tile traditionally decorates the facades and exteriors of mosques and other religious buildings. This mosque is in Isfahan, Iran.
+
+Blue was first used as a gender signifier just prior to World War I (for either girls or boys), and first established as a male gender signifier in the 1940s.[116]
+
+Madame Pompadour, the mistress of King Louis XV of France, wore blue myosotis, or forget-me-not flowers in her hair and on her gowns as a symbol of faithfulness to the king.
+
+Many sporting teams make blue their official colour, or use it as detail on kit of a different colour. In addition, the colour is present on the logos of many sports associations. Along with red, blue is the most commonly used non-white colours for teams.
+
+In international association football, blue is a common colour on kits, as a majority of nations wear the colours of their national flag. A notable exception to this link is four-time FIFA World Cup winners Italy, who wear a blue kit based on the Azzuro Savoia (Savoy blue) of the royal House of Savoy which unified the Italian states, despite the italian national flag being green, white and red.[127] The team themselves are known as Gli Azzurri (the Azures). Another World Cup winning nation with a blue shirt is France, who are known as Les Bleus (the Blues). Two neighbouring countries with two World Cup victories each, Argentina and Uruguay wear a light blue shirt, the former with white stripes. Uruguay are known as the La Celeste, Spanish for 'the sky blue one', while Argentina are known as Los Albicelestes, Spanish for 'the sky blue and whites'.[128]
+
+Blue features on the logo of football's governing body FIFA, as well as featuring highly in the design of their website.[129] The European governing body of football, UEFA, uses two tones of blue to create a map of Europe in the centre of their logo. The Asian Football Confederation, Oceania Football Confederation and CONCACAF (the governing body of football in North and Central America and the Caribbean) use blue text on their logos.
+
+In Major League Baseball, the premier baseball league in the United States and Canada, blue is one of the three colours, along with white and red, on the league's official logo. A team from Toronto, Ontario are nicknamed the Blue Jays. Sixteen other teams either regularly feature blue hats or utilise the colour in their uniforms.
+
+The National Basketball Association, the premier basketball league in the United States and Canada, also has blue as one of the colours on their logo, along with red and white also, as did its female equivalent, the WNBA, until March 28, 2011, when the latter adopted an orange and white logo. Former NBA player Theodore Edwards was nicknamed "Blue". Fifteen NBA teams feature the colour in their uniforms.
+
+The National Football League, the premier American football league in the United States, also uses blue as one of three colours, along with white and red, on their official logo. Thirteen NFL teams prominently feature the colour.
+
+The National Hockey League, the premier Ice hockey league in Canada and the United States, uses blue on its official logo. Ten teams prominently feature the colour, with two teams (Columbus Blue Jackets and St. Louis Blues) featuring the colour in their nicknames. The team in St. Louis is primarily nicknamed after the eponymous music genre.
+
+The Italian national football team wear blue in honour of the royal House of Savoy which unified the country.

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+
+
+Bayerische Motoren Werke AG, commonly referred to as BMW (German pronunciation: [ˈbeːˈʔɛmˈveː] (listen)), is a German multinational company which produces luxury vehicles and motorcycles. The company was founded in 1916 as a manufacturer of aircraft engines, which it produced from 1917 until 1918 and again from 1933 to 1945.
+
+Automobiles are marketed under the brands BMW, Mini and Rolls-Royce, and motorcycles are marketed under the brand BMW Motorrad. In 2015, BMW was the world's twelfth-largest producer of motor vehicles, with 2,279,503 vehicles produced.[2] The company has significant motorsport history, especially in touring cars, Formula 1, sports cars and the Isle of Man TT.
+
+BMW is headquartered in Munich and produces motor vehicles in Germany, Brazil, China, India, South Africa, the United Kingdom, the United States and Mexico. The Quandt family are long-term shareholders of the company (with the remaining shares owned by public float), following brothers Herbert Quandt and Harald Quandt's investments in 1959 which saved the company from bankruptcy.
+
+Bayerische Flugzeugwerke AG was formed in 1916. This company was renamed to Bayerische Motoren Werke (BMW) in 1922. However the name BMW dates back to 1913, when the original company to use the name BMW was born (initially as Rapp Motorenwerke). BMW's first product was a straight-six aircraft engine called the BMW IIIa. Following the end of World War I, BMW remained in business by producing motorcycle engines, farm equipment, household items and railway brakes. The company produced its first motorcycle, the BMW R 32 in 1923.
+
+BMW became an automobile manufacturer in 1928 when it purchased Fahrzeugfabrik Eisenach, which, at the time, built Austin Sevens under licence under the Dixi marque.[3] The first car sold as a BMW was a rebadged Dixi called the BMW 3/15, following BMW's acquisition of the car manufacturer Automobilwerk Eisenach. Throughout the 1930s, BMW expanded its range into sports cars and larger luxury cars.
+
+Aircraft engines, motorcycles, and automobiles would be BMW's main products until World War II. During the war, against the wishes of its director Franz Josef Popp[citation needed], BMW concentrated on aircraft engine production using forced labor consisting primarily of prisoners from concentration camps, with motorcycles as a side line and automobile manufacture ceased altogether. BMW's factories were heavily bombed during the war and its remaining West German facilities were banned from producing motor vehicles or aircraft after the war. Again, the company survived by making pots, pans, and bicycles. In 1948, BMW restarted motorcycle production. BMW resumed car production in Bavaria in 1952 with the BMW 501 luxury saloon. The range of cars was expanded in 1955, through the production of the cheaper Isetta microcar under licence.  Slow sales of luxury cars and small profit margins from microcars meant BMW was in serious financial trouble and in 1959 the company was nearly taken over by rival Daimler-Benz. A large investment in BMW by Herbert Quandt and Harald Quandt resulted in the company surviving as a separate entity. The BMW 700 was successful and assisted in the company's recovery.
+
+The 1962 introduction of the BMW New Class compact sedans was the beginning of BMW's reputation as a leading manufacturer of sport-oriented cars. Throughout the 1960s, BMW expanded its range by adding coupe and luxury sedan models. The BMW 5 Series mid-size sedan range was introduced in 1972, followed by the BMW 3 Series compact sedans in 1975, the BMW 6 Series luxury coupes in 1976 and the BMW 7 Series large luxury sedans in 1978.
+
+The BMW M division released its first road car, a mid-engine supercar, in 1978. This was followed by the BMW M5 in 1984 and the BMW M3 in 1986. Also in 1986, BMW introduced its first V12 engine in the 750i luxury sedan.
+
+The company purchased the Rover Group in 1994, however the takeover was not successful and was causing BMW large financial losses. In 2000, BMW sold off most of the Rover brands, retaining only the Mini brand.
+
+In 1998, BMW also acquired the rights to the Rolls Royce brand from Vickers Plc.
+
+The 1995 BMW Z3 expanded the line-up to include a mass-production two-seat roadster and the 1999 BMW X5 was the company's entry into the SUV market.
+
+The first mass-produced turbocharged petrol engine was introduced in 2006, with most engines switching over to turbocharging over the following decade. The first hybrid BMW was the 2010 BMW ActiveHybrid 7, and BMW's first electric car was the BMW i3 city car, which was released in 2013. After many years of establishing a reputation for sporting rear-wheel drive cars, BMW's first front-wheel drive car was the 2014 BMW 2 Series Active Tourer multi-purpose vehicle (MPV).
+
+The name BMW is an abbreviation for Bayerische Motoren Werke (German pronunciation: [ˈbaɪ̯ʁɪʃə mɔˈtʰɔʁn̩ ˈvɛɐ̯kə]). This name is grammatically incorrect (in German, compound words must not contain spaces), which is why the name's grammatically correct form Bayerische Motorenwerke (German pronunciation: [ˈbaɪ̯ʁɪʃə mɔˈtʰɔʁn̩vɛɐ̯kə] (listen)) has been used in several publications and advertisements in the past.[4][5] Bayerische Motorenwerke translates into English as Bavarian Motor Works.[6] The suffix AG, short for Aktiengesellschaft, signifies an incorporated entity which is owned by shareholders, thus akin to "Inc." (US) or  PLC, "Public Limited Company" (UK).
+
+The terms Beemer, Bimmer and Bee-em are sometimes used as slang for BMW in the English language[7][8] and are sometimes used interchangeably for cars and motorcycles.[9][10][11]
+
+The circular blue and white BMW logo or roundel evolved from the circular Rapp Motorenwerke company logo, which featured a black ring bearing the company name surrounding the company logo,[12] on a plinth a horse's head couped.[13]
+
+BMW retained Rapp's black ring inscribed with the company name, but adopted as the central element a circular escutcheon bearing a quasi-heraldic reference to the coat of arms (and flag) of the Free State of Bavaria (as the state of their origin was named after 1918), being the arms of the House of Wittelsbach, Dukes and Kings of Bavaria.[12] However as the local law regarding trademarks forbade the use of state coats of arms or other symbols of sovereignty on commercial logos, the design was sufficiently differentiated to comply, but retained the tinctures azure (blue) and argent (white).[14][12][15]
+
+The current iteration of the logo was introduced in 2020,[16] removing 3D effects that had been used in renderings of the logo, and also removing the black outline encircling the rondel. The logo will be used on BMW's branding but will not be used on vehicles.[17][18]
+
+The origin of the logo as a portrayal of the movement of an aircraft propeller, the BMW logo with the white blades seeming to cut through a blue sky, is a myth which sprang from a 1929 BMW advertisement depicting the BMW emblem overlaid on a rotating propeller, with the quarters defined by strobe-light effect, a promotion of an aircraft engine then being built by BMW under license from Pratt & Whitney.[12] "For a long time, BMW made little effort to correct the myth that the BMW badge is a propeller"
+(quote by Fred Jakobs, Archive Director, BMW Group Classic).[19] It is well established that this propellor portrayal was first used in a BMW advertisement in 1929 – twelve years after the logo was created – so this is not the true origin of the logo.[20]
+
+The slogan 'The Ultimate Driving Machine' was first used in North America in 1974.[21][22] In 2010, this long-lived campaign was mostly supplanted by a campaign intended to make the brand more approachable and to better appeal to women, 'Joy'. By 2012 BMW had returned to 'The Ultimate Driving Machine'.[23]
+
+For the fiscal year 2017, BMW reported earnings of EUR 8.620 billion, with an annual revenue of EUR 98.678 billion, an increase of 4.8% over the previous fiscal cycle.[24] BMW's shares traded at over €77 per share, and its market capitalization was valued at US 55.3 billion in November 2018.[25]
+
+BMW began production of motorcycle engines and then motorcycles after World War I.[26] Its motorcycle brand is now known as BMW Motorrad. Their first successful motorcycle after the failed Helios and Flink, was the "R32" in 1923, though production originally began in 1921.[27] This had a "boxer" twin engine, in which a cylinder projects into the air-flow from each side of the machine. Apart from their single-cylinder models (basically to the same pattern), all their motorcycles used this distinctive layout until the early 1980s. Many BMW's are still produced in this layout, which is designated the R Series.
+
+The entire BMW Motorcycle production has, since 1969, been located at the company's Berlin-Spandau factory.
+
+During the Second World War, BMW produced the BMW R75 motorcycle with a motor-driven sidecar attached, combined with a lockable differential, this made the vehicle very capable off-road.[28][29]
+
+In 1982, came the K Series, shaft drive but water-cooled and with either three or four cylinders mounted in a straight line from front to back. Shortly after, BMW also started making the chain-driven F and G series with single and parallel twin Rotax engines.
+
+In the early 1990s, BMW updated the airhead Boxer engine which became known as the oilhead. In 2002, the oilhead engine had two spark plugs per cylinder. In 2004 it added a built-in balance shaft, an increased capacity to 1,170 cc and enhanced performance to 100 hp (75 kW) for the R1200GS, compared to 85 hp (63 kW) of the previous R1150GS. More powerful variants of the oilhead engines are available in the R1100S and R1200S, producing 98 and 122 hp (73 and 91 kW), respectively.
+
+In 2004, BMW introduced the new K1200S Sports Bike which marked a departure for BMW. It had an engine producing 167 hp (125 kW), derived from the company's work with the Williams F1 team, and is lighter than previous K models. Innovations include electronically adjustable front and rear suspension, and a Hossack-type front fork that BMW calls Duolever.
+
+BMW introduced anti-lock brakes on production motorcycles starting in the late 1980s. The generation of anti-lock brakes available on the 2006 and later BMW motorcycles paved the way for the introduction of electronic stability control, or anti-skid technology later in the 2007 model year.
+
+BMW has been an innovator in motorcycle suspension design, taking up telescopic front suspension long before most other manufacturers. Then they switched to an Earles fork, front suspension by swinging fork (1955 to 1969). Most modern BMWs are truly rear swingarm, single sided at the back (compare with the regular swinging fork usually, and wrongly, called swinging arm).
+Some BMWs started using yet another trademark front suspension design, the Telelever, in the early 1990s. Like the Earles fork, the Telelever significantly reduces dive under braking.
+
+BMW Group, on 31 January 2013, announced that Pierer Industrie AG has bought Husqvarna Motorcycles for an undisclosed amount, which will not be revealed by either party in the future. The company is headed by Stephan Pierer (CEO of KTM). Pierer Industrie AG is 51% owner of KTM and 100% owner of Husqvarna.
+
+In September 2018, BMW unveiled a new self-driving motorcycle with BMW Motorrad with a goal of using the technology to help improve road safety.[30] The design of the bike was inspired by the company's BMW R1200 GS model.[31]
+
+The current model lines of BMW cars are:
+
+1 Series (F40)
+
+2 Series (F22)
+
+3 Series (G20)
+
+4 Series (F33)
+
+5 Series (G30)
+
+6 Series (G32)
+
+7 Series (G12)
+
+8 Series (G15)
+
+The current model lines of the X Series SUVs and crossovers are:
+
+X1 (F48)
+
+X2 (F39)
+
+X3 (G01)
+
+X4 (G02)
+
+X5 (G05)
+
+X6 (G06)
+
+X7 (G07)
+
+The current model line of the Z Series two-door roadsters is the Z4 (model code G29).
+
+Z4 (G29)
+
+All-electric vehicles and plug-in hybrid vehicles are sold under the BMW i sub-brand. The current model range consists of:
+
+i3
+
+i8
+
+BMW announced the launch of two new BMW i all-electric models, the BMW iX3 SUV by late 2020, and the BMW i4 four-door sedan in 2021.[33][34]
+
+In addition, several plug-in hybrid models built on existing platforms have been marketed as iPerformance models. Examples include the 225xe using a 1.5 L three-cylinder turbocharged petrol engine with an electric motor, the 330e/530e using a 2.0 L four-cylinder engine with an electric motor, and the 740e using a 2.0 litre turbocharged petrol engine with an electric motor.[35] Also, crossover and SUV plug-in hybrid models have been released using i technology: X1 xDrive25e, X2 xDrive25e, X3 xDrive30e, and X5 xDrive40e.[36]
+
+The BMW M GmbH subsidiary (called BMW Motorsport GmbH until 1993) has high-performance versions of various BMW models since 1978.
+
+The recent model range consists of:
+
+M2
+
+M4
+
+M5
+
+M8 coupe
+
+M8 convertible
+
+X3 M
+
+X4 M
+
+The letter "M" is also often used in the marketing of BMW's regular models, for example the F20 M140i model, the G11 M760Li model and various optional extras called "M Sport", "M Performance" or similar.
+
+BMW has a long history of motorsport activities, including:
+
+2016 BMW M4 DTM
+
+2016 BMW M6 GT3
+
+2016 BMW S1000RR
+
+In 1975, sculptor Alexander Calder was commissioned to paint the BMW 3.0 CSL racing car driven by Hervé Poulain at the 24 Hours of Le Mans, which became the first in the series of BMW Art Cars. Since Calder's work of art, many other renowned artists throughout the world have created BMW Art Cars, including David Hockney, Jenny Holzer, Roy Lichtenstein, Robert Rauschenberg, Frank Stella, and Andy Warhol.[41] To date, a total of 19 BMW Art Cars, based on both racing and regular production vehicles, have been created.
+
+1975 3.0 CSL Art Car by Alexander Calder
+
+1979 M1 Art Car by Andy Warhol
+
+2017 M6 GT3 Art Car by Cao Fei
+
+The global BMW Headquarters in Munich represents the cylinder head of a 4-cylinder engine. It was designed by Karl Schwanzer and was completed in 1972. The building has become a European icon[41] and was declared a protected historic building in 1999. The main tower consists of four vertical cylinders standing next to and across from each other. Each cylinder is divided horizontally in its center by a mold in the facade. Notably, these cylinders do not stand on the ground; they are suspended on a central support tower.
+
+BMW Museum is a futuristic cauldron-shaped building, which was also designed by Karl Schwanzer and opened in 1972.[42] The interior has a spiral theme and the roof is a 40-metre diameter BMW logo.
+
+BMW Welt, the company's exhibition space in Munich, was designed by Coop Himmelb(l)au and opened in 2007. It includes a showroom and lifting platforms where a customer's new car is theatrically unveiled to the customer.[43]
+
+BMW Museum
+
+BMW Welt
+
+In 2001 and 2002, BMW produced a series of 8 short films called The Hire, which had plots based around BMW models being driven to extremes by Clive Owen.[44] The directors for The Hire included Guy Ritchie, John Woo, John Frankenheimer and Ang Lee. In 2016, a ninth film in the series was released.
+
+The 2006 "BMW Performance Series" was a marketing event geared to attract black car buyers. It consisted of seven concerts by jazz musician Mike Phillips, and screenings of films by black filmmakers.[45][46]
+
+BMW was the principal sponsor of the 1998 The Art of the Motorcycle exhibition at various Guggenheim museums, though the financial relationship between BMW and the Guggenheim Foundation was criticised in many quarters.[47][48]
+
+In 2012, BMW began sponsoring Independent Collectors production of the BMW Art Guide, which is the first global guide to private and publicly accessible collections of contemporary art worldwide.[49] The fourth edition, released in 2016, features 256 collections from 43 countries.[50]
+
+BMW produces complete automobiles in the following countries:
+
+BMW also has local assembly operation using complete knock-down (CKD) components in Thailand, Russia, Egypt, Indonesia, Malaysia and India.[54]
+
+In the UK, BMW has a Mini factory near Oxford, plants in Swindon and Hams Hall, and Rolls Royce vehicle assembly at Goodwood. In 2020, these facilities were shut down for the period from March 23 to April 17 due to the coronavirus outbreak.[55]
+
+The BMW group (including Mini and Rolls-Royce) produced 1,366,838 automobiles in 2006 and then 1,481,253 automobiles in 2010.[56][57] BMW Motorcycles are being produced at the company's Berlin factory, which earlier had produced aircraft engines for Siemens.
+
+By 2011, about 56% of BMW-brand vehicles produced are powered by petrol engines and the remaining 44% are powered by diesel engines. Of those petrol vehicles, about 27% are four-cylinder models and about nine percent are eight-cylinder models.[58] On average, 9,000 vehicles per day exit BMW plants, and 63% are transported by rail.[59]
+
+Annual production since 2005, according to BMW's annual reports:[57]
+
+Annual sales since 2005, according to BMW's annual reports:
+
+* In 2008–2012, motorcycle productions figures include Husqvarna models.
+** Excluding Husqvarna, sales volume up to 2013: 59,776 units.
+
+In November 2016, BMW recalled 136,000 2007–2012 model year U.S. cars for fuel pump wiring problems possibly resulting in fuel leak and engine stalling or restarting issues.[60]
+
+In 2018, BMW recalled 106,000 diesel vehicles in South Korea with a defective exhaust gas recirculation module, which caused 39 engine fires. The recall was then expanded to 324,000 more cars in Europe.[61] Following the recall in South Korea, the government banned cars which had not yet been inspected from driving on public roads.[62] This affected up to 25% of the recalled cars, where the owners had been notified but the cars had not yet been inspected. BMW is reported to have been aware since 2016 that more than 4% of the affected cars in South Korea had experienced failures in the EGR coolers,[63] leading to approximately 20 owners suing the company.[64]
+
+BMW has collaborated with other car manufacturers on the following occasions:
+
+BMW made a six-year sponsorship deal with the United States Olympic Committee in July 2010.[76][77]
+
+In golf, BMW has sponsored various events,[78] including the PGA Championship since 2007,[79][80] the Italian Open form 2009–2012, the BMW Masters in China from 2012-2015[81][82] and the BMW International Open in Munich since 1989.[83]
+
+In rugby, BMW sponsored the South Africa national rugby union team from 2011 to 2015.[84][85]
+
+BMW is a charter member of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency's (EPA) National Environmental Achievement Track, which recognizes companies for their environmental stewardship and performance.[86] It is also a member of the South Carolina Environmental Excellence Program.[87]
+
+Since 1999, BMW has been named the world's most sustainable automotive company every year by the Dow Jones Sustainability Index.[88] The BMW Group is one of three automotive companies to be featured every year in the index.[89] In 2001, the BMW Group committed itself to the United Nations Environment Programme, the UN Global Compact and the Cleaner Production Declaration. It was also the first company in the automotive industry to appoint an environmental officer, in 1973.[90] BMW is a member of the World Business Council for Sustainable Development.[91]
+
+In 2012, BMW was the highest automotive company in the Carbon Disclosure Project's Global 500 list, with a score of 99 out of 100.[92][93] The BMW Group was rated the most sustainable DAX 30 company by Sustainalytics in 2012.[94]
+
+To reduce vehicle emissions, BMW is improving the efficiency of existing fossil-fuel powered models, while researching electric power, hybrid power and hydrogen for future models.[95]
+
+During the first quarter of 2018, BMW sold 26,858 Electrified Vehicles (EVs, PHEVs, & Hybrids).[96]
+
+DriveNow was a joint-venture between BMW and Sixt that operated from in Europe from 2011 until 2019. By December 2012,[97] DriveNow operated over 1,000 vehicles, in five cities and with approximately 60,000 customers.[98]
+
+In 2012, the BMW-owned subsidiary Alphabet began a corporate car-sharing service in Europe called AlphaCity.[99][100]
+
+The ReachNow car-sharing service was launched in Seattle in April 2016.[101] ReachNow currently operates in Seattle, Portland and Brooklyn.
+
+The first BMW production facility in China was opened in 2004, as a result of a joint venture between BMW and Brilliance Auto.[102][103] The plant was opened in the Shenyang industrial area and produces 3 Series and 5 Series models for the Chinese market.[104][105] In 2012, a second factory was opened in Shenyang.[106]
+
+Between January and November 2014, BMW sold 415,200 vehicles in China, through a network of over 440 BMW stores and 100 Mini stores.[107]
+
+On 31 July 2018, BMW announced to build 1 billion euro car factory in Hungary. The plant, to be built near Debrecen, will have a production capacity of 150,000 cars a year.[108]
+
+In July 2014, BMW announced it was establishing a plant in Mexico, in the city and state of San Luis Potosi involving an investment of $1 billion. The plant will employ 1,500 people, and produce 150,000 cars annually.[109]
+
+BMWs have been assembled in South Africa since 1968,[110] when Praetor Monteerders' plant was opened in Rosslyn, near Pretoria. BMW initially bought shares in the company, before fully acquiring it in 1975; in so doing, the company became BMW South Africa, the first wholly owned subsidiary of BMW to be established outside Germany. Unlike United States manufacturers, such as Ford and GM, which divested from the country in the 1980s, BMW retained full ownership of its operations in South Africa.
+
+Following the end of apartheid in 1994, and the lowering of import tariffs, BMW South Africa ended local production of the 5 Series and 7 Series, in order to concentrate on production of the 3 Series for the export market. South African–built BMWs are now exported to right hand drive markets including Japan, Australia, New Zealand, the United Kingdom, Indonesia, Malaysia, Singapore, and Hong Kong, as well as Sub-Saharan Africa. Since 1997, BMW South Africa has produced vehicles in left-hand drive for export to Taiwan, the United States and Iran, as well as South America.
+
+Three unique models that BMW Motorsport created for the South African market were the E23 M745i (1983), which used the M88 engine from the BMW M1, the BMW 333i (1986), which added a six-cylinder 3.2-litre M30 engine to the E30,[111] and the E30 BMW 325is (1989) which was powered by an Alpina-derived 2.7-litre engine.
+
+BMWs with a VIN starting with "NC0" are manufactured in South Africa.
+
+BMW cars have been officially sold in the United States since 1956[112] and manufactured in the United States since 1994.[113] The first BMW dealership in the United States opened in 1975.[114] In 2016, BMW was the twelfth highest selling brand in the United States.[115]
+
+The manufacturing plant in Greer, South Carolina has the highest production of the BMW plants worldwide,[116] currently producing approximately 1,500 vehicles per day.[117] The models produced at the Spartanburg plant are the X3, X4, X5, X6 and X7 SUV models.
+
+In addition to the South Carolina manufacturing facility, BMW's North American companies include sales, marketing, design, and financial services operations in the United States, Mexico, Canada and Latin America.
+
+On 9 October 2014, BMW's new complete knock-down (CKD) assembly plant in Araquari, assembled its first car— an F30 3 Series.[118][119]
+
+The cars assembled at Araquari are the F20 1 Series, F30 3 Series, F48 X1, F25 X3 and Mini Countryman.[120]
+
+Bavarian Auto Group became the importer of the BMW and Mini brands in 2003.
+
+Since 2005, the 3 Series, 5 Series, 7 Series, X1 and X3 models sold in Egypt are assembled from complete knock-down components at the BMW plant in 6th of October City.[120]
+
+BMW India was established in 2006 as a sales subsidiary with a head office located in Gurugram.
+
+A BMW complete knock-down assembly plant was opened in Chennai in 2007, assembling Indian-market 3 Series, 5 Series, 7 Series, X1, X3, X5, Mini Countryman and motorcycle models.[120][121] The 20 Million Euro plant aims to produce 1,700 cars per year.
+
+Russian-market 3 Series and 5 Series cars are assembled from complete knock-down components in Kaliningrad beginning in 1999.[122]
+
+BMW's complete knock-down (CKD) assembly plant in Kedah. Assembled Malaysia-market 1 Series, 3 Series, 5 Series, 7 Series, X1, X3, X4, X5, X6 and Mini Countryman since 2008.[123]
+
+BMW's first dealership in Canada, located in Ottawa, was opened in 1969.[124] In 1986, BMW established a head office in Canada.[125]
+
+BMW sold 28,149 vehicles in Canada in 2008.[126]
+
+BMW Japan Corp, a wholly owned subsidiary, imports and distributes BMW vehicles in Japan.[127]
+
+BMW Philippines, an owned subsidiary of San Miguel Corporation, The Official Importer and Distributor of BMW in the Philippines.[128]
+
+BMW sold 920 vehicles in the Philippines in 2019.[129]
+
+BMW Korea imports BMW vehicles in South Korea with more than fifty service centers to fully accomplish to South Korean customers. Also, BMW Korea has its own driving center in Incheon.[130]

en/689.html.txt

@@ -0,0 +1,43 @@
+Bobsleigh or bobsled is a team winter sport that involves making timed runs down narrow, twisting, banked, iced tracks in a gravity-powered sleigh. International bobsleigh competitions are governed by the International Bobsleigh and Skeleton Federation, also known as FIBT from the French Fédération Internationale de Bobsleigh et de Tobogganing.  National competitions are often governed by bodies such as the United States Bobsled and Skeleton Federation and Bobsleigh Canada Skeleton.
+
+The first bobsleds were built in St. Moritz, Switzerland, in the late 19th century by wealthy tourists from Victorian Britain who were staying at the Palace Hotel owned by Caspar Badrutt. The early sleds were adapted from boys' delivery sleds and toboggans. These eventually evolved into bobsleighs, luges and skeletons. Initially the tourists would race their hand-built contraptions down the narrow streets of St. Moritz, however, as collisions increased growing opposition from St Moritz residents led to bobsledding being eventually banned from public highways. In the winter of 1884, Badrutt had a purpose-built run constructed near the hamlet of Cresta. The Cresta Run remains the oldest in the world and is the home of the St. Moritz Tobogganing Club. It has hosted two Olympic Winter Games and is still in use.
+
+Modern bobsleigh teams compete to complete a downhill route in the fastest times. An aggregate time from several runs is used to determine the winners. The four-man event has been featured since the first Winter Games in 1924 in Chamonix, France. The only exception was the 1960 games in Squaw Valley when the organizing committee decided not to build a track to reduce costs.  The two-man event was introduced at the 1932 games and a two-woman event was first contested at the 2002 Winter Olympics.
+
+The name is derived from the action some early competitors adopted of bobbing back and forth inside their sleds to increase speed.[1]
+
+Although sledding on snow or ice had long been popular in many northern countries, the origins of bobsleighing as a modern sport are relatively recent. Its foundation began when hotelier Caspar Badrutt (1848–1904) convinced some wealthy English regulars to remain through the entire winter at his hotel in the mineral spa town of St. Moritz, Switzerland. He had been frustrated that his hotel was only busy during the summer months. By keeping his guests entertained with food, alcohol, and activities, he quickly established the concept of "winter resorting". Within a few years, wintering at Badrutt's St Moritz hotel became very fashionable in Victorian Britain. However, with increased numbers this led some guests to search for new diversions. In the early 1870s some adventurous Englishmen began adapting boys' delivery sleds for recreational purposes.[2]
+
+However, when they began colliding with pedestrians in the icy lanes, alleyways and roads of St Moritz, this led to the invention of "steering means" for the sleds. The basic bobsleigh (bobsled) consisted of  two cresta's (skeleton sleds) attached together with a board that had a steering mechanism at the front. The ability to steer meant the sleds could make longer runs through the town. Longer runs also meant higher speeds on curves. Local sentiments varied about these informal competitions but eventually complaints grew so vociferous that Badrutt had to do something. His solution was to build a basic natural ice run for his guests outside the town near the small hamlet named Cresta in the lates 1870s. Badrutt took action because he did not want to make enemies in the town and he had worked hard and investing a lot of time and money in popularizing wintering in St. Moritz so he was not going to let customers stop coming due to boredom.[2]
+
+Formal competitions started down the natural ice Cresta Run in 1884, which was built in an annual partnership between guests and local people. The run, which is still in operation as of 2014[update], has served as a host track for skeleton at two Winter Olympics (1928 and 1948). As one of the few natural weather tracks in the world, it does not use artificial refrigeration. It is not known how much the original track evolved in the early years as the three sports matured and stabilized. The first club formed in 1897, and the first purpose-built track solely for bobsleds opened in 1902 outside St Moritz. Over the years, bobsleigh tracks evolved from straight runs to twisting and turning tracks. The original wooden sleds[3] gave way to streamlined fiberglass and metal ones.
+
+The International Bobsleigh and Skeleton Federation (FIBT) was founded in 1923.  Men's four-man bobsleigh appeared in the first ever Winter Olympic Games in 1924, and the men's two-man bobsleigh event was added in 1932.  Though not included in the 1960 Winter Olympics, bobsleigh has featured in every Winter Olympics since. Women's bobsleigh competition began in the US in 1983 with two demonstration races in Lake Placid, New York, one held in February and the second held during the World Cup races in March 1983. Women's two-woman bobsleigh made its Olympic debut at the 2002 Winter Olympic Games. Bobsleigh is also contested at American, European, and World Cup championships.
+
+Germany and Switzerland have proven the most successful bobsleighing nations measured by overall success in European, World, World Cup, and Olympic championships. Since the 1990s Germans have dominated in international competition, having won more medals than any other nation. Italy, Austria, United States and Canada also have strong bobsleigh traditions.
+
+Bobsleighs can attain speeds of 150 km/h (93 mph), with the reported world record being 201 km/h (125 mph).[4]
+
+"Bobsleigh competitors are very noble". The World Fair Play Trophy was awarded to an Italian bobsleigh competitor, Eugenio Monti, 1964, then 30 years later to an Australian bobsleigh competitor, Justin McDonald, 1994.
+
+Modern tracks  are made of concrete, coated with ice. They are required to have at least one straight section and one labyrinth (three turns in quick succession without a straight section). Ideally, a modern track should be 1,200 to 1,300 metres (3,900–4,300 ft) long and have at least fifteen curves.  Speeds may exceed 120 kilometres per hour (75 mph), and some curves can subject the crews to as much as 5 g.
+
+Some bobsleigh tracks are also used for luge and skeleton competition.
+
+Some tracks offer tourists rides in bobsleighs, including those at Sigulda, Latvia; Innsbruck-Igls, Austria; Calgary, Alberta, Canada; Whistler, British Columbia, Canada; Lillehammer, Norway; Cesana Pariol, Italy; Lake Placid, US;  Salt Lake City, Utah, US and La Plagne, France.
+
+Modern day sleighs combine light metals, steel runners, and an aerodynamic composite body.  Competition sleighs must be a maximum of 3.80 metres (12.5 ft) long (4-crew) or 2.70 metres (8.9 ft) long (2-crew).  The runners on both are set at 0.67 metres (2.2 ft) gauge.  Until the weight-limit rule was added in 1952, bobsleigh crews tended to be very heavy to ensure the greatest possible speed.  Nowadays, the maximum weight, including crew, is 630 kilograms (1,390 lb) (4-man), 390 kilograms (860 lb) (2-man), or 340 kilograms (750 lb) (2-woman), which can be reached via the addition of metal weights.  The bobsleighs themselves are designed to be as light as possible to allow dynamic positioning of mass through the turns of the bobsleigh course.[5]
+
+Although bobsleigh crews once consisted of five or six people, they were reduced to two- and four-person sleighs in the 1930s. The crew has a pilot, a brakeman, and pushers. Athletes are selected based on their speed and strength, which are necessary to push the sleigh to a competitive speed at the start of the race. Pilots must have the skill, timing, and finesse to steer the sleigh along the path, or "line", that will produce the greatest speed.
+
+In modern bobsleighs, the steering system consists of two metal rings that actuate a pulley system located in the forward cowling that turns the front runners. For example, to turn left, the pilot would pull the left ring. Only subtle steering adjustments are necessary to guide the sled; at speeds up to 80 miles per hour (130 km/h), anything larger would result in a crash. The pilot does most of the steering, and the brakeman stops the sled after crossing the finish line by pulling the sled's brake lever.
+
+Women compete in women's bobsleigh (which is always two-woman) and men in both two and four-man competitions.[6] Women were confirmed as being able to compete in any four-"man" bobsleigh event, as from 25 September 2014, either as part of a mixed-sex team or an all-female team.
+
+Individual runs down the course, or "heats", begin from a standing start, with the crew pushing the sled for up to 50 metres (160 ft) before boarding; though the pilot does not steer, grooves in the ice make steering unnecessary until the sled leaves the starting area. While poor form during the initial push can lose a team the heat, it is otherwise rarely, if ever, decisive.  Over the rest of the course, a sleigh's speed depends on its weight, aerodynamics, runners, the condition of the ice, and the skill of the pilot.
+
+Race times are recorded in hundredths of seconds, so even seemingly minor errors – especially those at the beginning, which affect the remainder of the heat – can have a measurable impact on the final race standings.
+
+The men's and women's standings for normal races are calculated over the aggregate of two runs or heats. At the Olympic Winter Games and World Championships, all competitions (for both men and women) consist of four heats.
+
+.

en/69.html.txt

@@ -0,0 +1,203 @@
+
+
+
+
+Africa is the world's second-largest and second-most populous continent, after Asia. At about 30.3 million km2 (11.7 million square miles) including adjacent islands, it covers 6% of Earth's total surface area and 20% of its land area.[4] With 1.3 billion people[1][2] as of 2018, it accounts for about 16% of the world's human population. Africa's average population is the youngest amongst all the continents;[5][6] the median age in 2012 was 19.7, when the worldwide median age was 30.4.[7] Despite a wide range of natural resources, the continent is the least wealthy per capita, possibly due in part to the legacies of European colonization in Africa. Despite this low concentration of wealth, recent economic expansion and the large and young population make Africa an important economic market in the broader global context.
+
+The continent is surrounded by the Mediterranean Sea to the north, the Isthmus of Suez and the Red Sea to the northeast, the Indian Ocean to the southeast and the Atlantic Ocean to the west. The continent includes Madagascar and various archipelagos. It contains 54 fully recognised sovereign states (countries), eight territories and two de facto independent states with limited or no recognition. Algeria is Africa's largest country by area, and Nigeria is its largest by population.  African nations cooperate through the establishment of the African Union, which is headquartered in Addis Ababa.
+
+Africa straddles the Equator and encompasses numerous climate areas; it is the only continent to stretch from the northern temperate to southern temperate zones.[8] The majority of the continent and its countries are in the Northern Hemisphere, with a substantial portion and number of countries in the Southern Hemisphere. Africa is home to much biodiversity; it is the continent with the largest number of megafauna species, as it was least affected by the extinction of the Pleistocene megafauna. However, Africa also is heavily affected by a wide range of environmental issues, including desertification, deforestation, water scarcity, and other issues. These entrenched environmental concerns are expected to worsen as climate change impacts Africa. The UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has identified Africa as the most vulnerable continent to climate change.[9][10]
+
+Africa, particularly Eastern Africa, is widely accepted as the place of origin of humans and the Hominidae clade (great apes), meaning that Africa has a long and complex history. The earliest hominids and their ancestors have been dated to around 7 million years ago, including Sahelanthropus tchadensis, Australopithecus africanus, A. afarensis, Homo erectus, H. habilis and H. ergaster— the earliest Homo sapiens (modern human) remains, found in Ethiopia, South Africa, and Morocco, date to circa 200,000, 259,000, and 300,000 years ago respectively, and Homo sapiens is believed to have orignated in Africa around 350,000-260,000 years ago.[11][12][13][14][15] Early human civilizations, such as Ancient Egypt and Phoenicia emerged in North Africa. Following a subsequent long and complex history of civilizations, migration and trade, Africa hosts a large diversity of ethnicities, cultures and languages. The last 400 years have witnessed an increasing European influence on the continent. Starting in the 16th century, this was driven by trade, including the Trans-Atlantic slave trade, which created large African diaspora populations in the Americas. In the late 19th century, European countries colonized almost all of Africa, extracting resources from the continent and exploiting local communities; most present states in Africa emerged from a process of decolonisation in the 20th century.
+
+Afri was a Latin name used to refer to the inhabitants of then-known northern Africa to the west of the Nile river, and in its widest sense referred to all lands south of the Mediterranean (Ancient Libya).[16][17] This name seems to have originally referred to a native Libyan tribe, an ancestor of modern Berbers; see Terence for discussion. The name had usually been connected with the Phoenician word ʿafar meaning "dust",[18] but a 1981 hypothesis[19] has asserted that it stems from the Berber word ifri (plural ifran) meaning "cave", in reference to cave dwellers.[20] The same word[20] may be found in the name of the Banu Ifran from Algeria and Tripolitania, a Berber tribe originally from Yafran (also known as Ifrane) in northwestern Libya.[21]
+
+Under Roman rule, Carthage became the capital of the province it then named Africa Proconsularis, following its defeat of the Carthaginians in the Third Punic War in 146 BC, which also included the coastal part of modern Libya.[22] The Latin suffix -ica can sometimes be used to denote a land (e.g., in Celtica from Celtae, as used by Julius Caesar). The later Muslim region of Ifriqiya, following its conquest of the Byzantine (Eastern Roman) Empire's Exarchatus Africae, also preserved a form of the name.
+
+According to the Romans, Africa lay to the west of Egypt, while "Asia" was used to refer to Anatolia and lands to the east. A definite line was drawn between the two continents by the geographer Ptolemy (85–165 AD), indicating Alexandria along the Prime Meridian and making the isthmus of Suez and the Red Sea the boundary between Asia and Africa. As Europeans came to understand the real extent of the continent, the idea of "Africa" expanded with their knowledge.
+
+Other etymological hypotheses have been postulated for the ancient name "Africa":
+
+Africa is considered by most paleoanthropologists to be the oldest inhabited territory on Earth, with the human species originating from the continent.[29][30] During the mid-20th century, anthropologists discovered many fossils and evidence of human occupation perhaps as early as 7 million years ago (BP=before present). Fossil remains of several species of early apelike humans thought to have evolved into modern man, such as Australopithecus afarensis (radiometrically dated to approximately 3.9–3.0 million years BP,[31] Paranthropus boisei (c. 2.3–1.4 million years BP)[32] and Homo ergaster (c. 1.9 million–600,000 years BP) have been discovered.[4]
+
+After the evolution of Homo sapiens approximately 350,000 to 260,000 years BP in Africa.[12][13][14][15] the continent was mainly populated by groups of hunter-gatherers.[33][34][35] These first modern humans left Africa and populated the rest of the globe during the Out of Africa II migration dated to approximately 50,000 years BP, exiting the continent either across Bab-el-Mandeb over the Red Sea,[36][37] the Strait of Gibraltar in Morocco,[38][39] or the Isthmus of Suez in Egypt.[40]
+
+Other migrations of modern humans within the African continent have been dated to that time, with evidence of early human settlement found in Southern Africa, Southeast Africa, North Africa, and the Sahara.[41]
+
+The size of the Sahara has historically been extremely variable, with its area rapidly fluctuating and at times disappearing depending on global climatic conditions.[42] At the end of the Ice ages, estimated to have been around 10,500 BC, the Sahara had again become a green fertile valley, and its African populations returned from the interior and coastal highlands in Sub-Saharan Africa, with rock art paintings depicting a fertile Sahara and large populations discovered in Tassili n'Ajjer dating back perhaps 10 millennia.[43] However, the warming and drying climate meant that by 5000 BC, the Sahara region was becoming increasingly dry and hostile. Around 3500 BC, due to a tilt in the earth's orbit, the Sahara experienced a period of rapid desertification.[44] The population trekked out of the Sahara region towards the Nile Valley below the Second Cataract where they made permanent or semi-permanent settlements. A major climatic recession occurred, lessening the heavy and persistent rains in Central and Eastern Africa. Since this time, dry conditions have prevailed in Eastern Africa and, increasingly during the last 200 years, in Ethiopia.
+
+The domestication of cattle in Africa preceded agriculture and seems to have existed alongside hunter-gatherer cultures. It is speculated that by 6000 BC, cattle were domesticated in North Africa.[45] In the Sahara-Nile complex, people domesticated many animals, including the donkey and a small screw-horned goat which was common from Algeria to Nubia.
+
+Around 4000 BC, the Saharan climate started to become drier at an exceedingly fast pace.[46] This climate change caused lakes and rivers to shrink significantly and caused increasing desertification. This, in turn, decreased the amount of land conducive to settlements and helped to cause migrations of farming communities to the more tropical climate of West Africa.[46]
+
+By the first millennium BC, ironworking had been introduced in Northern Africa and around that time also became established in parts of sub-Saharan Africa either through independent invention there or diffusion from the north[47] and by 500 BC, metalworking began to become commonplace in West Africa. Ironworking was fully established by roughly 500 BC in many areas of East and West Africa, although other regions didn't begin ironworking until the early centuries AD. Copper objects from Egypt, North Africa, Nubia, and Ethiopia dating from around 500 BC have been excavated in West Africa, suggesting that Trans-Saharan trade networks had been established by this date.[46]
+
+At about 3300 BC, the historical record opens in Northern Africa with the rise of literacy in the Pharaonic civilization of Ancient Egypt.[48] One of the world's earliest and longest-lasting civilizations, the Egyptian state continued, with varying levels of influence over other areas, until 343 BC.[49][50] Egyptian influence reached deep into modern-day Libya and Nubia, and, according to Martin Bernal, as far north as Crete.[51]
+
+An independent centre of civilization with trading links to Phoenicia was established by Phoenicians from Tyre on the north-west African coast at Carthage.[52][53][54]
+
+European exploration of Africa began with Ancient Greeks and Romans.[55][56] In 332 BC, Alexander the Great was welcomed as a liberator in Persian-occupied Egypt. He founded Alexandria in Egypt, which would become the prosperous capital of the Ptolemaic dynasty after his death.[57]
+
+Following the conquest of North Africa's Mediterranean coastline by the Roman Empire, the area was integrated economically and culturally into the Roman system. Roman settlement occurred in modern Tunisia and elsewhere along the coast. The first Roman emperor native to North Africa was Septimius Severus, born in Leptis Magna in present-day Libya—his mother was Italian Roman and his father was Punic.[58]
+
+Christianity spread across these areas at an early date, from Judaea via Egypt and beyond the borders of the Roman world into Nubia;[59] by AD 340 at the latest, it had become the state religion of the Aksumite Empire. Syro-Greek missionaries, who arrived by way of the Red Sea, were responsible for this theological development.[60]
+
+In the early 7th century, the newly formed Arabian Islamic Caliphate expanded into Egypt, and then into North Africa. In a short while, the local Berber elite had been integrated into Muslim Arab tribes. When the Umayyad capital Damascus fell in the 8th century, the Islamic centre of the Mediterranean shifted from Syria to Qayrawan in North Africa. Islamic North Africa had become diverse, and a hub for mystics, scholars, jurists, and philosophers. During the above-mentioned period, Islam spread to sub-Saharan Africa, mainly through trade routes and migration.[61]
+
+In West Africa, Dhar Tichitt and Oualata in present-day Mauritania figure prominently among the early urban centers, dated to 2,000 BC. About 500 stone settlements litter the region in the former savannah of the Sahara. Its inhabitants fished and grew millet. It has been found by Augustin Holl that the Soninke of the Mandé peoples were likely responsible for constructing such settlements. Around 300 BC the region became more desiccated and the settlements began to decline, most likely relocating to Koumbi Saleh.[62] Architectural evidence and the comparison of pottery styles suggest that Dhar Tichitt was related to the subsequent Ghana Empire. Djenné-Djenno (in present-day Mali) was settled around 300 BC, and the town grew to house a sizable Iron Age population, as evidenced by crowded cemeteries. Living structures were made of sun-dried mud. By 250 BC Djenné-Djenno had become a large, thriving market town.[63][64]
+
+Farther south, in central Nigeria, around 1,000 BC, the Nok culture developed on the Jos Plateau. It was a highly centralized community. The Nok people produced lifelike representations in terracotta, including human heads and human figures, elephants, and other animals. By 500 BC they were smelting iron. By 200 AD the Nok culture had vanished. Based on stylistic similarities with the Nok terracottas, the bronze figurines of the Yoruba kingdom of Ife and those of the Bini kingdom of Benin are now[when?] believed[by whom?] to be continuations of the traditions of the earlier Nok culture.[65]
+
+Pre-colonial Africa possessed perhaps as many as 10,000 different states and polities[67] characterized by many different sorts of political organization and rule. These included small family groups of hunter-gatherers such as the San people of southern Africa; larger, more structured groups such as the family clan groupings of the Bantu-speaking peoples of central, southern, and eastern Africa; heavily structured clan groups in the Horn of Africa; the large Sahelian kingdoms; and autonomous city-states and kingdoms such as those of the Akan; Edo, Yoruba, and Igbo people in West Africa; and the Swahili coastal trading towns of Southeast Africa.
+
+By the ninth century AD, a string of dynastic states, including the earliest Hausa states, stretched across the sub-Saharan savannah from the western regions to central Sudan. The most powerful of these states were Ghana, Gao, and the Kanem-Bornu Empire.  Ghana declined in the eleventh century, but was succeeded by the Mali Empire which consolidated much of western Sudan in the thirteenth century. Kanem accepted Islam in the eleventh century.
+
+In the forested regions of the West African coast, independent kingdoms grew with little influence from the Muslim north. The Kingdom of Nri was established around the ninth century and was one of the first. It is also one of the oldest kingdoms in present-day Nigeria and was ruled by the Eze Nri. The Nri kingdom is famous for its elaborate bronzes, found at the town of Igbo-Ukwu. The bronzes have been dated from as far back as the ninth century.[68]
+
+The Kingdom of Ife, historically the first of these Yoruba city-states or kingdoms, established government under a priestly oba ('king' or 'ruler' in the Yoruba language), called the Ooni of Ife. Ife was noted as a major religious and cultural centre in West Africa, and for its unique naturalistic tradition of bronze sculpture. The Ife model of government was adapted at the Oyo Empire, where its obas or kings, called the Alaafins of Oyo, once controlled a large number of other Yoruba and non-Yoruba city-states and kingdoms; the Fon Kingdom of Dahomey was one of the non-Yoruba domains under Oyo control.
+
+The Almoravids were a Berber dynasty from the Sahara that spread over a wide area of northwestern Africa and the Iberian peninsula during the eleventh century.[69] The Banu Hilal and Banu Ma'qil were a collection of Arab Bedouin tribes from the Arabian Peninsula who migrated westwards via Egypt between the eleventh and thirteenth centuries. Their migration resulted in the fusion of the Arabs and Berbers, where the locals were Arabized,[70] and Arab culture absorbed elements of the local culture, under the unifying framework of Islam.[71]
+
+Following the breakup of Mali, a local leader named Sonni Ali (1464–1492) founded the Songhai Empire in the region of middle Niger and the western Sudan and took control of the trans-Saharan trade. Sonni Ali seized Timbuktu in 1468 and Jenne in 1473, building his regime on trade revenues and the cooperation of Muslim merchants. His successor Askia Mohammad I (1493–1528) made Islam the official religion, built mosques, and brought to Gao Muslim scholars, including al-Maghili (d.1504), the founder of an important tradition of Sudanic African Muslim scholarship.[72] By the eleventh century, some Hausa states – such as Kano, jigawa, Katsina, and Gobir – had developed into walled towns engaging in trade, servicing caravans, and the manufacture of goods. Until the fifteenth century, these small states were on the periphery of the major Sudanic empires of the era, paying tribute to Songhai to the west and Kanem-Borno to the east.
+
+Mansa Musa ruled the Mali Empire in the 14th century.
+
+Slavery had long been practiced in Africa.[73][74] Between the 7th and 20th centuries, the Arab slave trade (also known as "slavery in the east") took 18 million slaves from Africa via trans-Saharan and Indian Ocean routes. Between the 15th and the 19th centuries, the Atlantic slave trade took an estimated 7–12 million slaves to the New World.[75][76][77] In addition, more than 1 million Europeans were captured by Barbary pirates and sold as slaves in North Africa between the 16th and 19th centuries.[78]
+
+In West Africa, the decline of the Atlantic slave trade in the 1820s caused dramatic economic shifts in local polities. The gradual decline of slave-trading, prompted by a lack of demand for slaves in the New World, increasing anti-slavery legislation in Europe and America, and the British Royal Navy's increasing presence off the West African coast, obliged African states to adopt new economies. Between 1808 and 1860, the British West Africa Squadron seized approximately 1,600 slave ships and freed 150,000 Africans who were aboard.[79]
+
+Action was also taken against African leaders who refused to agree to British treaties to outlaw the trade, for example against "the usurping King of Lagos", deposed in 1851. Anti-slavery treaties were signed with over 50 African rulers.[80] The largest powers of West Africa (the Asante Confederacy, the Kingdom of Dahomey, and the Oyo Empire) adopted different ways of adapting to the shift. Asante and Dahomey concentrated on the development of "legitimate commerce" in the form of palm oil, cocoa, timber and gold, forming the bedrock of West Africa's modern export trade. The Oyo Empire, unable to adapt, collapsed into civil wars.[81]
+
+The Scramble for Africa, also called the Partition of Africa or the Conquest of Africa, was the invasion, occupation, division, and colonisation of African territory by European powers during a short period known to historians as the New Imperialism (between 1881 and 1914). In 1870, only 10 percent of Africa was under formal European control; by 1914 this had increased to almost 90 percent of the continent, with only Ethiopia (Abyssinia), the Dervish state (a portion of present-day Somalia)[82] and Liberia remaining independent, and the latter was a former United States colony. The European colonialists had several motives: a desire for valuable natural resources, the quest for national prestige, rivalry between European powers, and religious missionary zeal. Internal African native politics also played a role.
+
+Imperial rule by Europeans would continue until after the conclusion of World War II, when almost all remaining colonial territories gradually obtained formal independence. Independence movements in Africa gained momentum following World War II, which left the major European powers weakened. In 1951, Libya, a former Italian colony, gained independence. In 1956, Tunisia and Morocco won their independence from France.[86] Ghana followed suit the next year (March 1957),[87] becoming the first of the sub-Saharan colonies to be granted independence. Most of the rest of the continent became independent over the next decade.
+
+Portugal's overseas presence in Sub-Saharan Africa (most notably in Angola, Cape Verde, Mozambique, Guinea-Bissau and São Tomé and Príncipe) lasted from the 16th century to 1975, after the Estado Novo regime was overthrown in a military coup in Lisbon. Rhodesia unilaterally declared independence from the United Kingdom in 1965, under the white minority government of Ian Smith, but was not internationally recognized as an independent state (as Zimbabwe) until 1980, when black nationalists gained power after a bitter guerrilla war. Although South Africa was one of the first African countries to gain independence, the state remained under the control of the country's white minority through a system of racial segregation known as apartheid until 1994.
+
+Today, Africa contains 54 sovereign countries, most of which have borders that were drawn during the era of European colonialism. Since colonialism, African states have frequently been hampered by instability, corruption, violence, and authoritarianism. The vast majority of African states are republics that operate under some form of the presidential system of rule. However, few of them have been able to sustain democratic governments on a permanent basis, and many have instead cycled through a series of coups, producing military dictatorships.
+
+Great instability was mainly the result of marginalization of ethnic groups, and graft under these leaders. For political gain, many leaders fanned ethnic conflicts, some of which had been exacerbated, or even created, by colonial rule. In many countries, the military was perceived as being the only group that could effectively maintain order, and it ruled many nations in Africa during the 1970s and early 1980s. During the period from the early 1960s to the late 1980s, Africa had more than 70 coups and 13 presidential assassinations. Border and territorial disputes were also common, with the European-imposed borders of many nations being widely contested through armed conflicts.
+
+Cold War conflicts between the United States and the Soviet Union, as well as the policies of the International Monetary Fund,[88] also played a role in instability. When a country became independent for the first time, it was often expected to align with one of the two superpowers. Many countries in Northern Africa received Soviet military aid, while others in Central and Southern Africa were supported by the United States, France or both. The 1970s saw an escalation of Cold War intrigues, as newly independent Angola and Mozambique aligned themselves with the Soviet Union, and the West and South Africa sought to contain Soviet influence by supporting friendly regimes or insurgency movements. In Rhodesia, Soviet and Chinese-backed leftist guerrillas of the Zimbabwe Patriotic Front waged a brutal guerrilla war against the country's white government. There was a major famine in Ethiopia, when hundreds of thousands of people starved. Some claimed that Marxist economic policies made the situation worse.[89][90][91] The most devastating military conflict in modern independent Africa has been the Second Congo War; this conflict and its aftermath has killed an estimated 5.5 million people.[92] Since 2003 there has been an ongoing conflict in Darfur which has become a humanitarian disaster. Another notable tragic event is the 1994 Rwandan genocide in which an estimated 800,000 people were murdered. AIDS in post-colonial Africa has also been a prevalent issue.
+
+In the 21st century, however, the number of armed conflicts in Africa has steadily declined. For instance, the civil war in Angola came to an end in 2002 after nearly 30 years. This coincided with many countries abandoning communist-style command economies and opening up for market reforms. The improved stability and economic reforms have led to a great increase in foreign investment into many African nations, mainly from China,[93] which has spurred quick economic growth in many countries, seemingly ending decades of stagnation and decline. Several African economies are among the world's fastest growing as of 2016[update]. A significant part of this growth, which is sometimes referred to as Africa Rising, can also be attributed to the facilitated diffusion of information technologies and specifically the mobile telephone.[94] Migration from African nations has increased dramatically in the last decade.[95]
+
+Africa is the largest of the three great southward projections from the largest landmass of the Earth. Separated from Europe by the Mediterranean Sea, it is joined to Asia at its northeast extremity by the Isthmus of Suez (transected by the Suez Canal), 163 km (101 mi) wide.[96] (Geopolitically, Egypt's Sinai Peninsula east of the Suez Canal is often considered part of Africa, as well.)[97]
+
+The coastline is 26,000 km (16,000 mi) long, and the absence of deep indentations of the shore is illustrated by the fact that Europe, which covers only 10,400,000 km2 (4,000,000 sq mi) – about a third of the surface of Africa – has a coastline of 32,000 km (20,000 mi).[98] From the most northerly point, Ras ben Sakka in Tunisia (37°21' N), to the most southerly point, Cape Agulhas in South Africa (34°51'15" S), is a distance of approximately 8,000 km (5,000 mi).[99] Cape Verde, 17°33'22" W, the westernmost point, is a distance of approximately 7,400 km (4,600 mi) to Ras Hafun, 51°27'52" E, the most easterly projection that neighbours Cape Guardafui, the tip of the Horn of Africa.[98]
+
+Africa's largest country is Algeria, and its smallest country is Seychelles, an archipelago off the east coast.[100] The smallest nation on the continental mainland is The Gambia.
+
+The African Plate is a major tectonic plate straddling the equator as well as the prime meridian. It includes much of the continent of Africa, as well as oceanic crust which lies between the continent and various surrounding ocean ridges. Between 60 million years ago and 10 million years ago, the Somali Plate began rifting from the African Plate along the East African Rift.[102] Since the continent of Africa consists of crust from both the African and the Somali plates, some literature refers to the African Plate as the Nubian Plate to distinguish it from the continent as a whole.[103]
+
+Geologically, Africa includes the Arabian Peninsula; the Zagros Mountains of Iran and the Anatolian Plateau of Turkey mark where the African Plate collided with Eurasia. The Afrotropical realm and the Saharo-Arabian desert to its north unite the region biogeographically, and the Afro-Asiatic language family unites the north linguistically.
+
+The climate of Africa ranges from tropical to subarctic on its highest peaks. Its northern half is primarily desert, or arid, while its central and southern areas contain both savanna plains and dense jungle (rainforest) regions. In between, there is a convergence, where vegetation patterns such as sahel and steppe dominate. Africa is the hottest continent on Earth and 60% of the entire land surface consists of drylands and deserts.[105] The record for the highest-ever recorded temperature, in Libya in 1922 (58 °C (136 °F)), was discredited in 2013.[106][107]
+
+Africa boasts perhaps the world's largest combination of density and "range of freedom" of wild animal populations and diversity, with wild populations of large carnivores (such as lions, hyenas, and cheetahs) and herbivores (such as buffalo, elephants, camels, and giraffes) ranging freely on primarily open non-private plains. It is also home to a variety of "jungle" animals including snakes and primates and aquatic life such as crocodiles and amphibians. In addition, Africa has the largest number of megafauna species, as it was least affected by the extinction of the Pleistocene megafauna.
+
+Africa has over 3,000 protected areas, with 198 marine protected areas, 50 biosphere reserves, and 80 wetlands reserves. Significant habitat destruction, increases in human population and poaching are reducing Africa's biological diversity and arable land. Human encroachment, civil unrest and the introduction of non-native species threaten biodiversity in Africa. This has been exacerbated by administrative problems, inadequate personnel and funding problems.[105]
+
+Deforestation is affecting Africa at twice the world rate, according to the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP).[108] According to the University of Pennsylvania African Studies Center, 31% of Africa's pasture lands and 19% of its forests and woodlands are classified as degraded, and Africa is losing over four million hectares of forest per year, which is twice the average deforestation rate for the rest of the world.[105] Some sources claim that approximately 90% of the original, virgin forests in West Africa have been destroyed.[109] Over 90% of Madagascar's original forests have been destroyed since the arrival of humans 2000 years ago.[110] About 65% of Africa's agricultural land suffers from soil degradation.[111]
+
+Anthropogenic climate change is already a reality in Africa, as it is elsewhere in the world. According to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, Africa is among the most vulnerable continents to climate change.[113][114] The vulnerability of Africa to climate change is driven by a range of factors that includes weak adaptive capacity, high dependence on ecosystem goods for livelihoods, and less developed agricultural production systems.[115] The risks of climate change on agricultural production, food security, water resources and ecosystem services will likely have increasingly severe consequences on lives and sustainable development prospects in Africa.[116] Managing this risk requires integration of mitigation and adaptation strategies in the management of ecosystem goods and services, and the agriculture production systems in Africa.[117]
+
+Over the coming decades, warming from climate change is expected across almost all the earth's surface, and global mean rainfall will increase.[118] Regional effects on rainfall in the tropics are expected to be much more spatially variable and the sign of change at any one location is often less certain, although changes are expected. Consistent with this, observed surface temperatures have generally increased over Africa since the late 19th century to the early 21st century by about  1 °C,  but locally as much as 3 °C for minimum temperature in the Sahel at the end of the dry season.[119]  Observed precipitation trends indicate spatial and temporal discrepancies as expected.[120][114] The observed changes in temperature and precipitation vary regionally.[121][120]
+
+In terms of adaptation efforts, regional-level actors are making some progress. This includes the development and adoption of several regional climate change adaptation strategies[122] e.g. SADC Policy Paper Climate Change,[123] and the adaptation strategy for the water sector.[124] In addition, there has been other efforts to enhance climate change adaptation, such as the tripatite Programme on Climate Change Adaptation and Mitigation in Eastern and Southern Africa (COMESA-EAC-SADC).[125]
+
+The African Union (AU) is a 55-member federation consisting of all of Africa's states. The union was formed, with Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, as its headquarters, on 26 June 2001. The union was officially established on 9 July 2002[127] as a successor to the Organisation of African Unity (OAU). In July 2004, the African Union's Pan-African Parliament (PAP) was relocated to Midrand, in South Africa, but the African Commission on Human and Peoples' Rights remained in Addis Ababa. There is a policy in effect to decentralize the African Federation's institutions so that they are shared by all the states.
+
+The African Union, not to be confused with the AU Commission, is formed by the Constitutive Act of the African Union, which aims to transform the African Economic Community, a federated commonwealth, into a state under established international conventions. The African Union has a parliamentary government, known as the African Union Government, consisting of legislative, judicial and executive organs. It is led by the African Union President and Head of State, who is also the President of the Pan-African Parliament. A person becomes AU President by being elected to the PAP, and subsequently gaining majority support in the PAP. The powers and authority of the President of the African Parliament derive from the Constitutive Act and the Protocol of the Pan-African Parliament, as well as the inheritance of presidential authority stipulated by African treaties and by international treaties, including those subordinating the Secretary General of the OAU Secretariat (AU Commission) to the PAP. The government of the AU consists of all-union (federal), regional, state, and municipal authorities, as well as hundreds of institutions, that together manage the day-to-day affairs of the institution.
+
+Political associations such as the African Union offer hope for greater co-operation and peace between the continent's many countries. Extensive human rights abuses still occur in several parts of Africa, often under the oversight of the state. Most of such violations occur for political reasons, often as a side effect of civil war. Countries where major human rights violations have been reported in recent times include the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Sierra Leone, Liberia, Sudan, Zimbabwe, and Côte d'Ivoire.
+
+Although it has abundant natural resources, Africa remains the world's poorest and least-developed continent, the result of a variety of causes that may include corrupt governments that have often committed serious human rights violations, failed central planning, high levels of illiteracy, lack of access to foreign capital, and frequent tribal and military conflict (ranging from guerrilla warfare to genocide).[128] Its total nominal GDP remains behind that of the United States, China, Japan, Germany, the United Kingdom, India and France. According to the United Nations' Human Development Report in 2003, the bottom 24 ranked nations (151st to 175th) were all African.[129]
+
+Poverty, illiteracy, malnutrition and inadequate water supply and sanitation, as well as poor health, affect a large proportion of the people who reside in the African continent. In August 2008, the World Bank[130] announced revised global poverty estimates based on a new international poverty line of $1.25 per day (versus the previous measure of $1.00). 81% of the Sub-Saharan Africa population was living on less than $2.50 (PPP) per day in 2005, compared with 86% for India.[131]
+
+Sub-Saharan Africa is the least successful region of the world in reducing poverty ($1.25 per day); some 50% of the population living in poverty in 1981 (200 million people), a figure that rose to 58% in 1996 before dropping to 50% in 2005 (380 million people). The average poor person in sub-Saharan Africa is estimated to live on only 70 cents per day, and was poorer in 2003 than in 1973,[132] indicating increasing poverty in some areas. Some of it is attributed to unsuccessful economic liberalization programmes spearheaded by foreign companies and governments, but other studies have cited bad domestic government policies more than external factors.[133][134][135]
+
+Africa is now at risk of being in debt once again, particularly in Sub-Saharan African countries.  The last debt crisis in 2005 was resolved with help from the heavily indebted poor countries scheme (HIPC).  The HIPC resulted in some positive and negative effects on the economy in Africa.  About ten years after the 2005 debt crisis in Sub-Saharan Africa was resolved, Zambia fell back into debt.  A small reason was due to the fall in copper prices in 2011, but the bigger reason was that a large amount of the money Zambia borrowed was wasted or pocketed by the elite.[136]
+
+From 1995 to 2005, Africa's rate of economic growth increased, averaging 5% in 2005. Some countries experienced still higher growth rates, notably Angola, Sudan and Equatorial Guinea, all of which had recently begun extracting their petroleum reserves or had expanded their oil extraction capacity.
+
+In a recently published analysis based on World Values Survey data, the Austrian political scientist Arno Tausch maintained that several African countries, most notably Ghana, perform quite well on scales of mass support for democracy and the market economy.[137]
+
+Tausch's global value comparison based on the World Values Survey derived the following factor analytical scales: 1. The non-violent and law-abiding society 2. Democracy movement 3. Climate of personal non-violence 4. Trust in institutions 5. Happiness, good health 6. No redistributive religious fundamentalism 7. Accepting the market 8. Feminism 9. Involvement in politics 10. Optimism and engagement 11. No welfare mentality, acceptancy of the Calvinist work ethics. The spread in the performance of African countries with complete data, Tausch concluded "is really amazing". While one should be especially hopeful about the development of future democracy and the market economy in Ghana, the article suggests pessimistic tendencies for Egypt and Algeria, and especially for Africa's leading economy, South Africa. High Human Inequality, as measured by the UNDP's Human Development Report's Index of Human Inequality, further impairs the development of Human Security. Tausch also maintains that the certain recent optimism, corresponding to economic and human rights data, emerging from Africa, is reflected in the development of a civil society.
+
+The continent is believed to hold 90% of the world's cobalt, 90% of its platinum, 50% of its gold, 98% of its chromium, 70% of its tantalite,[138] 64% of its manganese and one-third of its uranium.[139] The Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) has 70% of the world's coltan, a mineral used in the production of tantalum capacitors for electronic devices such as cell phones. The DRC also has more than 30% of the world's diamond reserves.[140] Guinea is the world's largest exporter of bauxite.[141] As the growth in Africa has been driven mainly by services and not manufacturing or agriculture, it has been growth without jobs and without reduction in poverty levels. In fact, the food security crisis of 2008 which took place on the heels of the global financial crisis pushed 100 million people into food insecurity.[142]
+
+In recent years, the People's Republic of China has built increasingly stronger ties with African nations and is Africa's largest trading partner. In 2007, Chinese companies invested a total of US$1 billion in Africa.[93]
+
+A Harvard University study led by professor Calestous Juma showed that Africa could feed itself by making the transition from importer to self-sufficiency. "African agriculture is at the crossroads; we have come to the end of a century of policies that favoured Africa's export of raw materials and importation of food. Africa is starting to focus on agricultural innovation as its new engine for regional trade and prosperity."[143]
+
+During US President Barack Obama's visit to Africa in July 2013, he announced a US$7 billion plan to further develop infrastructure and work more intensively with African heads of state. He also announced a new programme named Trade Africa, designed to boost trade within the continent as well as between Africa and the US.[144]
+
+Africa's population has rapidly increased over the last 40 years, and consequently, it is relatively young. In some African states, more than half the population is under 25 years of age.[146] The total number of people in Africa increased from 229 million in 1950 to 630 million in 1990.[147] As of 2018, the population of Africa is estimated at 1.3 billion [1][2]. Africa's total population surpassing other continents is fairly recent; African population surpassed Europe in the 1990s, while the Americas was overtaken sometime around the year 2000; Africa's rapid population growth is expected to overtake the only two nations currently larger than its population, at roughly the same time – India and China's 1.4 billion people each will swap ranking around the year 2022.[148] This increase in number of babies born in Africa compared to the rest of the world is expected to reach approximately 37% in the year 2050, an increase of 21% since 1990 alone.[149]
+
+Speakers of Bantu languages (part of the Niger–Congo family) are the majority in southern, central and southeast Africa. The Bantu-speaking peoples from the Sahel progressively expanded over most of Sub-Saharan Africa.[150] But there are also several Nilotic groups in South Sudan and East Africa, the mixed Swahili people on the Swahili Coast, and a few remaining indigenous Khoisan ("San" or "Bushmen") and Pygmy peoples in southern and central Africa, respectively. Bantu-speaking Africans also predominate in Gabon and Equatorial Guinea, and are found in parts of southern Cameroon. In the Kalahari Desert of Southern Africa, the distinct people known as the Bushmen (also "San", closely related to, but distinct from "Hottentots") have long been present. The San are physically distinct from other Africans and are the indigenous people of southern Africa. Pygmies are the pre-Bantu indigenous peoples of central Africa.[151]
+
+The peoples of West Africa primarily speak Niger–Congo languages, belonging mostly to its non-Bantu branches, though some Nilo-Saharan and Afro-Asiatic speaking groups are also found. The Niger–Congo-speaking Yoruba, Igbo, Fulani, Akan and Wolof ethnic groups are the largest and most influential. In the central Sahara, Mandinka or Mande groups are most significant. Chadic-speaking groups, including the Hausa, are found in more northerly parts of the region nearest to the Sahara, and Nilo-Saharan communities, such as the Songhai, Kanuri and Zarma, are found in the eastern parts of West Africa bordering Central Africa.
+
+The peoples of North Africa consist of three main indigenous groups: Berbers in the northwest, Egyptians in the northeast, and Nilo-Saharan-speaking peoples in the east. The Arabs who arrived in the 7th century AD introduced the Arabic language and Islam to North Africa. The Semitic Phoenicians (who founded Carthage) and Hyksos, the Indo-Iranian Alans, the Indo- European Greeks, Romans, and Vandals settled in North Africa as well. Significant Berber communities remain within Morocco and Algeria in the 21st century, while, to a lesser extent, Berber speakers are also present in some regions of Tunisia and Libya.[152] The Berber-speaking Tuareg and other often-nomadic peoples are the principal inhabitants of the Saharan interior of North Africa. In Mauritania, there is a small but near-extinct Berber community in the north and Niger–Congo-speaking peoples in the south, though in both regions Arabic and Arab culture predominates. In Sudan, although Arabic and Arab culture predominate, it is mostly inhabited by groups that originally spoke Nilo-Saharan, such as the Nubians, Fur, Masalit and Zaghawa, who, over the centuries, have variously intermixed with migrants from the Arabian peninsula. Small communities of Afro-Asiatic-speaking Beja nomads can also be found in Egypt and Sudan.[153][citation needed]
+
+In the Horn of Africa, some Ethiopian and Eritrean groups (like the Amhara and Tigrayans, collectively known as Habesha) speak languages from the Semitic branch of the Afro-Asiatic language family, while the Oromo and Somali speak languages from the Cushitic branch of Afro-Asiatic.
+
+Prior to the decolonization movements of the post-World War II era, Europeans were represented in every part of Africa.[154] Decolonization during the 1960s and 1970s often resulted in the mass emigration of white settlers – especially from Algeria and Morocco (1.6 million pieds-noirs in North Africa),[155] Kenya, Congo,[156] Rhodesia, Mozambique and Angola.[157] Between 1975 and 1977, over a million colonials returned to Portugal alone.[158] Nevertheless, white Africans remain an important minority in many African states, particularly Zimbabwe, Namibia, Réunion, and the Republic of South Africa.[159] The country with the largest white African population is South Africa.[160] Dutch and British diasporas represent the largest communities of European ancestry on the continent today.[161]
+
+European colonization also brought sizable groups of Asians, particularly from the Indian subcontinent, to British colonies. Large Indian communities are found in South Africa, and smaller ones are present in Kenya, Tanzania, and some other southern and southeast African countries. The large Indian community in Uganda was expelled by the dictator Idi Amin in 1972, though many have since returned. The islands in the Indian Ocean are also populated primarily by people of Asian origin, often mixed with Africans and Europeans. The Malagasy people of Madagascar are an Austronesian people, but those along the coast are generally mixed with Bantu, Arab, Indian and European origins. Malay and Indian ancestries are also important components in the group of people known in South Africa as Cape Coloureds (people with origins in two or more races and continents). During the 20th century, small but economically important communities of Lebanese and Chinese[93] have also developed in the larger coastal cities of West and East Africa, respectively.[162]
+
+By most estimates, well over a thousand languages (UNESCO has estimated around two thousand) are spoken in Africa.[163] Most are of African origin, though some are of European or Asian origin. Africa is the most multilingual continent in the world, and it is not rare for individuals to fluently speak not only multiple African languages, but one or more European ones as well. There are four major language families indigenous to Africa:
+
+Following the end of colonialism, nearly all African countries adopted official languages that originated outside the continent, although several countries also granted legal recognition to indigenous languages (such as Swahili, Yoruba, Igbo and Hausa). In numerous countries, English and French (see African French) are used for communication in the public sphere such as government, commerce, education and the media. Arabic, Portuguese, Afrikaans and Spanish are examples of languages that trace their origin to outside of Africa, and that are used by millions of Africans today, both in the public and private spheres. Italian is spoken by some in former Italian colonies in Africa. German is spoken in Namibia, as it was a former German protectorate.
+
+Some aspects of traditional African cultures have become less practised in recent years as a result of neglect and suppression by colonial and post-colonial regimes. For example, African customs were discouraged, and African languages were prohibited in mission schools.[165] Leopold II of Belgium attempted to "civilize" Africans by discouraging polygamy and witchcraft.[165]
+
+Obidoh Freeborn posits that colonialism is one element that has created the character of modern African art.[166] According to authors Douglas Fraser and Herbert M. Cole, "The precipitous alterations in the power structure wrought by colonialism were quickly followed by drastic iconographic changes in the art." [167] Fraser and Cole assert that, in Igboland, some art objects "lack the vigor and careful craftsmanship of the earlier art objects that served traditional functions.[167] Author Chika Okeke-Agulu states that "the racist infrastructure of British imperial enterprise forced upon the political and cultural guardians of empire a denial and suppression of an emergent sovereign Africa and modernist art." [168] Editors F. Abiola Irele and Simon Gikandi comment that the current identity of African literature had its genesis in the "traumatic encounter between Africa and Europe."[169] On the other hand, Mhoze Chikowero believes that Africans deployed music, dance, spirituality, and other performative cultures to (re)asset themselves as active agents and indigenous intellectuals, to unmake their colonial marginalization and reshape their own destinies." [170]
+
+There is now a resurgence in the attempts to rediscover and revalue African traditional cultures, under such movements as the African Renaissance, led by Thabo Mbeki, Afrocentrism, led by a group of scholars, including Molefi Asante, as well as the increasing recognition of traditional spiritualism through decriminalization of Vodou and other forms of spirituality.
+
+African art and architecture reflect the diversity of African cultures. The region's oldest known beads were made from Nassarius shells and worn as personal ornaments 72,000 years ago.[171] The Great Pyramid of Giza in Egypt was the world's tallest structure for 4,000 years, until the completion of Lincoln Cathedral around the year 1300. The stone ruins of Great Zimbabwe are also noteworthy for their architecture, as are the monolithic churches at Lalibela, Ethiopia, such as the Church of Saint George.
+
+Egypt has long been a cultural focus of the Arab world, while remembrance of the rhythms of sub-Saharan Africa, in particular West Africa, was transmitted through the Atlantic slave trade to modern samba, blues, jazz, reggae, hip hop, and rock. The 1950s through the 1970s saw a conglomeration of these various styles with the popularization of Afrobeat and Highlife music. Modern music of the continent includes the highly complex choral singing of southern Africa and the dance rhythms of the musical genre of soukous, dominated by the music of the Democratic Republic of Congo. Indigenous musical and dance traditions of Africa are maintained by oral traditions, and they are distinct from the music and dance styles of North Africa and Southern Africa. Arab influences are visible in North African music and dance and, in Southern Africa, Western influences are apparent due to colonization.
+
+Fifty-four African countries have football (soccer) teams in the Confederation of African Football. Egypt has won the African Cup seven times, and a record-making three times in a row. Cameroon, Nigeria, Senegal, Ghana, and Algeria have advanced to the knockout stage of recent FIFA World Cups. South Africa hosted the 2010 World Cup tournament, becoming the first African country to do so.
+
+Cricket is popular in some African nations. South Africa and Zimbabwe have Test status, while Kenya is the leading non-test team and previously had One-Day International cricket (ODI) status (from 10 October 1997, until 30 January 2014). The three countries jointly hosted the 2003 Cricket World Cup. Namibia is the other African country to have played in a World Cup. Morocco in northern Africa has also hosted the 2002 Morocco Cup, but the national team has never qualified for a major tournament. Rugby is a popular sport in South Africa, Namibia, and Zimbabwe.
+
+Africans profess a wide variety of religious beliefs, and statistics on religious affiliation are difficult to come by since they are often a sensitive topic for governments with mixed religious populations.[172][173] According to the World Book Encyclopedia, Islam and Christianity are the two largest religions in Africa. According to Encyclopædia Britannica, 45% of the population are Christians, 40% are Muslims, and 10% follow traditional religions. A small number of Africans are Hindu, Buddhist, Confucianist, Baha'i, or Jewish. There is also a minority of people in Africa who are irreligious.
+
+The Holy Trinity Cathedral, in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia
+
+The Great Mosque of Kairouan, Tunisia, founded in 670, is the oldest mosque in North Africa;[174]
+
+Vodun altar in Abomey, Benin
+
+National Church of Nigeria, Abuja
+
+A map showing religious distribution in Africa
+
+The countries in this table are categorized according to the scheme for geographic subregions used by the United Nations, and data included are per sources in cross-referenced articles. Where they differ, provisos are clearly indicated.
+
+Africa
+
+Antarctica
+
+Asia
+
+Australia
+
+Europe
+
+North America
+
+South America
+
+Afro-Eurasia
+
+America
+
+Eurasia
+
+Oceania

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+Bogotá (/ˌboʊɡəˈtɑː/,[13][14] also UK: /ˌbɒɡ-/, US: /ˈboʊɡətɑː/,[15] Spanish: [boɣoˈta] (listen)), officially Bogotá, Distrito Capital, abbreviated Bogotá, D.C., and formerly known as Santa Fe de Bogotá during the time of the colony and  between 1991 and 2000, is the capital and largest city of Colombia, administered as the Capital District, as well as the capital of the department of Cundinamarca.[16] Bogotá is a territorial entity of the first order, with the same administrative status as the departments of Colombia. It is the political, economic, administrative and industrial center of the country.
+
+Bogotá was founded as the capital of the New Kingdom of Granada on 6 August 1538, by Spanish conquistador Gonzalo Jiménez de Quesada after a harsh expedition into the Andes conquering the Muisca. The Muisca were the indigenous inhabitants of the region, and they called the place of the foundation "Thybzaca" or "Old Town". The name of Bogotá corresponds to the Spanish pronunciation of the Chibcha Bacatá (or Mueketá) which was the name of a neighboring settlement located between the modern towns of Funza and Cota. There are different opinions about the meaning of the word Bacatá, the most accepted being that it means "walling of the farmland" in the Chibcha language.[17][18] Another popular translation argues that it means "The Lady of the Andes".[19] Further, the word 'Andes' in the Aymara language means "shining mountain", thus rendering the full lexical signification of Bogotá as "The Lady of the shining mountain" (notice, however, that the language of the Muisca people was not Aymara but Chibcha). Others suggest that Bacatá was the name of the Muisca cacique who governed the land before the Spaniards arrived.[20] Jiménez de Quesada gave the settlement the name of "Our Lady of Hope" but the Spanish crown gave it the name of Santafé (Holy Faith) in 1540 when it was appointed as a city.[17]
+
+Santafé became the seat of the government of the Spanish Royal Audiencia of the New Kingdom of Granada (created in 1550), and then after 1717 it was the capital of the Viceroyalty of New Granada. After the Battle of Boyacá on 7 August 1819, Bogotá became the capital of the independent nation of Gran Colombia. It was Simón Bolívar who rebaptized the city with the name of Bogotá, as a way of honoring the Muisca people and as an emancipation act towards the Spanish crown.[19] Hence, since the Viceroyalty of New Granada's independence from the Spanish Empire and during the formation of present-day Colombia, Bogotá has remained the capital of this territory.
+
+The city is located in the center of Colombia, on a high plateau known as the Bogotá savanna, part of the Altiplano Cundiboyacense located in the Eastern Cordillera of the Andes. It is the third-highest capital in South America and in the world after Quito and La Paz, at an average of 2,640 metres (8,660 ft) above sea level. Subdivided into 20 localities, Bogotá has an area of 1,587 square kilometres (613 square miles) and a relatively cool climate that is constant through the year.
+
+The city is home to central offices of the executive branch (Office of the President), the legislative branch (Congress of Colombia) and the judicial branch (Supreme Court of Justice, Constitutional Court, Council of State and the Superior Council of Judicature) of the Colombian government. Bogotá stands out for its economic strength and associated financial maturity, its attractiveness to global companies and the quality of human capital. It is the financial and commercial heart of Colombia, with the most business activity of any city in the country.[21][22] The capital hosts the main financial market in Colombia and the Andean natural region, and is the leading destination for new foreign direct investment projects coming into Latin America and Colombia.[23] It has the highest nominal GDP in the country, responsible for almost a quarter of the nation's total (24.7%).
+
+The city's airport, El Dorado International Airport, named after the mythical El Dorado, handles the largest cargo volume in Latin America, and is third in number of people.[24] Bogotá is home to the largest number of universities and research centers in the country,[22] and is an important cultural center, with many theaters, libraries and museums. Bogotá ranks 52nd on the Global Cities Index 2014,[25] and is considered a global city type "Alpha −" by GaWC.[26]
+
+The area of modern Bogotá was first populated by groups of indigenous people who migrated south based on the relation with the other Chibcha languages; the Bogotá savanna was the southernmost Chibcha-speaking group that exists from Nicaragua to the Andes in Colombia. The civilisation built by the Muisca, who settled in the valleys and fertile highlands of and surrounding the Altiplano Cundiboyacense (modern-day departments of Cundinamarca and Boyacá and small parts of Santander), was one of the great civilisations in the Americas. The name Muisca Confederation has been given to a loose egalitarian society of various chiefs (caciques) who lived in small settlements of maximum 100 bohíos. The agriculture and salt-based society of the people was rich in goldworking, trade and mummification. The religion of the Muisca consisted of various gods, mostly related to natural phenomena as the Sun (Sué) and his wife, the Moon; Chía, rain Chibchacum, rainbow Cuchavira and with building and feasting (Nencatacoa) and wisdom (Bochica). Their complex luni-solar calendar, deciphered by Manuel Izquierdo based on work by Duquesne, followed three different sets of years, where the sidereal and synodic months were represented. Their astronomical knowledge is represented in one of the few extant landmarks of the architecture of the Muisca in El Infiernito outside Villa de Leyva to the north of Bogotá.
+
+The first populations inhabiting the present-day Metropolitan Area of Bogotá were hunter-gatherers in the late Pleistocene. The oldest dated evidence thus far has been discovered in El Abra (12,500 BP), north of Zipaquirá. Slightly later dated excavations in a rock shelter southwest of the city in Soacha provided ages of ~11,000 BP; Tequendama. Since around 0 AD, the Muisca domesticated guinea pigs, part of their meat diet.[27] The people inhabiting the Bogotá savanna in the late 15th century were the Muisca, speaking Muysccubun, a member of the Chibcha language family.[28] Muisca means "people" or "person", making "Muisca people", how they are called, a tautology. At the arrival of the Spanish conquistadores, the Muisca population was estimated to be half a million indigenous people on the Bogotá savanna, and up to two million in the Muisca Confederation. They occupied the highland and mild climate flanks between the Sumapaz Mountains to the southwest and Cocuy's snowy peak to the northeast, covering an approximate area of 25,000 km2 (9,653 sq mi), comprising Bogotá's high plain, a large portion of the modern-day department of Boyacá department portion and a small area in the Santander region.
+
+Trade was the most important activity of the Muisca with other Chibcha-speaking neighbours,[29] such as the Guane, Lache and U'wa and with Cariban-speaking groups such as the Muzo or "Emerald People". Their knowledge of salt production from brines, a task devoted exclusively to Muisca women, gave them the name of "Salt People".[30] Tropical fruits that didn't grow on the cool highlands, as well as coca, cotton and gold were all traded at markets that took place every Muisca week; every four days. At these frequent markets, the Muisca obtained various luxury goods that appear worthless in a modern sense, as well as precious metals and gemstones that seem valuable to us and which became abundant and were used for various purposes.[31] The Muisca warrior elite were allowed to wear feathered crowns, from parrots and macaws whose habitat was to the east of the Andes; the Arawkan-speaking Guayupe, Tegua and Achagua.
+
+The Muisca cuisine consisted of a stable and varied diet of tubers, potatoes and fruits. Maize was the main ingredient of the Muisca, cultivated on elevated and irrigated terraces. Many words exist in Muysccubun for maize, corn and the various types and forms of it.[30] The product was also the base for chicha; the alcoholic beverage of the people, still sold in central Bogotá today. It was the beverage used to celebrate the construction of houses, harvests and sowing, ritual practices around the various sacred sites of the Altiplano, music and dances, trade at special fairs with farther away trading indigenous groups of Colombia and to inaugurate the new highest regarded member of the community; zipas, zaques, caciques and the religious ruler iraca from Sacred City of the Sun Sugamuxi.[32]
+
+From 1533, a belief persisted that the Río Grande de la Magdalena was the trail to the South Sea, to Perú, legendary El Dorado. Such was the target of Gonzalo Jiménez de Quesada, the Granadanian conquistador who left Santa Marta on 6 April 1536 with 800 soldiers, heading towards the interior of current Colombia. The expedition divided into two groups, one under Quesada's command to move on land, and the other commanded by Diego de Urbino would go up river in four brigantine ships to, later on, meet Quesada troops at the site named Tora de las Barrancas Bermejas. When they arrived, they heard news about Indians inhabiting the south and making large salt cakes used to trade for wild cotton and fish. Jiménez de Quesada decided to abandon the route to Peru and cross the mountain in search of salt villages. They saw crops, trails, white salt cakes and then huts where they found corn, yucca and beans. From Tora, the expedition went up the Opón River and found indigenous people wearing very finely painted cotton mantles. When they arrived in Muisca territories in the Andean Plateau, on 9 March 1537, of the expedition leaving Santa Marta, only 162 men were left.[33]
+
+The zipa at the moment of Spanish conquest was Tisquesusa. His main bohío was in a small village called Bacatá with others in Funza and Cajicá, giving name to the present day capital of Colombia. Bacatá was actually located near to the modern location of the city of Funza. A prophecy in his life came true; he would be dying, bathing in his own blood. Defending Funza with a reduced army of guecha warriors against the heavily exhausted but heavily armed strangers, his reign fell in the hands of Gonzalo Jiménez de Quesada and his younger brother Hernán Pérez on 20 April 1537. Upon his death, his brother Sagipa became the last zipa, against the inheritance tradition of the Muisca. Sagipa used to be a main captain for Tisquesusa but quickly submitted to the Spanish rulers. The first encomenderos asked high prices in valuable products and agricultural production from the indigenous people. On top of that epidemics of European viruses razed through the population, of which in current Boyacá 65–85 % of the Muisca were killed within 100 years.[34]
+
+Jiménez de Quesada decided to establish a military campament in the area in 1538, in the site today known as the Chorro de Quevedo square. The foundation was performed by the construction of 12 houses of reed, referring to the Twelve Apostles, and the construction of a preliminary church, also of reed. With the celebration of the first mass in the campament, celebrated by Dominican friar Domingo de las Casas the city was founded with the name of Nuestra Señora de la Esperanza (Our Lady of Hope) on 6 August 1538.[17][20] Quesada placed his right foot on the bare earth and said simply, "I take possession of this land in the name of the most sovereign emperor, Charles V."
+
+This founding, however, was irregular as no town council was formed nor were town officials appointed, as well as lacking some other juridical requirements for an official founding. As a consequence, the official founding only occurred about eight months later, on 27 April 1539, in a site close to one of the recreational lands of the zipa, called Theusa or Theusaquillo.[17] This official founding involved an official ceremony appointing a council and officials, and the demarcation of streets and lands, and in it fellow conquistadores Sebastián de Belalcázar and Nikolaus Federmann were present. While this was the official date of founding, traditionally it is the 6 August 1538 that is considered the date of the actual foundation.
+
+The village obtained the title of City by way of a decree from Charles V on 27 July 1540, which changed the name of the city from Our Lady of Hope to Santa Fe (Holy Faith), after the name of a town nearby Granada where Jiménez de Quesada grew up.[20] Jiménez de Quesada and conquerors De Belalcázar and Federmann left for Spain in April 1539, founding Guataquí together on 6 April 1539. The rule over the newly created New Kingdom of Granada was left to Jiménez de Quesada's brother, Hernán Pérez de Quesada. The first mayors of the city were captains Pedro de Arevalo y Jeronimo de Inzar. The city obtained the Title of Muy Noble y Muy Leal (Very Noble and Loyal) on 17 August 1575 by a decree from Phillip II. Bogotá, then called Santa Fe, later became the capital of the later Viceroyalty of New Granada.[28] Following the independence from Spain, Bogotá became capital of Gran Colombia and later the capital of the Republic of Colombia.
+
+The city mayor and the chapter formed by two councilmen, assisted by the constable and the police chief, governed the city. For better administration of these domains, in April 1550, the Audiencia of Santafé was organized. Santa Fe (or Santafé) became the seat of the government of the New Kingdom of Granada . Fourteen years later in 1564, the Spanish Crown designated the first Royal Audiencia chairman, Andrés Díaz Venero de Leyva. The Chapter and the Royal Audience were located on the other side of what is today the Plaza de Bolívar (then called, Plaza Mayor or Major Square). The street connecting the Major Square and the Square of Herbs— now Santander Park— was named Calle Real (Royal Street), now Carrera Séptima (or "Seventh Street"; counted from the mountains to the east of the city). After 1717 Santafé became the capital of the Viceroyalty of New Granada.
+
+Formed by Europeans, mestizos, indigenous people, and slaves, from the second half of the 16th century, the population began to grow rapidly. The 1789 census recorded 18,161 inhabitants, and by 1819 the city population reached 30,000 inhabitants distributed in 195 blocks. Importance grew when the Diocese was established.[citation needed]
+
+Political unease over the Spanish monarchy and the rights of citizens born in the Americas had been feeling all over Spanish colonies in America, and it was expressed in New Granada in many different ways, accelerating the movement to independence. One of the most transcendent was the Insurrection of the Comuneros, a riot by the locals that started in Villa del Socorro —current Department of Santander—in March 1781.[35] Spanish authorities suppressed the riot, and José Antonio Galán, the leader, was executed. He left an imprint, though. One of the soldiers witnessing his execution was an intellectually curious, noble teenager named Antonio Nariño, who was deeply impressed by both the insurrection and the execution. Nariño went on to become a politician in Santafé, and he became acquainted with the liberal ideas in vogue in Europe. He started organizing clandestine meetings with other intellectuals and politicians to discuss and promote the independence of the American colonies from the Spanish crown. In 1794, Nariño clandestinely translated and published in Santa Fe the Declaration of the Rights of Men and of the Citizen, and copies of his translation were distributed all over the continent and started creating a stirring in the political mentalities of the time. The Spanish government had banned the distribution of the pamphlet and soon discovered the material and burned any copy that they could find. Nariño was arrested on 29 August 1794, and sentenced to ten years of imprisonment and to have all of his properties confiscated, and was sent to exile the year after. Those suspected of being part of Nariño's intellectual circle were also persecuted, but his ideas had become widespread.[36]
+
+In 1807, following the French invasion of Spain and the subsequent abdication of the House of Bourbon in Spain, pressed by Napoleon to give the crown to his brother Joseph, resulting in the destruction of the Spanish administration, many in Spain and in the American colonies created local resistance governments called Juntas. The dissolution of the Supreme Central Junta, following a series of military defeats in the Spanish troops promoted the creation of local juntas all throughout Latin America, which very soon consolidated the independentist ideas already in vogue. After the establishment of a junta in Cartagena de Indias on 22 May 1810, and in many other cities throughout the Viceroyalty, the Junta de Santa Fe was established in 20 July 1810, in what is often called the Colombian Declaration of Independence. The Junta adopted the name of "Supreme Junta of the New Kingdom of Granada", and first swore allegiance to Viceroy Antonio José Amar y Borbón, and appointed him as president, but then he was deposed and arrested five days later. After declaring independence from Spain the different juntas attempted to establish a congress of provinces, but they were unable to do so and military conflicts soon emerged.
+
+The period between 1810 and 1816 was marked by intense conflict between federalist and centralist factions over the nature of the new government of the recently emancipated juntas, a period that has become known as la Patria Boba. The Province of Santafé became the Free and Independent State of Cundinamarca, which soon became embroiled in a civil war against other of the local juntas which banded together to form the United Provinces of New Granada and advocated for a federalist government system. Following a failed military campaign against Quito, General Simón Bolívar of the United Provinces led a campaign that led to the surrender of the Cundinamarca province in December 1814.
+
+In Spain, the war had ended and the Spanish monarchy was restored on 11 December 1813. King Ferdinand VII of Spain declared the uprisings in the colonies illegal and sent a large army to quell the rebellions and reconquer the lost colonies, for which he appointed General Pablo Morillo. Morillo led a successful military campaign that culminated in the capture of Santafé on 6 May 1816.
+
+In 1819, Bolívar initiated his campaign to liberate New Granada. Following a series of battles, the last of which was the Battle of Boyacá, the republican army led by Bolívar cleared its way to Santafé, where he arrived victorious on 10 August 1819. It was Simón Bolívar who rebaptized the city with the name of Bogotá, to honor the Muisca people and to emphasize the emancipation from Spain. Bogotá then became the capital of the Gran Colombia.
+
+Between 1819 and 1849, there were no fundamental structural changes from the colonial period. By the mid-19th century, a series of fundamental reforms were enacted, some of the most important being slavery abolition and religious, teaching, print and speech industry and trade freedom, among others.[citation needed] During the decade of the 70s, radicalism accelerated reforms and state and social institutions were substantially modified. However, during the second half of the century, the country faced permanent pronouncements, declarations of rebellions between states, and factions which resulted in civil wars: the last and bloodiest was the Thousand Days' War from 1899 to 1902.[citation needed]
+
+In 1823, a few years after the formation of Gran Colombia, the Public Library, now the National Library, was enlarged and modernized with new volumes and better facilities.[citation needed] The National Museum was founded. Those institutions were of great importance to the new republic's cultural development.  The Central University was the first State school, precursor of the current National University, founded in 1867 and domiciled in Bogotá.[citation needed]
+
+President Rafael Núñez declared the end of Federalism, and in 1886 the country became a centralist republic ruled by the constitution in force – save some amendments – up to 1981. In the middle of political and administration avatars, Bogotá continued as the capital and principal political center of the country.
+
+From a base of only 20,000 people in 1793, the city grew to approximately 117,000 people in 1912. Population growth was rapid after 1870, largely because of emigration from the eastern highlands.[37]
+
+Early in the 20th century, Colombia had to face devastating consequences from the One Thousand Days War, which lasted from 1899 to 1902, and the loss of Panama.[citation needed] Between 1904 and 1909, the lawfulness of the liberal party was re-established and President Rafael Reyes endeavored to implement a national government. Peace and state reorganization generated the increase of economic activities. Bogotá started deep architectural and urban transformation with significant industrial and artisan production increases.[citation needed] In 1910, the Industrial Exposition of the Century took place at Park of Independence. Stands built evidenced industrial, artisan work, beaux arts, electricity and machinery progress achieved. The period from 1910 to 1930 is designated conservative hegemony.[citation needed] Between 1924 and 1928, hard union struggles began, with oil fields and banana zone workers' strikes, leaving numerous people dead.[citation needed]
+
+Bogotá had practically no industry. Production was basically artisan work grouped in specific places, similar to commercial sectors.[citation needed] Plaza de Bolívar and surroundings lodged hat stores, at Calle del Comercio –current Carrera Seventh– and Calle Florián –now Carrera Eight– luxurious stores selling imported products opened their doors; at Pasaje Hernández, tailor's shops provided their services, and between 1870 and 1883, four main banks opened their doors: Bogotá, Colombia, Popular and Mortgage Credit banks.[citation needed]
+
+Following the banana zone killings and conservative party division, Enrique Olaya Herrera took office in 1930. The liberal party reformed during 16 years of the so-called Liberal Republic, agricultural, social, political, labor, educational, economic and administrative sectors. Unionism strengthened and education coverage expanded.[citation needed]
+
+The celebration produced a large number of infrastructure works, new construction and work sources. Following the 1946 liberal party division, a conservative candidate took presidential office again in 1948, after the killing of liberal leader Jorge Eliécer Gaitán, Bogotá's downtown was virtually destroyed as violence reigned. From then, Bogotá's urban, architectural and population sectors were substantially reorganized.[citation needed]
+
+The city begins the 21st century with important changes in its urban space and public transport, looking to plan a demographic and economic growth that would position it as a strategic hub for international business in Latin America. Some of the main interventions initiated in this century looked to develop projects contained in the Plan of Territorial Ordering (POT), which will guide the development of the city for the next two centuries.
+
+One of the most important interventions in the city for this time was its transportation system. In 1967, there were 2,679 urban buses in Bogotá that transported, on average, 1,629,254 passengers per day. The city had a little more than a million inhabitants and 8,000 hectares in length, the service was relatively reasonable and comfortable. But as the city grew and reached more than five million inhabitants and an area greater than 30,000 hectares, not only did the car fleet increase substantially to reach more than 20,000 vehicles, but chaos multiplied, as well as pollution and the inefficiency of the only existing transportation system.
+
+By the end of the 20th century, the situation was critical. There was no real urban public transport system that would serve as an alternative to the private vehicle - which further incentivized its use - and the city had low levels of competitiveness in Latin America, as well as an unsatisfactory quality of life for the vast majority of its inhabitants.
+
+The administrations of mayors Andrés Pastrana (1988–1990) and Jaime Castro (1992–1994), in addition to the first one of Antanas Mockus (1995–1997), formulated proposals to solve the problem of public transport, with limited results. It was during the mayoralty of the latter when there was an insistent talk about the possibility of establishing a mass transportation system that would help remedy the problem of mobility in Bogotá.
+
+Under the second administration of Antanas Mockus , Bogota opened a 'zone of tolerancia' which legalized prostitution in a large swath  of the center of the city in the Santa Fe neighborhood.[38]
+
+Mayor Enrique Peñalosa (whose first term was 1998–2000) included in his government program as a priority project a solution to the problem of public transport. Consequently, in the execution of the development plan "For the Bogotá we Want" in terms of mobility and in a concrete way to the massive transportation system project, the construction of a special infrastructure exclusively for its operation was determined. This system would include specialized bus corridors, equipped with single-use lanes, stations, bridges, bike paths and special pedestrian access platforms, designed to facilitate the user's experience in the system. However, Peñalosa was became infamous for this campaign against the poor, saying he would rather see robbers on the streets rather than people selling candies. Peñalosa also served a second term (2016–2019).
+
+After getting elected in 2011, Gustavo Petro, a populist mayor, clashed with conservative political establishment after remunicipalization of the city's garbage collection system. The inspector general, Alejandro Ordoñez deposed Petro for alleged constitutional overreach and when he tried to replace the city's private trash collectors. Petro was reinstated weeks later after a Bogota court ruled that the Alejandro Ordoñez had overstepped his authority.
+
+Although the proposal for biarticulated diesel buses called "Transmilenio" was in its early stages a success, due in part to the small numbers of passengers that it transported, in the long term it became an inefficient and contaminating system, saturated for a metro population of almost ten million inhabitants, guilty of environmental deterioration and air pollution.[39]
+
+For its part, the cultural equipment plan of Bogotá has given as one of its most significant results the construction of three large public libraries in different sectors of the city, in addition to the provision of existing ones. The new libraries were located in sectors that allow a wide coverage, have easy access by public transport and bike paths; and their projects were commissioned to distinguished architects of the city. They are those of El Tunal, in the south, projected by the architect Suely Vargas of El Tintal, in the west, the work of the architect Daniel Bermúdez, and the Virgilio Barco Vargas library, located in the Simón Bolívar park in the central area, work of the architect Rogelio Salmona. The three libraries, in addition to their excellent architecture, offer spaces for the educational and cultural development of the citizens of Bogota.[40]
+
+As for 2019, the city's distribution is composed of nine main business centers (Av. El Dorado Business Corridor, Centro Internacional, Parque de la 93, El Lago, North Point, Calle 100, Santa Barbara Business Center, Zona Industrial Montevideo & Parque Industrial Zona Franca). Grittier sides sit south and southwest, where working-class barrios continue to battle their reputations for drugs and crime. In the ritzier north you'll find boutique hotels, corporate offices and well-heeled locals piling into chic entertainment districts such as the Zona Rosa and Zona G.
+
+Bogotá is located in the southeastern part of the Bogotá savanna (Sabana de Bogotá) at an average altitude of 2,640 metres (8,660 ft) above sea level.[8] The Bogotá savanna is popularly called "savannah" (sabana), but constitutes actually a high plateau in the Andes mountains, part of an extended region known as the Altiplano Cundiboyacense, which literally means "high plateau of Cundinamarca and Boyacá". Bogotá is the largest city in the world at its elevation; there is no urban area that is both higher and more populous than Bogotá.
+
+In the extreme south of Bogota's District, the world's largest continuous paramo ecosystem can be found; Sumapaz Páramo in the locality Sumapaz.[41]
+
+The Bogotá River running NE-SW crosses the sabana, forming Tequendama Falls (Salto del Tequendama) to the south. Tributary rivers form valleys with flourishing villages, whose economy is based on agriculture, livestock raising and artisanal production.[citation needed]
+
+The sabana is bordered to the east by the Eastern Cordillera of the Andes mountain range. The Eastern Hills, which limit city growth, run from south to north, and form east of the center the Guadalupe and Monserrate mountains. The western city limit is the Bogotá River. The Sumapaz Paramo (moorland) borders the south and to the north Bogotá extends over the plateau up to the towns of Chía and Sopó.
+
+Most of the wetlands in the Bogota region have disappeared. They covered nearly 50,000 hectares in the 1960s, compared to only 727 in 2019, for a disappearance rate of 98%.[42]
+
+Bogotá has a subtropical highland climate (Köppen Cfb) bordering on a warm-summer Mediterranean climate (Csb).[43] The average temperature is 14.5 °C (58 °F),[44] varying from 6 to 19 °C (43 to 66 °F) on sunny days to 10 to 18 °C (50 to 64 °F) on rainy days. Dry and rainy seasons alternate throughout the year. The driest months are December, January, July and August. The warmest month is March, bringing a maximum of 19.7 °C (67.5 °F). The coolest nights occur in January, with an average of 7.6 °C (45.7 °F) in the city; fog is very usual in early morning, 220 days per year,[45] whilst clear sky sunny full days are quite unusual.[45]
+
+The official highest temperature recorded within the city limits is 30.0 °C (86 °F), and the lowest temperature recorded is −7.1 °C (19 °F), both at the Guaymaral Airport.[46]
+
+The rainiest months are April, May, September, October, and November, in which typical days are mostly overcast, with low clouds and some winds, bringing maximum temperatures of 18 °C (64 °F) and lows of 7 °C (45 °F).
+
+Because of its low latitude and high altitude, Bogotá has an average of 12 daylight hours and 11+ ultraviolet radiation year-round.[47]
+
+Bogotá has 20 localities, or districts, forming an extensive network of neighborhoods. Areas of higher economic status tend to be located in the north, close to the Eastern Hills in the districts of Chapinero, Usaquén and the east of Suba. The lower middle class inhabit the central, western and northwestern parts of the city.[citation needed]. The working-class neighborhoods are located in the south, some of them squatter areas.[citation needed]
+
+The urban layout in the center of the city is based on the focal point of a square or plaza, typical of Spanish-founded settlements, but the layout gradually becomes more modern in outlying neighborhoods. The types of roads are classified as Calles (streets), which run from west to east horizontally, with street numbers increasing towards the north, and also towards the south (with the suffix "Sur") from Calle 0 down south. Carreras (roads) run from north to south vertically, with numbering increasing from east to west. (with the suffix "Este" for roads east of Carrera 0). At the southeast of the city, the addresses are logically sur-este. Other types of roads more common in newer parts of the city may be termed Eje (Axis), Diagonal or Transversal.
+The numbering system for street addresses recently changed, and numbers are assigned according to street rank from main avenues to smaller avenues and local streets. Some of Bogotá's main roads, which also go by a proper name in addition to a number, are:
+
+The largest and most populous city in Colombia, Bogotá had 7,412,566 inhabitants within the city's limits (2018 census),[4] with a population density of approximately 4,310 inhabitants per square kilometer. Only 25,166 people are located in rural areas of Capital District. 47.8% of the population are male and 52.2% women.[4]
+
+In Bogotá, as in the rest of the country, urbanization has accelerated due to industrialization as well as complex political and social reasons such as poverty and violence, which led to migration from rural to urban areas throughout the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.[citation needed] A dramatic example of this is the number of displaced people who have arrived in Bogotá due to the internal armed conflict.[citation needed]
+
+Some estimates show that Bogotá's floating population may be as high as 4 million people, most of them being migrant workers from other departments and displaced people.[50] The majority of the displaced population lives in the Ciudad Bolívar, Kennedy, Usme, and Bosa sections.[citation needed]
+
+Race and Ethnicity in Bogotá[51]
+
+The ethnic composition of the city's population includes minorities of Afro-Colombian people (0.9%), and Indigenous Amerindians (0.3%); 98.8% of the population has no ethnic affiliation,[4] but are mestizos and whites.[citation needed]
+
+The native population of Bogota (bogotanos), is composed of two large groups: rolos and cachacos, the first being descendants of people who are not native to Bogota and the second, children of bogotanos.
+
+In Bogotá, the accelerated urbanization process is not exclusively due to industrialization, since there are complex political and social reasons such as poverty and violence, which have motivated migration from the countryside to the city throughout the 20th century, determining an exponential growth of the population in Bogotá and the establishment of misery belts in its surroundings. According to the Consultancy for Human Rights, Codhes, in the period 1999-2005 more than 260,000 displaced persons arrived in Bogotá, approximately 3.8% of the total population of Bogotá. The locations where the majority of the displaced population is concentrated are Ciudad Bolivar, Kennedy, Bosa and Usme. For this reason, the children of the migrant population born in Bogotá (rolos) often do not have a sense of belonging to the city or a cultural identity as marked as that of the cachacos. However, due to the growing acculturation of rolos and the decreasing number of ethnic cachacos in Bogotá, the  population of rolos tends to be predominant in the city
+
+Bogotá has gone to great lengths to change its formerly notorious crime rate and its image with increasing success after being considered in the 1990s to be one of the most violent cities in the world.[52] In 1993 there were 4,352 murders at a rate of 81 per 100,000 people;[53] in 2007 Bogotá suffered 1,401 murders at a rate of 20 per 100,000 inhabitants, and had a further reduction to 14 per 100,000 inhabitants in 2017 (the lowest since 1979).[54][55][56] This success was mainly the result of a participatory and integrated security policy; "Comunidad Segura", that was first adopted in 1995 and continues to be enforced.[57] 1.2 percent of street addresses account for 99 percent of homicides.[58]
+
+Bogotá is the capital of the Republic of Colombia, and houses the Congress, Supreme Court of Justice and the center of the executive administration as well as the residence of the President (Casa de Nariño).[59] These buildings, along with the Office of the Mayor, the Lievano Palace (Palacio Liévano), are located within a few meters from each other on the Bolívar Square (Plaza de Bolívar). The square is located in the city's historical center, La Candelaria, which features architecture in Spanish Colonial and Spanish Baroque styles.
+
+The Mayor of Bogotá and the City Council – both elected by popular vote – are responsible for city administration. In 2019 Claudia López was elected Mayor; her term runs from 2020 to 2023.
+
+The city is divided into 20 localities: Usaquén, Chapinero, Santa Fe, San Cristóbal, Usme, Tunjuelito, Bosa, Kennedy, Fontibón, Engativá, Suba, Barrios Unidos, Teusaquillo, Los Mártires, Antonio Nariño, Puente Aranda, La Candelaria, Rafael Uribe Uribe, Ciudad Bolívar and Sumapaz.
+
+Each of the 20 localities is governed by an administrative board elected by popular vote, made up of no fewer than seven members. The Mayor designates local mayors from candidates nominated by the respective administrative board.
+
+Bogotá is the main economic and industrial center of Colombia.
+The Colombian government fosters the import of capital goods, Bogotá being one of the main destinations of these imports.
+
+In 2016 the World Cities Study Group and Network (GaWC) from the United Kingdom ranked Bogotá as an Alpha−World City in the World Cities Study Group's inventory, a high-ranking. Alpha and Alpha- cities are important world cities that link major economic regions into the world economy.[60]
+
+Travel & Tourism's share of the city's overall GDP stands at 2.5%.[61] Bogotá is responsible for 56% of the tourism that arrives to Colombia and is home 1,423 multinational companies. Bogotá also ranked highly as a global city where business is done and meetings are held. Bogotá is a growing international meetings destination.[62][63]
+
+During the last year, Bogotá has won 50 major international events, with 12 more world-class events in progress.[62] The 16th World Summit of Nobel Peace Laureates took place from 2 to 5 February 2017 in Bogotá, Colombia.[64] One Young World is the preeminent global forum for young leaders aged 18–30. Bogotá, Colombia is the host city for Summit 2017.[65]
+
+The hotels in the historical center of La Candelaria and its surrounding areas cater to lovers of culture and the arts. This area also has the bulk of hostels in the city as well. In La Candelaria, there are many museums, including the Botero Museum and the Gold Museum. Close to La Candelaria is the Cerro Monserrate, which you can reach by cable car or funicular. The hotels located near Ciudad Salitre are intended for visitors who make short stops in Bogotá and near El Dorado International Airport.
+
+Important landmarks and tourist stops in Bogotá include the botanical garden José Celestino Mutis, the Quinta de Bolívar, the national observatory, the planetarium, Maloka, the Colpatria observation point, the observation point of La Calera, the monument of the American flags, and La Candelaria (the historical district of the city). There is also Usaquen, a colonial landmark where brunch and flea market on Sundays is a traditional activity. The city has numerous green parks and amusement parks like Salitre Magico or Mundo Aventura.
+
+Green areas surrounding Bogota are perfect locations for eco-tourism and hiking activities, in the eastern mountains of the city, just a few minutes walking from main roads, there are Quebrada La vieja and Chapinero Waterfalls, two of many green spots for sightseeing and tourism with clean air.[66][67]
+
+There are also several areas of the city where fine restaurants can be found. The G Zone, the T Zone, and La Macarena are well known for their gastronomic offerings.[68]
+
+Since the 2000s, major hotel chains have established in the city. Bogota has a great cultural diversity, coming from different regions of the country, which allows the tourist to know the multiculturalism of the country without the need to travel to other cities, this includes gastronomy and different festivals.
+
+Monserrate Sanctuary, a local landmark
+
+Atlantis Plaza Mall, featuring the Hard Rock Cafe
+
+La Candelaria, the historical district of the city
+
+Maloka
+
+Bogotá's economy has been significantly boosted due to new shopping malls built within the last few years. As of December 2011[update], over 160 new malls are planned in addition to the existing 100 malls.[69] Notable malls include:
+
+Bogota is home to several television stations like Canal Capital and Citytv which are local stations, Canal 13 is a regional station, and is home to the national channels Caracol TV, RCN TV, Canal Uno, Canal Institucional, and Señal Colombia. It has multiple satellite television services like Telefónica, Claro and DirecTV and several satellite dishes which offer hundreds of international channels, plus several exclusive channels for Bogotá.
+
+In Bogota, all the major radio networks in the country are available, in both AM and FM; 70% of the FM stations offer RDS service.
+There are several newspapers, including El Tiempo, El Espectador and El Nuevo Siglo, plus economical dailies La República and Portafolio, tabloids El Espacio, Q'Hubo, and Extra. Bogotá also offers three free newspapers, two Spanish, ADN and Publimetro, and one English, The Bogota Post.
+
+Energy and sewer bills are stratified based on the location of owner's residence,[70] The system is the classification of the residential properties that should receive public services.[71] Although the system does not consider the income per person and the rules say that the residential real estate should stratify and not households.[72] All mayors should do the stratification of residential properties of their municipality or district.[71]
+
+Bogotá's social strata have been divided as follows and have been extensively used by the government as a reference to develop social welfare programs, statistical information and to some degree for the assignment of lands.
+
+Bogotá's growth has placed a strain on its roads and highways, but since 1998 significant efforts to upgrade the infrastructure have been undertaken.[73] Private car ownership forms a major part of the congestion, in addition to taxis, buses and commercial vehicles. Buses remain the main means of mass transit. There are two bus systems: the traditional system and the TransMilenio.
+
+The traditional system runs a variety of bus types, operated by several companies on normal streets and avenues: Bus (large buses), Buseta (medium size buses) and Colectivo (vans or minivans). The bigger buses were divided into two categories: Ejecutivo, which was originally to be a deluxe service and was not to carry standing passengers, and corriente or normal service. Since May 2008, all buses run as corriente services. Bogotá is a hub for domestic and international bus routes. The Bogotá terminal serves routes to most cities and towns in Colombia[74] and is the largest in the country. There is international service to Ecuador, Perú and Venezuela.
+
+The TransMilenio system was created during Enrique Peñalosa's mayoral term,[75] and is a form of bus rapid transit that has been deployed as a measure to compensate for the lack of a subway or rail system. TransMilenio combines articulated buses that operate on dedicated bus roads (busways) and smaller buses (feeders) that operate in residential areas, bringing passengers to the main grid. TransMilenio's main routes are: Caracas Avenue, Northern Highway (Autopista Norte), 80th Street, Americas Avenue, Jiménez Avenue, and 30th Avenue (also referred to as Norte Quito Sur or N.Q.S. for short). Routes for Suba Avenue and Southern Highway (Autopista Sur), the southern leg of the 30th Avenue, were opened in April 2006. The third phase of the system will cover 7th Avenue, 10th Avenue, and 26th Street (or Avenida El Dorado). The system is planned to cover the entire city by 2030. Although the Transmilenio carries commuters to numerous corners of the city, it is more expensive (US$0.80 or 2300 COP) than any public transport, except taxis.
+
+In addition to TransMilenio, the Peñalosa administration and voter-approved referenda helped to establish travel restrictions on cars with certain license plate numbers during peak hours called Pico y placa; 121 kilometres (75 miles) of Ciclovía on Sundays and major holidays; a massive system (376 km (234 mi) as of 2013[update]) of bicycle paths and segregated lanes called ciclorrutas; and the removal of thousands of parking spots in an attempt to make roads more pedestrian-friendly and discourage car use. Ciclorrutas is one of the most extensive dedicated bike path networks of any city in the world, with a total extension of 376 kilometres (234 miles). It extends from the north of the city, 170th Street, to the south, 27th Street, and from Monserrate on the east to the Bogotá River on the west. The ciclorruta was started by the 1995–1998 Antanas Mockus administration with a few kilometers, and considerably extended afterwards with the development of a Bicycle Master Plan and the addition of paths hundreds of kilometers in extent.[76] Since the construction of the ciclorruta bicycle use in the city has increased, and a car free week was introduced in 2014.[77]
+
+Bi-articulated TransMilenio bus
+
+Urban (SITP) bus, part of the integrated public transport system
+
+Bikepath in central Bogota
+
+Traffic on the Northern Highway (Autopista Norte)
+
+Bogotá's main airport is El Dorado International Airport, with an approximate area of 6.9 km2 (2.7 sq mi) located west of the city's downtown in the Fontibón Locality. It is the third most important airport in Latin America after Mexico City International Airport and São Paulo–Guarulhos International Airport and it is the most important airport in Colombia. Construction of the airport was ordered by Gustavo Rojas Pinilla (19th President of Colombia) in 1955 to replace the Aeropuerto de Techo. Due to its central location in Colombia and in Latin America, it is a hub for Colombia's Flagship Carrier Avianca, Copa Airlines Colombia and LATAM Colombia. It is also serviced by a number of international airlines including American, Delta, United, Air France, KLM, Turkish Airlines, Jet Blue, and Lufthansa. The national airport has begun to take more responsibility due to the congestion at the international airport. In response to the high demand of approximately 27 Million passengers per year,[78] a new airport, El Dorado II, is planned to be built by 2021, to help alleviate traffic at the main airport.[79]
+
+A secondary airport, CATAM, serves as a base for Military and Police Aviation. This airport, which uses the runways of El Dorado will eventually move to Madrid, a nearby town in the region of Cundinamarca, leaving further space to expand El Dorado.[80]
+
+Guaymaral Airport is another small airport located in the northern boundaries of Bogota. It is used mainly for private aviation activities.
+
+Bogotá has little railway transit infrastructure, following the collapse of the tram network, although a number of plans hope to change that. The Bogotá Metro has been pushed forward by two successive governments, and proponents hope that construction will soon begin. Plans to construct railways in and out of the city, replacing defunct routes, have been delayed due to the pressing need for transport within the city.[81] A tram train line using right-of-way from the defunct Bogotá Savannah Railway, known as RegioTram, will be opening in 2023.
+
+Bogotá is the Colombian city with the most extensive and comprehensive network of bike paths. Bogotá's bike paths network or Ciclorutas de Bogotá in Spanish, designed and built during the administration of Mayors Antanas Mockus and Enrique Peñalosa, is also one of the most extensive in the world and the most extensive in Latin America.[82] The network is integrated with the TransMilenio bus system which has bicycle parking facilities.
+
+Bogota implemented a healthy habit called "Ciclovia" where principal highways are closed from 7:00 a.m. until 2:00 pm on Sundays and public holidays; therefore, the People ride their bikes to enjoy the city as well as exercise. In the same way just on December the same activity is carried out in the night, there are some special activities such as fireworks, street theater performances, and street food just to mention a few.
+
+Since 4 April 2016 the carrera 11 has been reduced from four to three car lanes and a new bike lane (cicloruta) has been inaugurated.[83]
+
+On 25 December 1884, the first tramway pulled by mules was inaugurated and covered the route from Plaza de Bolívar to Chapinero,[84] and in 1892, the line connecting Plaza de Bolívar and La Sabana Station started operating. The tramway ran over wooden rails and was easily derailed, so steel rails imported from Britain were eventually installed. In 1894, a tramway car ran the Bogotá–Chapinero line every 20 minutes.[citation needed] The tram system eventually grew to cover most of the city and its surrounding suburbs. But during the Bogotazo riots of 1948, the system suffered heavy damage and was forced to close. The economic effects of the subsequent civil war that followed prevented the damage from being repaired. Parts of the system continued to operate in a reduced state until 1951, when they were replaced by buses. Most of the streetcar tracks were eventually paved over, but exposed tracks can still be seen on many of the older roads of the city, especially downtown and in the La Candelaria area, although it has been about 70 years[when?] since any vehicles have run on them.
+
+The average amount of time people spend commuting with public transit in Bogota, for example to and from work, on a weekday is 97 min. 32% of public transit riders, ride for more than 2 hours every day. The average amount of time people wait at a stop or station for public transit is 20 min, while 40% of riders wait for over 20 minutes on average every day. The average distance people usually ride in a single trip with public transit is 8 km, while 16% travel for over 12 km in a single direction.[85]
+
+Known as the Athens of South America,[86] Bogotá has an extensive educational system of both primary and secondary schools and colleges. Due to the constant migration of people into the nation's capital, the availability of quotas for access to education offered by the State free of charge is often insufficient. The city also has a diverse system of colleges and private schools.
+
+There are a number of universities, both public and private. In 2002, there were a total of 113 higher education institutions; in Bogotá there are several universities, most partially or fully accredited by the NAC (National Accreditation Council): National University of Colombia, University of the Andes, Colombia, District University of Bogotá, La Salle University, Colombia, University of La Sabana, Pontifical Xavierian University, Our Lady of the Rosary University, Universidad Externado de Colombia, Military University Nueva Granada, Central University, Colombia, University of America, Sergio Arboleda University, Jorge Tadeo Lozano University, Pilot University of Colombia, Catholic University of Colombia, Saint Thomas Aquinas University and Universidad Pedagógica Nacional.
+
+The city has a University City at the National University of Colombia campus located in the traditional sector Teusaquillo. It is the largest campus in Colombia and one of the largest in Latin America.
+
+"El Claustro" at the Del Rosario University
+
+Building of Science and Technology "Luis Carlos Sarmiento" at the National University of Colombia
+
+Centro Ático at Pontifical Xavierian University
+
+Mario Laserna building in the University of the Andes
+
+Bogotá has many cultural venues including 58 museums, 62 art galleries, 33 library networks, 45 stage theaters, 75 sports and attraction parks, and over 150 national monuments.[87] Many of these are renowned globally such as:
+The Luis Ángel Arango Library, the most important in the region[according to whom?] which receives well over 6 million visitors a year;[88]
+The Colombian National Museum, one of the oldest in the Americas, dating back to 1823;[89]
+The Ibero-American Theater Festival, largest of its kind in the world, receives 2 million attendees enjoying over 450 performances across theaters and off the street;[90]
+The Bogotá Philharmonic is the most important[according to whom?] symphony orchestra in Colombia, with over 100 musicians and 140 performances a year.[91] The city has been a member of the UNESCO Creative Cities Network in the category of music since March 2012.[92]
+
+The Cristóbal Colón Theater, the country's oldest Opera House, opened in 1892. It is home to the National Symphony Association's major act, the National Symphony Orchestra of Colombia.[93]
+
+Rock al Parque or Rock at the Park is an open air rock music festival. Recurring annually, it gathers over 320,000 music fans who can enjoy over 60 band performances for free during three days a year.[94] The series have been so successful during its 15 years of operation that the city has replicated the initiative for other music genres, resulting in other recent festivals like Salsa at the Park, Hip Hop at the Park, Ballet at the Park, Opera at the Park, and Jazz at the Park.
+
+Kids' Choice Awards Colombia, are the most important[according to whom?] awards given in the city by Nickelodeon and the first ceremony was given in 2014 by the singer Maluma and in Corferias the ceremony has been the home of shows given by artists like Austin Mahone, Carlos Peña, Don Tetto and Riva among others.
+
+Bogotá has worked in recent years to position itself as leader in cultural offerings in South America, and it is increasingly being recognized worldwide as a hub in the region for the development of the arts.[95][96][97][98]
+In 2007, Bogotá was awarded the title of Cultural Capital of Ibero-America by the UCCI (Union of Ibero-American Capital Cities), and it became the only city to have received the recognition twice, after being awarded for the first time in 1991.[99]
+
+Bogotá gave the Spanish-speaking world José Asunción Silva (1865–1896), Modernism pioneer. His poetic work in the novel De sobremesa has a place in outstanding American literature. Rafael Pombo (1833–1912) was an American romanticism poet who left a collection of fables essential part of children imagination and Colombian tradition.
+
+The urban morphology and typology of colonial buildings in Bogotá have been maintained since the late nineteenth century, long after the independence of Colombia (1810).[citation needed] This persistence of the colonial setting is still visible, particularly in La Candelaria, the historical center of Bogotá. Also kept up are the colonial houses of two stories, with courtyards, gabled roofs, ceramic tiles and balconies. In some cases, these balconies were enclosed with glass windows during the Republican period, a distinguishing feature of the architecture of the sector (for example, the House of Rafael Pombo).[citation needed]
+
+"Republican Architecture" was the style that prevailed between 1830 and 1930.[citation needed] Although there were attempts to consolidate a modern architectural language, the only examples seen are University City and White City at the National University of Colombia (constructed 1936 to 1939).[citation needed] This work was developed by German architect Leopold Rother, although architects of rationalist trends participated in the design of campus buildings. We also see in Bogotan architecture trends such as art deco, expressionism and organic architecture. This last trend was typified by Bogotan architects in the second half of the twentieth century such as Rogelio Salmona.
+
+In 2015 BD Bacatá was inaugurated, surpassing the Colpatria Tower to become the tallest building of the city and of Colombia.[100] The building its expected to be the beginning of the city's downtown renovation.
+
+Santa Barbara business district
+
+Victorian architecture in Teusaquillo
+
+Torres del Parque
+
+Santa Maria bullring
+
+In 2007 Bogotá was named World Book Capital by UNESCO.[101] Bogotá is the first Latin American city to receive this recognition, and the second one in the Americas after Montreal. It stood out in programs, the library network and the presence of organizations that, in a coordinated manner, are working to promote books and reading in the city. Several specific initiatives for the World Book Capital program have been undertaken with the commitment of groups, both public and private, engaged in the book sector.
+
+The city is home to the Biblored, an institution which administers 16 small and four large public libraries (Biblioteca Virgilio Barco, Biblioteca El Tintal, Biblioteca El Tunal and Biblioteca Julio Mario Santodomingo). It also has six branches of the Library Network of the Family Compensation Fund Colsubsidio and libraries and documentation centers attached to institutions like the Museo Nacional de Colombia (specializing in old books, catalogs and art), Museum of Modern Art, the Alliance Française, and the Centro Colombo Americano.
+
+Another set of libraries are the new collaborative initiatives between the state, city and international agencies. Examples are the Cultural Center Gabriel García Marquez, custom designed by the Fondo de Cultura Economica in Mexico, and the Spanish Cultural Center, which will begin construction with public funds and of the Spanish government in downtown Bogotá.[citation needed]
+
+The National Library of Colombia (1777), a dependence of the Ministry of Culture and the Biblioteca Luis Angel Arango (1958), a dependence of the Bank of the Republic are the two largest public libraries in the city. The first is the repository of more than two million volumes, with an important collection of ancient books. The latter has almost two million volumes, and with 45,000 m2 (480,000 sq ft) in size, it hosts 10,000 visitors a day; the Library Alfonso Palacio Rudas is also a dependence of the Bank of the Republic, and is located at the north of the city, with about 50,000 volumes. Other large public libraries are the Library of Congress in Colombia (with 100,000 volumes), of the Instituto Caro y Cuervo (with nearly 200,000 volumes, the largest Latin American library in Philology and Linguistics), the Library of the Academy of History The Library of the Academy of Language, the Library of the Colombian Institute of Anthropology and History ICANH, and many university libraries.
+
+Bogotá is home to historical records housed in the General National Archive, a collection of about 60 million documents, one of the largest repositories of primary historical sources in Latin America. Bogotá is also home to the Musical Archive of the Cathedral of Bogotá (with thousands of books and choral song-colonial period), the Archdiocesan Archive, the Archive of the Conciliar Seminary of Bogotá, the Archive History National University of Colombia and the Archive of the Mint in Bogotá, under the Bank of the Republic.
+
+National Library of Colombia
+
+Julio Mario Santo Domingo Public Library
+
+Virgilio Barco Public Library
+
+El Tintal Public Library
+
+The city offers 58 museums and over 70 art galleries.[citation needed] The Colombian National Museum has acquisitions divided into four collections: art, history, archeology and ethnography. The Gold Museum, with 35,000 pieces of tumbaga gold, along with 30,000 objects in ceramic, stone and textiles, represents the largest collection of pre-Columbian gold in the world.[citation needed]
+
+The Botero Museum has 123 works of Fernando Botero and 87 works by international artists. The Museum of Modern Art in Bogotá has a collection of graphic arts, industrial design and photography. The Museum of Colonial Art is home to an important collection of colonial art from Colombia. Fundación Gilberto Alzate Avendaño hosts activities related to the performing arts and shows temporary exhibits of art in its halls and galleries.[citation needed]
+
+Among the scientific museums are the Archeological Museum – Casa del Marqués de San Jorge, which has about 30 thousand pieces of pre-Columbian art, Instituto de Ciencias Naturales (UN), one of the four largest museums of natural sciences in Latin America, and the Geological Museum, which has a collection specializing in Geology and Paleontology.[citation needed]
+
+Bogotá has historical museums like the Jorge Eliecer Gaitan Museum, the Museum of Independence (Museo de la Independencia), the Quinta de Bolívar and the Casa Museo Francisco José de Caldas, as well as the headquarters of Maloka and the Children's Museum of Bogotá. New museums include the Art Deco and the Museum of Bogotá.[citation needed]
+
+Besides the Ibero-American Theater Festival, the largest theater festival in the world, the city has forty-five theaters; the principal ones are the Colon Theater, the newly built Teatro Mayor Julio Mario Santo Domingo, the National Theater with its two venues, the traditional TPB Hall, the Theater of La Candelaria, the Camarin del Carmen (over 400 years old, formerly a convent), the Colsubsidio, and a symbol of the city, the renovated Teatro Jorge Eliecer Gaitan, León de Greiff Auditorium (home of the Bogotá Philharmonic Orchestra), and the Open Air Theater "La Media Torta", where musical events are also held.
+
+The Ibero-American Theater Festival, is not the only acclaimed festival. There are many other regional and local theater festivals that are celebrated and maintain the city active year-round . Amongst these is the "Alternative Theater Festival".[citation needed]
+
+Bogotá has its own film festival, the Bogotá Film Festival, and many theaters, showing both contemporary films and art cinema. Bogota's international art fair, ArtBo, takes place in October of every year and showcases thousands of works covering arts across all formats, movements, and concepts.[102]
+
+The main cultural center of the city is the La Candelaria, historic center of the city, with a concentration of universities and museums. In 2007 Bogotá was designated the Ibero-American cultural Capital of Iberoamerica.
+
+Before the Spanish conquest, the beliefs of the inhabitants of Bogotá formed part of the Muisca religion. From the colonial period onwards, the city has been predominantly Roman Catholic. Proof of this religious tradition is the number of churches built in the historic city center. The city has been seat of the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Bogotá since 22 March 1564. The seat of the Archbishop is the Primatial Cathedral of Bogotá; the archdiocese itself is located in new buildings in the north of the city. However a large group of the population nowadays declares itself non-practicing.[citation needed]
+
+The city has a mosque located in the area of Chapinero called the Estambul mosque,[103] a mosque being built on the Calle 80 with Cra 30 called Abou Bakr Alsiddiq mosque[104] and which is the first in the city to have the traditional Islamic architecture, and an Islamic Center called Al-Qurtubi.[105]
+
+The main Ashkenazi Jewish synagogue (there are a total of 4 synagogues in Bogotá) is located on 94th street (also called State of Israel avenue).
+
+An Eastern Orthodox church and the San Pablo Anglican Cathedral, the mother church of the Episcopal Church in Colombia, are both located in Chapinero. The Bogotá Colombia Temple of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints is located in the Niza neighborhood. There are four Buddhist centers located in the north of the city. There is also a wide variety of Protestant churches in different parts of the city, including the Bogotá Baptist Chapel, the non-denominational Union Church, and the St. Matthaus Evangelical Lutheran Church which holds services in German as well as Spanish for the German-Colombian community.
+
+Church of Our Lady of Lourdes
+
+Protestant Megachurch
+
+Bogotá Colombia Mormon Temple
+
+Abou Bakr Alsiddiq Mosque
+
+There is a broad array of restaurants in Bogotá that serve typical and international food. Parque de la 93, Usaquén, Zona T, The G Zone, La Macarena, La Candelaria, The parkway and the International Center are some of the main sectors where a number of international restaurants are found, ranging from Argentinian, Peruvian, Venezuelan, Brazilian, Mexican, American establishments to Arabic, Asian, French, Italian, Russian and British bistros, rotisseries, steakhouses and pubs, just to name a few.
+Typical dishes of Bogotá include the ajiaco,[106] a soup prepared with chicken, a variety of potatoes, corn on the cob, and guascas (an herb), usually served with sour cream and capers, and accompanied by avocado and rice.
+
+Tamale is a very traditional Bogotá dish. Colombian tamal is a paste made with rice, beef, pork and/or chicken (depending on the region), chickpea, carrot, and spices, wrapped in plantain leaves and steam-cooked.
+
+Figs with arequipe, strawberries with cream, postre de natas and cuajada con melao are some of the main desserts offered in the city. Canelazo is a hot drink from the Altiplano prepared with aguapanela, cinnamon and aguardiente. Another hot beverage is the carajillo, made with coffee (tinto as it is known in Colombia) and aguardiente.
+
+Ajiaco is one of the city's most representative dishes
+
+"Chocolate santafereño" (Santafe hot chocolate), almojábana, cheese and pandebono
+
+There are numerous parks in Bogotá, many with facilities for concerts, plays, movies, storytellers and other activities.
+
+Simón Bolívar Park
+
+Journalists' park
+
+93 Park
+
+Santander park
+
+El Virrey park
+
+The District Institute for Recreation and Sport promotes recreation, sports and use of the parks in Bogotá.
+
+Football has been declared a symbol of Bogotá, and is widely played in the city. There are three professional clubs in the city, Santa Fe, Millonarios, and La Equidad. The main stadium in the city is The Campín Stadium (Estadio Nemesio Camacho El Campín) home of the local teams Santa Fe and Millonarios, In 2001 The Campín Stadium has been the place for the 2001 Copa América final between the Colombia national football and the Mexico national football, final score 1–0 in favor of the home team and finally getting their first continental cup. The other soccer venue is the multi-use Techo Metropolitan Stadium which is the home of La Equidad.
+
+Other major sporting venues are the covered Coliseum El Campín, the Simón Bolívar Aquatic Complex, the Sports Palace, the El Salitre Sports Venue which includes the Luis Carlos Galán Velodrome (which hosted the 1995 UCI Track Cycling World Championships), the El Salitre Diamond Ballpark and the BMX track "Mario Andrés Soto".
+
+Bogotá hosted the first Bolivarian Games held in 1938. The city hosted the National Games in 2004, winning the championship. It was a sub-venue Bolivarian Pan American Games. In addition, the city on the route of the Tour of Colombia.
+
+After being a major venue city for the 2011 FIFA U-20 World Cup that was held in Colombia, Bogotá was one of the venue cities hosting the 2016 FIFA Futsal World Cup.[107]
+
+The flag originated with the insurgency movement against the colonial authorities which began on 20 July 1810, during which the rebels wore armbands with yellow and red bands, as these colours were those of the Spanish flag used as the flag for the New Kingdom of Granada.[citation needed]
+
+On 9 October 1952, exactly 142 years after these events, decree 555 of 1952 officially adopted the patriotic armband as the flag of Bogotá.[108] The flag of Cundinamarca follows the same pattern, plus a light blue tile which represents the Virgin Mary's cape.
+
+The flag itself is a yellow band above a red one. The yellow denotes the gold from the earth, as well as the virtues of justice, clemency, benevolence, the so-called "mundane qualities" (defined as nobility, excellence, richness, generosity, splendour, health, steadfastness, joy and prosperity), long life, eternity, power and constancy. The red denotes the virtue of charity, as well as the qualities of bravery, nobility, values, audacity, victory, honour and furor, Colombians call it the blood of their people.[citation needed]
+
+The coat of arms of the city was granted by emperor Charles V (Charles I of Spain) to the New Kingdom of Granada, by royal decree given in Valladolid, Spain on 3 December 1548. It contains a black eagle in the center, which symbolises steadfastness. The eagle is also a symbol of the Habsburgs, which was the ruling family of the Spanish empire at the time. The eagle is crowned with gold and holds a red pomegranate inside a golden background. The border contains olive branches with nine golden pomegranates on a blue background. The two red pomegranates symbolize audacity, and the nine golden ones represent the nine states which constituted the New Kingdom of Granada at the time. In 1932 the coat of arms was officially recognized and adopted as the symbol of Bogotá.[citation needed]
+
+Bogotá's anthem lyrics were written by Pedro Medina Avendaño; the melody was composed by Roberto Pineda Duque. The song was officially declared the anthem by decree 1000 31 July 1974, by then Mayor of Bogotá, Aníbal Fernandez de Soto.
+
+Bogotá is twinned with:
+
+Bogotá is part of the Union of Ibero-American Capital Cities[116] from 12 October 1982 establishing brotherly relations with the following cities:
+
+Other forms of cooperation and city friendship similar to the twin city programmes exist:
+
+Amazonas
+ Antioquia
+ Arauca
+ Atlántico
+ Bolívar
+ Boyacá
+
+Caldas
+ Caquetá
+ Casanare
+ Cauca
+ Cesar
+ Chocó
+
+Córdoba
+ Cundinamarca
+ Guainía
+ Guaviare
+ Huila
+ La Guajira
+
+Magdalena
+ Meta
+ Nariño
+ N. Santander
+ Putumayo
+ Quindío
+
+Risaralda
+ San Andrés
+ Santander
+ Sucre
+ Tolima
+ Valle del Cauca
+
+Vaupés
+ Vichada
+
+Capital district:
+ Bogotá

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+Bogotá (/ˌboʊɡəˈtɑː/,[13][14] also UK: /ˌbɒɡ-/, US: /ˈboʊɡətɑː/,[15] Spanish: [boɣoˈta] (listen)), officially Bogotá, Distrito Capital, abbreviated Bogotá, D.C., and formerly known as Santa Fe de Bogotá during the time of the colony and  between 1991 and 2000, is the capital and largest city of Colombia, administered as the Capital District, as well as the capital of the department of Cundinamarca.[16] Bogotá is a territorial entity of the first order, with the same administrative status as the departments of Colombia. It is the political, economic, administrative and industrial center of the country.
+
+Bogotá was founded as the capital of the New Kingdom of Granada on 6 August 1538, by Spanish conquistador Gonzalo Jiménez de Quesada after a harsh expedition into the Andes conquering the Muisca. The Muisca were the indigenous inhabitants of the region, and they called the place of the foundation "Thybzaca" or "Old Town". The name of Bogotá corresponds to the Spanish pronunciation of the Chibcha Bacatá (or Mueketá) which was the name of a neighboring settlement located between the modern towns of Funza and Cota. There are different opinions about the meaning of the word Bacatá, the most accepted being that it means "walling of the farmland" in the Chibcha language.[17][18] Another popular translation argues that it means "The Lady of the Andes".[19] Further, the word 'Andes' in the Aymara language means "shining mountain", thus rendering the full lexical signification of Bogotá as "The Lady of the shining mountain" (notice, however, that the language of the Muisca people was not Aymara but Chibcha). Others suggest that Bacatá was the name of the Muisca cacique who governed the land before the Spaniards arrived.[20] Jiménez de Quesada gave the settlement the name of "Our Lady of Hope" but the Spanish crown gave it the name of Santafé (Holy Faith) in 1540 when it was appointed as a city.[17]
+
+Santafé became the seat of the government of the Spanish Royal Audiencia of the New Kingdom of Granada (created in 1550), and then after 1717 it was the capital of the Viceroyalty of New Granada. After the Battle of Boyacá on 7 August 1819, Bogotá became the capital of the independent nation of Gran Colombia. It was Simón Bolívar who rebaptized the city with the name of Bogotá, as a way of honoring the Muisca people and as an emancipation act towards the Spanish crown.[19] Hence, since the Viceroyalty of New Granada's independence from the Spanish Empire and during the formation of present-day Colombia, Bogotá has remained the capital of this territory.
+
+The city is located in the center of Colombia, on a high plateau known as the Bogotá savanna, part of the Altiplano Cundiboyacense located in the Eastern Cordillera of the Andes. It is the third-highest capital in South America and in the world after Quito and La Paz, at an average of 2,640 metres (8,660 ft) above sea level. Subdivided into 20 localities, Bogotá has an area of 1,587 square kilometres (613 square miles) and a relatively cool climate that is constant through the year.
+
+The city is home to central offices of the executive branch (Office of the President), the legislative branch (Congress of Colombia) and the judicial branch (Supreme Court of Justice, Constitutional Court, Council of State and the Superior Council of Judicature) of the Colombian government. Bogotá stands out for its economic strength and associated financial maturity, its attractiveness to global companies and the quality of human capital. It is the financial and commercial heart of Colombia, with the most business activity of any city in the country.[21][22] The capital hosts the main financial market in Colombia and the Andean natural region, and is the leading destination for new foreign direct investment projects coming into Latin America and Colombia.[23] It has the highest nominal GDP in the country, responsible for almost a quarter of the nation's total (24.7%).
+
+The city's airport, El Dorado International Airport, named after the mythical El Dorado, handles the largest cargo volume in Latin America, and is third in number of people.[24] Bogotá is home to the largest number of universities and research centers in the country,[22] and is an important cultural center, with many theaters, libraries and museums. Bogotá ranks 52nd on the Global Cities Index 2014,[25] and is considered a global city type "Alpha −" by GaWC.[26]
+
+The area of modern Bogotá was first populated by groups of indigenous people who migrated south based on the relation with the other Chibcha languages; the Bogotá savanna was the southernmost Chibcha-speaking group that exists from Nicaragua to the Andes in Colombia. The civilisation built by the Muisca, who settled in the valleys and fertile highlands of and surrounding the Altiplano Cundiboyacense (modern-day departments of Cundinamarca and Boyacá and small parts of Santander), was one of the great civilisations in the Americas. The name Muisca Confederation has been given to a loose egalitarian society of various chiefs (caciques) who lived in small settlements of maximum 100 bohíos. The agriculture and salt-based society of the people was rich in goldworking, trade and mummification. The religion of the Muisca consisted of various gods, mostly related to natural phenomena as the Sun (Sué) and his wife, the Moon; Chía, rain Chibchacum, rainbow Cuchavira and with building and feasting (Nencatacoa) and wisdom (Bochica). Their complex luni-solar calendar, deciphered by Manuel Izquierdo based on work by Duquesne, followed three different sets of years, where the sidereal and synodic months were represented. Their astronomical knowledge is represented in one of the few extant landmarks of the architecture of the Muisca in El Infiernito outside Villa de Leyva to the north of Bogotá.
+
+The first populations inhabiting the present-day Metropolitan Area of Bogotá were hunter-gatherers in the late Pleistocene. The oldest dated evidence thus far has been discovered in El Abra (12,500 BP), north of Zipaquirá. Slightly later dated excavations in a rock shelter southwest of the city in Soacha provided ages of ~11,000 BP; Tequendama. Since around 0 AD, the Muisca domesticated guinea pigs, part of their meat diet.[27] The people inhabiting the Bogotá savanna in the late 15th century were the Muisca, speaking Muysccubun, a member of the Chibcha language family.[28] Muisca means "people" or "person", making "Muisca people", how they are called, a tautology. At the arrival of the Spanish conquistadores, the Muisca population was estimated to be half a million indigenous people on the Bogotá savanna, and up to two million in the Muisca Confederation. They occupied the highland and mild climate flanks between the Sumapaz Mountains to the southwest and Cocuy's snowy peak to the northeast, covering an approximate area of 25,000 km2 (9,653 sq mi), comprising Bogotá's high plain, a large portion of the modern-day department of Boyacá department portion and a small area in the Santander region.
+
+Trade was the most important activity of the Muisca with other Chibcha-speaking neighbours,[29] such as the Guane, Lache and U'wa and with Cariban-speaking groups such as the Muzo or "Emerald People". Their knowledge of salt production from brines, a task devoted exclusively to Muisca women, gave them the name of "Salt People".[30] Tropical fruits that didn't grow on the cool highlands, as well as coca, cotton and gold were all traded at markets that took place every Muisca week; every four days. At these frequent markets, the Muisca obtained various luxury goods that appear worthless in a modern sense, as well as precious metals and gemstones that seem valuable to us and which became abundant and were used for various purposes.[31] The Muisca warrior elite were allowed to wear feathered crowns, from parrots and macaws whose habitat was to the east of the Andes; the Arawkan-speaking Guayupe, Tegua and Achagua.
+
+The Muisca cuisine consisted of a stable and varied diet of tubers, potatoes and fruits. Maize was the main ingredient of the Muisca, cultivated on elevated and irrigated terraces. Many words exist in Muysccubun for maize, corn and the various types and forms of it.[30] The product was also the base for chicha; the alcoholic beverage of the people, still sold in central Bogotá today. It was the beverage used to celebrate the construction of houses, harvests and sowing, ritual practices around the various sacred sites of the Altiplano, music and dances, trade at special fairs with farther away trading indigenous groups of Colombia and to inaugurate the new highest regarded member of the community; zipas, zaques, caciques and the religious ruler iraca from Sacred City of the Sun Sugamuxi.[32]
+
+From 1533, a belief persisted that the Río Grande de la Magdalena was the trail to the South Sea, to Perú, legendary El Dorado. Such was the target of Gonzalo Jiménez de Quesada, the Granadanian conquistador who left Santa Marta on 6 April 1536 with 800 soldiers, heading towards the interior of current Colombia. The expedition divided into two groups, one under Quesada's command to move on land, and the other commanded by Diego de Urbino would go up river in four brigantine ships to, later on, meet Quesada troops at the site named Tora de las Barrancas Bermejas. When they arrived, they heard news about Indians inhabiting the south and making large salt cakes used to trade for wild cotton and fish. Jiménez de Quesada decided to abandon the route to Peru and cross the mountain in search of salt villages. They saw crops, trails, white salt cakes and then huts where they found corn, yucca and beans. From Tora, the expedition went up the Opón River and found indigenous people wearing very finely painted cotton mantles. When they arrived in Muisca territories in the Andean Plateau, on 9 March 1537, of the expedition leaving Santa Marta, only 162 men were left.[33]
+
+The zipa at the moment of Spanish conquest was Tisquesusa. His main bohío was in a small village called Bacatá with others in Funza and Cajicá, giving name to the present day capital of Colombia. Bacatá was actually located near to the modern location of the city of Funza. A prophecy in his life came true; he would be dying, bathing in his own blood. Defending Funza with a reduced army of guecha warriors against the heavily exhausted but heavily armed strangers, his reign fell in the hands of Gonzalo Jiménez de Quesada and his younger brother Hernán Pérez on 20 April 1537. Upon his death, his brother Sagipa became the last zipa, against the inheritance tradition of the Muisca. Sagipa used to be a main captain for Tisquesusa but quickly submitted to the Spanish rulers. The first encomenderos asked high prices in valuable products and agricultural production from the indigenous people. On top of that epidemics of European viruses razed through the population, of which in current Boyacá 65–85 % of the Muisca were killed within 100 years.[34]
+
+Jiménez de Quesada decided to establish a military campament in the area in 1538, in the site today known as the Chorro de Quevedo square. The foundation was performed by the construction of 12 houses of reed, referring to the Twelve Apostles, and the construction of a preliminary church, also of reed. With the celebration of the first mass in the campament, celebrated by Dominican friar Domingo de las Casas the city was founded with the name of Nuestra Señora de la Esperanza (Our Lady of Hope) on 6 August 1538.[17][20] Quesada placed his right foot on the bare earth and said simply, "I take possession of this land in the name of the most sovereign emperor, Charles V."
+
+This founding, however, was irregular as no town council was formed nor were town officials appointed, as well as lacking some other juridical requirements for an official founding. As a consequence, the official founding only occurred about eight months later, on 27 April 1539, in a site close to one of the recreational lands of the zipa, called Theusa or Theusaquillo.[17] This official founding involved an official ceremony appointing a council and officials, and the demarcation of streets and lands, and in it fellow conquistadores Sebastián de Belalcázar and Nikolaus Federmann were present. While this was the official date of founding, traditionally it is the 6 August 1538 that is considered the date of the actual foundation.
+
+The village obtained the title of City by way of a decree from Charles V on 27 July 1540, which changed the name of the city from Our Lady of Hope to Santa Fe (Holy Faith), after the name of a town nearby Granada where Jiménez de Quesada grew up.[20] Jiménez de Quesada and conquerors De Belalcázar and Federmann left for Spain in April 1539, founding Guataquí together on 6 April 1539. The rule over the newly created New Kingdom of Granada was left to Jiménez de Quesada's brother, Hernán Pérez de Quesada. The first mayors of the city were captains Pedro de Arevalo y Jeronimo de Inzar. The city obtained the Title of Muy Noble y Muy Leal (Very Noble and Loyal) on 17 August 1575 by a decree from Phillip II. Bogotá, then called Santa Fe, later became the capital of the later Viceroyalty of New Granada.[28] Following the independence from Spain, Bogotá became capital of Gran Colombia and later the capital of the Republic of Colombia.
+
+The city mayor and the chapter formed by two councilmen, assisted by the constable and the police chief, governed the city. For better administration of these domains, in April 1550, the Audiencia of Santafé was organized. Santa Fe (or Santafé) became the seat of the government of the New Kingdom of Granada . Fourteen years later in 1564, the Spanish Crown designated the first Royal Audiencia chairman, Andrés Díaz Venero de Leyva. The Chapter and the Royal Audience were located on the other side of what is today the Plaza de Bolívar (then called, Plaza Mayor or Major Square). The street connecting the Major Square and the Square of Herbs— now Santander Park— was named Calle Real (Royal Street), now Carrera Séptima (or "Seventh Street"; counted from the mountains to the east of the city). After 1717 Santafé became the capital of the Viceroyalty of New Granada.
+
+Formed by Europeans, mestizos, indigenous people, and slaves, from the second half of the 16th century, the population began to grow rapidly. The 1789 census recorded 18,161 inhabitants, and by 1819 the city population reached 30,000 inhabitants distributed in 195 blocks. Importance grew when the Diocese was established.[citation needed]
+
+Political unease over the Spanish monarchy and the rights of citizens born in the Americas had been feeling all over Spanish colonies in America, and it was expressed in New Granada in many different ways, accelerating the movement to independence. One of the most transcendent was the Insurrection of the Comuneros, a riot by the locals that started in Villa del Socorro —current Department of Santander—in March 1781.[35] Spanish authorities suppressed the riot, and José Antonio Galán, the leader, was executed. He left an imprint, though. One of the soldiers witnessing his execution was an intellectually curious, noble teenager named Antonio Nariño, who was deeply impressed by both the insurrection and the execution. Nariño went on to become a politician in Santafé, and he became acquainted with the liberal ideas in vogue in Europe. He started organizing clandestine meetings with other intellectuals and politicians to discuss and promote the independence of the American colonies from the Spanish crown. In 1794, Nariño clandestinely translated and published in Santa Fe the Declaration of the Rights of Men and of the Citizen, and copies of his translation were distributed all over the continent and started creating a stirring in the political mentalities of the time. The Spanish government had banned the distribution of the pamphlet and soon discovered the material and burned any copy that they could find. Nariño was arrested on 29 August 1794, and sentenced to ten years of imprisonment and to have all of his properties confiscated, and was sent to exile the year after. Those suspected of being part of Nariño's intellectual circle were also persecuted, but his ideas had become widespread.[36]
+
+In 1807, following the French invasion of Spain and the subsequent abdication of the House of Bourbon in Spain, pressed by Napoleon to give the crown to his brother Joseph, resulting in the destruction of the Spanish administration, many in Spain and in the American colonies created local resistance governments called Juntas. The dissolution of the Supreme Central Junta, following a series of military defeats in the Spanish troops promoted the creation of local juntas all throughout Latin America, which very soon consolidated the independentist ideas already in vogue. After the establishment of a junta in Cartagena de Indias on 22 May 1810, and in many other cities throughout the Viceroyalty, the Junta de Santa Fe was established in 20 July 1810, in what is often called the Colombian Declaration of Independence. The Junta adopted the name of "Supreme Junta of the New Kingdom of Granada", and first swore allegiance to Viceroy Antonio José Amar y Borbón, and appointed him as president, but then he was deposed and arrested five days later. After declaring independence from Spain the different juntas attempted to establish a congress of provinces, but they were unable to do so and military conflicts soon emerged.
+
+The period between 1810 and 1816 was marked by intense conflict between federalist and centralist factions over the nature of the new government of the recently emancipated juntas, a period that has become known as la Patria Boba. The Province of Santafé became the Free and Independent State of Cundinamarca, which soon became embroiled in a civil war against other of the local juntas which banded together to form the United Provinces of New Granada and advocated for a federalist government system. Following a failed military campaign against Quito, General Simón Bolívar of the United Provinces led a campaign that led to the surrender of the Cundinamarca province in December 1814.
+
+In Spain, the war had ended and the Spanish monarchy was restored on 11 December 1813. King Ferdinand VII of Spain declared the uprisings in the colonies illegal and sent a large army to quell the rebellions and reconquer the lost colonies, for which he appointed General Pablo Morillo. Morillo led a successful military campaign that culminated in the capture of Santafé on 6 May 1816.
+
+In 1819, Bolívar initiated his campaign to liberate New Granada. Following a series of battles, the last of which was the Battle of Boyacá, the republican army led by Bolívar cleared its way to Santafé, where he arrived victorious on 10 August 1819. It was Simón Bolívar who rebaptized the city with the name of Bogotá, to honor the Muisca people and to emphasize the emancipation from Spain. Bogotá then became the capital of the Gran Colombia.
+
+Between 1819 and 1849, there were no fundamental structural changes from the colonial period. By the mid-19th century, a series of fundamental reforms were enacted, some of the most important being slavery abolition and religious, teaching, print and speech industry and trade freedom, among others.[citation needed] During the decade of the 70s, radicalism accelerated reforms and state and social institutions were substantially modified. However, during the second half of the century, the country faced permanent pronouncements, declarations of rebellions between states, and factions which resulted in civil wars: the last and bloodiest was the Thousand Days' War from 1899 to 1902.[citation needed]
+
+In 1823, a few years after the formation of Gran Colombia, the Public Library, now the National Library, was enlarged and modernized with new volumes and better facilities.[citation needed] The National Museum was founded. Those institutions were of great importance to the new republic's cultural development.  The Central University was the first State school, precursor of the current National University, founded in 1867 and domiciled in Bogotá.[citation needed]
+
+President Rafael Núñez declared the end of Federalism, and in 1886 the country became a centralist republic ruled by the constitution in force – save some amendments – up to 1981. In the middle of political and administration avatars, Bogotá continued as the capital and principal political center of the country.
+
+From a base of only 20,000 people in 1793, the city grew to approximately 117,000 people in 1912. Population growth was rapid after 1870, largely because of emigration from the eastern highlands.[37]
+
+Early in the 20th century, Colombia had to face devastating consequences from the One Thousand Days War, which lasted from 1899 to 1902, and the loss of Panama.[citation needed] Between 1904 and 1909, the lawfulness of the liberal party was re-established and President Rafael Reyes endeavored to implement a national government. Peace and state reorganization generated the increase of economic activities. Bogotá started deep architectural and urban transformation with significant industrial and artisan production increases.[citation needed] In 1910, the Industrial Exposition of the Century took place at Park of Independence. Stands built evidenced industrial, artisan work, beaux arts, electricity and machinery progress achieved. The period from 1910 to 1930 is designated conservative hegemony.[citation needed] Between 1924 and 1928, hard union struggles began, with oil fields and banana zone workers' strikes, leaving numerous people dead.[citation needed]
+
+Bogotá had practically no industry. Production was basically artisan work grouped in specific places, similar to commercial sectors.[citation needed] Plaza de Bolívar and surroundings lodged hat stores, at Calle del Comercio –current Carrera Seventh– and Calle Florián –now Carrera Eight– luxurious stores selling imported products opened their doors; at Pasaje Hernández, tailor's shops provided their services, and between 1870 and 1883, four main banks opened their doors: Bogotá, Colombia, Popular and Mortgage Credit banks.[citation needed]
+
+Following the banana zone killings and conservative party division, Enrique Olaya Herrera took office in 1930. The liberal party reformed during 16 years of the so-called Liberal Republic, agricultural, social, political, labor, educational, economic and administrative sectors. Unionism strengthened and education coverage expanded.[citation needed]
+
+The celebration produced a large number of infrastructure works, new construction and work sources. Following the 1946 liberal party division, a conservative candidate took presidential office again in 1948, after the killing of liberal leader Jorge Eliécer Gaitán, Bogotá's downtown was virtually destroyed as violence reigned. From then, Bogotá's urban, architectural and population sectors were substantially reorganized.[citation needed]
+
+The city begins the 21st century with important changes in its urban space and public transport, looking to plan a demographic and economic growth that would position it as a strategic hub for international business in Latin America. Some of the main interventions initiated in this century looked to develop projects contained in the Plan of Territorial Ordering (POT), which will guide the development of the city for the next two centuries.
+
+One of the most important interventions in the city for this time was its transportation system. In 1967, there were 2,679 urban buses in Bogotá that transported, on average, 1,629,254 passengers per day. The city had a little more than a million inhabitants and 8,000 hectares in length, the service was relatively reasonable and comfortable. But as the city grew and reached more than five million inhabitants and an area greater than 30,000 hectares, not only did the car fleet increase substantially to reach more than 20,000 vehicles, but chaos multiplied, as well as pollution and the inefficiency of the only existing transportation system.
+
+By the end of the 20th century, the situation was critical. There was no real urban public transport system that would serve as an alternative to the private vehicle - which further incentivized its use - and the city had low levels of competitiveness in Latin America, as well as an unsatisfactory quality of life for the vast majority of its inhabitants.
+
+The administrations of mayors Andrés Pastrana (1988–1990) and Jaime Castro (1992–1994), in addition to the first one of Antanas Mockus (1995–1997), formulated proposals to solve the problem of public transport, with limited results. It was during the mayoralty of the latter when there was an insistent talk about the possibility of establishing a mass transportation system that would help remedy the problem of mobility in Bogotá.
+
+Under the second administration of Antanas Mockus , Bogota opened a 'zone of tolerancia' which legalized prostitution in a large swath  of the center of the city in the Santa Fe neighborhood.[38]
+
+Mayor Enrique Peñalosa (whose first term was 1998–2000) included in his government program as a priority project a solution to the problem of public transport. Consequently, in the execution of the development plan "For the Bogotá we Want" in terms of mobility and in a concrete way to the massive transportation system project, the construction of a special infrastructure exclusively for its operation was determined. This system would include specialized bus corridors, equipped with single-use lanes, stations, bridges, bike paths and special pedestrian access platforms, designed to facilitate the user's experience in the system. However, Peñalosa was became infamous for this campaign against the poor, saying he would rather see robbers on the streets rather than people selling candies. Peñalosa also served a second term (2016–2019).
+
+After getting elected in 2011, Gustavo Petro, a populist mayor, clashed with conservative political establishment after remunicipalization of the city's garbage collection system. The inspector general, Alejandro Ordoñez deposed Petro for alleged constitutional overreach and when he tried to replace the city's private trash collectors. Petro was reinstated weeks later after a Bogota court ruled that the Alejandro Ordoñez had overstepped his authority.
+
+Although the proposal for biarticulated diesel buses called "Transmilenio" was in its early stages a success, due in part to the small numbers of passengers that it transported, in the long term it became an inefficient and contaminating system, saturated for a metro population of almost ten million inhabitants, guilty of environmental deterioration and air pollution.[39]
+
+For its part, the cultural equipment plan of Bogotá has given as one of its most significant results the construction of three large public libraries in different sectors of the city, in addition to the provision of existing ones. The new libraries were located in sectors that allow a wide coverage, have easy access by public transport and bike paths; and their projects were commissioned to distinguished architects of the city. They are those of El Tunal, in the south, projected by the architect Suely Vargas of El Tintal, in the west, the work of the architect Daniel Bermúdez, and the Virgilio Barco Vargas library, located in the Simón Bolívar park in the central area, work of the architect Rogelio Salmona. The three libraries, in addition to their excellent architecture, offer spaces for the educational and cultural development of the citizens of Bogota.[40]
+
+As for 2019, the city's distribution is composed of nine main business centers (Av. El Dorado Business Corridor, Centro Internacional, Parque de la 93, El Lago, North Point, Calle 100, Santa Barbara Business Center, Zona Industrial Montevideo & Parque Industrial Zona Franca). Grittier sides sit south and southwest, where working-class barrios continue to battle their reputations for drugs and crime. In the ritzier north you'll find boutique hotels, corporate offices and well-heeled locals piling into chic entertainment districts such as the Zona Rosa and Zona G.
+
+Bogotá is located in the southeastern part of the Bogotá savanna (Sabana de Bogotá) at an average altitude of 2,640 metres (8,660 ft) above sea level.[8] The Bogotá savanna is popularly called "savannah" (sabana), but constitutes actually a high plateau in the Andes mountains, part of an extended region known as the Altiplano Cundiboyacense, which literally means "high plateau of Cundinamarca and Boyacá". Bogotá is the largest city in the world at its elevation; there is no urban area that is both higher and more populous than Bogotá.
+
+In the extreme south of Bogota's District, the world's largest continuous paramo ecosystem can be found; Sumapaz Páramo in the locality Sumapaz.[41]
+
+The Bogotá River running NE-SW crosses the sabana, forming Tequendama Falls (Salto del Tequendama) to the south. Tributary rivers form valleys with flourishing villages, whose economy is based on agriculture, livestock raising and artisanal production.[citation needed]
+
+The sabana is bordered to the east by the Eastern Cordillera of the Andes mountain range. The Eastern Hills, which limit city growth, run from south to north, and form east of the center the Guadalupe and Monserrate mountains. The western city limit is the Bogotá River. The Sumapaz Paramo (moorland) borders the south and to the north Bogotá extends over the plateau up to the towns of Chía and Sopó.
+
+Most of the wetlands in the Bogota region have disappeared. They covered nearly 50,000 hectares in the 1960s, compared to only 727 in 2019, for a disappearance rate of 98%.[42]
+
+Bogotá has a subtropical highland climate (Köppen Cfb) bordering on a warm-summer Mediterranean climate (Csb).[43] The average temperature is 14.5 °C (58 °F),[44] varying from 6 to 19 °C (43 to 66 °F) on sunny days to 10 to 18 °C (50 to 64 °F) on rainy days. Dry and rainy seasons alternate throughout the year. The driest months are December, January, July and August. The warmest month is March, bringing a maximum of 19.7 °C (67.5 °F). The coolest nights occur in January, with an average of 7.6 °C (45.7 °F) in the city; fog is very usual in early morning, 220 days per year,[45] whilst clear sky sunny full days are quite unusual.[45]
+
+The official highest temperature recorded within the city limits is 30.0 °C (86 °F), and the lowest temperature recorded is −7.1 °C (19 °F), both at the Guaymaral Airport.[46]
+
+The rainiest months are April, May, September, October, and November, in which typical days are mostly overcast, with low clouds and some winds, bringing maximum temperatures of 18 °C (64 °F) and lows of 7 °C (45 °F).
+
+Because of its low latitude and high altitude, Bogotá has an average of 12 daylight hours and 11+ ultraviolet radiation year-round.[47]
+
+Bogotá has 20 localities, or districts, forming an extensive network of neighborhoods. Areas of higher economic status tend to be located in the north, close to the Eastern Hills in the districts of Chapinero, Usaquén and the east of Suba. The lower middle class inhabit the central, western and northwestern parts of the city.[citation needed]. The working-class neighborhoods are located in the south, some of them squatter areas.[citation needed]
+
+The urban layout in the center of the city is based on the focal point of a square or plaza, typical of Spanish-founded settlements, but the layout gradually becomes more modern in outlying neighborhoods. The types of roads are classified as Calles (streets), which run from west to east horizontally, with street numbers increasing towards the north, and also towards the south (with the suffix "Sur") from Calle 0 down south. Carreras (roads) run from north to south vertically, with numbering increasing from east to west. (with the suffix "Este" for roads east of Carrera 0). At the southeast of the city, the addresses are logically sur-este. Other types of roads more common in newer parts of the city may be termed Eje (Axis), Diagonal or Transversal.
+The numbering system for street addresses recently changed, and numbers are assigned according to street rank from main avenues to smaller avenues and local streets. Some of Bogotá's main roads, which also go by a proper name in addition to a number, are:
+
+The largest and most populous city in Colombia, Bogotá had 7,412,566 inhabitants within the city's limits (2018 census),[4] with a population density of approximately 4,310 inhabitants per square kilometer. Only 25,166 people are located in rural areas of Capital District. 47.8% of the population are male and 52.2% women.[4]
+
+In Bogotá, as in the rest of the country, urbanization has accelerated due to industrialization as well as complex political and social reasons such as poverty and violence, which led to migration from rural to urban areas throughout the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.[citation needed] A dramatic example of this is the number of displaced people who have arrived in Bogotá due to the internal armed conflict.[citation needed]
+
+Some estimates show that Bogotá's floating population may be as high as 4 million people, most of them being migrant workers from other departments and displaced people.[50] The majority of the displaced population lives in the Ciudad Bolívar, Kennedy, Usme, and Bosa sections.[citation needed]
+
+Race and Ethnicity in Bogotá[51]
+
+The ethnic composition of the city's population includes minorities of Afro-Colombian people (0.9%), and Indigenous Amerindians (0.3%); 98.8% of the population has no ethnic affiliation,[4] but are mestizos and whites.[citation needed]
+
+The native population of Bogota (bogotanos), is composed of two large groups: rolos and cachacos, the first being descendants of people who are not native to Bogota and the second, children of bogotanos.
+
+In Bogotá, the accelerated urbanization process is not exclusively due to industrialization, since there are complex political and social reasons such as poverty and violence, which have motivated migration from the countryside to the city throughout the 20th century, determining an exponential growth of the population in Bogotá and the establishment of misery belts in its surroundings. According to the Consultancy for Human Rights, Codhes, in the period 1999-2005 more than 260,000 displaced persons arrived in Bogotá, approximately 3.8% of the total population of Bogotá. The locations where the majority of the displaced population is concentrated are Ciudad Bolivar, Kennedy, Bosa and Usme. For this reason, the children of the migrant population born in Bogotá (rolos) often do not have a sense of belonging to the city or a cultural identity as marked as that of the cachacos. However, due to the growing acculturation of rolos and the decreasing number of ethnic cachacos in Bogotá, the  population of rolos tends to be predominant in the city
+
+Bogotá has gone to great lengths to change its formerly notorious crime rate and its image with increasing success after being considered in the 1990s to be one of the most violent cities in the world.[52] In 1993 there were 4,352 murders at a rate of 81 per 100,000 people;[53] in 2007 Bogotá suffered 1,401 murders at a rate of 20 per 100,000 inhabitants, and had a further reduction to 14 per 100,000 inhabitants in 2017 (the lowest since 1979).[54][55][56] This success was mainly the result of a participatory and integrated security policy; "Comunidad Segura", that was first adopted in 1995 and continues to be enforced.[57] 1.2 percent of street addresses account for 99 percent of homicides.[58]
+
+Bogotá is the capital of the Republic of Colombia, and houses the Congress, Supreme Court of Justice and the center of the executive administration as well as the residence of the President (Casa de Nariño).[59] These buildings, along with the Office of the Mayor, the Lievano Palace (Palacio Liévano), are located within a few meters from each other on the Bolívar Square (Plaza de Bolívar). The square is located in the city's historical center, La Candelaria, which features architecture in Spanish Colonial and Spanish Baroque styles.
+
+The Mayor of Bogotá and the City Council – both elected by popular vote – are responsible for city administration. In 2019 Claudia López was elected Mayor; her term runs from 2020 to 2023.
+
+The city is divided into 20 localities: Usaquén, Chapinero, Santa Fe, San Cristóbal, Usme, Tunjuelito, Bosa, Kennedy, Fontibón, Engativá, Suba, Barrios Unidos, Teusaquillo, Los Mártires, Antonio Nariño, Puente Aranda, La Candelaria, Rafael Uribe Uribe, Ciudad Bolívar and Sumapaz.
+
+Each of the 20 localities is governed by an administrative board elected by popular vote, made up of no fewer than seven members. The Mayor designates local mayors from candidates nominated by the respective administrative board.
+
+Bogotá is the main economic and industrial center of Colombia.
+The Colombian government fosters the import of capital goods, Bogotá being one of the main destinations of these imports.
+
+In 2016 the World Cities Study Group and Network (GaWC) from the United Kingdom ranked Bogotá as an Alpha−World City in the World Cities Study Group's inventory, a high-ranking. Alpha and Alpha- cities are important world cities that link major economic regions into the world economy.[60]
+
+Travel & Tourism's share of the city's overall GDP stands at 2.5%.[61] Bogotá is responsible for 56% of the tourism that arrives to Colombia and is home 1,423 multinational companies. Bogotá also ranked highly as a global city where business is done and meetings are held. Bogotá is a growing international meetings destination.[62][63]
+
+During the last year, Bogotá has won 50 major international events, with 12 more world-class events in progress.[62] The 16th World Summit of Nobel Peace Laureates took place from 2 to 5 February 2017 in Bogotá, Colombia.[64] One Young World is the preeminent global forum for young leaders aged 18–30. Bogotá, Colombia is the host city for Summit 2017.[65]
+
+The hotels in the historical center of La Candelaria and its surrounding areas cater to lovers of culture and the arts. This area also has the bulk of hostels in the city as well. In La Candelaria, there are many museums, including the Botero Museum and the Gold Museum. Close to La Candelaria is the Cerro Monserrate, which you can reach by cable car or funicular. The hotels located near Ciudad Salitre are intended for visitors who make short stops in Bogotá and near El Dorado International Airport.
+
+Important landmarks and tourist stops in Bogotá include the botanical garden José Celestino Mutis, the Quinta de Bolívar, the national observatory, the planetarium, Maloka, the Colpatria observation point, the observation point of La Calera, the monument of the American flags, and La Candelaria (the historical district of the city). There is also Usaquen, a colonial landmark where brunch and flea market on Sundays is a traditional activity. The city has numerous green parks and amusement parks like Salitre Magico or Mundo Aventura.
+
+Green areas surrounding Bogota are perfect locations for eco-tourism and hiking activities, in the eastern mountains of the city, just a few minutes walking from main roads, there are Quebrada La vieja and Chapinero Waterfalls, two of many green spots for sightseeing and tourism with clean air.[66][67]
+
+There are also several areas of the city where fine restaurants can be found. The G Zone, the T Zone, and La Macarena are well known for their gastronomic offerings.[68]
+
+Since the 2000s, major hotel chains have established in the city. Bogota has a great cultural diversity, coming from different regions of the country, which allows the tourist to know the multiculturalism of the country without the need to travel to other cities, this includes gastronomy and different festivals.
+
+Monserrate Sanctuary, a local landmark
+
+Atlantis Plaza Mall, featuring the Hard Rock Cafe
+
+La Candelaria, the historical district of the city
+
+Maloka
+
+Bogotá's economy has been significantly boosted due to new shopping malls built within the last few years. As of December 2011[update], over 160 new malls are planned in addition to the existing 100 malls.[69] Notable malls include:
+
+Bogota is home to several television stations like Canal Capital and Citytv which are local stations, Canal 13 is a regional station, and is home to the national channels Caracol TV, RCN TV, Canal Uno, Canal Institucional, and Señal Colombia. It has multiple satellite television services like Telefónica, Claro and DirecTV and several satellite dishes which offer hundreds of international channels, plus several exclusive channels for Bogotá.
+
+In Bogota, all the major radio networks in the country are available, in both AM and FM; 70% of the FM stations offer RDS service.
+There are several newspapers, including El Tiempo, El Espectador and El Nuevo Siglo, plus economical dailies La República and Portafolio, tabloids El Espacio, Q'Hubo, and Extra. Bogotá also offers three free newspapers, two Spanish, ADN and Publimetro, and one English, The Bogota Post.
+
+Energy and sewer bills are stratified based on the location of owner's residence,[70] The system is the classification of the residential properties that should receive public services.[71] Although the system does not consider the income per person and the rules say that the residential real estate should stratify and not households.[72] All mayors should do the stratification of residential properties of their municipality or district.[71]
+
+Bogotá's social strata have been divided as follows and have been extensively used by the government as a reference to develop social welfare programs, statistical information and to some degree for the assignment of lands.
+
+Bogotá's growth has placed a strain on its roads and highways, but since 1998 significant efforts to upgrade the infrastructure have been undertaken.[73] Private car ownership forms a major part of the congestion, in addition to taxis, buses and commercial vehicles. Buses remain the main means of mass transit. There are two bus systems: the traditional system and the TransMilenio.
+
+The traditional system runs a variety of bus types, operated by several companies on normal streets and avenues: Bus (large buses), Buseta (medium size buses) and Colectivo (vans or minivans). The bigger buses were divided into two categories: Ejecutivo, which was originally to be a deluxe service and was not to carry standing passengers, and corriente or normal service. Since May 2008, all buses run as corriente services. Bogotá is a hub for domestic and international bus routes. The Bogotá terminal serves routes to most cities and towns in Colombia[74] and is the largest in the country. There is international service to Ecuador, Perú and Venezuela.
+
+The TransMilenio system was created during Enrique Peñalosa's mayoral term,[75] and is a form of bus rapid transit that has been deployed as a measure to compensate for the lack of a subway or rail system. TransMilenio combines articulated buses that operate on dedicated bus roads (busways) and smaller buses (feeders) that operate in residential areas, bringing passengers to the main grid. TransMilenio's main routes are: Caracas Avenue, Northern Highway (Autopista Norte), 80th Street, Americas Avenue, Jiménez Avenue, and 30th Avenue (also referred to as Norte Quito Sur or N.Q.S. for short). Routes for Suba Avenue and Southern Highway (Autopista Sur), the southern leg of the 30th Avenue, were opened in April 2006. The third phase of the system will cover 7th Avenue, 10th Avenue, and 26th Street (or Avenida El Dorado). The system is planned to cover the entire city by 2030. Although the Transmilenio carries commuters to numerous corners of the city, it is more expensive (US$0.80 or 2300 COP) than any public transport, except taxis.
+
+In addition to TransMilenio, the Peñalosa administration and voter-approved referenda helped to establish travel restrictions on cars with certain license plate numbers during peak hours called Pico y placa; 121 kilometres (75 miles) of Ciclovía on Sundays and major holidays; a massive system (376 km (234 mi) as of 2013[update]) of bicycle paths and segregated lanes called ciclorrutas; and the removal of thousands of parking spots in an attempt to make roads more pedestrian-friendly and discourage car use. Ciclorrutas is one of the most extensive dedicated bike path networks of any city in the world, with a total extension of 376 kilometres (234 miles). It extends from the north of the city, 170th Street, to the south, 27th Street, and from Monserrate on the east to the Bogotá River on the west. The ciclorruta was started by the 1995–1998 Antanas Mockus administration with a few kilometers, and considerably extended afterwards with the development of a Bicycle Master Plan and the addition of paths hundreds of kilometers in extent.[76] Since the construction of the ciclorruta bicycle use in the city has increased, and a car free week was introduced in 2014.[77]
+
+Bi-articulated TransMilenio bus
+
+Urban (SITP) bus, part of the integrated public transport system
+
+Bikepath in central Bogota
+
+Traffic on the Northern Highway (Autopista Norte)
+
+Bogotá's main airport is El Dorado International Airport, with an approximate area of 6.9 km2 (2.7 sq mi) located west of the city's downtown in the Fontibón Locality. It is the third most important airport in Latin America after Mexico City International Airport and São Paulo–Guarulhos International Airport and it is the most important airport in Colombia. Construction of the airport was ordered by Gustavo Rojas Pinilla (19th President of Colombia) in 1955 to replace the Aeropuerto de Techo. Due to its central location in Colombia and in Latin America, it is a hub for Colombia's Flagship Carrier Avianca, Copa Airlines Colombia and LATAM Colombia. It is also serviced by a number of international airlines including American, Delta, United, Air France, KLM, Turkish Airlines, Jet Blue, and Lufthansa. The national airport has begun to take more responsibility due to the congestion at the international airport. In response to the high demand of approximately 27 Million passengers per year,[78] a new airport, El Dorado II, is planned to be built by 2021, to help alleviate traffic at the main airport.[79]
+
+A secondary airport, CATAM, serves as a base for Military and Police Aviation. This airport, which uses the runways of El Dorado will eventually move to Madrid, a nearby town in the region of Cundinamarca, leaving further space to expand El Dorado.[80]
+
+Guaymaral Airport is another small airport located in the northern boundaries of Bogota. It is used mainly for private aviation activities.
+
+Bogotá has little railway transit infrastructure, following the collapse of the tram network, although a number of plans hope to change that. The Bogotá Metro has been pushed forward by two successive governments, and proponents hope that construction will soon begin. Plans to construct railways in and out of the city, replacing defunct routes, have been delayed due to the pressing need for transport within the city.[81] A tram train line using right-of-way from the defunct Bogotá Savannah Railway, known as RegioTram, will be opening in 2023.
+
+Bogotá is the Colombian city with the most extensive and comprehensive network of bike paths. Bogotá's bike paths network or Ciclorutas de Bogotá in Spanish, designed and built during the administration of Mayors Antanas Mockus and Enrique Peñalosa, is also one of the most extensive in the world and the most extensive in Latin America.[82] The network is integrated with the TransMilenio bus system which has bicycle parking facilities.
+
+Bogota implemented a healthy habit called "Ciclovia" where principal highways are closed from 7:00 a.m. until 2:00 pm on Sundays and public holidays; therefore, the People ride their bikes to enjoy the city as well as exercise. In the same way just on December the same activity is carried out in the night, there are some special activities such as fireworks, street theater performances, and street food just to mention a few.
+
+Since 4 April 2016 the carrera 11 has been reduced from four to three car lanes and a new bike lane (cicloruta) has been inaugurated.[83]
+
+On 25 December 1884, the first tramway pulled by mules was inaugurated and covered the route from Plaza de Bolívar to Chapinero,[84] and in 1892, the line connecting Plaza de Bolívar and La Sabana Station started operating. The tramway ran over wooden rails and was easily derailed, so steel rails imported from Britain were eventually installed. In 1894, a tramway car ran the Bogotá–Chapinero line every 20 minutes.[citation needed] The tram system eventually grew to cover most of the city and its surrounding suburbs. But during the Bogotazo riots of 1948, the system suffered heavy damage and was forced to close. The economic effects of the subsequent civil war that followed prevented the damage from being repaired. Parts of the system continued to operate in a reduced state until 1951, when they were replaced by buses. Most of the streetcar tracks were eventually paved over, but exposed tracks can still be seen on many of the older roads of the city, especially downtown and in the La Candelaria area, although it has been about 70 years[when?] since any vehicles have run on them.
+
+The average amount of time people spend commuting with public transit in Bogota, for example to and from work, on a weekday is 97 min. 32% of public transit riders, ride for more than 2 hours every day. The average amount of time people wait at a stop or station for public transit is 20 min, while 40% of riders wait for over 20 minutes on average every day. The average distance people usually ride in a single trip with public transit is 8 km, while 16% travel for over 12 km in a single direction.[85]
+
+Known as the Athens of South America,[86] Bogotá has an extensive educational system of both primary and secondary schools and colleges. Due to the constant migration of people into the nation's capital, the availability of quotas for access to education offered by the State free of charge is often insufficient. The city also has a diverse system of colleges and private schools.
+
+There are a number of universities, both public and private. In 2002, there were a total of 113 higher education institutions; in Bogotá there are several universities, most partially or fully accredited by the NAC (National Accreditation Council): National University of Colombia, University of the Andes, Colombia, District University of Bogotá, La Salle University, Colombia, University of La Sabana, Pontifical Xavierian University, Our Lady of the Rosary University, Universidad Externado de Colombia, Military University Nueva Granada, Central University, Colombia, University of America, Sergio Arboleda University, Jorge Tadeo Lozano University, Pilot University of Colombia, Catholic University of Colombia, Saint Thomas Aquinas University and Universidad Pedagógica Nacional.
+
+The city has a University City at the National University of Colombia campus located in the traditional sector Teusaquillo. It is the largest campus in Colombia and one of the largest in Latin America.
+
+"El Claustro" at the Del Rosario University
+
+Building of Science and Technology "Luis Carlos Sarmiento" at the National University of Colombia
+
+Centro Ático at Pontifical Xavierian University
+
+Mario Laserna building in the University of the Andes
+
+Bogotá has many cultural venues including 58 museums, 62 art galleries, 33 library networks, 45 stage theaters, 75 sports and attraction parks, and over 150 national monuments.[87] Many of these are renowned globally such as:
+The Luis Ángel Arango Library, the most important in the region[according to whom?] which receives well over 6 million visitors a year;[88]
+The Colombian National Museum, one of the oldest in the Americas, dating back to 1823;[89]
+The Ibero-American Theater Festival, largest of its kind in the world, receives 2 million attendees enjoying over 450 performances across theaters and off the street;[90]
+The Bogotá Philharmonic is the most important[according to whom?] symphony orchestra in Colombia, with over 100 musicians and 140 performances a year.[91] The city has been a member of the UNESCO Creative Cities Network in the category of music since March 2012.[92]
+
+The Cristóbal Colón Theater, the country's oldest Opera House, opened in 1892. It is home to the National Symphony Association's major act, the National Symphony Orchestra of Colombia.[93]
+
+Rock al Parque or Rock at the Park is an open air rock music festival. Recurring annually, it gathers over 320,000 music fans who can enjoy over 60 band performances for free during three days a year.[94] The series have been so successful during its 15 years of operation that the city has replicated the initiative for other music genres, resulting in other recent festivals like Salsa at the Park, Hip Hop at the Park, Ballet at the Park, Opera at the Park, and Jazz at the Park.
+
+Kids' Choice Awards Colombia, are the most important[according to whom?] awards given in the city by Nickelodeon and the first ceremony was given in 2014 by the singer Maluma and in Corferias the ceremony has been the home of shows given by artists like Austin Mahone, Carlos Peña, Don Tetto and Riva among others.
+
+Bogotá has worked in recent years to position itself as leader in cultural offerings in South America, and it is increasingly being recognized worldwide as a hub in the region for the development of the arts.[95][96][97][98]
+In 2007, Bogotá was awarded the title of Cultural Capital of Ibero-America by the UCCI (Union of Ibero-American Capital Cities), and it became the only city to have received the recognition twice, after being awarded for the first time in 1991.[99]
+
+Bogotá gave the Spanish-speaking world José Asunción Silva (1865–1896), Modernism pioneer. His poetic work in the novel De sobremesa has a place in outstanding American literature. Rafael Pombo (1833–1912) was an American romanticism poet who left a collection of fables essential part of children imagination and Colombian tradition.
+
+The urban morphology and typology of colonial buildings in Bogotá have been maintained since the late nineteenth century, long after the independence of Colombia (1810).[citation needed] This persistence of the colonial setting is still visible, particularly in La Candelaria, the historical center of Bogotá. Also kept up are the colonial houses of two stories, with courtyards, gabled roofs, ceramic tiles and balconies. In some cases, these balconies were enclosed with glass windows during the Republican period, a distinguishing feature of the architecture of the sector (for example, the House of Rafael Pombo).[citation needed]
+
+"Republican Architecture" was the style that prevailed between 1830 and 1930.[citation needed] Although there were attempts to consolidate a modern architectural language, the only examples seen are University City and White City at the National University of Colombia (constructed 1936 to 1939).[citation needed] This work was developed by German architect Leopold Rother, although architects of rationalist trends participated in the design of campus buildings. We also see in Bogotan architecture trends such as art deco, expressionism and organic architecture. This last trend was typified by Bogotan architects in the second half of the twentieth century such as Rogelio Salmona.
+
+In 2015 BD Bacatá was inaugurated, surpassing the Colpatria Tower to become the tallest building of the city and of Colombia.[100] The building its expected to be the beginning of the city's downtown renovation.
+
+Santa Barbara business district
+
+Victorian architecture in Teusaquillo
+
+Torres del Parque
+
+Santa Maria bullring
+
+In 2007 Bogotá was named World Book Capital by UNESCO.[101] Bogotá is the first Latin American city to receive this recognition, and the second one in the Americas after Montreal. It stood out in programs, the library network and the presence of organizations that, in a coordinated manner, are working to promote books and reading in the city. Several specific initiatives for the World Book Capital program have been undertaken with the commitment of groups, both public and private, engaged in the book sector.
+
+The city is home to the Biblored, an institution which administers 16 small and four large public libraries (Biblioteca Virgilio Barco, Biblioteca El Tintal, Biblioteca El Tunal and Biblioteca Julio Mario Santodomingo). It also has six branches of the Library Network of the Family Compensation Fund Colsubsidio and libraries and documentation centers attached to institutions like the Museo Nacional de Colombia (specializing in old books, catalogs and art), Museum of Modern Art, the Alliance Française, and the Centro Colombo Americano.
+
+Another set of libraries are the new collaborative initiatives between the state, city and international agencies. Examples are the Cultural Center Gabriel García Marquez, custom designed by the Fondo de Cultura Economica in Mexico, and the Spanish Cultural Center, which will begin construction with public funds and of the Spanish government in downtown Bogotá.[citation needed]
+
+The National Library of Colombia (1777), a dependence of the Ministry of Culture and the Biblioteca Luis Angel Arango (1958), a dependence of the Bank of the Republic are the two largest public libraries in the city. The first is the repository of more than two million volumes, with an important collection of ancient books. The latter has almost two million volumes, and with 45,000 m2 (480,000 sq ft) in size, it hosts 10,000 visitors a day; the Library Alfonso Palacio Rudas is also a dependence of the Bank of the Republic, and is located at the north of the city, with about 50,000 volumes. Other large public libraries are the Library of Congress in Colombia (with 100,000 volumes), of the Instituto Caro y Cuervo (with nearly 200,000 volumes, the largest Latin American library in Philology and Linguistics), the Library of the Academy of History The Library of the Academy of Language, the Library of the Colombian Institute of Anthropology and History ICANH, and many university libraries.
+
+Bogotá is home to historical records housed in the General National Archive, a collection of about 60 million documents, one of the largest repositories of primary historical sources in Latin America. Bogotá is also home to the Musical Archive of the Cathedral of Bogotá (with thousands of books and choral song-colonial period), the Archdiocesan Archive, the Archive of the Conciliar Seminary of Bogotá, the Archive History National University of Colombia and the Archive of the Mint in Bogotá, under the Bank of the Republic.
+
+National Library of Colombia
+
+Julio Mario Santo Domingo Public Library
+
+Virgilio Barco Public Library
+
+El Tintal Public Library
+
+The city offers 58 museums and over 70 art galleries.[citation needed] The Colombian National Museum has acquisitions divided into four collections: art, history, archeology and ethnography. The Gold Museum, with 35,000 pieces of tumbaga gold, along with 30,000 objects in ceramic, stone and textiles, represents the largest collection of pre-Columbian gold in the world.[citation needed]
+
+The Botero Museum has 123 works of Fernando Botero and 87 works by international artists. The Museum of Modern Art in Bogotá has a collection of graphic arts, industrial design and photography. The Museum of Colonial Art is home to an important collection of colonial art from Colombia. Fundación Gilberto Alzate Avendaño hosts activities related to the performing arts and shows temporary exhibits of art in its halls and galleries.[citation needed]
+
+Among the scientific museums are the Archeological Museum – Casa del Marqués de San Jorge, which has about 30 thousand pieces of pre-Columbian art, Instituto de Ciencias Naturales (UN), one of the four largest museums of natural sciences in Latin America, and the Geological Museum, which has a collection specializing in Geology and Paleontology.[citation needed]
+
+Bogotá has historical museums like the Jorge Eliecer Gaitan Museum, the Museum of Independence (Museo de la Independencia), the Quinta de Bolívar and the Casa Museo Francisco José de Caldas, as well as the headquarters of Maloka and the Children's Museum of Bogotá. New museums include the Art Deco and the Museum of Bogotá.[citation needed]
+
+Besides the Ibero-American Theater Festival, the largest theater festival in the world, the city has forty-five theaters; the principal ones are the Colon Theater, the newly built Teatro Mayor Julio Mario Santo Domingo, the National Theater with its two venues, the traditional TPB Hall, the Theater of La Candelaria, the Camarin del Carmen (over 400 years old, formerly a convent), the Colsubsidio, and a symbol of the city, the renovated Teatro Jorge Eliecer Gaitan, León de Greiff Auditorium (home of the Bogotá Philharmonic Orchestra), and the Open Air Theater "La Media Torta", where musical events are also held.
+
+The Ibero-American Theater Festival, is not the only acclaimed festival. There are many other regional and local theater festivals that are celebrated and maintain the city active year-round . Amongst these is the "Alternative Theater Festival".[citation needed]
+
+Bogotá has its own film festival, the Bogotá Film Festival, and many theaters, showing both contemporary films and art cinema. Bogota's international art fair, ArtBo, takes place in October of every year and showcases thousands of works covering arts across all formats, movements, and concepts.[102]
+
+The main cultural center of the city is the La Candelaria, historic center of the city, with a concentration of universities and museums. In 2007 Bogotá was designated the Ibero-American cultural Capital of Iberoamerica.
+
+Before the Spanish conquest, the beliefs of the inhabitants of Bogotá formed part of the Muisca religion. From the colonial period onwards, the city has been predominantly Roman Catholic. Proof of this religious tradition is the number of churches built in the historic city center. The city has been seat of the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Bogotá since 22 March 1564. The seat of the Archbishop is the Primatial Cathedral of Bogotá; the archdiocese itself is located in new buildings in the north of the city. However a large group of the population nowadays declares itself non-practicing.[citation needed]
+
+The city has a mosque located in the area of Chapinero called the Estambul mosque,[103] a mosque being built on the Calle 80 with Cra 30 called Abou Bakr Alsiddiq mosque[104] and which is the first in the city to have the traditional Islamic architecture, and an Islamic Center called Al-Qurtubi.[105]
+
+The main Ashkenazi Jewish synagogue (there are a total of 4 synagogues in Bogotá) is located on 94th street (also called State of Israel avenue).
+
+An Eastern Orthodox church and the San Pablo Anglican Cathedral, the mother church of the Episcopal Church in Colombia, are both located in Chapinero. The Bogotá Colombia Temple of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints is located in the Niza neighborhood. There are four Buddhist centers located in the north of the city. There is also a wide variety of Protestant churches in different parts of the city, including the Bogotá Baptist Chapel, the non-denominational Union Church, and the St. Matthaus Evangelical Lutheran Church which holds services in German as well as Spanish for the German-Colombian community.
+
+Church of Our Lady of Lourdes
+
+Protestant Megachurch
+
+Bogotá Colombia Mormon Temple
+
+Abou Bakr Alsiddiq Mosque
+
+There is a broad array of restaurants in Bogotá that serve typical and international food. Parque de la 93, Usaquén, Zona T, The G Zone, La Macarena, La Candelaria, The parkway and the International Center are some of the main sectors where a number of international restaurants are found, ranging from Argentinian, Peruvian, Venezuelan, Brazilian, Mexican, American establishments to Arabic, Asian, French, Italian, Russian and British bistros, rotisseries, steakhouses and pubs, just to name a few.
+Typical dishes of Bogotá include the ajiaco,[106] a soup prepared with chicken, a variety of potatoes, corn on the cob, and guascas (an herb), usually served with sour cream and capers, and accompanied by avocado and rice.
+
+Tamale is a very traditional Bogotá dish. Colombian tamal is a paste made with rice, beef, pork and/or chicken (depending on the region), chickpea, carrot, and spices, wrapped in plantain leaves and steam-cooked.
+
+Figs with arequipe, strawberries with cream, postre de natas and cuajada con melao are some of the main desserts offered in the city. Canelazo is a hot drink from the Altiplano prepared with aguapanela, cinnamon and aguardiente. Another hot beverage is the carajillo, made with coffee (tinto as it is known in Colombia) and aguardiente.
+
+Ajiaco is one of the city's most representative dishes
+
+"Chocolate santafereño" (Santafe hot chocolate), almojábana, cheese and pandebono
+
+There are numerous parks in Bogotá, many with facilities for concerts, plays, movies, storytellers and other activities.
+
+Simón Bolívar Park
+
+Journalists' park
+
+93 Park
+
+Santander park
+
+El Virrey park
+
+The District Institute for Recreation and Sport promotes recreation, sports and use of the parks in Bogotá.
+
+Football has been declared a symbol of Bogotá, and is widely played in the city. There are three professional clubs in the city, Santa Fe, Millonarios, and La Equidad. The main stadium in the city is The Campín Stadium (Estadio Nemesio Camacho El Campín) home of the local teams Santa Fe and Millonarios, In 2001 The Campín Stadium has been the place for the 2001 Copa América final between the Colombia national football and the Mexico national football, final score 1–0 in favor of the home team and finally getting their first continental cup. The other soccer venue is the multi-use Techo Metropolitan Stadium which is the home of La Equidad.
+
+Other major sporting venues are the covered Coliseum El Campín, the Simón Bolívar Aquatic Complex, the Sports Palace, the El Salitre Sports Venue which includes the Luis Carlos Galán Velodrome (which hosted the 1995 UCI Track Cycling World Championships), the El Salitre Diamond Ballpark and the BMX track "Mario Andrés Soto".
+
+Bogotá hosted the first Bolivarian Games held in 1938. The city hosted the National Games in 2004, winning the championship. It was a sub-venue Bolivarian Pan American Games. In addition, the city on the route of the Tour of Colombia.
+
+After being a major venue city for the 2011 FIFA U-20 World Cup that was held in Colombia, Bogotá was one of the venue cities hosting the 2016 FIFA Futsal World Cup.[107]
+
+The flag originated with the insurgency movement against the colonial authorities which began on 20 July 1810, during which the rebels wore armbands with yellow and red bands, as these colours were those of the Spanish flag used as the flag for the New Kingdom of Granada.[citation needed]
+
+On 9 October 1952, exactly 142 years after these events, decree 555 of 1952 officially adopted the patriotic armband as the flag of Bogotá.[108] The flag of Cundinamarca follows the same pattern, plus a light blue tile which represents the Virgin Mary's cape.
+
+The flag itself is a yellow band above a red one. The yellow denotes the gold from the earth, as well as the virtues of justice, clemency, benevolence, the so-called "mundane qualities" (defined as nobility, excellence, richness, generosity, splendour, health, steadfastness, joy and prosperity), long life, eternity, power and constancy. The red denotes the virtue of charity, as well as the qualities of bravery, nobility, values, audacity, victory, honour and furor, Colombians call it the blood of their people.[citation needed]
+
+The coat of arms of the city was granted by emperor Charles V (Charles I of Spain) to the New Kingdom of Granada, by royal decree given in Valladolid, Spain on 3 December 1548. It contains a black eagle in the center, which symbolises steadfastness. The eagle is also a symbol of the Habsburgs, which was the ruling family of the Spanish empire at the time. The eagle is crowned with gold and holds a red pomegranate inside a golden background. The border contains olive branches with nine golden pomegranates on a blue background. The two red pomegranates symbolize audacity, and the nine golden ones represent the nine states which constituted the New Kingdom of Granada at the time. In 1932 the coat of arms was officially recognized and adopted as the symbol of Bogotá.[citation needed]
+
+Bogotá's anthem lyrics were written by Pedro Medina Avendaño; the melody was composed by Roberto Pineda Duque. The song was officially declared the anthem by decree 1000 31 July 1974, by then Mayor of Bogotá, Aníbal Fernandez de Soto.
+
+Bogotá is twinned with:
+
+Bogotá is part of the Union of Ibero-American Capital Cities[116] from 12 October 1982 establishing brotherly relations with the following cities:
+
+Other forms of cooperation and city friendship similar to the twin city programmes exist:
+
+Amazonas
+ Antioquia
+ Arauca
+ Atlántico
+ Bolívar
+ Boyacá
+
+Caldas
+ Caquetá
+ Casanare
+ Cauca
+ Cesar
+ Chocó
+
+Córdoba
+ Cundinamarca
+ Guainía
+ Guaviare
+ Huila
+ La Guajira
+
+Magdalena
+ Meta
+ Nariño
+ N. Santander
+ Putumayo
+ Quindío
+
+Risaralda
+ San Andrés
+ Santander
+ Sucre
+ Tolima
+ Valle del Cauca
+
+Vaupés
+ Vichada
+
+Capital district:
+ Bogotá

en/692.html.txt

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+
+
+
+
+The Romani (also spelled Romany /ˈroʊməni/, /ˈrɒ-/), colloquially known as Roma, are an Indo-Aryan ethnic group, traditionally nomadic itinerants living mostly in Europe, and diaspora populations in the Americas. The Romani as a people originate from the northern Indian subcontinent,[61][62][63] from the Rajasthan, Haryana, and Punjab regions of modern-day India.[62][63]
+
+Genetic findings appear to confirm that the Romani "came from a single group that left northwestern India" in about 512 CE.[64] Genetic research published in the European Journal of Human Genetics "revealed that over 70% of males belong to a single lineage that appears unique to the Roma".[65] They are dispersed, but their most concentrated populations are located in Europe, especially Central, Eastern and Southern Europe (including Turkey, Spain and Southern France). The Romani arrived in Mid-West Asia and Europe around 1007.[66] They have been associated with another Indo-Aryan group, the Dom people: the two groups have been said to have separated from each other or, at least, to share a similar history.[67] Specifically, the ancestors of both the Romani and the Dom left North India sometime between the 6th and 11th century.[66]
+
+The Romani are widely known in English by the exonym Gypsies (or Gipsies), which is considered by some Roma people to be pejorative due to its connotations of illegality and irregularity.[68] Beginning in 1888, the Gypsy Lore Society[69] started to publish a journal that was meant to dispel rumors about their lifestyle.[70]
+
+Since the 19th century, some Romani have also migrated to the Americas. There are an estimated one million Roma in the United States;[6] and 800,000 in Brazil, most of whose ancestors emigrated in the 19th century from Eastern Europe. Brazil also includes a notable Romani community descended from people deported by the Portuguese Empire during the Portuguese Inquisition.[71] In migrations since the late 19th century, Romani have also moved to other countries in South America and to Canada.[72][page needed]
+
+In February 2016, during the International Roma Conference, the Indian Minister of External Affairs stated that the people of the Roma community were children of India.[73] The conference ended with a recommendation to the government of India to recognize the Roma community spread across 30 countries as a part of the Indian diaspora.[74]
+
+The Romani language is divided into several dialects which together have an estimated number of speakers of more than two million.[75] The total number of Romani people is at least twice as high (several times as high according to high estimates). Many Romani are native speakers of the dominant language in their country of residence or of mixed languages combining the dominant language with a dialect of Romani; those varieties are sometimes called Para-Romani.[76]
+
+Perceived as derogatory, many of these exonyms are falling out of standard usage and being replaced by a version of the name Roma.
+
+Rom means man or husband in the Romani language. It has the variants dom and lom, which may be related to the Sanskrit words dam-pati (lord of the house, husband), dama (to subdue), lom (hair), lomaka (hairy), loman, roman (hairy), romaça (man with beard and long hair).[86] Another possible origin is from Sanskrit डोम doma (member of a low caste of travelling musicians and dancers).
+
+In the Romani language, Rom is a masculine noun, meaning 'man of the Roma ethnic group' or 'man, husband', with the plural Roma. The feminine of Rom in the Romani language is Romni. However, in most cases, in other languages Rom is now used for people of both genders.[87]
+
+Romani is the feminine adjective, while Romano is the masculine adjective. Some Romanies use Rom or Roma as an ethnic name, while others (such as the Sinti, or the Romanichal) do not use this term as a self-ascription for the entire ethnic group.[88]
+
+Sometimes, rom and romani are spelled with a double r, i.e., rrom and rromani. In this case rr is used to represent the phoneme /ʀ/ (also written as ř and rh), which in some Romani dialects has remained different from the one written with a single r. The rr spelling is common in certain institutions (such as the INALCO Institute in Paris), or used in certain countries, e.g., Romania, to distinguish from the endonym/homonym for Romanians (sg. român, pl. români).[89]
+
+In the English language (according to the Oxford English Dictionary), Rom is a noun (with the plural Roma or Roms) and an adjective, while Romani (Romany) is also a noun (with the plural Romani, the Romani, Romanies, or Romanis) and an adjective.  Both Rom and Romani have been in use in English since the 19th century as an alternative for Gypsy.[90] Romani was sometimes spelled Rommany, but more often Romany, while today Romani is the most popular spelling.  Occasionally, the double r spelling (e.g., Rroma, Rromani) mentioned above is also encountered in English texts.
+
+The term Roma is increasingly encountered,[91][92] as a generic term for the Romani people.[93][94][95]
+
+Because all Romanis use the word Romani as an adjective, the term became a noun for the entire ethnic group.[96] Today, the term Romani is used by some organizations, including the United Nations and the US Library of Congress.[89] However, the Council of Europe and other organizations consider that Roma is the correct term referring to all related groups, regardless of their country of origin, and recommend that Romani be restricted to the language and culture: Romani language, Romani culture.[87]
+
+The standard assumption is that the demonyms of the Romani people, Lom and Dom share the same origin.[97][98]
+
+The English term Gypsy (or Gipsy) originates from the Middle English gypcian, short for Egipcien. The Spanish term Gitano and French Gitan have similar etymologies. They are ultimately derived from the Greek Αιγύπτιοι (Aigyptioi), meaning Egyptian, via Latin. This designation owes its existence to the belief, common in the Middle Ages, that the Romani, or some related group (such as the Middle Eastern Dom people), were itinerant Egyptians.[99][100] This belief appears to derive from verses in the biblical Book of Ezekiel (29: 6 and 12-13) referring to the Egyptians being scattered among the nations by an angry God. According to one narrative, they were exiled from Egypt as punishment for allegedly harbouring the infant Jesus.[101] In his book 'The Zincali: an account of the Gypsies of Spain', George Borrow notes that when they first appeared in Germany it was under the character of Egyptians doing penance for their having refused hospitality to the Virgin and her son. As described in Victor Hugo's novel The Hunchback of Notre Dame, the medieval French referred to the Romanies as Egyptiens.
+
+This exonym is sometimes written with capital letter, to show that it designates an ethnic group.[102] However, the word is considered derogatory because of its negative and stereotypical associations.[94][103][104][105] The Council of Europe consider that "Gypsy" or equivalent terms, as well as administrative terms such as "Gens du Voyage" (referring in fact to an ethnic group but not acknowledging ethnic identification) are not in line with European recommendations.[87] In North America, the word Gypsy is most commonly used as a reference to Romani ethnicity, though lifestyle and fashion are at times also referenced by using this word.[106]
+
+Another common designation of the Romani people is Cingane (alt. Tsinganoi, Zigar, Zigeuner), which likely derives from Athinganoi, the name of a Christian sect with whom the Romani (or some related group) became associated in the Middle Ages.[100][107][108][109]
+
+For a variety of reasons, many Romanis choose not to register their ethnic identity in official censuses. There are an estimated 10 million Romani people in Europe (as of 2019),[110] although some high estimates by Romani organizations give numbers as high as 14 million.[111] Significant Romani populations are found in the Balkans, in some Central European states, in Spain, France, Russia and Ukraine. In the European Union there are an estimated 6 million Romanis.[112]  Several million more Romanis may live outside Europe, in particular in the Middle East and in the Americas.[113]
+
+Like the Roma in general, many different ethnonyms are given to subgroups of Roma. Sometimes a subgroup uses more than one endonym, is commonly known by an exonym or erroneously by the endonym of another subgroup. The only name approaching an all-encompassing self-description is Rom.[114] Even when subgroups don't use the name, they all acknowledge a common origin and a dichotomy between themselves and Gadjo (non-Roma).[114] For instance, while the main group of Roma in German-speaking countries refer to themselves as Sinti, their name for their original language is Romanes.
+
+Subgroups have been described as, in part, a result of the Hindu caste system, which the founding population of Rom almost certainly experienced in their South Asian urheimat.[114][115]
+
+Many groups use names apparently derived from the Romani word kalo or calo, meaning "black" or "absorbing all light".[116] This closely resembles words for "black" or "dark" in Indo-Aryan languages (e.g., Sanskrit काल kāla: "black", "of a dark colour").[114] Likewise, the name of the Dom or Domba people of North India – to whom the Roma have genetic,[117] cultural and linguistic links – has come to imply "dark-skinned", in some Indian languages.[118] Hence names such as kale and calé may have originated as an exonym or a euphemism for Roma.
+
+Other endonyms for Romani include, for example:
+
+The Roma people have a number of distinct populations, the largest being the Roma and the Iberian Calé or Caló, who reached Anatolia and the Balkans about the early 12th century, from a migration out of northwestern India beginning about 600 years earlier.[132][64] They settled in present-day Turkey, Greece, Serbia, Romania, Moldova, Bulgaria, North Macedonia, Hungary and Slovakia, by order of volume, and Spain. From the Balkans, they migrated throughout Europe and, in the nineteenth and later centuries, to the Americas. The Romani population in the United States is estimated at more than one million.[133] Brazil has the second largest Romani population in the Americas, estimated at approximately 800,000 by the 2011 census. The Romani people are mainly called by non-Romani ethnic Brazilians as ciganos. Most of them belong to the ethnic subgroup Calés (Kale), of the Iberian peninsula. Juscelino Kubitschek, Brazilian president during 1956–1961 term, was 50% Czech Romani by his mother's bloodline; and Washington Luís, last president of the First Brazilian Republic (1926–1930 term), had Portuguese Kale ancestry.
+
+There is no official or reliable count of the Romani populations worldwide.[134] Many Romani refuse to register their ethnic identity in official censuses for fear of discrimination.[135][better source needed] Others are descendants of intermarriage with local populations and no longer identify only as Romani, or not at all.
+
+As of the early 2000s, an estimated 3.8[136][page needed] to 9 million Romani people lived in Europe and Asia Minor.[137][page needed] although some Romani organizations estimate numbers as high as 14 million.[138]  Significant Romani populations are found in the Balkan peninsula, in some Central European states, in Spain, France, Russia, and Ukraine. The total number of Romani living outside Europe are primarily in the Middle East and North Africa and in the Americas, and are estimated in total at more than two million. Some countries do not collect data by ethnicity.
+
+The Romani people identify as distinct ethnicities based in part on territorial, cultural and dialectal differences, and self-designation.[139][140][141][142]
+
+Genetic findings suggest an Indian origin for Roma.[132][64][143] Because Romani groups did not keep chronicles of their history or have oral accounts of it, most hypotheses about the Romani's migration early history are based on linguistic theory.[144] There is also no known record of a migration from India to Europe from medieval times that can be connected indisputably to Roma.[145]
+
+According to a legend reported in the Persian epic poem, the Shahnameh, from Iran and repeated by several modern authors, the Sasanian king Bahrām V Gōr learned towards the end of his reign (421–39) that the poor could not afford to enjoy music, and he asked the king of India to send him ten thousand luris, lute-playing experts.  When the luris arrived, Bahrām gave each one an ox, a donkey, and a donkey-load of wheat so that they could live on agriculture and play music for free for the poor. But the luris ate the oxen and the wheat and came back a year later with their cheeks hollowed with hunger. The king, angered with their having wasted what he had given them, ordered them to pack up their bags and go wandering around the world on their donkeys.[146]
+
+The linguistic evidence has indisputably shown that the roots of the Romani language lie in India: the language has grammatical characteristics of Indian languages and shares with them a large part of the basic lexicon, for example, regarding body parts or daily routines.[147]
+
+More exactly, Romani shares the basic lexicon with Hindi and Punjabi. It shares many phonetic features with Marwari, while its grammar is closest to Bengali.[148]
+
+Romani and Domari share some similarities: agglutination of postpositions of the second Layer (or case marking clitics) to the nominal stem, concord markers for the past tense, the neutralisation of gender marking in the plural, and the use of the oblique case as an accusative.[149] This has prompted much discussion about the relationships between these two languages. Domari was once thought to be a "sister language" of Romani, the two languages having split after the departure from the Indian subcontinent –  but later research suggests that the differences between them are significant enough to treat them as two separate languages within the Central zone (Hindustani) group of languages. The Dom and the Rom therefore likely descend from two different migration waves out of India, separated by several centuries.[67][150]
+
+In phonology, Romani language shares several isoglosses with the Central branch of Indo-Aryan languages especially in the realization of some sounds of the Old Indo-Aryan. However, it also preserves several dental clusters. In regards to verb morphology, Romani follows exactly the same pattern of northwestern languages such as Kashmiri and Shina through the adoption of oblique enclitic pronouns as person markers, lending credence to the theory of their Central Indian origin and a subsequent migration to northwestern India. Though the retention of dental clusters suggests a break from central languages during the transition from Old to Middle Indo-Aryan, the overall morphology suggests that the language participated in some of the significant developments leading toward the emergence of New Indo-Aryan languages.[151]
+Numerals in the Romani, Domari and Lomavren languages, with Sanskrit, Hindi and Persian forms for comparison.[152] Note that Romani 7–9 are borrowed from Greek.
+
+Genetic findings in 2012 suggest the Romani originated in northwestern India and migrated as a group.[132][64][153] According to the study, the ancestors of present scheduled castes and scheduled tribes populations of northern India, traditionally referred to collectively as the Ḍoma, are the likely ancestral populations of modern European Roma.[154] In December 2012, additional findings appeared to confirm the "Roma came from a single group that left northwestern India about 1,500 years ago".[64] They reached the Balkans about 900 years ago[132] and then spread throughout Europe. The team also found the Roma to display genetic isolation, as well as "differential gene flow in time and space with non-Romani Europeans".[132][64]
+
+Genetic research published in European Journal of Human Genetics "has revealed that over 70% of males belong to a single lineage that appears unique to the Roma".[65]
+
+Genetic evidence supports the medieval migration from India. The Romani have been described as "a conglomerate of genetically isolated founder populations",[155] while a number of common Mendelian disorders among Romanies from all over Europe indicates "a common origin and founder effect".[155][156]
+
+A study from 2001 by Gresham et al. suggests "a limited number of related founders, compatible with a small group of migrants splitting from a distinct caste or tribal group".[157] The same study found that "a single lineage... found across Romani populations, accounts for almost one-third of Romani males".[157] A 2004 study by Morar et al. concluded that the Romani population "was founded approximately 32–40 generations ago, with secondary and tertiary founder events occurring approximately 16–25 generations ago".[158]
+
+Haplogroup H-M82 is a major lineage cluster in the Balkan Romani group, accounting for approximately 60% of the total.[159] Haplogroup H is uncommon in Europe but present in the Indian subcontinent and Sri Lanka.
+
+A study of 444 people representing three different ethnic groups in North Macedonia found mtDNA haplogroups M5a1 and H7a1a were dominant in Romanies (13.7% and 10.3%, respectively).[160]
+
+Y-DNA composition of Romani in North Macedonia, based on 57 samples:[161]
+
+Y-DNA Haplogroup H1a occurs in Romani at frequencies 7–70%. Unlike ethnic Hungarians, among Hungarian and Slovakian Romani subpopulations, Haplogroup E-M78 and I1 usually occur above 10% and sometimes over 20%.  While among Slovakian and Tiszavasvari Romani the dominant haplogroup is H1a, among Tokaj Romani is Haplogroup J2a (23%), while among Taktaharkány Romani is Haplogroup I2a (21%).[162] Five, rather consistent founder lineages throughout the subpopulations, were found among Romani – J-M67 and J-M92 (J2), H-M52 (H1a1), and I-P259 (I1?). Haplogroup I-P259 as H is not found at frequencies of over 3 percent among host populations, while haplogroups E and I are absent in South Asia. The lineages E-V13, I-P37 (I2a) and R-M17 (R1a) may represent gene flow from the host populations. Bulgarian, Romanian and Greek Romani are dominated by Haplogroup H-M82 (H1a1), while among Spanish Romani J2 is prevalent.[163] In Serbia among Kosovo[a] and Belgrade Romani Haplogroup H prevails, while among Vojvodina Romani, H drops to 7 percent and E-V13 rises to a prevailing level.[164]
+
+Among non-Roma Europeans Haplogroup H is extremely rare, peaking at 7 percent among Albanians from Tirana[165] and 11 percent among Bulgarian Turks. It occurs at 5 percent among Hungarians,[162] although the carriers might be of Romani origin.[163] Among non Roma-speaking Europeans at 2 percent among Slovaks,[166] 2 percent among Croats,[167] 1 percent among Macedonians from Skopje, 3 percent among Macedonian Albanians,[168] 1 percent among Serbs from Belgrade,[169] 3 percent among Bulgarians from Sofia,[170] 1 percent among Austrians and Swiss,[171] 3 percent among Romanians from Ploiesti, 1 percent among Turks.[166]
+
+They may have emerged from the modern Indian state of Rajasthan,[172] migrating to the northwest (the Punjab region, Sindh and Baluchistan of the Indian subcontinent) around 250 BC. Their subsequent westward migration, possibly in waves, is now believed to have occurred beginning in about CE 500.[64]
+It has also been suggested that emigration from India may have taken place in the context of the raids by Mahmud of Ghazni. As these soldiers were defeated, they were moved west with their families into the Byzantine Empire.[173] The author Ralph Lilley Turner theorised a central Indian origin of Romani followed by a migration to Northwest India as it shares a number of ancient isoglosses with Central Indo-Aryan languages in relation to realization of some sounds of Old Indo-Aryan. This is lent further credence by its sharing exactly the same pattern of northwestern languages such as Kashmiri and Shina through the adoption of oblique enclitic pronouns as person markers. The overall morphology suggests that Romani participated in some of the significant developments leading toward the emergence of New Indo-Aryan languages, thus indicating that the proto-Romani did not leave the Indian subcontinent until late in the second half of the first millennium.[151][174]
+
+Though according to a 2012 genomic study, the Romani reached the Balkans as early as the 12th century,[175] the first historical records of the Romani reaching south-eastern Europe are from the 14th century: in 1322, after leaving Ireland on a pilgrimage to Jerusalem, Irish Franciscan friar Symon Semeonis encountered a migrant group of Romani outside the town of Candia (modern Heraklion), in Crete, calling them "the descendants of Cain"; his account is the earliest surviving description by a Western chronicler of the Romani in Europe.
+
+In 1350, Ludolph of Saxony mentioned a similar people with a unique language whom he called Mandapolos, a word some think derives from the Greek word mantes (meaning prophet or fortune teller).[176]
+
+Around 1360, a fiefdom called the Feudum Acinganorum was established in Corfu, which mainly used Romani serfs and to which the Romani on the island were subservient.[177]
+
+By the 1440s, they were recorded in Germany;[178] and by the 16th century, Scotland and Sweden.[179] Some Romani migrated from Persia through North Africa, reaching the Iberian Peninsula in the 15th century. The two currents met in France.[180]
+
+Their early history shows a mixed reception. Although 1385 marks the first recorded transaction for a Romani slave in Wallachia, they were issued safe conduct by Holy Roman Emperor Sigismund in 1417. Romanies were ordered expelled from the Meissen region of Germany in 1416, Lucerne in 1471, Milan in 1493, France in 1504, Catalonia in 1512, Sweden in 1525, England in 1530 (see Egyptians Act 1530), and Denmark in 1536. In 1510, any Romani found in Switzerland were ordered put to death, with similar rules established in England in 1554, and Denmark in 1589, whereas Portugal began deportations of Romanies to its colonies in 1538.[182]
+
+A 1596 English statute gave Romanis special privileges that other wanderers lacked. France passed a similar law in 1683. Catherine the Great of Russia declared the Romanies "crown slaves" (a status superior to serfs), but also kept them out of certain parts of the capital.[183] In 1595, Ștefan Răzvan overcame his birth into slavery, and became the Voivode (Prince) of Moldavia.[182]
+
+Since a royal edict by Charles II in 1695, Spanish Romanis had been restricted to certain towns.[184] An official edict in 1717 restricted them to only 75 towns and districts, so that they would not be concentrated in any one region. In the Great Gypsy Round-up, Romani were arrested and imprisoned by the Spanish Monarchy in 1749.
+
+During the latter part of the 17th century, around the Franco-Dutch War, both France and Holland needed thousands of men to fight. Some recruitment took the form of rounding up vagrants and the poor to work the galleys and provide the armies' labour force. With this background, Romanis were targets of both the French and the Dutch.
+
+After the wars, and into the first decade of the 18th century, Romanis were slaughtered with impunity throughout Holland. Romanis, called ‘heiden’ by the Dutch, wandered throughout the rural areas of Europe and became the societal pariahs of the age. Heidenjachten, translated as "heathen hunt" happened throughout Holland in an attempt to eradicate them.[185]
+
+Although some Romani could be kept as slaves in Wallachia and Moldavia until abolition in 1856, the majority traveled as free nomads with their wagons, as alluded to in the spoked wheel symbol in the Romani flag.[186] Elsewhere in Europe, they were subjected to ethnic cleansing, abduction of their children, and forced labour. In England, Romani were sometimes expelled from small communities or hanged; in France, they were branded, and their heads were shaved; in Moravia and Bohemia, the women were marked by their ears being severed. As a result, large groups of the Romani moved to the East, toward Poland, which was more tolerant, and Russia, where the Romani were treated more fairly as long as they paid the annual taxes.[187]
+
+Romani began emigrating to North America in colonial times, with small groups recorded in Virginia and French Louisiana. Larger-scale Roma emigration to the United States began in the 1860s, with Romanichal groups from Great Britain. The most significant number immigrated in the early 20th century, mainly from the Vlax group of Kalderash. Many Romani also settled in South America.
+
+During World War II, the Nazis embarked on a systematic genocide of the Romani, a process known in Romani as the Porajmos.[188] Romanies were marked for extermination and sentenced to forced labor and imprisonment in concentration camps. They were often killed on sight, especially by the Einsatzgruppen (paramilitary death squads) on the Eastern Front.[189] The total number of victims has been variously estimated at between 220,000 and 1,500,000.[190]
+
+The treatment of the Romani in Nazi puppet states differed markedly. In the Independent State of Croatia, the Ustaša killed almost the entire Roma population of 25,000. The concentration camp system of Jasenovac, run by the Ustaša militia and the Croat political police, were responsible for the deaths of between 15,000 and 20,000 Roma.[191]
+
+In Czechoslovakia, they were labeled a "socially degraded stratum", and Romani women were sterilized as part of a state policy to reduce their population. This policy was implemented with large financial incentives, threats of denying future welfare payments, with misinformation, or after administering drugs.[192][193]
+
+An official inquiry from the Czech Republic, resulting in a report (December 2005), concluded that the Communist authorities had practised an assimilation policy towards Romanis, which "included efforts by social services to control the birth rate in the Romani community. The problem of sexual sterilisation carried out in the Czech Republic, either with improper motivation or illegally, exists," said the Czech Public Defender of Rights, recommending state compensation for women affected between 1973 and 1991.[194] New cases were revealed up until 2004, in both the Czech Republic and Slovakia. Germany, Norway, Sweden and Switzerland "all have histories of coercive sterilization of minorities and other groups".[195]
+
+The traditional Romanies place a high value on the extended family. Virginity is essential in unmarried women. Both men and women often marry young; there has been controversy in several countries over the Romani practise of child marriage. Romani law establishes that the man's family must pay a bride price to the bride's parents, but only traditional families still follow it.
+
+Once married, the woman joins the husband's family, where her main job is to tend to her husband's and her children's needs and take care of her in-laws. The power structure in the traditional Romani household has at its top the oldest man or grandfather, and men, in general, have more authority than women. Women gain respect and power as they get older. Young wives begin gaining authority once they have children.
+
+Romani social behavior is strictly regulated by Hindu purity laws[196] ("marime" or "marhime"), still respected by most Roma (and by most older generations of Sinti). This regulation affects many aspects of life and is applied to actions, people and things: parts of the human body are considered impure: the genital organs (because they produce emissions) and the rest of the lower body. Clothes for the lower body, as well as the clothes of menstruating women, are washed separately. Items used for eating are also washed in a different place. Childbirth is considered impure and must occur outside the dwelling place. The mother is deemed to be impure for forty days after giving birth.
+
+Death is considered impure, and affects the whole family of the dead, who remain impure for a period of time. In contrast to the practice of cremating the dead, Romani dead must be buried.[197] Cremation and burial are both known from the time of the Rigveda, and both are widely practiced in Hinduism today (although the tendency is for Hindus to practice cremation, while some communities in South India tend to bury their dead).[198] Some animals are also considered impure, for instance, cats, because they lick their hindquarters. Horses, in contrast, are not considered impure because they cannot do so.[199]
+
+In Romani philosophy, Romanipen (also romanypen, romanipe, romanype, romanimos, romaimos, romaniya) is the totality of the Romani spirit, Romani culture, Romani Law,  being a Romani, a set of Romani strains.
+
+An ethnic Romani is considered a gadjo in the Romani society if he has no Romanipen. Sometimes a non-Romani may be considered a Romani if he has Romanipen. Usually this is an adopted child. It has been hypothesized that it owes more to a framework of culture rather than simply an adherence to historically received rules.[200]
+
+Most Romani people are Christian,[201] others Muslim; some retained their ancient faith of Hinduism from their original homeland of India, while others have their own religion and political organization.[202]
+
+The ancestors of modern-day Romani people were Hindu, but adopted Christianity or Islam depending on the regions through which they had migrated.[203] Muslim Roma are found in Turkey, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Albania, Egypt, Kosovo, North Macedonia, and Bulgaria, forming a very significant proportion of the Romani people. In neighboring countries such as Serbia and Greece, most Romani inhabitants follow the practice of Orthodoxy. It is likely that the adherence to differing religions prevented families from engaging in intermarriage.[204]
+
+In Spain, most Gitanos are Roman Catholics.[citation needed]
+Some brotherhoods have organized Gitanos in their Holy Week devotions.
+They are popularly known as Cofradía de los Gitanos.
+However, the proportion of followers of Evangelical Christianity among Gitanos is higher than among the rest of Spaniards.[citation needed]
+Their version of el culto integrates Flamenco music.
+
+Blessed Ceferino Giménez Malla is recently considered a patron saint of the Romani people in Roman Catholicism.[205] Saint Sarah, or Sara e Kali, has also been venerated as a patron saint in her shrine at Saintes-Maries-de-la-Mer, France. Since the turn of the 21st century, Sara e Kali is understood to have been Kali, an Indian deity brought from India by the refugee ancestors of the Roma people; as the Roma became Christianized, she was absorbed in a syncretic way and venerated as a saint.[206]
+
+Saint Sarah is now increasingly being considered as "a Romani Goddess, the Protectress of the Roma" and an "indisputable link with Mother India".[206][207]
+
+Romanies often adopt the dominant religion of their host country in the event that a ceremony associated with a formal religious institution is necessary, such as a baptism or funeral (their particular belief systems and indigenous religion and worship remain preserved regardless of such adoption processes). The Roma continue to practice "Shaktism", a practice with origins in India, whereby a female consort is required for the worship of a god. Adherence to this practice means that for the Roma who worship the Christian God, prayer is conducted through the Virgin Mary, or her mother, Saint Anne. Shaktism continues over one thousand years after the people's separation from India.[208]
+
+Besides the Roma elders (who serve as spiritual leaders), priests, churches, or bibles do not exist among the Romanies –  the only exception is the Pentecostal Roma.[208]
+
+For the Roma communities that have resided in the Balkans for numerous centuries, often referred to as "Turkish Gypsies", the following histories apply for religious beliefs:
+
+In Ukraine and Russia, the Roma populations are also Muslim as the families of Balkan migrants continue to live in these locations. Their ancestors settled on the Crimean peninsula during the 17th and 18th centuries, but then migrated to Ukraine, southern Russia and the Povolzhie (along the Volga River). Formally, Islam is the religion that these communities align themselves with and the people are recognized for their staunch preservation of the Romani language and identity.[210]
+
+In Poland and Slovakia, their populations are Roman Catholic, many times adopting and following local, cultural Catholicism as a syncretic system of belief that incorporates distinct Roma beliefs and cultural aspects. For example, many Polish Roma delays their Church wedding due to the belief that sacramental marriage is accompanied by divine ratification, creating a virtually indissoluble union until the couple consummate, after which the sacramental marriage is dissoluble only by the death of a spouse. Therefore, for Polish Roma, once married, one can't ever divorce. Another aspect of Polish Roma's Catholicism is a tradition of pilgrimage to the Jasna Góra Monastery.[212]
+
+Most Eastern European Romanies are Roman Catholic, Eastern Orthodox, or Muslim.[213] Those in Western Europe and the United States are mostly Roman Catholic or Protestant –  in southern Spain, many Romanies are Pentecostal, but this is a small minority that has emerged in contemporary times.[208] In Egypt, the Romanies are split into Christian and Muslim populations.[214]
+
+Romani music plays an important role in Central and Eastern European countries such as Croatia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Serbia, Montenegro, Bulgaria, North Macedonia, Albania, Hungary, Slovakia, Slovenia and Romania, and the style and performance practices of Romani musicians have influenced European classical composers such as Franz Liszt and Johannes Brahms. The lăutari who perform at traditional Romanian weddings are virtually all Romani.[citation needed]
+
+Probably the most internationally prominent contemporary performers[citation needed] in the lăutari tradition are Taraful Haiducilor. Bulgaria's popular "wedding music", too, is almost exclusively performed by Romani musicians such as Ivo Papasov, a virtuoso clarinetist closely associated with this genre and Bulgarian pop-folk singer Azis.
+
+Many famous classical musicians, such as the Hungarian pianist Georges Cziffra, are Romani, as are many prominent performers of manele. Zdob și Zdub, one of the most prominent rock bands in Moldova, although not Romanies themselves, draw heavily on Romani music, as do Spitalul de Urgență in Romania, Shantel in Germany, Goran Bregović in Serbia, Darko Rundek in Croatia, Beirut and Gogol Bordello in the United States.
+
+Another tradition of Romani music is the genre of the Romani brass band, with such notable practitioners as Boban Marković of Serbia, and the brass lăutari groups Fanfare Ciocărlia and Fanfare din Cozmesti of Romania.
+
+Dances such as the flamenco of Spain and Oriental dances of Egypt are said to have originated from the Romani.[215]
+
+The distinctive sound of Romani music has also strongly influenced bolero, jazz, and flamenco (especially cante jondo) in Spain. European-style gypsy jazz ("jazz Manouche" or "Sinti jazz") is still widely practiced among the original creators (the Romanie People); one who acknowledged this artistic debt was guitarist Django Reinhardt. Contemporary artists in this tradition known internationally include Stochelo Rosenberg, Biréli Lagrène, Jimmy Rosenberg, Paulus Schäfer and Tchavolo Schmitt.
+
+The Romanies of Turkey have achieved musical acclaim from national and local audiences. Local performers usually perform for special holidays. Their music is usually performed on instruments such as the darbuka, gırnata and cümbüş.[216]
+
+Romani contemporary art is art created by Romani people. It emerged at the climax of the process that began in Central and Eastern Europe in the late-1980s, when the interpretation of the cultural practice of minorities was enabled by a paradigm shift, commonly referred to in specialist literature as the Cultural turn. The idea of the "cultural turn" was introduced; and this was also the time when the notion of cultural democracy became crystallized in the debates carried on at various public forums. Civil society gained strength, and civil politics appeared, which is a prerequisite for cultural democracy. This shift of attitude in scholarly circles derived from concerns specific not only to ethnicity, but also to society, gender and class.[217]
+
+Most Romani speak one of several dialects of the Romani language,[218] an Indo-Aryan language, with roots in Sanskrit. They also often speak the languages of the countries they live in. Typically, they also incorporate loanwords and calques into Romani from the languages of those countries and especially words for terms that the Romani language does not have. Most of the Ciganos of Portugal, the Gitanos of Spain, the Romanichal of the UK, and Scandinavian Travellers have lost their knowledge of pure Romani, and respectively speak the mixed languages Caló,[219] Angloromany, and Scandoromani. Most of the speaker communities in these regions consist of later immigrants from eastern or central Europe.[220]
+
+There are no concrete statistics for the number of Romani speakers, both in Europe and globally. However, a conservative estimation has been made at 3.5 million speakers in Europe and a further 500,000 elsewhere,[220] although the actual number may be considerably higher. This makes Romani the second largest minority language in Europe, behind Catalan.[220]
+
+In relation to dialect diversity, Romani works in the same way as most other European languages.[221] Cross-dialect communication is dominated by the following features:
+
+One of the most enduring persecutions against the Romani people was their enslavement. Slavery was widely practiced in medieval Europe, including the territory of present-day Romania from before the founding of the principalities of Moldavia and Wallachia in the 13th–14th century.[222][page needed] Legislation decreed that all the Romani living in these states, as well as any others who immigrated there, were classified as slaves.[223] Slavery was gradually abolished during the 1840s and 1850s.[224][page needed]
+
+The exact origins of slavery in the Danubian Principalities are not known. There is some debate over whether the Romani people came to Wallachia and Moldavia as free men or were brought as slaves. Historian Nicolae Iorga associated the Roma people's arrival with the 1241 Mongol invasion of Europe and considered their slavery as a vestige of that era, in which the Romanians took the Roma as slaves from the Mongols and preserved their status to use their labor. Other historians believe that the Romani were enslaved while captured during the battles with the Tatars. The practice of enslaving war prisoners may also have been adopted from the Mongols.[222][page needed]
+
+Some Romani may have been slaves or auxiliary troops of the Mongols or Tatars, but most of them migrated from south of the Danube at the end of the 14th century, some time after the foundation of Wallachia. By then, the institution of slavery was already established in Moldavia and possibly in both principalities. After the Roma migrated into the area, slavery became a widespread practice by the majority population. The Tatar slaves, smaller in numbers, were eventually merged into the Roma population.[225]
+
+Some branches of the Romani people reached Western Europe in the 15th century, fleeing as refugees from the Ottoman conquest of the Balkans.[226] Although the Romani were refugees from the conflicts in southeastern Europe, they were often suspected by certain populations in the West of being associated with the Ottoman invasion because their physical appearance seemed Turkish. (The Imperial Diet at Landau and Freiburg in 1496–1498 declared that the Romani were spies of the Turks). In Western Europe, such suspicions and discrimination against a people who were a visible minority resulted in persecution, often violent, with efforts to achieve ethnic cleansing until the modern era. In times of social tension, the Romani suffered as scapegoats; for instance, they were accused of bringing the plague during times of epidemics.[227]
+
+On 30 July 1749, Spain conducted The Great Roundup of Romani (Gitanos) in its territory. The Spanish Crown ordered a nationwide raid that led to the break-up of families as all able-bodied men were interned into forced labor camps in an attempt at ethnic cleansing. The measure was eventually reversed and the Romanis were freed as protests began to arise in different communities, sedentary romanis being highly esteemed and protected in rural Spain.[228][229]
+
+Later in the 19th century, Romani immigration was forbidden on a racial basis in areas outside Europe, mostly in the English-speaking world. Argentina in 1880 prohibited immigration by Roma, as did the United States in 1885.[227]
+
+In the Habsburg Monarchy under Maria Theresa (1740–1780), a series of decrees tried to force the Romanies to permanently settle, removed rights to horse and wagon ownership (1754), renamed them as "New Citizens" and forced Romani boys into military service if they had no trade (1761), forced them to register with the local authorities (1767), and prohibited marriage between Romanies (1773). Her successor Josef II prohibited the wearing of traditional Romani clothing and the use of the Romani language, punishable by flogging.[230]
+
+In Spain, attempts to assimilate the Gitanos were under way as early as 1619, when Gitanos were forcibly settled, the use of the Romani language was prohibited, Gitano men and women were sent to separate workhouses and their children sent to orphanages. King Charles III took on a more progressive attitude to Gitano assimilation, proclaiming their equal rights as Spanish citizens and ending official denigration based on their race. While he prohibited the nomadic lifestyle, the use of the Calo language, Romani clothing, their trade in horses and other itinerant trades, he also forbade any form of discrimination against them or barring them from the guilds. The use of the word gitano was also forbidden to further assimilation, substituted for "New Castilian", which was also applied to former Jews and Muslims.[231][232]
+
+Most historians agree that Charles III pragmática failed for three main reasons, ultimately derived from its implementation outside major cities and in marginal areas: The difficulty the Gitano community faced in changing its nomadic lifestyle, the marginal lifestyle in which the community had been driven by society and the serious difficulties of applying the pragmática in the fields of education and work. One author ascribes its failure to the overall rejection by the wider population of the integration of the Gitanos.[230][233]
+
+Other examples of forced assimilation include Norway, where a law was passed in 1896 permitting the state to remove children from their parents and place them in state institutions.[234] This resulted in some 1,500 Romani children being taken from their parents in the 20th century.[235]
+
+The persecution of the Romanies reached a peak during World War II in the Porajmos genocide perpetrated by Nazi Germany. In 1935, the Nuremberg laws stripped the Romani people living in Nazi Germany of their citizenship, after which they were subjected to violence, imprisonment in concentration camps and later genocide in extermination camps. The policy was extended in areas occupied by the Nazis during the war, and it was also applied by their allies, notably the Independent State of Croatia, Romania, and Hungary.
+
+Because no accurate pre-war census figures exist for the Romanis, it is impossible to accurately assess the actual number of victims. Most estimates for numbers of Romani victims of the Holocaust fall between 200,000 and 500,000, although figures ranging between 90,000 and 1.5 million have been proposed. Lower estimates do not include those killed in all Axis-controlled countries. A detailed study by Sybil Milton, formerly senior historian at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum gave a figure of at least a minimum of 220,000, possibly closer to 500,000.[236] Ian Hancock, Director of the Program of Romani Studies and the Romani Archives and Documentation Center at the University of Texas at Austin, argues in favour of a higher figure of between 500,000 and 1,500,000.[237]
+
+In Central Europe, the extermination in the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia was so thorough that the Bohemian Romani language became extinct.
+
+In Europe, Romani people are associated with poverty, and are accused of high rates of crime and behaviours that are perceived by the rest of the population as being antisocial or inappropriate.[239] Partly for this reason, discrimination against the Romani people has continued to the present day,[240][241] although efforts are being made to address them.[242] Amnesty International reports continued instances of Antizigan discrimination during the 20th century, particularly in Romania, Serbia,[243] Slovakia,[244] Hungary,[245] Slovenia,[246] and Kosovo.[247] The European Union has recognized that discrimination against Romani must be addressed, and with the national Roma integration strategy they encourage member states to work towards greater Romani inclusion and upholding the rights of the Romani in the European union.[248]
+
+In Eastern Europe, Roma children often attend Roma Special Schools, separate from non-Roma children, which puts them at an educational disadvantage.[251]:83
+
+The Romanis of Kosovo have been severely persecuted by ethnic Albanians since the end of the Kosovo War, and the region's Romani community is, for the most part, annihilated.[252]
+
+Czechoslovakia carried out a policy of sterilization of Romani women, starting in 1973.[253] The dissidents of the Charter 77 denounced it in 1977–78 as a genocide, but the practice continued through the Velvet Revolution of 1989.[254] A 2005 report by the Czech Republic's independent ombudsman, Otakar Motejl, identified dozens of cases of coercive sterilization between 1979 and 2001, and called for criminal investigations and possible prosecution against several health care workers and administrators.[255]
+
+In 2008, following the rape and subsequent murder of an Italian woman in Rome at the hands of a young man from a local Romani encampment,[256] the Italian government declared that Italy's Romani population represented a national security risk and that swift action was required to address the emergenza nomadi (nomad emergency).[257] Specifically, officials in the Italian government accused the Romanies of being responsible for rising crime rates in urban areas.
+
+The 2008 deaths of Cristina and Violetta Djeordsevic, two Roma children who drowned while Italian beach-goers remained unperturbed, brought international attention to the relationship between Italians and the Roma people. Reviewing the situation in 2012, one Belgian magazine observed:
+
+On International Roma Day, which falls on 8 April, the significant proportion of Europe's 12 million Roma who live in deplorable conditions will not have much to celebrate. And poverty is not the only worry for the community. Ethnic tensions are on the rise. In 2008, Roma camps came under attack in Italy, intimidation by racist parliamentarians is the norm in Hungary. Speaking in 1993, Václav Havel prophetically remarked that "the treatment of the Roma is a Litmus test for democracy": and democracy has been found wanting. The consequences of the transition to capitalism have been disastrous for the Roma. Under communism they had jobs, free housing and schooling. Now many are unemployed, many are losing their homes and racism is increasingly rewarded with impunity.[258]
+
+The 2016 Pew Research poll found that Italians, in particular, hold strong anti-Roma views, with 82% of Italians expressing negative opinions about Roma. In Greece 67%, in Hungary 64%, in France 61%, in Spain 49%, in Poland 47%, in the UK 45%, in Sweden 42%, in Germany 40%, and in the Netherlands[259] 37% had an unfavourable view of Roma.[260] The 2019 Pew Research poll found that 83% of Italians, 76% of Slovaks, 72% of Greeks, 68% of Bulgarians, 66% of Czechs, 61% of Lithuanians, 61% of Hungarians, 54% of Ukrainians, 52% of Russians, 51% of Poles, 44% of French, 40% of Spaniards, and 37% of Germans held unfavorable views of Roma.[261]
+
+Reports of anti-Roma incidents are increasing across Europe.[262] Discrimination against Roma remains widespread in Romania,[263] Slovakia,[264] Bulgaria,[265][266], and the Czech Republic.[267] Roma communities across Ukraine have been the target of violent attacks.[268][269]
+
+In the summer of 2010, French authorities demolished at least 51 illegal Roma camps and began the process of repatriating their residents to their countries of origin.[270] This followed tensions between the French state and Roma communities, which had been heightened after French police opened fire and killed a traveller who drove through a police checkpoint, hitting an officer, and attempted to hit two more officers at another checkpoint. In retaliation a group of Roma, armed with hatchets and iron bars, attacked the police station of Saint-Aignan, toppled traffic lights and road signs and burned three cars.[271][272] The French government has been accused of perpetrating these actions to pursue its political agenda.[273] EU Justice Commissioner Viviane Reding stated that the European Commission should take legal action against France over the issue, calling the deportations "a disgrace". A leaked file dated 5 August, sent from the Interior Ministry to regional police chiefs, included the instruction: "Three hundred camps or illegal settlements must be cleared within three months, Roma camps are a priority."[274]
+
+Many depictions of Romani people in literature and art present romanticized narratives of mystical powers of fortune telling or irascible or passionate temper paired with an indomitable love of freedom and a habit of criminality. Romani were a popular subject in Venetian painting from the time of Giorgione at the start of the 16th century; the inclusion of such a figure adds an exotic oriental flavour to scenes. A Venetian Renaissance painting by Paris Bordone (ca. 1530, Strasbourg) of the Holy Family in Egypt makes Elizabeth, a Romani fortune-teller; the scene is otherwise located in a distinctly European landscape.[275]
+
+Particularly notable are classics like the story Carmen by Prosper Mérimée and the opera based on it by Georges Bizet, Victor Hugo's The Hunchback of Notre Dame, Herge's The Castafiore Emerald and Miguel de Cervantes' La Gitanilla. The Romani were also depicted in A Midsummer Night's Dream, As You Like It, Othello and The Tempest, all by William Shakespeare.
+
+The Romani were also heavily romanticized in the Soviet Union, a classic example being the 1975 film Tabor ukhodit v Nebo.
+A more realistic depiction of contemporary Romani in the Balkans, featuring Romani lay actors speaking in their native dialects, although still playing with established clichés of a Romani penchant for both magic and crime, was presented by Emir Kusturica in his Time of the Gypsies (1988) and Black Cat, White Cat (1998). The films of Tony Gatlif, a French director of Romani ethnicity, like Les Princes (1983), Latcho Drom (1993) and Gadjo Dilo (1997) also portray romani life.
+
+Paris Bordone, c. 1530, Elizabeth, at right, is shown as a Romani fortune-teller
+
+August von Pettenkofen: Gypsy Children (1885), Hermitage Museum
+
+Vincent van Gogh: The Caravans – Gypsy Camp near Arles (1888, oil on canvas)
+
+Carmen
+
+Esméralda
+
+Nicolae Grigorescu Gypsy from Boldu (1897), Art Museum of Iași
+
+General
+
+Lists
+
+European countries Roma links
+
+Non-governmental organisations
+
+Museums and libraries

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+The Romani (also spelled Romany /ˈroʊməni/, /ˈrɒ-/), colloquially known as Roma, are an Indo-Aryan ethnic group, traditionally nomadic itinerants living mostly in Europe, and diaspora populations in the Americas. The Romani as a people originate from the northern Indian subcontinent,[61][62][63] from the Rajasthan, Haryana, and Punjab regions of modern-day India.[62][63]
+
+Genetic findings appear to confirm that the Romani "came from a single group that left northwestern India" in about 512 CE.[64] Genetic research published in the European Journal of Human Genetics "revealed that over 70% of males belong to a single lineage that appears unique to the Roma".[65] They are dispersed, but their most concentrated populations are located in Europe, especially Central, Eastern and Southern Europe (including Turkey, Spain and Southern France). The Romani arrived in Mid-West Asia and Europe around 1007.[66] They have been associated with another Indo-Aryan group, the Dom people: the two groups have been said to have separated from each other or, at least, to share a similar history.[67] Specifically, the ancestors of both the Romani and the Dom left North India sometime between the 6th and 11th century.[66]
+
+The Romani are widely known in English by the exonym Gypsies (or Gipsies), which is considered by some Roma people to be pejorative due to its connotations of illegality and irregularity.[68] Beginning in 1888, the Gypsy Lore Society[69] started to publish a journal that was meant to dispel rumors about their lifestyle.[70]
+
+Since the 19th century, some Romani have also migrated to the Americas. There are an estimated one million Roma in the United States;[6] and 800,000 in Brazil, most of whose ancestors emigrated in the 19th century from Eastern Europe. Brazil also includes a notable Romani community descended from people deported by the Portuguese Empire during the Portuguese Inquisition.[71] In migrations since the late 19th century, Romani have also moved to other countries in South America and to Canada.[72][page needed]
+
+In February 2016, during the International Roma Conference, the Indian Minister of External Affairs stated that the people of the Roma community were children of India.[73] The conference ended with a recommendation to the government of India to recognize the Roma community spread across 30 countries as a part of the Indian diaspora.[74]
+
+The Romani language is divided into several dialects which together have an estimated number of speakers of more than two million.[75] The total number of Romani people is at least twice as high (several times as high according to high estimates). Many Romani are native speakers of the dominant language in their country of residence or of mixed languages combining the dominant language with a dialect of Romani; those varieties are sometimes called Para-Romani.[76]
+
+Perceived as derogatory, many of these exonyms are falling out of standard usage and being replaced by a version of the name Roma.
+
+Rom means man or husband in the Romani language. It has the variants dom and lom, which may be related to the Sanskrit words dam-pati (lord of the house, husband), dama (to subdue), lom (hair), lomaka (hairy), loman, roman (hairy), romaça (man with beard and long hair).[86] Another possible origin is from Sanskrit डोम doma (member of a low caste of travelling musicians and dancers).
+
+In the Romani language, Rom is a masculine noun, meaning 'man of the Roma ethnic group' or 'man, husband', with the plural Roma. The feminine of Rom in the Romani language is Romni. However, in most cases, in other languages Rom is now used for people of both genders.[87]
+
+Romani is the feminine adjective, while Romano is the masculine adjective. Some Romanies use Rom or Roma as an ethnic name, while others (such as the Sinti, or the Romanichal) do not use this term as a self-ascription for the entire ethnic group.[88]
+
+Sometimes, rom and romani are spelled with a double r, i.e., rrom and rromani. In this case rr is used to represent the phoneme /ʀ/ (also written as ř and rh), which in some Romani dialects has remained different from the one written with a single r. The rr spelling is common in certain institutions (such as the INALCO Institute in Paris), or used in certain countries, e.g., Romania, to distinguish from the endonym/homonym for Romanians (sg. român, pl. români).[89]
+
+In the English language (according to the Oxford English Dictionary), Rom is a noun (with the plural Roma or Roms) and an adjective, while Romani (Romany) is also a noun (with the plural Romani, the Romani, Romanies, or Romanis) and an adjective.  Both Rom and Romani have been in use in English since the 19th century as an alternative for Gypsy.[90] Romani was sometimes spelled Rommany, but more often Romany, while today Romani is the most popular spelling.  Occasionally, the double r spelling (e.g., Rroma, Rromani) mentioned above is also encountered in English texts.
+
+The term Roma is increasingly encountered,[91][92] as a generic term for the Romani people.[93][94][95]
+
+Because all Romanis use the word Romani as an adjective, the term became a noun for the entire ethnic group.[96] Today, the term Romani is used by some organizations, including the United Nations and the US Library of Congress.[89] However, the Council of Europe and other organizations consider that Roma is the correct term referring to all related groups, regardless of their country of origin, and recommend that Romani be restricted to the language and culture: Romani language, Romani culture.[87]
+
+The standard assumption is that the demonyms of the Romani people, Lom and Dom share the same origin.[97][98]
+
+The English term Gypsy (or Gipsy) originates from the Middle English gypcian, short for Egipcien. The Spanish term Gitano and French Gitan have similar etymologies. They are ultimately derived from the Greek Αιγύπτιοι (Aigyptioi), meaning Egyptian, via Latin. This designation owes its existence to the belief, common in the Middle Ages, that the Romani, or some related group (such as the Middle Eastern Dom people), were itinerant Egyptians.[99][100] This belief appears to derive from verses in the biblical Book of Ezekiel (29: 6 and 12-13) referring to the Egyptians being scattered among the nations by an angry God. According to one narrative, they were exiled from Egypt as punishment for allegedly harbouring the infant Jesus.[101] In his book 'The Zincali: an account of the Gypsies of Spain', George Borrow notes that when they first appeared in Germany it was under the character of Egyptians doing penance for their having refused hospitality to the Virgin and her son. As described in Victor Hugo's novel The Hunchback of Notre Dame, the medieval French referred to the Romanies as Egyptiens.
+
+This exonym is sometimes written with capital letter, to show that it designates an ethnic group.[102] However, the word is considered derogatory because of its negative and stereotypical associations.[94][103][104][105] The Council of Europe consider that "Gypsy" or equivalent terms, as well as administrative terms such as "Gens du Voyage" (referring in fact to an ethnic group but not acknowledging ethnic identification) are not in line with European recommendations.[87] In North America, the word Gypsy is most commonly used as a reference to Romani ethnicity, though lifestyle and fashion are at times also referenced by using this word.[106]
+
+Another common designation of the Romani people is Cingane (alt. Tsinganoi, Zigar, Zigeuner), which likely derives from Athinganoi, the name of a Christian sect with whom the Romani (or some related group) became associated in the Middle Ages.[100][107][108][109]
+
+For a variety of reasons, many Romanis choose not to register their ethnic identity in official censuses. There are an estimated 10 million Romani people in Europe (as of 2019),[110] although some high estimates by Romani organizations give numbers as high as 14 million.[111] Significant Romani populations are found in the Balkans, in some Central European states, in Spain, France, Russia and Ukraine. In the European Union there are an estimated 6 million Romanis.[112]  Several million more Romanis may live outside Europe, in particular in the Middle East and in the Americas.[113]
+
+Like the Roma in general, many different ethnonyms are given to subgroups of Roma. Sometimes a subgroup uses more than one endonym, is commonly known by an exonym or erroneously by the endonym of another subgroup. The only name approaching an all-encompassing self-description is Rom.[114] Even when subgroups don't use the name, they all acknowledge a common origin and a dichotomy between themselves and Gadjo (non-Roma).[114] For instance, while the main group of Roma in German-speaking countries refer to themselves as Sinti, their name for their original language is Romanes.
+
+Subgroups have been described as, in part, a result of the Hindu caste system, which the founding population of Rom almost certainly experienced in their South Asian urheimat.[114][115]
+
+Many groups use names apparently derived from the Romani word kalo or calo, meaning "black" or "absorbing all light".[116] This closely resembles words for "black" or "dark" in Indo-Aryan languages (e.g., Sanskrit काल kāla: "black", "of a dark colour").[114] Likewise, the name of the Dom or Domba people of North India – to whom the Roma have genetic,[117] cultural and linguistic links – has come to imply "dark-skinned", in some Indian languages.[118] Hence names such as kale and calé may have originated as an exonym or a euphemism for Roma.
+
+Other endonyms for Romani include, for example:
+
+The Roma people have a number of distinct populations, the largest being the Roma and the Iberian Calé or Caló, who reached Anatolia and the Balkans about the early 12th century, from a migration out of northwestern India beginning about 600 years earlier.[132][64] They settled in present-day Turkey, Greece, Serbia, Romania, Moldova, Bulgaria, North Macedonia, Hungary and Slovakia, by order of volume, and Spain. From the Balkans, they migrated throughout Europe and, in the nineteenth and later centuries, to the Americas. The Romani population in the United States is estimated at more than one million.[133] Brazil has the second largest Romani population in the Americas, estimated at approximately 800,000 by the 2011 census. The Romani people are mainly called by non-Romani ethnic Brazilians as ciganos. Most of them belong to the ethnic subgroup Calés (Kale), of the Iberian peninsula. Juscelino Kubitschek, Brazilian president during 1956–1961 term, was 50% Czech Romani by his mother's bloodline; and Washington Luís, last president of the First Brazilian Republic (1926–1930 term), had Portuguese Kale ancestry.
+
+There is no official or reliable count of the Romani populations worldwide.[134] Many Romani refuse to register their ethnic identity in official censuses for fear of discrimination.[135][better source needed] Others are descendants of intermarriage with local populations and no longer identify only as Romani, or not at all.
+
+As of the early 2000s, an estimated 3.8[136][page needed] to 9 million Romani people lived in Europe and Asia Minor.[137][page needed] although some Romani organizations estimate numbers as high as 14 million.[138]  Significant Romani populations are found in the Balkan peninsula, in some Central European states, in Spain, France, Russia, and Ukraine. The total number of Romani living outside Europe are primarily in the Middle East and North Africa and in the Americas, and are estimated in total at more than two million. Some countries do not collect data by ethnicity.
+
+The Romani people identify as distinct ethnicities based in part on territorial, cultural and dialectal differences, and self-designation.[139][140][141][142]
+
+Genetic findings suggest an Indian origin for Roma.[132][64][143] Because Romani groups did not keep chronicles of their history or have oral accounts of it, most hypotheses about the Romani's migration early history are based on linguistic theory.[144] There is also no known record of a migration from India to Europe from medieval times that can be connected indisputably to Roma.[145]
+
+According to a legend reported in the Persian epic poem, the Shahnameh, from Iran and repeated by several modern authors, the Sasanian king Bahrām V Gōr learned towards the end of his reign (421–39) that the poor could not afford to enjoy music, and he asked the king of India to send him ten thousand luris, lute-playing experts.  When the luris arrived, Bahrām gave each one an ox, a donkey, and a donkey-load of wheat so that they could live on agriculture and play music for free for the poor. But the luris ate the oxen and the wheat and came back a year later with their cheeks hollowed with hunger. The king, angered with their having wasted what he had given them, ordered them to pack up their bags and go wandering around the world on their donkeys.[146]
+
+The linguistic evidence has indisputably shown that the roots of the Romani language lie in India: the language has grammatical characteristics of Indian languages and shares with them a large part of the basic lexicon, for example, regarding body parts or daily routines.[147]
+
+More exactly, Romani shares the basic lexicon with Hindi and Punjabi. It shares many phonetic features with Marwari, while its grammar is closest to Bengali.[148]
+
+Romani and Domari share some similarities: agglutination of postpositions of the second Layer (or case marking clitics) to the nominal stem, concord markers for the past tense, the neutralisation of gender marking in the plural, and the use of the oblique case as an accusative.[149] This has prompted much discussion about the relationships between these two languages. Domari was once thought to be a "sister language" of Romani, the two languages having split after the departure from the Indian subcontinent –  but later research suggests that the differences between them are significant enough to treat them as two separate languages within the Central zone (Hindustani) group of languages. The Dom and the Rom therefore likely descend from two different migration waves out of India, separated by several centuries.[67][150]
+
+In phonology, Romani language shares several isoglosses with the Central branch of Indo-Aryan languages especially in the realization of some sounds of the Old Indo-Aryan. However, it also preserves several dental clusters. In regards to verb morphology, Romani follows exactly the same pattern of northwestern languages such as Kashmiri and Shina through the adoption of oblique enclitic pronouns as person markers, lending credence to the theory of their Central Indian origin and a subsequent migration to northwestern India. Though the retention of dental clusters suggests a break from central languages during the transition from Old to Middle Indo-Aryan, the overall morphology suggests that the language participated in some of the significant developments leading toward the emergence of New Indo-Aryan languages.[151]
+Numerals in the Romani, Domari and Lomavren languages, with Sanskrit, Hindi and Persian forms for comparison.[152] Note that Romani 7–9 are borrowed from Greek.
+
+Genetic findings in 2012 suggest the Romani originated in northwestern India and migrated as a group.[132][64][153] According to the study, the ancestors of present scheduled castes and scheduled tribes populations of northern India, traditionally referred to collectively as the Ḍoma, are the likely ancestral populations of modern European Roma.[154] In December 2012, additional findings appeared to confirm the "Roma came from a single group that left northwestern India about 1,500 years ago".[64] They reached the Balkans about 900 years ago[132] and then spread throughout Europe. The team also found the Roma to display genetic isolation, as well as "differential gene flow in time and space with non-Romani Europeans".[132][64]
+
+Genetic research published in European Journal of Human Genetics "has revealed that over 70% of males belong to a single lineage that appears unique to the Roma".[65]
+
+Genetic evidence supports the medieval migration from India. The Romani have been described as "a conglomerate of genetically isolated founder populations",[155] while a number of common Mendelian disorders among Romanies from all over Europe indicates "a common origin and founder effect".[155][156]
+
+A study from 2001 by Gresham et al. suggests "a limited number of related founders, compatible with a small group of migrants splitting from a distinct caste or tribal group".[157] The same study found that "a single lineage... found across Romani populations, accounts for almost one-third of Romani males".[157] A 2004 study by Morar et al. concluded that the Romani population "was founded approximately 32–40 generations ago, with secondary and tertiary founder events occurring approximately 16–25 generations ago".[158]
+
+Haplogroup H-M82 is a major lineage cluster in the Balkan Romani group, accounting for approximately 60% of the total.[159] Haplogroup H is uncommon in Europe but present in the Indian subcontinent and Sri Lanka.
+
+A study of 444 people representing three different ethnic groups in North Macedonia found mtDNA haplogroups M5a1 and H7a1a were dominant in Romanies (13.7% and 10.3%, respectively).[160]
+
+Y-DNA composition of Romani in North Macedonia, based on 57 samples:[161]
+
+Y-DNA Haplogroup H1a occurs in Romani at frequencies 7–70%. Unlike ethnic Hungarians, among Hungarian and Slovakian Romani subpopulations, Haplogroup E-M78 and I1 usually occur above 10% and sometimes over 20%.  While among Slovakian and Tiszavasvari Romani the dominant haplogroup is H1a, among Tokaj Romani is Haplogroup J2a (23%), while among Taktaharkány Romani is Haplogroup I2a (21%).[162] Five, rather consistent founder lineages throughout the subpopulations, were found among Romani – J-M67 and J-M92 (J2), H-M52 (H1a1), and I-P259 (I1?). Haplogroup I-P259 as H is not found at frequencies of over 3 percent among host populations, while haplogroups E and I are absent in South Asia. The lineages E-V13, I-P37 (I2a) and R-M17 (R1a) may represent gene flow from the host populations. Bulgarian, Romanian and Greek Romani are dominated by Haplogroup H-M82 (H1a1), while among Spanish Romani J2 is prevalent.[163] In Serbia among Kosovo[a] and Belgrade Romani Haplogroup H prevails, while among Vojvodina Romani, H drops to 7 percent and E-V13 rises to a prevailing level.[164]
+
+Among non-Roma Europeans Haplogroup H is extremely rare, peaking at 7 percent among Albanians from Tirana[165] and 11 percent among Bulgarian Turks. It occurs at 5 percent among Hungarians,[162] although the carriers might be of Romani origin.[163] Among non Roma-speaking Europeans at 2 percent among Slovaks,[166] 2 percent among Croats,[167] 1 percent among Macedonians from Skopje, 3 percent among Macedonian Albanians,[168] 1 percent among Serbs from Belgrade,[169] 3 percent among Bulgarians from Sofia,[170] 1 percent among Austrians and Swiss,[171] 3 percent among Romanians from Ploiesti, 1 percent among Turks.[166]
+
+They may have emerged from the modern Indian state of Rajasthan,[172] migrating to the northwest (the Punjab region, Sindh and Baluchistan of the Indian subcontinent) around 250 BC. Their subsequent westward migration, possibly in waves, is now believed to have occurred beginning in about CE 500.[64]
+It has also been suggested that emigration from India may have taken place in the context of the raids by Mahmud of Ghazni. As these soldiers were defeated, they were moved west with their families into the Byzantine Empire.[173] The author Ralph Lilley Turner theorised a central Indian origin of Romani followed by a migration to Northwest India as it shares a number of ancient isoglosses with Central Indo-Aryan languages in relation to realization of some sounds of Old Indo-Aryan. This is lent further credence by its sharing exactly the same pattern of northwestern languages such as Kashmiri and Shina through the adoption of oblique enclitic pronouns as person markers. The overall morphology suggests that Romani participated in some of the significant developments leading toward the emergence of New Indo-Aryan languages, thus indicating that the proto-Romani did not leave the Indian subcontinent until late in the second half of the first millennium.[151][174]
+
+Though according to a 2012 genomic study, the Romani reached the Balkans as early as the 12th century,[175] the first historical records of the Romani reaching south-eastern Europe are from the 14th century: in 1322, after leaving Ireland on a pilgrimage to Jerusalem, Irish Franciscan friar Symon Semeonis encountered a migrant group of Romani outside the town of Candia (modern Heraklion), in Crete, calling them "the descendants of Cain"; his account is the earliest surviving description by a Western chronicler of the Romani in Europe.
+
+In 1350, Ludolph of Saxony mentioned a similar people with a unique language whom he called Mandapolos, a word some think derives from the Greek word mantes (meaning prophet or fortune teller).[176]
+
+Around 1360, a fiefdom called the Feudum Acinganorum was established in Corfu, which mainly used Romani serfs and to which the Romani on the island were subservient.[177]
+
+By the 1440s, they were recorded in Germany;[178] and by the 16th century, Scotland and Sweden.[179] Some Romani migrated from Persia through North Africa, reaching the Iberian Peninsula in the 15th century. The two currents met in France.[180]
+
+Their early history shows a mixed reception. Although 1385 marks the first recorded transaction for a Romani slave in Wallachia, they were issued safe conduct by Holy Roman Emperor Sigismund in 1417. Romanies were ordered expelled from the Meissen region of Germany in 1416, Lucerne in 1471, Milan in 1493, France in 1504, Catalonia in 1512, Sweden in 1525, England in 1530 (see Egyptians Act 1530), and Denmark in 1536. In 1510, any Romani found in Switzerland were ordered put to death, with similar rules established in England in 1554, and Denmark in 1589, whereas Portugal began deportations of Romanies to its colonies in 1538.[182]
+
+A 1596 English statute gave Romanis special privileges that other wanderers lacked. France passed a similar law in 1683. Catherine the Great of Russia declared the Romanies "crown slaves" (a status superior to serfs), but also kept them out of certain parts of the capital.[183] In 1595, Ștefan Răzvan overcame his birth into slavery, and became the Voivode (Prince) of Moldavia.[182]
+
+Since a royal edict by Charles II in 1695, Spanish Romanis had been restricted to certain towns.[184] An official edict in 1717 restricted them to only 75 towns and districts, so that they would not be concentrated in any one region. In the Great Gypsy Round-up, Romani were arrested and imprisoned by the Spanish Monarchy in 1749.
+
+During the latter part of the 17th century, around the Franco-Dutch War, both France and Holland needed thousands of men to fight. Some recruitment took the form of rounding up vagrants and the poor to work the galleys and provide the armies' labour force. With this background, Romanis were targets of both the French and the Dutch.
+
+After the wars, and into the first decade of the 18th century, Romanis were slaughtered with impunity throughout Holland. Romanis, called ‘heiden’ by the Dutch, wandered throughout the rural areas of Europe and became the societal pariahs of the age. Heidenjachten, translated as "heathen hunt" happened throughout Holland in an attempt to eradicate them.[185]
+
+Although some Romani could be kept as slaves in Wallachia and Moldavia until abolition in 1856, the majority traveled as free nomads with their wagons, as alluded to in the spoked wheel symbol in the Romani flag.[186] Elsewhere in Europe, they were subjected to ethnic cleansing, abduction of their children, and forced labour. In England, Romani were sometimes expelled from small communities or hanged; in France, they were branded, and their heads were shaved; in Moravia and Bohemia, the women were marked by their ears being severed. As a result, large groups of the Romani moved to the East, toward Poland, which was more tolerant, and Russia, where the Romani were treated more fairly as long as they paid the annual taxes.[187]
+
+Romani began emigrating to North America in colonial times, with small groups recorded in Virginia and French Louisiana. Larger-scale Roma emigration to the United States began in the 1860s, with Romanichal groups from Great Britain. The most significant number immigrated in the early 20th century, mainly from the Vlax group of Kalderash. Many Romani also settled in South America.
+
+During World War II, the Nazis embarked on a systematic genocide of the Romani, a process known in Romani as the Porajmos.[188] Romanies were marked for extermination and sentenced to forced labor and imprisonment in concentration camps. They were often killed on sight, especially by the Einsatzgruppen (paramilitary death squads) on the Eastern Front.[189] The total number of victims has been variously estimated at between 220,000 and 1,500,000.[190]
+
+The treatment of the Romani in Nazi puppet states differed markedly. In the Independent State of Croatia, the Ustaša killed almost the entire Roma population of 25,000. The concentration camp system of Jasenovac, run by the Ustaša militia and the Croat political police, were responsible for the deaths of between 15,000 and 20,000 Roma.[191]
+
+In Czechoslovakia, they were labeled a "socially degraded stratum", and Romani women were sterilized as part of a state policy to reduce their population. This policy was implemented with large financial incentives, threats of denying future welfare payments, with misinformation, or after administering drugs.[192][193]
+
+An official inquiry from the Czech Republic, resulting in a report (December 2005), concluded that the Communist authorities had practised an assimilation policy towards Romanis, which "included efforts by social services to control the birth rate in the Romani community. The problem of sexual sterilisation carried out in the Czech Republic, either with improper motivation or illegally, exists," said the Czech Public Defender of Rights, recommending state compensation for women affected between 1973 and 1991.[194] New cases were revealed up until 2004, in both the Czech Republic and Slovakia. Germany, Norway, Sweden and Switzerland "all have histories of coercive sterilization of minorities and other groups".[195]
+
+The traditional Romanies place a high value on the extended family. Virginity is essential in unmarried women. Both men and women often marry young; there has been controversy in several countries over the Romani practise of child marriage. Romani law establishes that the man's family must pay a bride price to the bride's parents, but only traditional families still follow it.
+
+Once married, the woman joins the husband's family, where her main job is to tend to her husband's and her children's needs and take care of her in-laws. The power structure in the traditional Romani household has at its top the oldest man or grandfather, and men, in general, have more authority than women. Women gain respect and power as they get older. Young wives begin gaining authority once they have children.
+
+Romani social behavior is strictly regulated by Hindu purity laws[196] ("marime" or "marhime"), still respected by most Roma (and by most older generations of Sinti). This regulation affects many aspects of life and is applied to actions, people and things: parts of the human body are considered impure: the genital organs (because they produce emissions) and the rest of the lower body. Clothes for the lower body, as well as the clothes of menstruating women, are washed separately. Items used for eating are also washed in a different place. Childbirth is considered impure and must occur outside the dwelling place. The mother is deemed to be impure for forty days after giving birth.
+
+Death is considered impure, and affects the whole family of the dead, who remain impure for a period of time. In contrast to the practice of cremating the dead, Romani dead must be buried.[197] Cremation and burial are both known from the time of the Rigveda, and both are widely practiced in Hinduism today (although the tendency is for Hindus to practice cremation, while some communities in South India tend to bury their dead).[198] Some animals are also considered impure, for instance, cats, because they lick their hindquarters. Horses, in contrast, are not considered impure because they cannot do so.[199]
+
+In Romani philosophy, Romanipen (also romanypen, romanipe, romanype, romanimos, romaimos, romaniya) is the totality of the Romani spirit, Romani culture, Romani Law,  being a Romani, a set of Romani strains.
+
+An ethnic Romani is considered a gadjo in the Romani society if he has no Romanipen. Sometimes a non-Romani may be considered a Romani if he has Romanipen. Usually this is an adopted child. It has been hypothesized that it owes more to a framework of culture rather than simply an adherence to historically received rules.[200]
+
+Most Romani people are Christian,[201] others Muslim; some retained their ancient faith of Hinduism from their original homeland of India, while others have their own religion and political organization.[202]
+
+The ancestors of modern-day Romani people were Hindu, but adopted Christianity or Islam depending on the regions through which they had migrated.[203] Muslim Roma are found in Turkey, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Albania, Egypt, Kosovo, North Macedonia, and Bulgaria, forming a very significant proportion of the Romani people. In neighboring countries such as Serbia and Greece, most Romani inhabitants follow the practice of Orthodoxy. It is likely that the adherence to differing religions prevented families from engaging in intermarriage.[204]
+
+In Spain, most Gitanos are Roman Catholics.[citation needed]
+Some brotherhoods have organized Gitanos in their Holy Week devotions.
+They are popularly known as Cofradía de los Gitanos.
+However, the proportion of followers of Evangelical Christianity among Gitanos is higher than among the rest of Spaniards.[citation needed]
+Their version of el culto integrates Flamenco music.
+
+Blessed Ceferino Giménez Malla is recently considered a patron saint of the Romani people in Roman Catholicism.[205] Saint Sarah, or Sara e Kali, has also been venerated as a patron saint in her shrine at Saintes-Maries-de-la-Mer, France. Since the turn of the 21st century, Sara e Kali is understood to have been Kali, an Indian deity brought from India by the refugee ancestors of the Roma people; as the Roma became Christianized, she was absorbed in a syncretic way and venerated as a saint.[206]
+
+Saint Sarah is now increasingly being considered as "a Romani Goddess, the Protectress of the Roma" and an "indisputable link with Mother India".[206][207]
+
+Romanies often adopt the dominant religion of their host country in the event that a ceremony associated with a formal religious institution is necessary, such as a baptism or funeral (their particular belief systems and indigenous religion and worship remain preserved regardless of such adoption processes). The Roma continue to practice "Shaktism", a practice with origins in India, whereby a female consort is required for the worship of a god. Adherence to this practice means that for the Roma who worship the Christian God, prayer is conducted through the Virgin Mary, or her mother, Saint Anne. Shaktism continues over one thousand years after the people's separation from India.[208]
+
+Besides the Roma elders (who serve as spiritual leaders), priests, churches, or bibles do not exist among the Romanies –  the only exception is the Pentecostal Roma.[208]
+
+For the Roma communities that have resided in the Balkans for numerous centuries, often referred to as "Turkish Gypsies", the following histories apply for religious beliefs:
+
+In Ukraine and Russia, the Roma populations are also Muslim as the families of Balkan migrants continue to live in these locations. Their ancestors settled on the Crimean peninsula during the 17th and 18th centuries, but then migrated to Ukraine, southern Russia and the Povolzhie (along the Volga River). Formally, Islam is the religion that these communities align themselves with and the people are recognized for their staunch preservation of the Romani language and identity.[210]
+
+In Poland and Slovakia, their populations are Roman Catholic, many times adopting and following local, cultural Catholicism as a syncretic system of belief that incorporates distinct Roma beliefs and cultural aspects. For example, many Polish Roma delays their Church wedding due to the belief that sacramental marriage is accompanied by divine ratification, creating a virtually indissoluble union until the couple consummate, after which the sacramental marriage is dissoluble only by the death of a spouse. Therefore, for Polish Roma, once married, one can't ever divorce. Another aspect of Polish Roma's Catholicism is a tradition of pilgrimage to the Jasna Góra Monastery.[212]
+
+Most Eastern European Romanies are Roman Catholic, Eastern Orthodox, or Muslim.[213] Those in Western Europe and the United States are mostly Roman Catholic or Protestant –  in southern Spain, many Romanies are Pentecostal, but this is a small minority that has emerged in contemporary times.[208] In Egypt, the Romanies are split into Christian and Muslim populations.[214]
+
+Romani music plays an important role in Central and Eastern European countries such as Croatia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Serbia, Montenegro, Bulgaria, North Macedonia, Albania, Hungary, Slovakia, Slovenia and Romania, and the style and performance practices of Romani musicians have influenced European classical composers such as Franz Liszt and Johannes Brahms. The lăutari who perform at traditional Romanian weddings are virtually all Romani.[citation needed]
+
+Probably the most internationally prominent contemporary performers[citation needed] in the lăutari tradition are Taraful Haiducilor. Bulgaria's popular "wedding music", too, is almost exclusively performed by Romani musicians such as Ivo Papasov, a virtuoso clarinetist closely associated with this genre and Bulgarian pop-folk singer Azis.
+
+Many famous classical musicians, such as the Hungarian pianist Georges Cziffra, are Romani, as are many prominent performers of manele. Zdob și Zdub, one of the most prominent rock bands in Moldova, although not Romanies themselves, draw heavily on Romani music, as do Spitalul de Urgență in Romania, Shantel in Germany, Goran Bregović in Serbia, Darko Rundek in Croatia, Beirut and Gogol Bordello in the United States.
+
+Another tradition of Romani music is the genre of the Romani brass band, with such notable practitioners as Boban Marković of Serbia, and the brass lăutari groups Fanfare Ciocărlia and Fanfare din Cozmesti of Romania.
+
+Dances such as the flamenco of Spain and Oriental dances of Egypt are said to have originated from the Romani.[215]
+
+The distinctive sound of Romani music has also strongly influenced bolero, jazz, and flamenco (especially cante jondo) in Spain. European-style gypsy jazz ("jazz Manouche" or "Sinti jazz") is still widely practiced among the original creators (the Romanie People); one who acknowledged this artistic debt was guitarist Django Reinhardt. Contemporary artists in this tradition known internationally include Stochelo Rosenberg, Biréli Lagrène, Jimmy Rosenberg, Paulus Schäfer and Tchavolo Schmitt.
+
+The Romanies of Turkey have achieved musical acclaim from national and local audiences. Local performers usually perform for special holidays. Their music is usually performed on instruments such as the darbuka, gırnata and cümbüş.[216]
+
+Romani contemporary art is art created by Romani people. It emerged at the climax of the process that began in Central and Eastern Europe in the late-1980s, when the interpretation of the cultural practice of minorities was enabled by a paradigm shift, commonly referred to in specialist literature as the Cultural turn. The idea of the "cultural turn" was introduced; and this was also the time when the notion of cultural democracy became crystallized in the debates carried on at various public forums. Civil society gained strength, and civil politics appeared, which is a prerequisite for cultural democracy. This shift of attitude in scholarly circles derived from concerns specific not only to ethnicity, but also to society, gender and class.[217]
+
+Most Romani speak one of several dialects of the Romani language,[218] an Indo-Aryan language, with roots in Sanskrit. They also often speak the languages of the countries they live in. Typically, they also incorporate loanwords and calques into Romani from the languages of those countries and especially words for terms that the Romani language does not have. Most of the Ciganos of Portugal, the Gitanos of Spain, the Romanichal of the UK, and Scandinavian Travellers have lost their knowledge of pure Romani, and respectively speak the mixed languages Caló,[219] Angloromany, and Scandoromani. Most of the speaker communities in these regions consist of later immigrants from eastern or central Europe.[220]
+
+There are no concrete statistics for the number of Romani speakers, both in Europe and globally. However, a conservative estimation has been made at 3.5 million speakers in Europe and a further 500,000 elsewhere,[220] although the actual number may be considerably higher. This makes Romani the second largest minority language in Europe, behind Catalan.[220]
+
+In relation to dialect diversity, Romani works in the same way as most other European languages.[221] Cross-dialect communication is dominated by the following features:
+
+One of the most enduring persecutions against the Romani people was their enslavement. Slavery was widely practiced in medieval Europe, including the territory of present-day Romania from before the founding of the principalities of Moldavia and Wallachia in the 13th–14th century.[222][page needed] Legislation decreed that all the Romani living in these states, as well as any others who immigrated there, were classified as slaves.[223] Slavery was gradually abolished during the 1840s and 1850s.[224][page needed]
+
+The exact origins of slavery in the Danubian Principalities are not known. There is some debate over whether the Romani people came to Wallachia and Moldavia as free men or were brought as slaves. Historian Nicolae Iorga associated the Roma people's arrival with the 1241 Mongol invasion of Europe and considered their slavery as a vestige of that era, in which the Romanians took the Roma as slaves from the Mongols and preserved their status to use their labor. Other historians believe that the Romani were enslaved while captured during the battles with the Tatars. The practice of enslaving war prisoners may also have been adopted from the Mongols.[222][page needed]
+
+Some Romani may have been slaves or auxiliary troops of the Mongols or Tatars, but most of them migrated from south of the Danube at the end of the 14th century, some time after the foundation of Wallachia. By then, the institution of slavery was already established in Moldavia and possibly in both principalities. After the Roma migrated into the area, slavery became a widespread practice by the majority population. The Tatar slaves, smaller in numbers, were eventually merged into the Roma population.[225]
+
+Some branches of the Romani people reached Western Europe in the 15th century, fleeing as refugees from the Ottoman conquest of the Balkans.[226] Although the Romani were refugees from the conflicts in southeastern Europe, they were often suspected by certain populations in the West of being associated with the Ottoman invasion because their physical appearance seemed Turkish. (The Imperial Diet at Landau and Freiburg in 1496–1498 declared that the Romani were spies of the Turks). In Western Europe, such suspicions and discrimination against a people who were a visible minority resulted in persecution, often violent, with efforts to achieve ethnic cleansing until the modern era. In times of social tension, the Romani suffered as scapegoats; for instance, they were accused of bringing the plague during times of epidemics.[227]
+
+On 30 July 1749, Spain conducted The Great Roundup of Romani (Gitanos) in its territory. The Spanish Crown ordered a nationwide raid that led to the break-up of families as all able-bodied men were interned into forced labor camps in an attempt at ethnic cleansing. The measure was eventually reversed and the Romanis were freed as protests began to arise in different communities, sedentary romanis being highly esteemed and protected in rural Spain.[228][229]
+
+Later in the 19th century, Romani immigration was forbidden on a racial basis in areas outside Europe, mostly in the English-speaking world. Argentina in 1880 prohibited immigration by Roma, as did the United States in 1885.[227]
+
+In the Habsburg Monarchy under Maria Theresa (1740–1780), a series of decrees tried to force the Romanies to permanently settle, removed rights to horse and wagon ownership (1754), renamed them as "New Citizens" and forced Romani boys into military service if they had no trade (1761), forced them to register with the local authorities (1767), and prohibited marriage between Romanies (1773). Her successor Josef II prohibited the wearing of traditional Romani clothing and the use of the Romani language, punishable by flogging.[230]
+
+In Spain, attempts to assimilate the Gitanos were under way as early as 1619, when Gitanos were forcibly settled, the use of the Romani language was prohibited, Gitano men and women were sent to separate workhouses and their children sent to orphanages. King Charles III took on a more progressive attitude to Gitano assimilation, proclaiming their equal rights as Spanish citizens and ending official denigration based on their race. While he prohibited the nomadic lifestyle, the use of the Calo language, Romani clothing, their trade in horses and other itinerant trades, he also forbade any form of discrimination against them or barring them from the guilds. The use of the word gitano was also forbidden to further assimilation, substituted for "New Castilian", which was also applied to former Jews and Muslims.[231][232]
+
+Most historians agree that Charles III pragmática failed for three main reasons, ultimately derived from its implementation outside major cities and in marginal areas: The difficulty the Gitano community faced in changing its nomadic lifestyle, the marginal lifestyle in which the community had been driven by society and the serious difficulties of applying the pragmática in the fields of education and work. One author ascribes its failure to the overall rejection by the wider population of the integration of the Gitanos.[230][233]
+
+Other examples of forced assimilation include Norway, where a law was passed in 1896 permitting the state to remove children from their parents and place them in state institutions.[234] This resulted in some 1,500 Romani children being taken from their parents in the 20th century.[235]
+
+The persecution of the Romanies reached a peak during World War II in the Porajmos genocide perpetrated by Nazi Germany. In 1935, the Nuremberg laws stripped the Romani people living in Nazi Germany of their citizenship, after which they were subjected to violence, imprisonment in concentration camps and later genocide in extermination camps. The policy was extended in areas occupied by the Nazis during the war, and it was also applied by their allies, notably the Independent State of Croatia, Romania, and Hungary.
+
+Because no accurate pre-war census figures exist for the Romanis, it is impossible to accurately assess the actual number of victims. Most estimates for numbers of Romani victims of the Holocaust fall between 200,000 and 500,000, although figures ranging between 90,000 and 1.5 million have been proposed. Lower estimates do not include those killed in all Axis-controlled countries. A detailed study by Sybil Milton, formerly senior historian at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum gave a figure of at least a minimum of 220,000, possibly closer to 500,000.[236] Ian Hancock, Director of the Program of Romani Studies and the Romani Archives and Documentation Center at the University of Texas at Austin, argues in favour of a higher figure of between 500,000 and 1,500,000.[237]
+
+In Central Europe, the extermination in the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia was so thorough that the Bohemian Romani language became extinct.
+
+In Europe, Romani people are associated with poverty, and are accused of high rates of crime and behaviours that are perceived by the rest of the population as being antisocial or inappropriate.[239] Partly for this reason, discrimination against the Romani people has continued to the present day,[240][241] although efforts are being made to address them.[242] Amnesty International reports continued instances of Antizigan discrimination during the 20th century, particularly in Romania, Serbia,[243] Slovakia,[244] Hungary,[245] Slovenia,[246] and Kosovo.[247] The European Union has recognized that discrimination against Romani must be addressed, and with the national Roma integration strategy they encourage member states to work towards greater Romani inclusion and upholding the rights of the Romani in the European union.[248]
+
+In Eastern Europe, Roma children often attend Roma Special Schools, separate from non-Roma children, which puts them at an educational disadvantage.[251]:83
+
+The Romanis of Kosovo have been severely persecuted by ethnic Albanians since the end of the Kosovo War, and the region's Romani community is, for the most part, annihilated.[252]
+
+Czechoslovakia carried out a policy of sterilization of Romani women, starting in 1973.[253] The dissidents of the Charter 77 denounced it in 1977–78 as a genocide, but the practice continued through the Velvet Revolution of 1989.[254] A 2005 report by the Czech Republic's independent ombudsman, Otakar Motejl, identified dozens of cases of coercive sterilization between 1979 and 2001, and called for criminal investigations and possible prosecution against several health care workers and administrators.[255]
+
+In 2008, following the rape and subsequent murder of an Italian woman in Rome at the hands of a young man from a local Romani encampment,[256] the Italian government declared that Italy's Romani population represented a national security risk and that swift action was required to address the emergenza nomadi (nomad emergency).[257] Specifically, officials in the Italian government accused the Romanies of being responsible for rising crime rates in urban areas.
+
+The 2008 deaths of Cristina and Violetta Djeordsevic, two Roma children who drowned while Italian beach-goers remained unperturbed, brought international attention to the relationship between Italians and the Roma people. Reviewing the situation in 2012, one Belgian magazine observed:
+
+On International Roma Day, which falls on 8 April, the significant proportion of Europe's 12 million Roma who live in deplorable conditions will not have much to celebrate. And poverty is not the only worry for the community. Ethnic tensions are on the rise. In 2008, Roma camps came under attack in Italy, intimidation by racist parliamentarians is the norm in Hungary. Speaking in 1993, Václav Havel prophetically remarked that "the treatment of the Roma is a Litmus test for democracy": and democracy has been found wanting. The consequences of the transition to capitalism have been disastrous for the Roma. Under communism they had jobs, free housing and schooling. Now many are unemployed, many are losing their homes and racism is increasingly rewarded with impunity.[258]
+
+The 2016 Pew Research poll found that Italians, in particular, hold strong anti-Roma views, with 82% of Italians expressing negative opinions about Roma. In Greece 67%, in Hungary 64%, in France 61%, in Spain 49%, in Poland 47%, in the UK 45%, in Sweden 42%, in Germany 40%, and in the Netherlands[259] 37% had an unfavourable view of Roma.[260] The 2019 Pew Research poll found that 83% of Italians, 76% of Slovaks, 72% of Greeks, 68% of Bulgarians, 66% of Czechs, 61% of Lithuanians, 61% of Hungarians, 54% of Ukrainians, 52% of Russians, 51% of Poles, 44% of French, 40% of Spaniards, and 37% of Germans held unfavorable views of Roma.[261]
+
+Reports of anti-Roma incidents are increasing across Europe.[262] Discrimination against Roma remains widespread in Romania,[263] Slovakia,[264] Bulgaria,[265][266], and the Czech Republic.[267] Roma communities across Ukraine have been the target of violent attacks.[268][269]
+
+In the summer of 2010, French authorities demolished at least 51 illegal Roma camps and began the process of repatriating their residents to their countries of origin.[270] This followed tensions between the French state and Roma communities, which had been heightened after French police opened fire and killed a traveller who drove through a police checkpoint, hitting an officer, and attempted to hit two more officers at another checkpoint. In retaliation a group of Roma, armed with hatchets and iron bars, attacked the police station of Saint-Aignan, toppled traffic lights and road signs and burned three cars.[271][272] The French government has been accused of perpetrating these actions to pursue its political agenda.[273] EU Justice Commissioner Viviane Reding stated that the European Commission should take legal action against France over the issue, calling the deportations "a disgrace". A leaked file dated 5 August, sent from the Interior Ministry to regional police chiefs, included the instruction: "Three hundred camps or illegal settlements must be cleared within three months, Roma camps are a priority."[274]
+
+Many depictions of Romani people in literature and art present romanticized narratives of mystical powers of fortune telling or irascible or passionate temper paired with an indomitable love of freedom and a habit of criminality. Romani were a popular subject in Venetian painting from the time of Giorgione at the start of the 16th century; the inclusion of such a figure adds an exotic oriental flavour to scenes. A Venetian Renaissance painting by Paris Bordone (ca. 1530, Strasbourg) of the Holy Family in Egypt makes Elizabeth, a Romani fortune-teller; the scene is otherwise located in a distinctly European landscape.[275]
+
+Particularly notable are classics like the story Carmen by Prosper Mérimée and the opera based on it by Georges Bizet, Victor Hugo's The Hunchback of Notre Dame, Herge's The Castafiore Emerald and Miguel de Cervantes' La Gitanilla. The Romani were also depicted in A Midsummer Night's Dream, As You Like It, Othello and The Tempest, all by William Shakespeare.
+
+The Romani were also heavily romanticized in the Soviet Union, a classic example being the 1975 film Tabor ukhodit v Nebo.
+A more realistic depiction of contemporary Romani in the Balkans, featuring Romani lay actors speaking in their native dialects, although still playing with established clichés of a Romani penchant for both magic and crime, was presented by Emir Kusturica in his Time of the Gypsies (1988) and Black Cat, White Cat (1998). The films of Tony Gatlif, a French director of Romani ethnicity, like Les Princes (1983), Latcho Drom (1993) and Gadjo Dilo (1997) also portray romani life.
+
+Paris Bordone, c. 1530, Elizabeth, at right, is shown as a Romani fortune-teller
+
+August von Pettenkofen: Gypsy Children (1885), Hermitage Museum
+
+Vincent van Gogh: The Caravans – Gypsy Camp near Arles (1888, oil on canvas)
+
+Carmen
+
+Esméralda
+
+Nicolae Grigorescu Gypsy from Boldu (1897), Art Museum of Iași
+
+General
+
+Lists
+
+European countries Roma links
+
+Non-governmental organisations
+
+Museums and libraries

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+
+
+In chemistry, alcohol is an organic compound that carries at least one hydroxyl functional group (−OH) bound to a saturated carbon atom.[2] The term alcohol originally referred to the primary alcohol ethanol (ethyl alcohol), which is used as a drug and is the main alcohol present in alcoholic beverages. An important class of alcohols, of which methanol and ethanol are the simplest members, includes all compounds for which the general formula is CnH2n+1OH. Simple monoalcohols that are the subject of this article include primary (RCH2OH), secondary (R2CHOH) and tertiary (R3COH) alcohols.
+
+The suffix -ol appears in the IUPAC chemical name of all substances where the hydroxyl group is the functional group with the highest priority. When a higher priority group is present in the compound, the prefix hydroxy- is used in its IUPAC name. The suffix -ol in non-IUPAC names (such as paracetamol or cholesterol) also typically indicates that the substance is an alcohol. However, many substances that contain hydroxyl functional groups (particularly sugars, such as glucose and sucrose) have names which include neither the suffix -ol, nor the prefix hydroxy-.
+
+Alcohol distillation possibly originated in the Indus valley civilization as early as 2000 BCE. The people of India used an alcoholic drink called Sura made from fermented rice, barley, jaggery, and flowers of the madhyaka tree.[3] Alcohol distillation was known to Islamic chemists as early as the eighth century.[4][5]
+
+The Arab chemist, al-Kindi, unambiguously described the distillation of wine in a treatise titled as "The Book of the chemistry of Perfume and Distillations".[6][7][8]
+
+The word "alcohol" is from the Arabic kohl (Arabic: الكحل‎, romanized: al-kuḥl), a powder used as an eyeliner.[9] Al- is the Arabic definite article, equivalent to the in English. Alcohol was originally used for the very fine powder produced by the sublimation of the natural mineral stibnite to form antimony trisulfide Sb2S3. It was considered to be the essence or "spirit" of this mineral. It was used as an antiseptic, eyeliner, and cosmetic. The meaning of alcohol was extended to distilled substances in general, and then narrowed to ethanol, when "spirits" was a synonym for hard liquor.[10]
+
+Bartholomew Traheron, in his 1543 translation of John of Vigo, introduces the word as a term used by "barbarous" authors for "fine powder." Vigo wrote: "the barbarous auctours use alcohol, or (as I fynde it sometymes wryten) alcofoll, for moost fine poudre."[11]
+
+The 1657 Lexicon Chymicum, by William Johnson glosses the word as "antimonium sive stibium."[12] By extension, the word came to refer to any fluid obtained by distillation, including "alcohol of wine," the distilled essence of wine. Libavius in Alchymia (1594) refers to "vini alcohol vel vinum alcalisatum". Johnson (1657) glosses alcohol vini as "quando omnis superfluitas vini a vino separatur, ita ut accensum ardeat donec totum consumatur, nihilque fæcum aut phlegmatis in fundo remaneat." The word's meaning became restricted to "spirit of wine" (the chemical known today as ethanol) in the 18th century and was extended to the class of substances so-called as "alcohols" in modern chemistry after 1850.[11]
+
+The term ethanol was invented in 1892, combining the word ethane with the "-ol" ending of "alcohol".[13]
+
+IUPAC nomenclature is used in scientific publications and where precise identification of the substance is important, especially in cases where the relative complexity of the molecule does not make such a systematic name unwieldy. In naming simple alcohols, the name of the alkane chain loses the terminal e and adds the suffix -ol, e.g., as in "ethanol" from the alkane chain name "ethane".[14] When necessary, the position of the hydroxyl group is indicated by a number between the alkane name and the -ol: propan-1-ol for CH3CH2CH2OH, propan-2-ol for CH3CH(OH)CH3. If a higher priority group is present (such as an aldehyde, ketone, or carboxylic acid), then the prefix hydroxy-is used,[14] e.g., as in 1-hydroxy-2-propanone (CH3C(O)CH2OH).[15]
+
+In cases where the OH functional group is bonded to an sp2 carbon on an aromatic ring the molecule is known as a phenol, and is named using the IUPAC rules for naming phenols.[16]
+
+In other less formal contexts, an alcohol is often called with the name of the corresponding alkyl group followed by the word "alcohol", e.g., methyl alcohol, ethyl alcohol. Propyl alcohol may be n-propyl alcohol or isopropyl alcohol, depending on whether the hydroxyl group is bonded to the end or middle carbon on the straight propane chain. As described under systematic naming, if another group on the molecule takes priority, the alcohol moiety is often indicated using the "hydroxy-" prefix.[17]
+
+Alcohols are then classified into primary, secondary (sec-, s-), and tertiary (tert-, t-), based upon the number of carbon atoms connected to the carbon atom that bears the hydroxyl functional group. (The respective numeric shorthands 1°, 2°, and 3° are also sometimes used in informal settings.[18]) The primary alcohols have general formulas RCH2OH. The simplest primary alcohol is methanol (CH3OH), for which R=H, and the next is ethanol, for which R=CH3, the methyl group. Secondary alcohols are those of the form RR'CHOH, the simplest of which is 2-propanol (R=R'=CH3). For the tertiary alcohols the general form is RR'R"COH. The simplest example is tert-butanol (2-methylpropan-2-ol), for which each of R, R', and R" is CH3. In these shorthands, R, R', and R" represent substituents, alkyl or other attached, generally organic groups.
+
+In archaic nomenclature, alcohols can be named as derivatives of methanol using "-carbinol" as the ending.  For instance, (CH3)3COH can be named trimethylcarbinol.
+
+Alcohols have a long history of myriad uses. For simple mono-alcohols, which is the focus on this article, the following are most important industrial alcohols:[20]
+
+Methanol is the most common industrial alcohol, with about 12 million tons/y produced in 1980. The combined capacity of the other alcohols is about the same, distributed roughly equally.[20]
+
+With respect to acute toxicity, simple alcohols have low acute toxicities.  Doses of several milliliters are tolerated.  For pentanols, hexanols, octanols and longer alcohols, LD50 range from 2–5 g/kg (rats, oral).  Methanol and ethanol are less acutely toxic.  All alcohols are mild skin irritants.[20]
+
+The metabolism of methanol (and ethylene glycol) is affected by the presence of ethanol, which has a higher affinity for liver alcohol dehydrogenase.  In this way methanol will be excreted intact in urine.[21][22][23]
+
+In general, the hydroxyl group makes alcohols polar. Those groups can form hydrogen bonds to one another and to most other compounds.  Owing to the presence of the polar OH alcohols are more water-soluble than simple hydrocarbons.  Methanol, ethanol, and propanol are miscible in water. Butanol, with a four-carbon chain, is moderately soluble.
+
+Because of hydrogen bonding, alcohols tend to have higher boiling points than comparable hydrocarbons and ethers. The boiling point of the alcohol ethanol is 78.29 °C, compared to 69 °C for the hydrocarbon hexane, and 34.6 °C for diethyl ether.
+
+Simple alcohols are found widely in nature.  Ethanol is most prominent because it is the product of fermentation, a major energy-producing pathway.  The other simple alcohols are formed in only trace amounts.  More complex alcohols are pervasive, as manifested in sugars, some amino acids, and fatty acids.
+
+In the Ziegler process, linear alcohols are produced from ethylene and triethylaluminium followed by oxidation and hydrolysis.[20] An idealized synthesis of 1-octanol is shown:
+
+The process generates a range of alcohols that are separated by distillation.
+
+Many higher alcohols are produced by hydroformylation of alkenes followed by hydrogenation. When applied to a terminal alkene, as is common, one typically obtains a linear alcohol:[20]
+
+Such processes give fatty alcohols, which are useful for detergents.
+
+Some low molecular weight alcohols of industrial importance are produced by the addition of water to alkenes. Ethanol, isopropanol, 2-butanol, and tert-butanol are produced by this general method. Two implementations are employed, the direct and indirect methods. The direct method avoids the formation of stable intermediates, typically using acid catalysts. In the indirect method, the alkene is converted to the sulfate ester, which is subsequently hydrolyzed. The direct hydration using ethylene (ethylene hydration)[24] or other alkenes from cracking of fractions of distilled crude oil.
+
+Hydration is also used industrially to produce the diol ethylene glycol from ethylene oxide.
+
+Ethanol is obtained by fermentation using glucose produced from sugar from the hydrolysis of starch, in the presence of yeast and temperature of less than 37 °C to produce ethanol. For instance, such a process might proceed by the conversion of sucrose by the enzyme invertase into glucose and fructose, then the conversion of glucose by the enzyme complex zymase into ethanol (and carbon dioxide).
+
+Several species of the benign bacteria in the intestine use fermentation as a form of anaerobic metabolism. This metabolic reaction produces ethanol as a waste product. Thus, human bodies contain some quantity of alcohol endogenously produced by these bacteria. In rare cases, this can be sufficient to cause "auto-brewery syndrome" in which intoxicating quantities of alcohol are produced.[25][26][27]
+
+Like ethanol, butanol can be produced by fermentation processes. Saccharomyces yeast are known to produce these higher alcohols at temperatures above 75 °F (24 °C). The bacterium Clostridium acetobutylicum can feed on cellulose to produce butanol on an industrial scale.[28]
+
+Primary alkyl halides react with aqueous NaOH or KOH mainly to primary alcohols in nucleophilic aliphatic substitution. (Secondary and especially tertiary alkyl halides will give the elimination (alkene) product instead). Grignard reagents react with carbonyl groups to secondary and tertiary alcohols. Related reactions are the Barbier reaction and the Nozaki-Hiyama reaction.
+
+Aldehydes or ketones are reduced with sodium borohydride or lithium aluminium hydride (after an acidic workup). Another reduction by aluminiumisopropylates is the Meerwein-Ponndorf-Verley reduction. Noyori asymmetric hydrogenation is the asymmetric reduction of β-keto-esters.
+
+Alkenes engage in an acid catalysed hydration reaction using concentrated sulfuric acid as a catalyst that gives usually secondary or tertiary alcohols. The hydroboration-oxidation and oxymercuration-reduction of alkenes are more reliable in organic synthesis. Alkenes react with NBS and water in halohydrin formation reaction. Amines can be converted to diazonium salts, which are then hydrolyzed.
+
+The formation of a secondary alcohol via reduction and hydration is shown:
+
+With a pKa of around 16–19, they are, in general, slightly weaker acids than water.  With strong bases such as sodium hydride or sodium they form salts called alkoxides, with the general formula RO− M+.
+
+The acidity of alcohols is strongly affected by solvation.  In the gas phase, alcohols are more acidic than in water.[29]
+
+The OH group is not a good leaving group in nucleophilic substitution reactions, so neutral alcohols do not react in such reactions. However, if the oxygen is first protonated to give R−OH2+, the leaving group (water) is much more stable, and the nucleophilic substitution can take place. For instance, tertiary alcohols react with hydrochloric acid to produce tertiary alkyl halides, where the hydroxyl group is replaced by a chlorine atom by unimolecular nucleophilic substitution. If primary or secondary alcohols are to be reacted with hydrochloric acid, an activator such as zinc chloride is needed. In alternative fashion, the conversion may be performed directly using thionyl chloride.[1]
+
+
+
+Alcohols may, likewise, be converted to alkyl bromides using hydrobromic acid or phosphorus tribromide, for example:
+
+In the Barton-McCombie deoxygenation an alcohol is deoxygenated to an alkane with tributyltin hydride or a trimethylborane-water complex in a radical substitution reaction.
+
+Meanwhile, the oxygen atom has lone pairs of nonbonded electrons that render it weakly basic in the presence of strong acids such as sulfuric acid. For example, with methanol:
+
+
+
+Upon treatment with strong acids, alcohols undergo the E1 elimination reaction to produce alkenes. The reaction, in general, obeys Zaitsev's Rule, which states that the most stable (usually the most substituted) alkene is formed. Tertiary alcohols eliminate easily at just above room temperature, but primary alcohols require a higher temperature.
+
+This is a diagram of acid catalysed dehydration of ethanol to produce ethylene:
+
+
+
+A more controlled elimination reaction requires the formation of the xanthate ester.
+
+Tertiary alcohols react with strong acids to generate carbocations.  The reaction is related to their dehydration, e.g. isobutylene from tert-butyl alcohol. A special kind of dehydration reaction involves triphenylmethanol and especially its amine-substituted derivatives.  When treated with acid, these alcohols lose water to give stable carbocations, which are commercial dyes.[30]
+
+Alcohol and carboxylic acids react in the so-called Fischer esterification.  The reaction usually requires a catalyst, such as concentrated sulfuric acid:
+
+Other types of ester are prepared in a similar manner –  for example, tosyl (tosylate) esters are made by reaction of the alcohol with p-toluenesulfonyl chloride in pyridine.
+
+Primary alcohols (R-CH2OH) can be oxidized either to aldehydes (R-CHO) or to carboxylic acids (R-CO2H).  The oxidation of secondary alcohols (R1R2CH-OH) normally terminates at the ketone (R1R2C=O) stage. Tertiary alcohols (R1R2R3C-OH) are resistant to oxidation.
+
+The direct oxidation of primary alcohols to carboxylic acids normally proceeds via the corresponding aldehyde, which is transformed via an aldehyde hydrate (R-CH(OH)2) by reaction with water before it can be further oxidized to the carboxylic acid.
+
+Reagents useful for the transformation of primary alcohols to aldehydes are normally also suitable for the oxidation of secondary alcohols to ketones. These include Collins reagent and Dess-Martin periodinane. The direct oxidation of primary alcohols to carboxylic acids can be carried out using potassium permanganate or the Jones reagent.

en/695.html.txt

@@ -0,0 +1,90 @@
+In Greek mythology, Pandora (Greek: Πανδώρα,  derived from πᾶν, pān, i.e. "all" and δῶρον, dōron, i.e. "gift", thus  "the all-endowed", "all-gifted" or "all-giving")[1] was the first human woman created by Hephaestus on the instructions of Zeus.[2][3] As Hesiod related it, each god cooperated by giving her unique gifts. Her other name—inscribed against her figure on a white-ground kylix in the British Museum[4]—is Anesidora (Ancient Greek: Ἀνησιδώρα), "she who sends up gifts"[5] (up implying "from below" within the earth).
+
+The Pandora myth is a kind of theodicy, addressing the question of why there is evil in the world. According to this, Pandora opened a jar (pithos), in modern accounts sometimes mistranslated as "Pandora's box", releasing all the evils of humanity. Hesiod's interpretation of Pandora's story went on to influence both Jewish and Christian theology and so perpetuated her bad reputation into the Renaissance. Later poets, dramatists, painters and sculptors made her their subject and over the course of five centuries contributed new insights into her motives and significance.
+
+Hesiod, both in his Theogony (briefly, without naming Pandora outright, line 570) and in Works and Days, gives the earliest version of the Pandora story.
+
+The Pandora myth first appeared in lines 560–612 of Hesiod's poem in epic meter, the Theogony (c. 8th–7th centuries BC), without ever giving the woman a name. After humans received the stolen gift of fire from Prometheus, an angry Zeus decides to give humanity a punishing gift to compensate for the boon they had been given. He commands Hephaestus to mold from earth the first woman, a "beautiful evil" whose descendants would torment the human race. After Hephaestus does so, Athena dresses her in a silvery gown, an embroidered veil, garlands and an ornate crown of silver. This woman goes unnamed in the Theogony, but is presumably Pandora, whose myth Hesiod revisited in Works and Days. When she first appears before gods and mortals, "wonder seized them" as they looked upon her. But she was "sheer guile, not to be withstood by men." Hesiod elaborates (590–93):
+
+From her is the race of women and female kind:
+of her is the deadly race and tribe of women who
+live amongst mortal men to their great trouble,
+no helpmates in hateful poverty, but only in wealth.
+
+Hesiod goes on to lament that men who try to avoid the evil of women by avoiding marriage will fare no better (604–7):
+
+He reaches deadly old age without anyone to tend his years,
+and though he at least has no lack of livelihood while he lives,
+yet, when he is dead, his kinsfolk divide his possessions amongst them.
+
+Hesiod concedes that occasionally a man finds a good wife, but still (609) "evil contends with good."
+
+The more famous version of the Pandora myth comes from another of Hesiod's poems, Works and Days. In this version of the myth (lines 60–105), Hesiod expands upon her origin, and moreover widens the scope of the misery she inflicts on humanity. As before, she is created by Hephaestus, but now more gods contribute to her completion (63–82): Athena taught her needlework and weaving (63–4); Aphrodite "shed grace upon her head and cruel longing and cares that weary the limbs" (65–6); Hermes gave her "a shameful mind and deceitful nature" (67–8); Hermes also gave her the power of speech, putting in her "lies and crafty words" (77–80) ; Athena then clothed her (72); next Persuasion and the Charites adorned her with necklaces and other finery (72–4); the Horae adorned her with a garland crown (75). Finally, Hermes gives this woman a name: Pandora – "All-gifted" – "because all the Olympians gave her a gift" (81). (In Greek, Pandora has an active rather than a passive meaning; hence, Pandora properly means "All-giving." The implications of this mistranslation are explored in "All-giving Pandora: mythic inversion?" below.) In this retelling of her story, Pandora's deceitful feminine nature becomes the least of humanity's worries. For she brings with her a jar (which, due to textual corruption in the sixteenth century, came to be called a box)[6][7] containing[8] "burdensome toil and sickness that brings death to men" (91–2), diseases (102) and "a myriad other pains" (100). Prometheus had (fearing further reprisals) warned his brother Epimetheus not to accept any gifts from Zeus. But Epimetheus did not listen; he accepted Pandora, who promptly scattered the contents of her jar. As a result, Hesiod tells us, "the earth and sea are full of evils" (101). One item, however, did not escape the jar (96–9):
+
+Only Hope was left within her unbreakable house,
+she remained under the lip of the jar, and did not
+fly away. Before [she could], Pandora replaced the
+lid of the jar. This was the will of aegis-bearing
+Zeus the Cloudgatherer.
+
+Hesiod does not say why hope (elpis) remained in the jar.[9] and closes with the moral (105): "Thus it is not possible to escape the mind of Zeus."
+
+Hesiod also outlines how the end of man's Golden Age (an all-male society of immortals who were reverent to the gods, worked hard, and ate from abundant groves of fruit) was brought on by Prometheus. When he stole Fire from Mt. Olympus and gave it to mortal man, Zeus punished the technologically advanced society by creating a woman. Thus, Pandora was created and given the jar (mistranslated as 'box') which releases all evils upon man. [10]
+
+Archaic and Classic Greek literature seem to make little further mention of Pandora, but mythographers later filled in minor details or added postscripts to Hesiod's account. For example, the Bibliotheca and Hyginus each make explicit what might be latent in the Hesiodic text: Epimetheus married Pandora. They each add that the couple had a daughter, Pyrrha, who married Deucalion and survived the deluge with him. However, the Hesiodic Catalogue of Women, fragment #5, had made a "Pandora" one of the daughters of Deucalion, and the mother of Graecus by Zeus. In the 15th-century AD an attempt was made to conjoin pagan and scriptural narrative by the monk Annio da Viterbo, who claimed to have found an account by the ancient Chaldean historian Berossus in which "Pandora" was named as a daughter-in-law of Noah in the alternative Flood narrative.
+
+The mistranslation of pithos, a large storage jar, as "box"[11] is usually attributed to the sixteenth century humanist Erasmus of Rotterdam when he translated Hesiod's tale of Pandora into Latin. Hesiod's pithos refers to a large storage jar, often half-buried in the ground, used for wine, oil or grain.[12] It can also refer to a funerary jar.[13] Erasmus, however, translated pithos into the Latin word pyxis, meaning "box".[14] The phrase "Pandora's box" has endured ever since.
+
+Historic interpretations of the Pandora figure are rich enough to have offered Dora and Erwin Panofsky scope for monographic treatment.[15] M. L. West writes that the story of Pandora and her jar is from a pre-Hesiodic myth, and that this explains the confusion and problems with Hesiod's version and its inconclusiveness.[16] He writes that in earlier myths, Pandora was married to Prometheus, and cites the ancient Hesiodic Catalogue of Women as preserving this older tradition, and that the jar may have at one point contained only good things for humanity. He also writes that it may have been that Epimetheus and Pandora and their roles were transposed in the pre-Hesiodic myths, a "mythic inversion". He remarks that there is a curious correlation between Pandora being made out of earth in Hesiod's story, to what is in the Bibliotheca that Prometheus created man from water and earth.[16][17] Hesiod's myth of Pandora's jar, then, could be an amalgam of many variant early myths.
+
+The meaning of Pandora's name, according to the myth provided in Works and Days, is  "all-gifted". However, according to others Pandora more properly means "all-giving".[18] Certain vase paintings dated to the 5th century BC likewise indicate that the pre-Hesiodic myth of the goddess Pandora endured for centuries after the time of Hesiod. An alternative name for Pandora attested on a white-ground kylix (ca. 460 BC) is Anesidora, which similarly means "she who sends up gifts." This vase painting clearly depicts Hephaestus and Athena putting the finishing touches on the first woman, as in the Theogony. Written above this figure (a convention in Greek vase painting) is the name Anesidora. More commonly, however, the epithet anesidora is applied to Gaea or Demeter. In view of such evidence, William E. Phipps has pointed out, "Classics scholars suggest that Hesiod reversed the meaning of the name of an earth goddess called Pandora (all-giving) or Anesidora (one-who-sends-up-gifts). Vase paintings and literary texts give evidence of Pandora as a mother earth figure who was worshipped by some Greeks. The main English commentary on Works and Days states that Hesiod shows no awareness [of this]."[19]
+
+Jane Ellen Harrison[20] also turned to the repertory of vase-painters to shed light on aspects of myth that were left unaddressed or disguised in literature. On a fifth-century amphora in the Ashmolean Museum (her fig.71) the half-figure of Pandora emerges from the ground, her arms upraised in the epiphany gesture, to greet Epimetheus. A winged ker with a fillet hovers overhead: "Pandora rises from the earth; she is the Earth, giver of all gifts," Harrison observes. Over time this "all-giving" goddess somehow devolved into an "all-gifted" mortal woman. A.H. Smith,[21] however, noted that in Hesiod's account Athena and the Seasons brought wreaths of grass and spring flowers to Pandora, indicating that Hesiod was conscious of Pandora's original "all-giving" function. For Harrison, therefore, Hesiod's story provides "evidence of a shift from matriarchy to patriarchy in Greek culture. As the life-bringing goddess Pandora is eclipsed, the death-bringing human Pandora arises."[22] Thus, Harrison concludes "in the patriarchal mythology of Hesiod her great figure is strangely changed and diminished. She is no longer Earth-Born, but the creature, the handiwork of Olympian Zeus." (Harrison 1922:284). Robert Graves, quoting Harrison,[23] asserts of the Hesiodic episode that "Pandora is not a genuine myth, but an anti-feminist fable, probably of his own invention." H.J. Rose wrote that the myth of Pandora is decidedly more illiberal than that of epic in that it makes Pandora the origin of all of Man's woes with her being the exemplification of the bad wife.[24]
+
+The Hesiodic myth did not, however, completely obliterate the memory of the all-giving goddess Pandora. A scholium to line 971 of Aristophanes' The Birds mentions a cult "to Pandora, the earth, because she bestows all things necessary for life".[25] And in fifth-century Athens, Pandora made a prominent appearance in what, at first, appears an unexpected context, in a marble relief or bronze appliqués as a frieze along the base of the Athena Parthenos, the culminating experience on the Acropolis.  Jeffrey M. Hurwit has interpreted her presence there as an "anti-Athena."  Both were motherless, and reinforced via opposite means the civic ideologies of patriarchy and the "highly gendered social and political realities of fifth-century Athens"[25]—Athena by rising above her sex to defend it, and Pandora by embodying the need for it. Meanwhile, Pausanias (i.24.7) merely noted the subject and moved on.
+
+Images of Pandora began to appear on Greek pottery as early as the 5th century BCE, although identification of the scene represented is sometimes ambiguous. An independent tradition that does not square with any of the Classical literary sources is in the visual repertory of Attic red-figure vase-painters, which sometimes supplements, sometimes ignores, the written testimony; in these representations the upper part of Pandora is visible rising from the earth, "a chthonic goddess like Gaia herself."[26] Sometimes,[27] but not always, she is labeled Pandora. In some cases the figure of Pandora emerging from the earth is surrounded by figures carrying hammers in what has been suggested as a scene from a satyr play by Sophocles, Pandora, or The Hammerers, of which only fragments remain.[28] But there have also been alternative interpretations of such scenes.[29]
+
+In a late Pre-Raphaelite painting by John D. Batten, hammer-wielding workmen appear through a doorway, while in the foreground Hephaestus broods on the as yet unanimated figure of “Pandora”.[30] There were also earlier English paintings of the newly created Pandora as surrounded by the heavenly gods presenting gifts, a scene also depicted on ancient Greek pottery.[31] In one case it was part of a decorative scheme painted on the ceiling at Petworth House by Louis Laguerre in about 1720.[32] William Etty’s Pandora Crowned by the Seasons of a century later is similarly presented as an apotheosis taking place among the clouds.[33]
+
+In between these two had come James Barry’s huge Birth of Pandora, on which he laboured for over a decade at the turn of the nineteenth century.[34] Well before that he was working on the design, which was intended to reflect his theoretical writings on the interdependence between history painting and the way it should reflect the ideal state.[35] An early drawing, only preserved now in the print made of it by Luigi Schiavonetti, follows the account of Hesiod and shows Pandora being adorned by the Graces and the Hours while the gods look on.[36] Its ideological purpose, however, was to demonstrate an equal society unified by the harmonious function of those within it. But in the actual painting which followed much later, a subordinated Pandora is surrounded by gift-bearing gods and Minerva stands near her, demonstrating the feminine arts proper to her passive role. The shift is back to the culture of blame whenever she steps outside it.[37]
+
+In the individual representations of Pandora that were to follow, her idealisation is as a dangerous type of beauty, generally naked or semi-naked. She is only differentiated from other paintings or statues of such females by being given the attribute of a jar or, increasingly in the 19th century, a straight-sided box. As well as the many European paintings of her from this period, there are examples in sculptures by Henri-Joseph Ruxthiel (1819),[38]John Gibson (1856),[39] Pierre Loison (1861, see above) and Chauncy Bradley Ives (1871).[40]
+
+There is an additional reason why Pandora should appear nude, in that it was a theological commonplace going back to the early Church Fathers that the Classical myth of Pandora made her a type of Eve.[41] Each is the first woman in the world; and each is a central character in a story of transition from an original state of plenty and ease to one of suffering and death, a transition which is brought about as a punishment for transgression of divine law.
+
+It has been argued that it was as a result of the Hellenisation of Western Asia that the misogyny in Hesiod's account of Pandora began openly to influence both Jewish and then Christian interpretations of scripture.[42] The doctrinal bias against women so initiated then continued into Renaissance times. Bishop Jean Olivier's long Latin poem Pandora drew on the Classical account as well as the Biblical to demonstrate that woman is the means of drawing men to sin. Originally appearing in 1541 and republished thereafter, it was soon followed by two separate French translations in 1542 and 1548.[43]  At the same period appeared a 5-act tragedy by the Protestant theologian Leonhard Culmann (1498-1568) titled Ein schön weltlich Spiel von der schönen Pandora (1544), similarly drawing on Hesiod in order to teach conventional Christian morality.[44]
+
+The equation of the two also occurs in the 1550 allegorical painting by Jean Cousin the Elder, Eva Prima Pandora (Eve the first Pandora), in which a naked woman reclines in a grotto. Her right elbow rests on a skull, indicating the bringing of death, and she holds an apple branch in that hand – both attributes of Eve. Her left arm is wreathed by a snake (another reference to the temptation of Eve) and that hand rests on an unstopped jar, Pandora's attribute. Above hangs the sign from which the painting gains its name and beneath it is a closed jar, perhaps the counterpart of the other in Olympus, containing blessings.[45]
+
+In Juan de Horozco's Spanish emblem book, Emblemas morales (1589), a motive is given for Pandora's action. Accompanying an illustration of her opening the lid of an urn from which demons and angels emerge is a commentary that condemns “female curiosity and the desire to learn by which the very first woman was deceived”.[46] In the succeeding century that desire to learn was equated with the female demand to share the male prerogative of education. In Nicolas Regnier’s painting “The Allegory of Vanity” (1626), subtitled “Pandora”, it is typified by her curiosity about the contents of the urn that she has just unstopped and is compared to the other attributes of vanity surrounding her (fine clothes, jewellery, a pot of gold coins).[47] Again, Pietro Paolini’s lively Pandora of about 1632 seems more aware of the effect that her pearls and fashionable headgear is making than of the evils escaping from the jar she holds.[48] There is a social message carried by these paintings too, for education, no less than expensive adornment, is only available to those who can afford it.
+
+But an alternative interpretation of Pandora’s curiosity makes it merely an extension of childish innocence. This comes out in portrayals of Pandora as a young girl, as in Walter Crane’s “Little Pandora” spilling buttons while encumbered by the doll she is carrying,[49] in Arthur Rackham’s book illustration[50] and Frederick Stuart Church’s etching of an adolescent girl taken aback by the contents of the ornamental box she has opened.[51] The same innocence informs Odilon Redon’s 1910/12 clothed figure carrying a box and merging into a landscape suffused with light,[52] and even more the 1914 version of a naked Pandora surrounded by flowers, a primaeval Eve in the Garden of Eden.[53] Such innocence, “naked and without alarm” in the words of an earlier French poet, portrays Pandora more as victim of a conflict outside her comprehension than as temptress.
+
+Early dramatic treatments of the story of Pandora are works of musical theatre. La Estatua de Prometeo (1670) by Pedro Calderón de la Barca is made an allegory in which devotion to learning is contrasted with the active life. Prometheus moulds a clay statue of Minerva, the goddess of wisdom to whom he is devoted, and gives it life from a stolen sunbeam. This initiates a debate among the gods whether a creation outside their own work is justified; his devotion is in the end rewarded with permission to marry his statue.[54] In this work, Pandora, the statue in question, plays only a passive role in the competition between Prometheus and his brother Epimetheus (signifying the active life), and between the gods and men.
+
+Another point to note about Calderón’s musical drama is that the theme of a statue married by her creator is more suggestive of the story of Pygmalion. The latter is also typical of Voltaire’s ultimately unproduced opera Pandore (1740).[55] There too the creator of a statue animates it with stolen fire, but then the plot is complicated when Jupiter also falls in love with this new creation but is prevented by Destiny from consummating it. In revenge the god sends Destiny to tempt this new Eve into opening a box full of curses as a punishment for Earth’s revolt against Heaven.[56]
+
+If Pandora appears suspended between the roles of Eve and of Pygmalion’s creation in Voltaire’s work, in Charles-Pierre Colardeau’s erotic poem Les Hommes de Prométhée (1774) she is presented equally as a love-object and in addition as an unfallen Eve:
+
+Having been fashioned from clay and given the quality of “naïve grace combined with feeling”, she is set to wander through an enchanted landscape. There she encounters the first man, the prior creation of Prometheus, and warmly responds to his embrace. At the end the couple quit their marriage couch and survey their surroundings “As sovereigns of the world, kings of the universe”.[58]
+
+One other musical work with much the same theme was Aumale de Corsenville's one-act verse melodrama Pandore, which had an overture and incidental music by Franz Ignaz Beck. There Prometheus, having already stolen fire from heaven, creates a perfect female, “artless in nature, of limpid innocence”, for which he anticipates divine vengeance. However, his patron Minerva descends to announce that the gods have gifted Pandora with other qualities and that she will become the future model and mother of humanity.[59] The work was performed on 2 July 1789, on the very eve of the French Revolution,[60] and was soon forgotten in the course of the events that followed.
+
+Over the course of the 19th century, the story of Pandora was interpreted in radically different ways by four dramatic authors in four countries. In two of these she was presented as the bride of Epimetheus; in the two others she was the wife of Prometheus. The earliest of these works was the lyrical dramatic fragment by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, written between 1807 and 1808.[61] Though it bears the title Pandora, what exists of the play revolves round Epimetheus’ longing for the return of the wife who has abandoned him and has yet to arrive. It is in fact a philosophical transformation of Goethe's passion in old age for a teenaged girl.[62]
+
+Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s The Masque of Pandora dates from 1876. It begins with her creation, her refusal by Prometheus and acceptance by Epimetheus. Then in the latter’s house an “oaken chest, Carven with figures and embossed with gold” attracts her curiosity. After she eventually gives in to temptation and opens it, she collapses in despair and a storm destroys the garden outside. When Epimetheus returns, she begs him to kill her but he accepts joint responsibility.[63] The work was twice used as the basis for operas by Alfred Cellier in 1881 and by Eleanor Everest Freer in 1933.[64] Iconographical elements from the masque also figure in Walter Crane's large watercolour of Pandora of 1885. She is pictured as sprawled over a carved wooden chest on which are embossed golden designs of the three fates who figure as a chorus in Longfellow's scene 3. Outside the palace, a high wind is bending the trees. But on the front of the chest, a medallion showing the serpent wound about the tree of knowledge recalls the old interpretation of Pandora as a type of Eve.[65]
+
+In England the high drama of the incident was travestied in James Robinson Planché’s Olympic Revels or Prometheus and Pandora (1831), the first of the Victorian burlesques. It is a costume drama peppered with comic banter and songs during which the gods betroth Pandora to a disappointed Prometheus with “only one little box” for dowry. When she opens it, Jupiter descends to curse her and Prometheus, but Hope emerges from the box and negotiates their pardon.[66]
+
+At the other end of the century, Gabriel Fauré’s ambitious opera Prométhée (1900) had a cast of hundreds, a huge orchestra and an outdoor amphitheatre for stage. It was based in part on the Prometheus Bound of Aeschylus but was rewritten so as to give the character of Pandore an equal part with his. This necessitated her falling “as if dead” on hearing the judgement against Prométhée in Act 1; a funeral procession bearing her body at the start of Act 2, after which she revives to mourn the carrying out of Prométhée's sentence; while in Act 3 she disobeys Prométhée by accepting a box, supposedly filled with blessings for mankind, and makes the tragedy complete.[67]
+
+Madame Vestris in the burlesque Prometheus and Pandora, an 1831 print
+
+Swedish soprano Christine Nilsson as Pandora by Alexandre Cabanel, 1873
+
+Jane Morris in the role, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, coloured chalks, 1879
+
+Yvonne Gregory’s photogram recreates a pose from a painting, 1919
+
+The pattern during the 19th century had only repeated that of the nearly three millennia before it. The ancient myth of Pandora never settled into one accepted version, was never agreed to have a single interpretation. It was used as a vehicle to illustrate the prevailing ideologies or artistic fashions of the time and eventually became so worn a coinage that it grew confused with other, sometimes later, stories. Best known in the end for a single metaphorical attribute, the box with which she was not even endowed until the 16th century, depictions of Pandora have been further confused with other holders of receptacles – with one of the trials of Psyche,[68] with Sophonisba about to drink poison[69] or Artemisia with the ashes of her husband.[70] Nevertheless, her very polyvalence has been in the end the guarantor of her cultural survival.

en/696.html.txt

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+In Greek mythology, Pandora (Greek: Πανδώρα,  derived from πᾶν, pān, i.e. "all" and δῶρον, dōron, i.e. "gift", thus  "the all-endowed", "all-gifted" or "all-giving")[1] was the first human woman created by Hephaestus on the instructions of Zeus.[2][3] As Hesiod related it, each god cooperated by giving her unique gifts. Her other name—inscribed against her figure on a white-ground kylix in the British Museum[4]—is Anesidora (Ancient Greek: Ἀνησιδώρα), "she who sends up gifts"[5] (up implying "from below" within the earth).
+
+The Pandora myth is a kind of theodicy, addressing the question of why there is evil in the world. According to this, Pandora opened a jar (pithos), in modern accounts sometimes mistranslated as "Pandora's box", releasing all the evils of humanity. Hesiod's interpretation of Pandora's story went on to influence both Jewish and Christian theology and so perpetuated her bad reputation into the Renaissance. Later poets, dramatists, painters and sculptors made her their subject and over the course of five centuries contributed new insights into her motives and significance.
+
+Hesiod, both in his Theogony (briefly, without naming Pandora outright, line 570) and in Works and Days, gives the earliest version of the Pandora story.
+
+The Pandora myth first appeared in lines 560–612 of Hesiod's poem in epic meter, the Theogony (c. 8th–7th centuries BC), without ever giving the woman a name. After humans received the stolen gift of fire from Prometheus, an angry Zeus decides to give humanity a punishing gift to compensate for the boon they had been given. He commands Hephaestus to mold from earth the first woman, a "beautiful evil" whose descendants would torment the human race. After Hephaestus does so, Athena dresses her in a silvery gown, an embroidered veil, garlands and an ornate crown of silver. This woman goes unnamed in the Theogony, but is presumably Pandora, whose myth Hesiod revisited in Works and Days. When she first appears before gods and mortals, "wonder seized them" as they looked upon her. But she was "sheer guile, not to be withstood by men." Hesiod elaborates (590–93):
+
+From her is the race of women and female kind:
+of her is the deadly race and tribe of women who
+live amongst mortal men to their great trouble,
+no helpmates in hateful poverty, but only in wealth.
+
+Hesiod goes on to lament that men who try to avoid the evil of women by avoiding marriage will fare no better (604–7):
+
+He reaches deadly old age without anyone to tend his years,
+and though he at least has no lack of livelihood while he lives,
+yet, when he is dead, his kinsfolk divide his possessions amongst them.
+
+Hesiod concedes that occasionally a man finds a good wife, but still (609) "evil contends with good."
+
+The more famous version of the Pandora myth comes from another of Hesiod's poems, Works and Days. In this version of the myth (lines 60–105), Hesiod expands upon her origin, and moreover widens the scope of the misery she inflicts on humanity. As before, she is created by Hephaestus, but now more gods contribute to her completion (63–82): Athena taught her needlework and weaving (63–4); Aphrodite "shed grace upon her head and cruel longing and cares that weary the limbs" (65–6); Hermes gave her "a shameful mind and deceitful nature" (67–8); Hermes also gave her the power of speech, putting in her "lies and crafty words" (77–80) ; Athena then clothed her (72); next Persuasion and the Charites adorned her with necklaces and other finery (72–4); the Horae adorned her with a garland crown (75). Finally, Hermes gives this woman a name: Pandora – "All-gifted" – "because all the Olympians gave her a gift" (81). (In Greek, Pandora has an active rather than a passive meaning; hence, Pandora properly means "All-giving." The implications of this mistranslation are explored in "All-giving Pandora: mythic inversion?" below.) In this retelling of her story, Pandora's deceitful feminine nature becomes the least of humanity's worries. For she brings with her a jar (which, due to textual corruption in the sixteenth century, came to be called a box)[6][7] containing[8] "burdensome toil and sickness that brings death to men" (91–2), diseases (102) and "a myriad other pains" (100). Prometheus had (fearing further reprisals) warned his brother Epimetheus not to accept any gifts from Zeus. But Epimetheus did not listen; he accepted Pandora, who promptly scattered the contents of her jar. As a result, Hesiod tells us, "the earth and sea are full of evils" (101). One item, however, did not escape the jar (96–9):
+
+Only Hope was left within her unbreakable house,
+she remained under the lip of the jar, and did not
+fly away. Before [she could], Pandora replaced the
+lid of the jar. This was the will of aegis-bearing
+Zeus the Cloudgatherer.
+
+Hesiod does not say why hope (elpis) remained in the jar.[9] and closes with the moral (105): "Thus it is not possible to escape the mind of Zeus."
+
+Hesiod also outlines how the end of man's Golden Age (an all-male society of immortals who were reverent to the gods, worked hard, and ate from abundant groves of fruit) was brought on by Prometheus. When he stole Fire from Mt. Olympus and gave it to mortal man, Zeus punished the technologically advanced society by creating a woman. Thus, Pandora was created and given the jar (mistranslated as 'box') which releases all evils upon man. [10]
+
+Archaic and Classic Greek literature seem to make little further mention of Pandora, but mythographers later filled in minor details or added postscripts to Hesiod's account. For example, the Bibliotheca and Hyginus each make explicit what might be latent in the Hesiodic text: Epimetheus married Pandora. They each add that the couple had a daughter, Pyrrha, who married Deucalion and survived the deluge with him. However, the Hesiodic Catalogue of Women, fragment #5, had made a "Pandora" one of the daughters of Deucalion, and the mother of Graecus by Zeus. In the 15th-century AD an attempt was made to conjoin pagan and scriptural narrative by the monk Annio da Viterbo, who claimed to have found an account by the ancient Chaldean historian Berossus in which "Pandora" was named as a daughter-in-law of Noah in the alternative Flood narrative.
+
+The mistranslation of pithos, a large storage jar, as "box"[11] is usually attributed to the sixteenth century humanist Erasmus of Rotterdam when he translated Hesiod's tale of Pandora into Latin. Hesiod's pithos refers to a large storage jar, often half-buried in the ground, used for wine, oil or grain.[12] It can also refer to a funerary jar.[13] Erasmus, however, translated pithos into the Latin word pyxis, meaning "box".[14] The phrase "Pandora's box" has endured ever since.
+
+Historic interpretations of the Pandora figure are rich enough to have offered Dora and Erwin Panofsky scope for monographic treatment.[15] M. L. West writes that the story of Pandora and her jar is from a pre-Hesiodic myth, and that this explains the confusion and problems with Hesiod's version and its inconclusiveness.[16] He writes that in earlier myths, Pandora was married to Prometheus, and cites the ancient Hesiodic Catalogue of Women as preserving this older tradition, and that the jar may have at one point contained only good things for humanity. He also writes that it may have been that Epimetheus and Pandora and their roles were transposed in the pre-Hesiodic myths, a "mythic inversion". He remarks that there is a curious correlation between Pandora being made out of earth in Hesiod's story, to what is in the Bibliotheca that Prometheus created man from water and earth.[16][17] Hesiod's myth of Pandora's jar, then, could be an amalgam of many variant early myths.
+
+The meaning of Pandora's name, according to the myth provided in Works and Days, is  "all-gifted". However, according to others Pandora more properly means "all-giving".[18] Certain vase paintings dated to the 5th century BC likewise indicate that the pre-Hesiodic myth of the goddess Pandora endured for centuries after the time of Hesiod. An alternative name for Pandora attested on a white-ground kylix (ca. 460 BC) is Anesidora, which similarly means "she who sends up gifts." This vase painting clearly depicts Hephaestus and Athena putting the finishing touches on the first woman, as in the Theogony. Written above this figure (a convention in Greek vase painting) is the name Anesidora. More commonly, however, the epithet anesidora is applied to Gaea or Demeter. In view of such evidence, William E. Phipps has pointed out, "Classics scholars suggest that Hesiod reversed the meaning of the name of an earth goddess called Pandora (all-giving) or Anesidora (one-who-sends-up-gifts). Vase paintings and literary texts give evidence of Pandora as a mother earth figure who was worshipped by some Greeks. The main English commentary on Works and Days states that Hesiod shows no awareness [of this]."[19]
+
+Jane Ellen Harrison[20] also turned to the repertory of vase-painters to shed light on aspects of myth that were left unaddressed or disguised in literature. On a fifth-century amphora in the Ashmolean Museum (her fig.71) the half-figure of Pandora emerges from the ground, her arms upraised in the epiphany gesture, to greet Epimetheus. A winged ker with a fillet hovers overhead: "Pandora rises from the earth; she is the Earth, giver of all gifts," Harrison observes. Over time this "all-giving" goddess somehow devolved into an "all-gifted" mortal woman. A.H. Smith,[21] however, noted that in Hesiod's account Athena and the Seasons brought wreaths of grass and spring flowers to Pandora, indicating that Hesiod was conscious of Pandora's original "all-giving" function. For Harrison, therefore, Hesiod's story provides "evidence of a shift from matriarchy to patriarchy in Greek culture. As the life-bringing goddess Pandora is eclipsed, the death-bringing human Pandora arises."[22] Thus, Harrison concludes "in the patriarchal mythology of Hesiod her great figure is strangely changed and diminished. She is no longer Earth-Born, but the creature, the handiwork of Olympian Zeus." (Harrison 1922:284). Robert Graves, quoting Harrison,[23] asserts of the Hesiodic episode that "Pandora is not a genuine myth, but an anti-feminist fable, probably of his own invention." H.J. Rose wrote that the myth of Pandora is decidedly more illiberal than that of epic in that it makes Pandora the origin of all of Man's woes with her being the exemplification of the bad wife.[24]
+
+The Hesiodic myth did not, however, completely obliterate the memory of the all-giving goddess Pandora. A scholium to line 971 of Aristophanes' The Birds mentions a cult "to Pandora, the earth, because she bestows all things necessary for life".[25] And in fifth-century Athens, Pandora made a prominent appearance in what, at first, appears an unexpected context, in a marble relief or bronze appliqués as a frieze along the base of the Athena Parthenos, the culminating experience on the Acropolis.  Jeffrey M. Hurwit has interpreted her presence there as an "anti-Athena."  Both were motherless, and reinforced via opposite means the civic ideologies of patriarchy and the "highly gendered social and political realities of fifth-century Athens"[25]—Athena by rising above her sex to defend it, and Pandora by embodying the need for it. Meanwhile, Pausanias (i.24.7) merely noted the subject and moved on.
+
+Images of Pandora began to appear on Greek pottery as early as the 5th century BCE, although identification of the scene represented is sometimes ambiguous. An independent tradition that does not square with any of the Classical literary sources is in the visual repertory of Attic red-figure vase-painters, which sometimes supplements, sometimes ignores, the written testimony; in these representations the upper part of Pandora is visible rising from the earth, "a chthonic goddess like Gaia herself."[26] Sometimes,[27] but not always, she is labeled Pandora. In some cases the figure of Pandora emerging from the earth is surrounded by figures carrying hammers in what has been suggested as a scene from a satyr play by Sophocles, Pandora, or The Hammerers, of which only fragments remain.[28] But there have also been alternative interpretations of such scenes.[29]
+
+In a late Pre-Raphaelite painting by John D. Batten, hammer-wielding workmen appear through a doorway, while in the foreground Hephaestus broods on the as yet unanimated figure of “Pandora”.[30] There were also earlier English paintings of the newly created Pandora as surrounded by the heavenly gods presenting gifts, a scene also depicted on ancient Greek pottery.[31] In one case it was part of a decorative scheme painted on the ceiling at Petworth House by Louis Laguerre in about 1720.[32] William Etty’s Pandora Crowned by the Seasons of a century later is similarly presented as an apotheosis taking place among the clouds.[33]
+
+In between these two had come James Barry’s huge Birth of Pandora, on which he laboured for over a decade at the turn of the nineteenth century.[34] Well before that he was working on the design, which was intended to reflect his theoretical writings on the interdependence between history painting and the way it should reflect the ideal state.[35] An early drawing, only preserved now in the print made of it by Luigi Schiavonetti, follows the account of Hesiod and shows Pandora being adorned by the Graces and the Hours while the gods look on.[36] Its ideological purpose, however, was to demonstrate an equal society unified by the harmonious function of those within it. But in the actual painting which followed much later, a subordinated Pandora is surrounded by gift-bearing gods and Minerva stands near her, demonstrating the feminine arts proper to her passive role. The shift is back to the culture of blame whenever she steps outside it.[37]
+
+In the individual representations of Pandora that were to follow, her idealisation is as a dangerous type of beauty, generally naked or semi-naked. She is only differentiated from other paintings or statues of such females by being given the attribute of a jar or, increasingly in the 19th century, a straight-sided box. As well as the many European paintings of her from this period, there are examples in sculptures by Henri-Joseph Ruxthiel (1819),[38]John Gibson (1856),[39] Pierre Loison (1861, see above) and Chauncy Bradley Ives (1871).[40]
+
+There is an additional reason why Pandora should appear nude, in that it was a theological commonplace going back to the early Church Fathers that the Classical myth of Pandora made her a type of Eve.[41] Each is the first woman in the world; and each is a central character in a story of transition from an original state of plenty and ease to one of suffering and death, a transition which is brought about as a punishment for transgression of divine law.
+
+It has been argued that it was as a result of the Hellenisation of Western Asia that the misogyny in Hesiod's account of Pandora began openly to influence both Jewish and then Christian interpretations of scripture.[42] The doctrinal bias against women so initiated then continued into Renaissance times. Bishop Jean Olivier's long Latin poem Pandora drew on the Classical account as well as the Biblical to demonstrate that woman is the means of drawing men to sin. Originally appearing in 1541 and republished thereafter, it was soon followed by two separate French translations in 1542 and 1548.[43]  At the same period appeared a 5-act tragedy by the Protestant theologian Leonhard Culmann (1498-1568) titled Ein schön weltlich Spiel von der schönen Pandora (1544), similarly drawing on Hesiod in order to teach conventional Christian morality.[44]
+
+The equation of the two also occurs in the 1550 allegorical painting by Jean Cousin the Elder, Eva Prima Pandora (Eve the first Pandora), in which a naked woman reclines in a grotto. Her right elbow rests on a skull, indicating the bringing of death, and she holds an apple branch in that hand – both attributes of Eve. Her left arm is wreathed by a snake (another reference to the temptation of Eve) and that hand rests on an unstopped jar, Pandora's attribute. Above hangs the sign from which the painting gains its name and beneath it is a closed jar, perhaps the counterpart of the other in Olympus, containing blessings.[45]
+
+In Juan de Horozco's Spanish emblem book, Emblemas morales (1589), a motive is given for Pandora's action. Accompanying an illustration of her opening the lid of an urn from which demons and angels emerge is a commentary that condemns “female curiosity and the desire to learn by which the very first woman was deceived”.[46] In the succeeding century that desire to learn was equated with the female demand to share the male prerogative of education. In Nicolas Regnier’s painting “The Allegory of Vanity” (1626), subtitled “Pandora”, it is typified by her curiosity about the contents of the urn that she has just unstopped and is compared to the other attributes of vanity surrounding her (fine clothes, jewellery, a pot of gold coins).[47] Again, Pietro Paolini’s lively Pandora of about 1632 seems more aware of the effect that her pearls and fashionable headgear is making than of the evils escaping from the jar she holds.[48] There is a social message carried by these paintings too, for education, no less than expensive adornment, is only available to those who can afford it.
+
+But an alternative interpretation of Pandora’s curiosity makes it merely an extension of childish innocence. This comes out in portrayals of Pandora as a young girl, as in Walter Crane’s “Little Pandora” spilling buttons while encumbered by the doll she is carrying,[49] in Arthur Rackham’s book illustration[50] and Frederick Stuart Church’s etching of an adolescent girl taken aback by the contents of the ornamental box she has opened.[51] The same innocence informs Odilon Redon’s 1910/12 clothed figure carrying a box and merging into a landscape suffused with light,[52] and even more the 1914 version of a naked Pandora surrounded by flowers, a primaeval Eve in the Garden of Eden.[53] Such innocence, “naked and without alarm” in the words of an earlier French poet, portrays Pandora more as victim of a conflict outside her comprehension than as temptress.
+
+Early dramatic treatments of the story of Pandora are works of musical theatre. La Estatua de Prometeo (1670) by Pedro Calderón de la Barca is made an allegory in which devotion to learning is contrasted with the active life. Prometheus moulds a clay statue of Minerva, the goddess of wisdom to whom he is devoted, and gives it life from a stolen sunbeam. This initiates a debate among the gods whether a creation outside their own work is justified; his devotion is in the end rewarded with permission to marry his statue.[54] In this work, Pandora, the statue in question, plays only a passive role in the competition between Prometheus and his brother Epimetheus (signifying the active life), and between the gods and men.
+
+Another point to note about Calderón’s musical drama is that the theme of a statue married by her creator is more suggestive of the story of Pygmalion. The latter is also typical of Voltaire’s ultimately unproduced opera Pandore (1740).[55] There too the creator of a statue animates it with stolen fire, but then the plot is complicated when Jupiter also falls in love with this new creation but is prevented by Destiny from consummating it. In revenge the god sends Destiny to tempt this new Eve into opening a box full of curses as a punishment for Earth’s revolt against Heaven.[56]
+
+If Pandora appears suspended between the roles of Eve and of Pygmalion’s creation in Voltaire’s work, in Charles-Pierre Colardeau’s erotic poem Les Hommes de Prométhée (1774) she is presented equally as a love-object and in addition as an unfallen Eve:
+
+Having been fashioned from clay and given the quality of “naïve grace combined with feeling”, she is set to wander through an enchanted landscape. There she encounters the first man, the prior creation of Prometheus, and warmly responds to his embrace. At the end the couple quit their marriage couch and survey their surroundings “As sovereigns of the world, kings of the universe”.[58]
+
+One other musical work with much the same theme was Aumale de Corsenville's one-act verse melodrama Pandore, which had an overture and incidental music by Franz Ignaz Beck. There Prometheus, having already stolen fire from heaven, creates a perfect female, “artless in nature, of limpid innocence”, for which he anticipates divine vengeance. However, his patron Minerva descends to announce that the gods have gifted Pandora with other qualities and that she will become the future model and mother of humanity.[59] The work was performed on 2 July 1789, on the very eve of the French Revolution,[60] and was soon forgotten in the course of the events that followed.
+
+Over the course of the 19th century, the story of Pandora was interpreted in radically different ways by four dramatic authors in four countries. In two of these she was presented as the bride of Epimetheus; in the two others she was the wife of Prometheus. The earliest of these works was the lyrical dramatic fragment by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, written between 1807 and 1808.[61] Though it bears the title Pandora, what exists of the play revolves round Epimetheus’ longing for the return of the wife who has abandoned him and has yet to arrive. It is in fact a philosophical transformation of Goethe's passion in old age for a teenaged girl.[62]
+
+Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s The Masque of Pandora dates from 1876. It begins with her creation, her refusal by Prometheus and acceptance by Epimetheus. Then in the latter’s house an “oaken chest, Carven with figures and embossed with gold” attracts her curiosity. After she eventually gives in to temptation and opens it, she collapses in despair and a storm destroys the garden outside. When Epimetheus returns, she begs him to kill her but he accepts joint responsibility.[63] The work was twice used as the basis for operas by Alfred Cellier in 1881 and by Eleanor Everest Freer in 1933.[64] Iconographical elements from the masque also figure in Walter Crane's large watercolour of Pandora of 1885. She is pictured as sprawled over a carved wooden chest on which are embossed golden designs of the three fates who figure as a chorus in Longfellow's scene 3. Outside the palace, a high wind is bending the trees. But on the front of the chest, a medallion showing the serpent wound about the tree of knowledge recalls the old interpretation of Pandora as a type of Eve.[65]
+
+In England the high drama of the incident was travestied in James Robinson Planché’s Olympic Revels or Prometheus and Pandora (1831), the first of the Victorian burlesques. It is a costume drama peppered with comic banter and songs during which the gods betroth Pandora to a disappointed Prometheus with “only one little box” for dowry. When she opens it, Jupiter descends to curse her and Prometheus, but Hope emerges from the box and negotiates their pardon.[66]
+
+At the other end of the century, Gabriel Fauré’s ambitious opera Prométhée (1900) had a cast of hundreds, a huge orchestra and an outdoor amphitheatre for stage. It was based in part on the Prometheus Bound of Aeschylus but was rewritten so as to give the character of Pandore an equal part with his. This necessitated her falling “as if dead” on hearing the judgement against Prométhée in Act 1; a funeral procession bearing her body at the start of Act 2, after which she revives to mourn the carrying out of Prométhée's sentence; while in Act 3 she disobeys Prométhée by accepting a box, supposedly filled with blessings for mankind, and makes the tragedy complete.[67]
+
+Madame Vestris in the burlesque Prometheus and Pandora, an 1831 print
+
+Swedish soprano Christine Nilsson as Pandora by Alexandre Cabanel, 1873
+
+Jane Morris in the role, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, coloured chalks, 1879
+
+Yvonne Gregory’s photogram recreates a pose from a painting, 1919
+
+The pattern during the 19th century had only repeated that of the nearly three millennia before it. The ancient myth of Pandora never settled into one accepted version, was never agreed to have a single interpretation. It was used as a vehicle to illustrate the prevailing ideologies or artistic fashions of the time and eventually became so worn a coinage that it grew confused with other, sometimes later, stories. Best known in the end for a single metaphorical attribute, the box with which she was not even endowed until the 16th century, depictions of Pandora have been further confused with other holders of receptacles – with one of the trials of Psyche,[68] with Sophonisba about to drink poison[69] or Artemisia with the ashes of her husband.[70] Nevertheless, her very polyvalence has been in the end the guarantor of her cultural survival.

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+Coordinates: 16°42′43″S 64°39′58″W / 16.712°S 64.666°W / -16.712; -64.666
+
+in South America (grey)
+
+Bolivia[10] (/bəˈlɪviə/ (listen) Spanish pronunciation: [bo.ˈli.βja]), officially the Plurinational State of Bolivia (Spanish: Estado Plurinacional de Bolivia Spanish pronunciation: [esˈtaðo pluɾinasjoˈnal de βoˈliβja] (listen)),[11][12] is a landlocked country located in western-central South America. The constitutional capital is Sucre, while the seat of government and executive capital is La Paz. The largest city and principal industrial center is Santa Cruz de la Sierra, located on the Llanos Orientales (tropical lowlands), a mostly flat region in the east of the country.
+
+The sovereign state of Bolivia is a constitutionally unitary state, divided into nine departments. Its geography varies from the peaks of the Andes in the West, to the Eastern Lowlands, situated within the Amazon Basin. It is bordered to the north and east by Brazil, to the southeast by Paraguay, to the south by Argentina, to the southwest by Chile, and to the northwest by Peru. One-third of the country is within the Andean mountain range. With 1,098,581 km2 (424,164 sq mi) of area, Bolivia is the fifth largest country in South America, after Brazil, Argentina, Peru, and Colombia (and alongside Paraguay, one of the only two landlocked countries in the Americas), the 27th largest in the world, the largest landlocked country in the Southern Hemisphere and the world's seventh largest landlocked country, after Kazakhstan, Mongolia, Chad, Niger, Mali and Ethiopia.
+
+The country's population, estimated at 11 million, is multiethnic, including Amerindians, Mestizos, Europeans, Asians and Africans. Spanish is the official and predominant language, although 36 indigenous languages also have official status, of which the most commonly spoken are Guarani, Aymara and Quechua languages.
+
+Before Spanish colonization, the Andean region of Bolivia was part of the Inca Empire, while the northern and eastern lowlands were inhabited by independent tribes. Spanish conquistadors arriving from Cuzco and Asunción took control of the region in the 16th century. During the Spanish colonial period Bolivia was administered by the Royal Audiencia of Charcas. Spain built its empire in large part upon the silver that was extracted from Bolivia's mines.
+After the first call for independence in 1809, 16 years of war followed before the establishment of the Republic, named for Simón Bolívar. Over the course of the 19th and early 20th century Bolivia lost control of several peripheral territories to neighboring countries including the seizure of its coastline by Chile in 1879. Bolivia remained relatively politically stable until 1971, when Hugo Banzer led a coup d'état which replaced the socialist government of Juan José Torres with a military dictatorship headed by Banzer; Torres was murdered in Buenos Aires, Argentina by a right-wing death squad in 1976. Banzer's regime cracked down on leftist and socialist opposition and other forms of dissent, resulting in the torture and deaths of a number of Bolivian citizens. Banzer was ousted in 1978 and later returned as the democratically elected president of Bolivia from 1997 to 2001.
+
+Modern Bolivia is a charter member of the UN, IMF, NAM, OAS, ACTO, Bank of the South, ALBA, and USAN. Bolivia remains the second poorest country in South America.[13] It is a developing country, with a medium ranking in the Human Development Index and a poverty level of 38.6%.[14] Its main economic activities include agriculture, forestry, fishing, mining, and manufacturing goods such as textiles, clothing, refined metals, and refined petroleum. Bolivia is very rich in minerals, including tin, silver, lithium, and copper.
+
+Bolivia is named after Simón Bolívar, a Venezuelan leader in the Spanish American wars of independence.[15] The leader of Venezuela, Antonio José de Sucre, had been given the option by Bolívar to either unite Charcas (present-day Bolivia) with the newly formed Republic of Peru, to unite with the United Provinces of Rio de la Plata, or to formally declare its independence from Spain as a wholly independent state. Sucre opted to create a brand new state and on 6 August 1825, with local support, named it in honor of Simón Bolívar.[16]
+
+The original name was Republic of Bolívar. Some days later, congressman Manuel Martín Cruz proposed: "If from Romulus, Rome, then from Bolívar, Bolivia" (Spanish: Si de Rómulo, Roma; de Bolívar, Bolivia). The name was approved by the Republic on 3 October 1825.[17] In 2009, a new constitution changed the country's official name to "Plurinational State of Bolivia" in recognition of the multi-ethnic nature of the country and the enhanced position of Bolivia's indigenous peoples under the new constitution.[17]
+
+The region now known as Bolivia had been occupied for over 2,500 years when the Aymara arrived. However, present-day Aymara associate themselves with the ancient civilization of the Tiwanaku culture which had its capital at Tiwanaku, in Western Bolivia. The capital city of Tiwanaku dates from as early as 1500 BC when it was a small, agriculturally based village.[18]
+
+The community grew to urban proportions between AD 600 and AD 800, becoming an important regional power in the southern Andes. According to early estimates,[when?] the city covered approximately 6.5 square kilometers (2.5 square miles) at its maximum extent and had between 15,000 and 30,000 inhabitants.[19] In 1996 satellite imaging was used to map the extent of fossilized suka kollus (flooded raised fields) across the three primary valleys of Tiwanaku, arriving at population-carrying capacity estimates of anywhere between 285,000 and 1,482,000 people.[20]
+
+Around AD 400, Tiwanaku went from being a locally dominant force to a predatory state. Tiwanaku expanded its reaches into the Yungas and brought its culture and way of life to many other cultures in Peru, Bolivia, and Chile. Tiwanaku was not a violent culture in many respects. In order to expand its reach, Tiwanaku exercised great political astuteness, creating colonies, fostering trade agreements (which made the other cultures rather dependent), and instituting state cults.[21]
+
+The empire continued to grow with no end in sight. William H. Isbell states "Tiahuanaco underwent a dramatic transformation between AD 600 and 700 that established new monumental standards for civic architecture and greatly increased the resident population."[22] Tiwanaku continued to absorb cultures rather than eradicate them. Archaeologists note a dramatic adoption of Tiwanaku ceramics into the cultures which became part of the Tiwanaku empire. Tiwanaku's power was further solidified through the trade it implemented among the cities within its empire.[21]
+
+Tiwanaku's elites gained their status through the surplus food they controlled, collected from outlying regions and then redistributed to the general populace. Further, this elite's control of llama herds became a powerful control mechanism as llamas were essential for carrying goods between the civic centre and the periphery. These herds also came to symbolize class distinctions between the commoners and the elites. Through this control and manipulation of surplus resources, the elite's power continued to grow until about AD 950. At this time a dramatic shift in climate occurred,[23][page needed] causing a significant drop in precipitation in the Titicaca Basin, believed by archaeologists to have been on the scale of a major drought.
+
+As the rainfall decreased, many of the cities farther away from Lake Titicaca began to tender fewer foodstuffs to the elites. As the surplus of food decreased, and thus the amount available to underpin their power, the control of the elites began to falter. The capital city became the last place viable for food production due to the resiliency of the raised field method of agriculture. Tiwanaku disappeared around AD 1000 because food production, the main source of the elites' power, dried up. The area remained uninhabited for centuries thereafter.[23]
+
+Between 1438 and 1527, the Inca empire expanded from its capital at Cuzco, Peru. It gained control over much of what is now Andean Bolivia and extended its control into the fringes of the Amazon basin.
+
+The Spanish conquest of the Inca empire began in 1524, and was mostly completed by 1533. The territory now called Bolivia was known as Charcas, and was under the authority of the Viceroy of Lima. Local government came from the Audiencia de Charcas located in Chuquisaca (La Plata—modern Sucre). Founded in 1545 as a mining town, Potosí soon produced fabulous wealth, becoming the largest city in the New World with a population exceeding 150,000 people.[24]
+
+By the late 16th century, Bolivian silver was an important source of revenue for the Spanish Empire.[25] A steady stream of natives served as labor force under the brutal, slave conditions of the Spanish version of the pre-Columbian draft system called the mita.[26] Charcas was transferred to the Viceroyalty of the Río de la Plata in 1776 and the people from Buenos Aires, the capital of the Viceroyalty, coined the term "Upper Peru" (Spanish: Alto Perú) as a popular reference to the Royal Audiencia of Charcas. Túpac Katari led the indigenous rebellion that laid siege to La Paz in March 1781,[27] during which 20,000 people died.[28] As Spanish royal authority weakened during the Napoleonic wars, sentiment against colonial rule grew.
+
+The struggle for independence started in the city of Sucre on 25 May 1809 and the Chuquisaca Revolution (Chuquisaca was then the name of the city) is known as the first cry of Freedom in Latin America. That revolution was followed by the La Paz revolution on 16 July 1809. The La Paz revolution marked a complete split with the Spanish government, while the Chuquisaca Revolution established a local independent junta in the name of the Spanish King deposed by Napoleon Bonaparte. Both revolutions were short-lived and defeated by the Spanish authorities in the Viceroyalty of the Rio de La Plata, but the following year the Spanish American wars of independence raged across the continent.
+
+Bolivia was captured and recaptured many times during the war by the royalists and patriots. Buenos Aires sent three military campaigns, all of which were defeated, and eventually limited itself to protecting the national borders at Salta. Bolivia was finally freed of Royalist dominion by Marshal Antonio José de Sucre, with a military campaign coming from the North in support of the campaign of Simón Bolívar. After 16 years of war the Republic was proclaimed on 6 August 1825.
+
+In 1836, Bolivia, under the rule of Marshal Andrés de Santa Cruz, invaded Peru to reinstall the deposed president, General Luis José de Orbegoso. Peru and Bolivia formed the Peru-Bolivian Confederation, with de Santa Cruz as the Supreme Protector. Following tension between the Confederation and Chile, Chile declared war on 28 December 1836. Argentina separately declared war on the Confederation on 9 May 1837. The Peruvian-Bolivian forces achieved several major victories during the War of the Confederation: the defeat of the Argentine expedition and the defeat of the first Chilean expedition on the fields of Paucarpata near the city of Arequipa. The Chilean army and its Peruvian rebel allies surrendered unconditionally and signed the Paucarpata Treaty. The treaty stipulated that Chile would withdraw from Peru-Bolivia, Chile would return captured Confederate ships, economic relations would be normalized, and the Confederation would pay Peruvian debt to Chile. However, the Chilean government and public rejected the peace treaty. Chile organized a second attack on the Confederation and defeated it in the Battle of Yungay. After this defeat, Santa Cruz resigned and went to exile in Ecuador and then Paris, and the Peruvian-Bolivian Confederation was dissolved.
+
+Following the renewed independence of Peru, Peruvian president General Agustín Gamarra invaded Bolivia. On 18 November 1841, the battle de Ingavi took place, in which the Bolivian Army defeated the Peruvian troops of Gamarra (killed in the battle). After the victory, Bolivia invaded Perú on several fronts.  The eviction of the Bolivian troops from the south of Peru would be achieved by the greater availability of material and human resources of Peru; the Bolivian Army did not have enough troops to maintain an occupation. In the district of Locumba – Tacna, a column of Peruvian soldiers and peasants defeated a Bolivian regiment in the so-called Battle of Los Altos de Chipe (Locumba). In the district of Sama and in Arica, the Peruvian colonel José María Lavayén organized a troop that managed to defeat the Bolivian forces of Colonel Rodríguez Magariños and threaten the port of Arica. In the battle of Tarapacá on 7 January 1842, Peruvian militias formed by the commander Juan Buendía defeated a detachment led by Bolivian colonel José María García, who died in the confrontation. Bolivian troops left Tacna, Arica and Tarapacá in February 1842, retreating towards Moquegua and Puno.[29] The battles of Motoni and  Orurillo forced the withdrawal of Bolivian forces occupying Peruvian territory and exposed Bolivia to the threat of counter-invasion. The Treaty of Puno was signed on 7 June 1842, ending the war. However, the climate of tension between Lima and La Paz would continue until 1847, when the signing of a Peace and Trade Treaty became effective.
+
+The estimated population of the main three cities in 1843 was La Paz 300,000, Cochabamba 250,000 and Potosi 200,000.[30]
+
+A period of political and economic instability in the early-to-mid-19th century weakened Bolivia. In addition, during the War of the Pacific (1879–83), Chile occupied vast territories rich in natural resources south west of Bolivia, including the Bolivian coast. Chile took control of today's Chuquicamata area, the adjoining rich salitre (saltpeter) fields, and the port of Antofagasta among other Bolivian territories.
+
+Since independence, Bolivia has lost over half of its territory to neighboring countries.[31] Through diplomatic channels in 1909, it lost the basin of the Madre de Dios River and the territory of the Purus in the Amazon, yielding 250,000 km² to Peru.[32] It also lost the state of Acre, in the Acre War, important because this region was known for its production of rubber. Peasants and the Bolivian army fought briefly but after a few victories, and facing the prospect of a total war against Brazil, it was forced to sign the Treaty of Petrópolis in 1903, in which Bolivia lost this rich territory. Popular myth has it that Bolivian president Mariano Melgarejo (1864–71) traded the land for what he called "a magnificent white horse" and Acre was subsequently flooded by Brazilians, which ultimately led to confrontation and fear of war with Brazil.[citation needed]
+
+In the late 19th century, an increase in the world price of silver brought Bolivia relative prosperity and political stability.
+
+During the early 20th century, tin replaced silver as the country's most important source of wealth. A succession of governments controlled by the economic and social elite followed laissez-faire capitalist policies through the first 30 years of the 20th century.[33]
+
+Living conditions of the native people, who constitute most of the population, remained deplorable. With work opportunities limited to primitive conditions in the mines and in large estates having nearly feudal status, they had no access to education, economic opportunity, and political participation. Bolivia's defeat by Paraguay in the Chaco War (1932–35), where Bolivia lost a great part of the Gran Chaco region in dispute, marked a turning-point.[34][35][36]
+
+The Revolutionary Nationalist Movement (MNR), the most historic political party, emerged as a broad-based party. Denied its victory in the 1951 presidential elections, the MNR led a successful revolution in 1952. Under President Víctor Paz Estenssoro, the MNR, having strong popular pressure, introduced universal suffrage into his political platform and carried out a sweeping land-reform promoting rural education and nationalization of the country's largest tin mines.
+
+Twelve years of tumultuous rule left the MNR divided. In 1964, a military junta overthrew President Estenssoro at the outset of his third term. The 1969 death of President René Barrientos Ortuño, a former member of the junta who was elected president in 1966, led to a succession of weak governments. Alarmed by the rising Popular Assembly and the increase in the popularity of President Juan José Torres, the military, the MNR, and others installed Colonel (later General) Hugo Banzer Suárez as president in 1971. He returned to the presidency in 1997 through 2001. Juan José Torres, who had fled Bolivia, was kidnapped and assassinated in 1976 as part of Operation Condor, the U.S.-supported campaign of political repression by South American right-wing dictators.[37]
+
+The United States' Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) financed and trained the Bolivian military dictatorship in the 1960s. The revolutionary leader Che Guevara was killed by a team of CIA officers and members of the Bolivian Army on 9 October 1967, in Bolivia. Félix Rodríguez was a CIA officer on the team with the Bolivian Army that captured and shot Guevara.[38] Rodriguez said that after he received a Bolivian presidential execution order, he told "the soldier who pulled the trigger to aim carefully, to remain consistent with the Bolivian government's story that Che had been killed in action during a clash with the Bolivian army." Rodriguez said the US government had wanted Che in Panama, and "I could have tried to falsify the command to the troops, and got Che to Panama as the US government said they had wanted", but that he had chosen to "let history run its course" as desired by Bolivia.[39]
+
+Elections in 1979 and 1981 were inconclusive and marked by fraud. There were coups d'état, counter-coups, and caretaker governments. In 1980, General Luis García Meza Tejada carried out a ruthless and violent coup d'état that did not have popular support. He pacified the people by promising to remain in power only for one year. At the end of the year, he staged a televised rally to claim popular support and announced, "Bueno, me quedo", or, "All right; I'll stay [in office]."[40] After a military rebellion forced out Meza in 1981, three other military governments in 14 months struggled with Bolivia's growing problems. Unrest forced the military to convoke the Congress, elected in 1980, and allow it to choose a new chief executive. In October 1982, Hernán Siles Zuazo again became president, 22 years after the end of his first term of office (1956–60).
+
+In 1993, Gonzalo Sánchez de Lozada was elected president in alliance with the Tupac Katari Revolutionary Liberation Movement, which inspired indigenous-sensitive and multicultural-aware policies.[41] Sánchez de Lozada pursued an aggressive economic and social reform agenda. The most dramatic reform was privatization under the "capitalization" program, under which investors, typically foreign, acquired 50% ownership and management control of public enterprises in return for agreed upon capital investments.[42][43] In 1993, Sanchez de Lozada introduced the Plan de Todos, which led to the decentralization of government, introduction of intercultural bilingual education, implementation of agrarian legislation, and privatization of state owned businesses. The plan explicitly stated that Bolivian citizens would own a minimum of 51% of enterprises; under the plan, most state-owned enterprises (SOEs), though not mines, were sold.[44] This privatization of SOEs led to a neoliberal structuring.[45]
+
+The reforms and economic restructuring were strongly opposed by certain segments of society, which instigated frequent and sometimes violent protests, particularly in La Paz and the Chapare coca-growing region, from 1994 through 1996. The indigenous population of the Andean region was not able to benefit from government reforms.[46] During this time, the umbrella labor-organization of Bolivia, the Central Obrera Boliviana (COB), became increasingly unable to effectively challenge government policy. A teachers' strike in 1995 was defeated because the COB could not marshal the support of many of its members, including construction and factory workers.
+
+In the 1997 elections, General Hugo Banzer, leader of the Nationalist Democratic Action party (ADN) and former dictator (1971–78), won 22% of the vote, while the MNR candidate won 18%. At the outset of his government, President Banzer launched a policy of using special police-units to eradicate physically the illegal coca of the Chapare region. The MIR of Jaime Paz Zamora remained a coalition-partner throughout the Banzer government, supporting this policy (called the Dignity Plan).[47] The Banzer government basically continued the free-market and privatization-policies of its predecessor. The relatively robust economic growth of the mid-1990s continued until about the third year of its term in office. After that, regional, global and domestic factors contributed to a decline in economic growth. Financial crises in Argentina and Brazil, lower world prices for export commodities, and reduced employment in the coca sector depressed the Bolivian economy. The public also perceived a significant amount of public sector corruption. These factors contributed to increasing social protests during the second half of Banzer's term.
+
+Between January 1999 and April 2000, large-scale protests erupted in Cochabamba, Bolivia's third largest city, in response to the privatisation of water resources by foreign companies and a subsequent doubling of water prices. On 6 August 2001, Banzer resigned from office after being diagnosed with cancer. He died less than a year later. Vice President Jorge Fernando Quiroga Ramírez completed the final year of his term.
+
+In the June 2002 national elections, former President Gonzalo Sánchez de Lozada (MNR) placed first with 22.5% of the vote, followed by coca-advocate and native peasant-leader Evo Morales (Movement Toward Socialism, MAS) with 20.9%. A July agreement between the MNR and the fourth-place MIR, which had again been led in the election by former President Jaime Paz Zamora, virtually ensured the election of Sánchez de Lozada in the congressional run-off, and on 6 August he was sworn in for the second time. The MNR platform featured three overarching objectives: economic reactivation (and job creation), anti-corruption, and social inclusion.
+
+In 2003 the Bolivian gas conflict broke out. On 12 October 2003 the government imposed martial law in El Alto after 16 people were shot by the police and several dozen wounded in violent clashes. Faced with the option of resigning or more bloodshed, Sánchez de Lozada offered his resignation in a letter to an emergency session of Congress. After his resignation was accepted and his vice president, Carlos Mesa, invested, he left on a commercially scheduled flight for the United States.
+
+The country's internal situation became unfavorable for such political action on the international stage. After a resurgence of gas protests in 2005, Carlos Mesa attempted to resign in January 2005, but his offer was refused by Congress. On 22 March 2005, after weeks of new street protests from organizations accusing Mesa of bowing to U.S. corporate interests, Mesa again offered his resignation to Congress, which was accepted on 10 June. The chief justice of the Supreme Court, Eduardo Rodríguez, was sworn as interim president to succeed the outgoing Carlos Mesa.
+
+Evo Morales won the 2005 presidential election with 53.7% of the votes, an absolute majority, unusual in Bolivian elections. On 1 May 2006, Morales caused controversy when he announced his intent to re-nationalize Bolivian hydrocarbon assets. Fulfilling a campaign promise, on 6 August 2006, Morales opened the Bolivian Constituent Assembly to begin writing a new constitution aimed at giving more power to the indigenous majority.[48]
+
+In August 2007, a conflict which came to be known as The Calancha Case arose in Sucre. Local citizens demanded that an official discussion of the seat of government be included in the agenda of the full body of the Bolivian Constituent Assembly. The people of Sucre wanted to make Sucre the full capital of the country, including returning the executive and legislative branches to the city, but the government rejected the demand as impractical. Three people died in the conflict and as many as 500 were wounded.[49] The result of the conflict was to include text in the constitution stating that the capital of Bolivia is officially Sucre, while leaving the executive and legislative branches in La Paz.  In May 2008, Evo Morales was a signatory to the UNASUR Constitutive Treaty of the Union of South American Nations.
+
+2009 marked the creation of a new constitution and the renaming of the country to the Plurinational State of Bolivia. This also triggered a new general election in which Evo Morales was re-elected with 61.36% of the vote. His party, Movement for Socialism, also won a two-thirds majority in both houses of the National Congress.[50] The previous constitution did not allow for consecutive reelection of a president, but the new constitution allowed for one reelection, and in 2013 the Bolivian Constitutional Court ruled that Morales' first term under the previous constitution, did not count towards his term limit. This allowed Evo Morales to run for a third term in 2014, and he was re-elected with 64.22% of the vote.[51] On 17 October 2015, Morales surpassed Andrés de Santa Cruz's nine years, eight months, and twenty-four days in office and became Bolivia's longest serving president.[52] During his third term, Evo Morales began to plan for a fourth, and the 2016 Bolivian constitutional referendum asked voters to override the constitution and allow Evo Morales to run for an additional term in office. Morales narrowly lost the referendum[53], however in 2017 his party then petitioned the Bolivian Constitutional Court to override the constitution on the basis that the American Convention on Human Rights made term limits a human rights violation.[54] The Inter-American Court of Human Rights determined that term limits are not a human rights violation in 2018,[55][56] however Morales had already been given permission to run for a fourth term in the 2019 elections, and the permission was not retracted.
+
+Amidst allegations that Morales rigged the 2019 Bolivian general election and after three weeks of widespread protests organized to dispute the election,[57] Morales resigned on 10 November 2019. International auditors as well as local investigators and analysts reported findings of irregularities and fraud. [58][59][60] Morales lost support from several key quarters, including trade unions, indigenous organizations, the police, and the military, who recommended his resignation in order to pacify the country.[61] He fled to Mexico and was granted asylum there, along with his vice president and several other members of his government.[62][63] Jeanine Áñez was declared acting president of Bolivia following the constitutional line of succession after the President, Vice President and Head of the Senate resigned.  She was confirmed Interim President by the Constitutional court who declared her succession to be constitutional and automatic after abdication by the previous president and vice president.[64][65] Morales and his supporters argue that the event was a coup d'état. International politicians, scholars and journalists are divided between describing the event as a coup or popular uprising.[66][67][68][69][70][71][72][73] Violent protests against Áñez followed, incited by Morales followers.[74]
+
+Because the election was declared invalid, previously elected members of the House of Deputies and Senate retained their seats. This resulted in Morales' MAS party still holding a majority in both chambers.[75] New elections were scheduled for 3 May 2020.[76] After declaration of a quarantine period to combat coronavirus, however, the Bolivian electoral body, the TSE, made an announcement postponing the election. All major parties agreed with this measure and a date for the new election will be chosen by the legislative assembly based on a public health evaluation at a later date.[77][78]A tentative date was proposed by the TSE as sometime between 7 June and 6 September.[79]
+
+Bolivia is located in the central zone of South America, between 57°26'–69°38'W and 9°38'–22°53'S. With an area of 1,098,581 square kilometres (424,164 sq mi), Bolivia is the world's 28th-largest country, and the fifth largest country in South America,[80] extending from the Central Andes through part of the Gran Chaco, Pantanal and as far as the Amazon. The geographic center of the country is the so-called Puerto Estrella ("Star Port") on the Río Grande, in Ñuflo de Chávez Province, Santa Cruz Department.
+
+The geography of the country exhibits a great variety of terrain and climates. Bolivia has a high level of biodiversity, considered one of the greatest in the world, as well as several ecoregions with ecological sub-units such as the Altiplano, tropical rainforests (including Amazon rainforest), dry valleys, and the Chiquitania, which is a tropical savanna. These areas feature enormous variations in altitude, from an elevation of 6,542 metres (21,463 ft) above sea level in Nevado Sajama to nearly 70 metres (230 ft) along the Paraguay River. Although a country of great geographic diversity, Bolivia has remained a landlocked country since the War of the Pacific. Puerto Suárez, San Matías and Puerto Quijarro are located in the Bolivian Pantanal.
+
+Bolivia can be divided into three physiographic regions:
+
+Bolivia has three drainage basins:
+
+The geology of Bolivia comprises a variety of different lithologies as well as tectonic and sedimentary environments. On a synoptic scale, geological units coincide with topographical units. Most elementally, the country is divided into a mountainous western area affected by the subduction processes in the Pacific and an eastern lowlands of stable platforms and shields.
+
+The climate of Bolivia varies drastically from one eco-region to the other, from the tropics in the eastern llanos to a polar climate in the western Andes. The summers are warm, humid in the east and dry in the west, with rains that often modify temperatures, humidity, winds, atmospheric pressure and evaporation, yielding very different climates in different areas. When the climatological phenomenon known as El Niño[84][85] takes place, it causes great alterations in the weather. Winters are very cold in the west, and it snows in the mountain ranges, while in the western regions, windy days are more common. The autumn is dry in the non-tropical regions.
+
+Bolivia is especially vulnerable to the negative consequences of climate change. Twenty percent of the world's tropical glaciers are located within the country,[86] and are more sensitive to change in temperature due to the tropical climate they are located in. Temperatures in the Andes increased by 0.1 °C per decade from 1939 to 1998, and have begun to triple (0.33 °C) annually from 1980 to 2005,[87] causing glaciers to recede at an accelerated pace and create unforeseen water shortages in Andean agricultural towns. Farmers have taken to temporary city jobs when there is poor yield for their crops, while others have started permanently leaving the agricultural sector and are migrating to nearby towns for other forms of work;[88] some view these migrants as the first generation of climate refugees.[89] Cities that neighboring agricultural land, like El Alto, face the challenge of providing services to the influx of new migrants; because there is no alternative water source, the city's water source is now being constricted.
+
+Bolivia's government and other agencies have acknowledged the need to instill new policies battling the effects of climate change. The World Bank has provided funding through the Climate Investment Funds (CIF) and are using the Pilot Program for Climate Resilience (PPCR II) to construct new irrigation systems, protect riverbanks and basins, and work on building water resources with the help of indigenous communities.[90] Bolivia has also implemented the Bolivian Strategy on Climate Change, which is based on taking action in these four areas:
+
+Bolivia, with an enormous variety of organisms and ecosystems, is part of the "Like-Minded Megadiverse Countries".[92]
+
+Bolivia's variable altitudes, ranging from 90–6,542 metres (295–21,463 ft) above sea level, allow for a vast biologic diversity. The territory of Bolivia comprises four types of biomes, 32 ecological regions, and 199 ecosystems. Within this geographic area there are several natural parks and reserves such as the Noel Kempff Mercado National Park, the Madidi National Park, the Tunari National Park, the Eduardo Avaroa Andean Fauna National Reserve, and the Kaa-Iya del Gran Chaco National Park and Integrated Management Natural Area, among others.
+
+Bolivia boasts over 17,000 species of seed plants, including over 1,200 species of fern, 1,500 species of marchantiophyta and moss, and at least 800 species of fungus. In addition, there are more than 3,000 species of medicinal plants. Bolivia is considered the place of origin for such species as peppers and chili peppers, peanuts, the common beans, yucca, and several species of palm. Bolivia also naturally produces over 4,000 kinds of potatoes.
+
+Bolivia has more than 2,900 animal species, including 398 mammals, over 1,400 birds (about 14% of birds known in the world, being the sixth most diverse country in terms of bird species)[93][unreliable source?], 204 amphibians, 277 reptiles, and 635 fish, all fresh water fish as Bolivia is a landlocked country. In addition, there are more than 3,000 types of butterfly, and more than 60 domestic animals.
+
+Bolivia has gained global attention for its 'Law of the Rights of Mother Earth', which accords nature the same rights as humans.[94]
+
+Bolivia has been governed by democratically elected governments since 1982; prior to that, it was governed by various dictatorships. Presidents Hernán Siles Zuazo (1982–85) and Víctor Paz Estenssoro (1985–89) began a tradition of ceding power peacefully which has continued, although two presidents have stepped down in the face of popular protests: Gonzalo Sánchez de Lozada in 2003 and Carlos Mesa in 2005.
+
+Bolivia's multiparty democracy has seen a wide variety of parties in the presidency and parliament, although the Revolutionary Nationalist Movement, Nationalist Democratic Action, and the Revolutionary Left Movement predominated from 1985 to 2005. On 11 November 2019, all senior governmental positions were vacated following the resignation of Evo Morales and his government. On 13 November 2019, Jeanine Áñez, a former senator representing Beni, declared herself acting president of Bolivia. She is currently the de facto President of Bolivia.
+
+The constitution, drafted in 2006–07 and approved in 2009, provides for balanced executive, legislative, judicial, and electoral powers, as well as several levels of autonomy. The traditionally strong executive branch tends to overshadow the Congress, whose role is generally limited to debating and approving legislation initiated by the executive. The judiciary, consisting of the Supreme Court and departmental and lower courts, has long been riddled with corruption and inefficiency. Through revisions to the constitution in 1994, and subsequent laws, the government has initiated potentially far-reaching reforms in the judicial system as well as increasing decentralizing powers to departments, municipalities, and indigenous territories.
+
+The executive branch is headed by a president and vice president, and consists of a variable number (currently, 20) of government ministries. The president is elected to a five-year term by popular vote, and governs from the Presidential Palace (popularly called the Burnt Palace, Palacio Quemado) in La Paz. In the case that no candidate receives an absolute majority of the popular vote or more than 40% of the vote with an advantage of more than 10% over the second-place finisher, a run-off is to be held among the two candidates most voted.[95]
+
+The Asamblea Legislativa Plurinacional (Plurinational Legislative Assembly or National Congress) has two chambers. The Cámara de Diputados (Chamber of Deputies) has 130 members elected to five-year terms, seventy from single-member districts (circunscripciones), sixty by proportional representation, and seven by the minority indigenous peoples of seven departments. The Cámara de Senadores (Chamber of Senators) has 36 members (four per department). Members of the Assembly are elected to five-year terms. The body has its headquarters on the Plaza Murillo in La Paz, but also holds honorary sessions elsewhere in Bolivia. The Vice President serves as titular head of the combined Assembly.
+
+The judiciary consists of the Supreme Court of Justice, the Plurinational Constitutional Court, the Judiciary Council, Agrarian and Environmental Court, and District (departmental) and lower courts. In October 2011, Bolivia held its first judicial elections to choose members of the national courts by popular vote, a reform brought about by Evo Morales.
+
+The Plurinational Electoral Organ is an independent branch of government which replaced the National Electoral Court in 2010. The branch consists of the Supreme Electoral Court, the nine Departmental Electoral Court, Electoral Judges, the anonymously selected Juries at Election Tables, and Electoral Notaries.[96] Wilfredo Ovando presides over the seven-member Supreme Electoral Court. Its operations are mandated by the Constitution and regulated by the Electoral Regime Law (Law 026, passed 2010). The Organ's first elections were the country's first judicial election in October 2011, and five municipal special elections held in 2011.
+
+Bolivia has its constitutionally recognized capital in Sucre, while La Paz is the seat of government. La Plata (now Sucre) was proclaimed provisional capital of the newly independent Alto Perú (later, Bolivia) on 1 July 1826.[97] On 12 July 1839, President José Miguel de Velasco proclaimed a law naming the city as the capital of Bolivia, and renaming it in honor of the revolutionary leader Antonio José de Sucre.[97] The Bolivian seat of government moved to La Paz at the start of the twentieth century, as a consequence of Sucre's relative remoteness from economic activity after the decline of Potosí and its silver industry and of the Liberal Party in the War of 1899.
+
+The 2009 Constitution assigns the role of national capital to Sucre, not referring to La Paz in the text.[95] In addition to being the constitutional capital, the Supreme Court of Bolivia is located in Sucre, making it the judicial capital. Nonetheless, the Palacio Quemado (the Presidential Palace and seat of Bolivian executive power) is located in La Paz, as are the National Congress and Plurinational Electoral Organ. La Paz thus continues to be the seat of government.
+
+There are 54 prisons in Bolivia, which incarcerate around 8,700 people as of 2010[update]. The prisons are managed by the Penitentiary Regime Directorate (Spanish: Dirección de Régimen Penintenciario). There are 17 prisons in departmental capital cities and 36 provincial prisons.[98]
+
+Despite losing its maritime coast, the so-called Litoral Department, after the War of the Pacific, Bolivia has historically maintained, as a state policy, a maritime claim to that part of Chile; the claim asks for sovereign access to the Pacific Ocean and its maritime space. The issue has also been presented before the Organization of American States; in 1979, the OAS passed the 426 Resolution,[99] which declared that the Bolivian problem is a hemispheric problem. On 4 April 1884, a truce was signed with Chile, whereby Chile gave facilities of access to Bolivian products through Antofagasta, and freed the payment of export rights in the port of Arica. In October 1904, the Treaty of Peace and Friendship was signed, and Chile agreed to build a railway between Arica and La Paz, to improve access of Bolivian products to the ports.
+
+The Special Economical Zone for Bolivia in Ilo (ZEEBI) is a special economic area of 5 kilometres (3.1 miles) of maritime coast, and a total extension of 358 hectares (880 acres), called Mar Bolivia ("Sea Bolivia"), where Bolivia may maintain a free port near Ilo, Peru under its administration and operation[100][unreliable source?] for a period of 99 years starting in 1992; once that time has passed, all the construction and territory revert to the Peruvian government. Since 1964, Bolivia has had its own port facilities in the Bolivian Free Port in Rosario, Argentina. This port is located on the Paraná River, which is directly connected to the Atlantic Ocean.
+
+The dispute with Chile was taken to the International Court of Justice. The court ruled in support of the Chilean position, and declared that although Chile may have held talks about a Bolivian corridor to the sea, the country was not required to actually negotiate one or to surrender its territory.[101]
+
+The Bolivian military comprises three branches: Ejército (Army), Naval (Navy) and Fuerza Aérea (Air Force). The legal age for voluntary admissions is 18; however, when numbers are small the government in the past has recruited people as young as 14.[3] The tour of duty is generally 12 months.
+
+The Bolivian army has around 31,500 men. There are six military regions (regiones militares—RMs) in the army. The army is organized into ten divisions. Although it is landlocked Bolivia keeps a navy. The Bolivian Naval Force (Fuerza Naval Boliviana in Spanish) is a naval force about 5,000 strong in 2008.[102] The Bolivian Air Force ('Fuerza Aérea Boliviana' or 'FAB') has nine air bases, located at La Paz, Cochabamba, Santa Cruz, Puerto Suárez, Tarija, Villamontes, Cobija, Riberalta, and Roboré.
+
+In 2018, Bolivia signed the UN treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons.[103][104]
+
+The Bolivian government annually spends $130 million on defense.[105]
+
+Bolivia has nine departments—Pando, La Paz, Beni, Oruro, Cochabamba, Santa Cruz, Potosí, Chuquisaca, Tarija.
+
+According to what is established by the Bolivian Political Constitution, the Law of Autonomies and Decentralization regulates the procedure for the elaboration of Statutes of Autonomy, the transfer and distribution of direct competences between the central government and the autonomous entities.[106]
+
+There are four levels of decentralization: Departmental government, constituted by the Departmental Assembly, with rights over the legislation of the department. The governor is chosen by universal suffrage. Municipal government, constituted by a Municipal Council, with rights over the legislation of the municipality. The mayor is chosen by universal suffrage. Regional government, formed by several provinces or municipalities of geographical continuity within a department. It is constituted by a Regional Assembly. Original indigenous government, self-governance of original indigenous people on the ancient territories where they live.
+
+Bolivia's estimated 2012 gross domestic product (GDP) totaled $27.43 billion at official exchange rate and $56.14 billion at purchasing power parity. Despite a series of mostly political setbacks, between 2006 and 2009 the Morales administration has spurred growth higher than at any point in the preceding 30 years. The growth was accompanied by a moderate decrease in inequality.[107] A surplus budget of 1.7% (GDP) was obtained by 2012, the government runs surpluses since Morales administration reflecting a prudent economic management.[citation needed]
+
+A major blow to the Bolivian economy came with a drastic fall in the price of tin during the early 1980s, which impacted one of Bolivia's main sources of income and one of its major mining industries.[108] Since 1985, the government of Bolivia has implemented a far-reaching program of macroeconomic stabilization and structural reform aimed at maintaining price stability, creating conditions for sustained growth, and alleviating scarcity. A major reform of the customs service has significantly improved transparency in this area. Parallel legislative reforms have locked into place market-liberal policies, especially in the hydrocarbon and telecommunication sectors, that have encouraged private investment. Foreign investors are accorded national treatment.[109]
+
+In April 2000, Hugo Banzer, the former president of Bolivia, signed a contract with Aguas del Tunari, a private consortium, to operate and improve the water supply in Bolivia's third-largest city, Cochabamba. Shortly thereafter, the company tripled the water rates in that city, an action which resulted in protests and rioting among those who could no longer afford clean water.[110][111] Amidst Bolivia's nationwide economic collapse and growing national unrest over the state of the economy, the Bolivian government was forced to withdraw the water contract.
+
+Bolivia has the second largest natural gas reserves in South America.[112] The government has a long-term sales agreement to sell natural gas to Brazil through 2019. The government held a binding referendum in 2005 on the Hydrocarbon Law.
+
+The US Geological Service estimates that Bolivia has 5.4 million cubic tonnes of lithium, which represent 50%–70% of world reserves. However, to mine for it would involve disturbing the country's salt flats (called Salar de Uyuni), an important natural feature which boosts tourism in the region. The government does not want to destroy this unique natural landscape to meet the rising world demand for lithium.[113] On the other hand, sustainable extraction of lithium is attempted by the government. This project is carried out by the public company "Recursos Evaporíticos" subsidiary of COMIBOL.
+
+It is thought that due to the importance of lithium for batteries for electric vehicles and stabilization of electric grids with large proportions of intermittent renewables in the electricity mix, Bolivia could be strengthened geopolitically. However, this perspective has also been criticized for underestimating the power of economic incentives for expanded production in other parts of the world.[114]
+
+Once Bolivia's government depended heavily on foreign assistance to finance development projects and to pay the public staff. At the end of 2002, the government owed $4.5 billion to its foreign creditors, with $1.6 billion of this amount owed to other governments and most of the balance owed to multilateral development banks. Most payments to other governments have been rescheduled on several occasions since 1987 through the Paris Club mechanism. External creditors have been willing to do this because the Bolivian government has generally achieved the monetary and fiscal targets set by IMF programs since 1987, though economic crises have undercut Bolivia's normally good record. However, by 2013 the foreign assistance is just a fraction of the government budget thanks to tax collection mainly from the profitable exports to Brazil and Argentina of natural gas.
+
+The amount in reserve currencies and gold held by Bolivia's Central Bank advanced from 1.085 billion US dollars in 2000, under Hugo Banzer Suarez's government, to 15.282 billion US dollars in 2014 under Evo Morales' government.
+
+The income from tourism has become increasingly important. Bolivia's tourist industry has placed an emphasis on attracting ethnic diversity.[117] The most visited places include Nevado Sajama, Torotoro National Park, Madidi National Park, Tiwanaku and the city of La Paz.
+
+The best known of the various festivals found in the country is the "Carnaval de Oruro", which was among the first 19 "Masterpieces of the Oral and Intangible Heritage of Humanity", as proclaimed by UNESCO in May 2001.[118]
+
+Bolivia's Yungas Road was called the "world's most dangerous road" by the Inter-American Development Bank, called (El Camino de la Muerte) in Spanish.[119] The northern portion of the road, much of it unpaved and without guardrails, was cut into the Cordillera Oriental Mountain in the 1930s. The fall from the narrow 12 feet (3.7 m) path is as much as 2,000 feet (610 m) in some places and due to the humid weather from the Amazon there are often poor conditions like mudslides and falling rocks.[120] Each year over 25,000 bikers cycle along the 40 miles (64 km) road. In 2018, an Israeli woman was killed by a falling rock while cycling on the road.[121]
+
+The Apolo road goes deep into La Paz. Roads in this area were originally built to allow access to mines located near Charazani. Other noteworthy roads run to Coroico, Sorata, the Zongo Valley (Illimani mountain), and along the Cochabamba highway (carretera).[122] According to researchers with the Center for International Forestry Research (CIFOR), Bolivia's road network was still underdeveloped as of 2014. In lowland areas of Bolivia there is less than 2,000 kilometres (2,000,000 m) of paved road. There have been some recent investments; animal husbandry has expanded in Guayaramerín, which might be due to a new road connecting Guayaramerín with Trinidad.[123]
+
+The General Directorate of Civil Aeronautics (Dirección General de Aeronáutica Civil—DGAC) formerly part of the FAB, administers a civil aeronautics school called the National Institute of Civil Aeronautics (Instituto Nacional de Aeronáutica Civil—INAC), and two commercial air transport services TAM and TAB.
+
+TAM – Transporte Aéreo Militar (the Bolivian Military Airline) was an airline based in La Paz, Bolivia. It was the civilian wing of the 'Fuerza Aérea Boliviana' (the Bolivian Air Force), operating passenger services to remote towns and communities in the North and Northeast of Bolivia. TAM (a.k.a. TAM Group 71) has been a part of the FAB since 1945. The airline company has suspended its operations since 23 September 2019.[124]
+
+Boliviana de Aviación, often referred to as simply BoA, is the flag carrier airline of Bolivia and is wholly owned by the country's government.[125]
+
+A private airline serving regional destinations is Línea Aérea Amaszonas,[126] with services including some international destinations.
+
+Although a civil transport airline, TAB – Transportes Aéreos Bolivianos, was created as a subsidiary company of the FAB in 1977. It is subordinate to the Air Transport Management (Gerencia de Transportes Aéreos) and is headed by an FAB general. TAB, a charter heavy cargo airline, links Bolivia with most countries of the Western Hemisphere; its inventory includes a fleet of Hercules C130 aircraft. TAB is headquartered adjacent to El Alto International Airport. TAB flies to Miami and Houston, with a stop in Panama.
+
+The three largest, and main international airports in Bolivia are El Alto International Airport in La Paz, Viru Viru International Airport in Santa Cruz, and Jorge Wilstermann International Airport in Cochabamba.  There are regional airports in other cities that connect to these three hubs.[127]
+
+Bolivia possesses an extensive but aged rail system, all in 1000 mm gauge, consisting of two disconnected networks.
+
+Bolivia owns a communications satellite which was offshored/outsourced and launched by China, named Túpac Katari 1.[128] In 2015, it was announced that electrical power advancements include a planned $300 million nuclear reactor developed by the Russian nuclear company Rosatom.[129]
+
+Bolivias's drinking water and sanitation coverage has greatly improved since 1990 due to a considerable increase in sectoral investment. However, the country has the continent's lowest coverage levels and services are of low quality. Political and institutional instability have contributed to the weakening of the sector's institutions at the national and local levels.
+
+Two concessions to foreign private companies in two of the three largest cities – Cochabamba and La Paz/El Alto – were prematurely ended in 2000 and 2006 respectively. The country's second largest city, Santa Cruz de la Sierra, manages its own water and sanitation system relatively successfully by way of cooperatives. The government of Evo Morales intends to strengthen citizen participation within the sector. Increasing coverage requires a substantial increase of investment financing.
+
+According to the government the main problems in the sector are low access to sanitation throughout the country; low access to water in rural areas; insufficient and ineffective investments; a low visibility of community service providers; a lack of respect of indigenous customs; "technical and institutional difficulties in the design and implementation of projects"; a lack of capacity to operate and maintain infrastructure; an institutional framework that is "not consistent with the political change in the country"; "ambiguities in the social participation schemes"; a reduction in the quantity and 
+quality of water due to climate change; pollution and a lack of integrated water resources management; and the lack of policies and programs for the reuse of wastewater.[130]
+
+Only 27% of the population has access to improved sanitation, 80 to 88% has access to improved water sources. Coverage in urban areas is bigger than in rural ones.[131]
+
+According to the last two censuses carried out by the Bolivian National Statistics Institute (Instituto Nacional de Estadística, INE), the population increased from 8,274,325 (from which 4,123,850 were men and 4,150,475 were women) in 2001 to 10,059,856 in 2012.[134]
+
+In the last fifty years the Bolivian population has tripled, reaching a population growth rate of 2.25%. The growth of the population in the inter-census periods (1950–1976 and 1976–1992) was approximately 2.05%, while between the last period, 1992–2001, it reached 2.74% annually.
+
+Some 67.49% of Bolivians live in urban areas, while the remaining 32.51% in rural areas. The most part of the population (70%) is concentrated in the departments of La Paz, Santa Cruz and Cochabamba. In the Andean Altiplano region the departments of La Paz and Oruro hold the largest percentage of population, in the valley region the largest percentage is held by the departments of Cochabamba and Chuquisaca, while in the Llanos region by Santa Cruz and Beni. At national level, the population density is 8.49, with variations marked between 0.8 (Pando Department) and 26.2 (Cochabamba Department).
+
+The largest population center is located in the so-called "central axis" and in the Llanos region. Bolivia has a young population. According to the 2011 census, 59% of the population is between 15 and 59 years old, 39% is less than 15 years old. Almost 60% of the population is younger than 25 years of age.
+
+According to a genetic study done on Bolivians, average values of Native American, European and African ancestry are 86%, 12.5%, and 1.5%, in individuals from La Paz and 76.8%, 21.4%, and 1.8% in individuals from Chuquisaca; respectively.[135]
+
+The vast majority of Bolivians are mestizo (with the indigenous component higher than the European one), although the government has not included the cultural self-identification "mestizo" in the November 2012 census.[136]
+There are approximately three dozen native groups totaling approximately half of the Bolivian population – the largest proportion of indigenous people in Latin America. Exact numbers vary based on the wording of the ethnicity question and the available response choices. For example, the 2001 census did not provide the racial category "mestizo" as a response choice, resulting in a much higher proportion of respondents identifying themselves as belonging to one of the available indigenous ethnicity choices. Mestizos are distributed throughout the entire country and make up 26% of the Bolivian population. Most people assume their mestizo identity while at the same time identifying themselves with one or more indigenous cultures. A 2018 estimate of racial classification put mestizo (mixed white and Amerindian) at 68%, indigenous at 20%, white at 5%, cholo at 2%, black at 1%, other at 4%, while 2% were unspecified; 44% attributed themselves to some indigenous group, predominantly the linguistic categories of Quechuas or Aymaras.[3] Whites comprised about 14% of the population in 2006, and are usually concentrated in the largest cities: La Paz, Santa Cruz de la Sierra and Cochabamba, but as well in some minor cities like Tarija and Sucre. The ancestry of Whites and the White ancestry of Mestizos lies within the continents of Europe and Middle East, most notably Spain, Italy, Germany, Croatia, Lebanon and Syria. In the Santa Cruz Department, there are several dozen colonies of German-speaking Mennonites from Russia totaling around 40,000 inhabitants (as of 2012[update]).[137]
+
+Afro-Bolivians, descendants of African slaves who arrived in the time of the Spanish Empire, inhabit the department of La Paz, and are located mainly in the provinces of Nor Yungas and Sud Yungas. Slavery was abolished in Bolivia in 1831.[138] There are also important communities of Japanese (14.000[139]) and Lebanese (12.900[140]).
+
+Indigenous peoples, also called "originarios" ("native" or "original") and less frequently, Amerindians, could be categorized by geographic area, such as Andean, like the Aymaras and Quechuas (who formed the ancient Inca Empire), who are concentrated in the western departments of La Paz, Potosí, Oruro, Cochabamba and Chuquisaca. There also are ethnic populations in the east, composed of the Chiquitano, Chané, Guaraní and Moxos, among others, who inhabit the departments of Santa Cruz, Beni, Tarija and Pando.
+
+There are small numbers of European citizens from Germany, France, Italy and Portugal, as well as from other countries of the Americas, as Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Cuba, Ecuador, the United States, Paraguay, Peru, Mexico and Venezuela, among others. There are important Peruvian colonies in La Paz, El Alto and Santa Cruz de la Sierra.
+
+There are around 140,000 mennonites in Bolivia of Friesian, Flemish and German ethnic origins.[141][142]
+
+The Indigenous peoples of Bolivia can be divided into two categories of ethnic groups: the Andeans, who are located in the Andean Altiplano and the valley region; and the lowland groups, who inhabit the warm regions of central and eastern Bolivia, including the valleys of Cochabamba Department, the Amazon Basin areas of northern La Paz Department, and the lowland departments of Beni, Pando, Santa Cruz, and Tarija (including the Gran Chaco region in the southeast of the country). Large numbers of Andean peoples have also migrated to form Quechua, Aymara, and intercultural communities in the lowlands.
+
+Bolivia has great linguistic diversity as a result of its multiculturalism. The Constitution of Bolivia recognizes 36 official languages besides Spanish: Aymara, Araona, Baure, Bésiro, Canichana, Cavineño, Cayubaba, Chácobo, Chimán, Ese Ejja, Guaraní, Guarasu'we, Guarayu, Itonama, Leco, Machajuyai-Kallawaya, Machineri, Maropa, Mojeño-Ignaciano, Mojeño-Trinitario, Moré, Mosetén, Movima, Pacawara, Puquina, Quechua, Sirionó, Tacana, Tapieté, Toromona, Uru-Chipaya, Weenhayek, Yaminawa, Yuki, Yuracaré, and Zamuco.[2]
+
+Spanish is the most spoken official language in the country, according to the 2001 census; as it is spoken by two-thirds of the population. All legal and official documents issued by the State, including the Constitution, the main private and public institutions, the media, and commercial activities, are in Spanish.
+
+The main indigenous languages are: Quechua (21.2% of the population in the 2001 census), Aymara (14.6%), Guarani (0.6%) and others (0.4%) including the Moxos in the department of Beni.[3]
+
+Plautdietsch, a German dialect, is spoken by about 70,000 Mennonites in Santa Cruz. Portuguese is spoken mainly in the areas close to Brazil.
+
+Religion in Bolivia (2014)[143]
+
+Bolivia is a constitutionally secular state that guarantees the freedom of religion and the independence of government from religion.[144]
+
+According to the 2001 census conducted by the National Institute of Statistics of Bolivia, 78% of the population is Roman Catholic, followed by 19% that are Protestant, as well as a small number of Bolivians that are Orthodox, and 3% non-religious.[145][146]
+
+The Association of Religion Data Archives (relying on the World Christian Database) records that in 2010, 92.5% of Bolivians identified as Christian (of any denomination), 3.1% identified with indigenous religion, 2.2% identified as Bahá'í, 1.9% identified as agnostic, and all other groups constituted 0.1% or less.[147]
+
+Much of the indigenous population adheres to different traditional beliefs marked by inculturation or syncretisim with Christianity. The cult of Pachamama,[148] or "Mother Earth", is notable. The veneration of the Virgin of Copacabana, Virgin of Urkupiña and Virgin of Socavón, is also an important feature of Christian pilgrimage. There also are important Aymaran communities near Lake Titicaca that have a strong devotion to James the Apostle.[149] Deities worshiped in Bolivia include Ekeko, the Aymaran god of abundance and prosperity, whose day is celebrated every 24 January, and Tupá, a god of the Guaraní people.
+
+Approximately 67% of Bolivians live in urban areas,[150] among the lowest proportion in South America. Nevertheless, the rate of urbanization is growing steadily, at around 2.5% annually. According to the 2012 census, there are total of 3,158,691 households in Bolivia – an increase of 887,960 from 2001.[134] In 2009, 75.4% of homes were classified as a house, hut, or Pahuichi; 3.3% were apartments; 21.1% were rental residences; and 0.1% were mobile homes.[151] Most of the country's largest cities are located in the highlands of the west and central regions.
+
+[152]
+
+Bolivian culture has been heavily influenced by the Aymara, the Quechua, as well as the popular cultures of Latin America as a whole.
+
+The cultural development is divided into three distinct periods: precolumbian, colonial, and republican. Important archaeological ruins, gold and silver ornaments, stone monuments, ceramics, and weavings remain from several important pre-Columbian cultures. Major ruins include Tiwanaku, El Fuerte de Samaipata, Inkallaqta and Iskanawaya. The country abounds in other sites that are difficult to reach and have seen little archaeological exploration.[153]
+
+The Spanish brought their own tradition of religious art which, in the hands of local native and mestizo builders and artisans, developed into a rich and distinctive style of architecture, painting, and sculpture known as "Mestizo Baroque". The colonial period produced not only the paintings of Pérez de Holguín, Flores, Bitti, and others but also the works of skilled but unknown stonecutters, woodcarvers, goldsmiths, and silversmiths. An important body of Native Baroque religious music of the colonial period was recovered and has been performed internationally to wide acclaim since 1994.[153]
+
+Bolivian artists of stature in the 20th century include María Luisa Pacheco, Roberto Mamani Mamani, Alejandro Mario Yllanes, Alfredo Da Silva, and Marina Núñez del Prado.
+
+Bolivia has a rich folklore. Its regional folk music is distinctive and varied. The "devil dances" at the annual carnival of Oruro are one of the great folkloric events of South America, as is the lesser known carnival at Tarabuco.[153]
+
+In 2008, following UNESCO standards, Bolivia was declared free of illiteracy, making it the fourth country in South America to attain this status.[154]
+
+Bolivia has public and private universities. Among them: Universidad Mayor, Real y Pontificia de San Francisco Xavier de Chuquisaca USFX – Sucre, founded in 1624; Universidad Mayor de San Andrés UMSA – La Paz, founded in 1830; Universidad Mayor de San Simon UMSS – Cochabamba, founded in 1832; Universidad Autónoma Gabriel René Moreno UAGRM – Santa Cruz de la Sierra, founded in 1880; Universidad Técnica de Oruro UTO – Oruro, founded in 1892; and Universidad Autónoma Tomás Frías UATF – Potosi, founded in 1892.
+
+Based on 2013 The World Factbook estimates, Bolivia is ranked 161st in life expectancy with a number of 68.2 years.[150] Life expectancy for men is 65.4 and for women is 71.1.[150] A study by the United Nations Development Programme and United Nations International Emergency Children's Fund reported over 230 babies died per day in Bolivia through lack of proper care.[155] The majority of the population has no health insurance or access to healthcare.[156] Demographic and Health Surveys has completed five surveys in Bolivia since 1989 on a wide range of topics.[157]
+
+Between 2006 and 2016, extreme poverty in Bolivia fell from 38.2% to 16.8%. Chronic malnutrition in children under five years of age also went down by 14% and the child mortality rate was reduced by more than 50%, according to World Health Organization.[158]
+
+Football is popular. The national team is the Bolivia national football team.
+
+Racquetball is the second most popular sport in Bolivia as for the results in the Odesur 2018 Games held in Cochabamba.[159][160]

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@@ -0,0 +1,270 @@
+Coordinates: 16°42′43″S 64°39′58″W / 16.712°S 64.666°W / -16.712; -64.666
+
+in South America (grey)
+
+Bolivia[10] (/bəˈlɪviə/ (listen) Spanish pronunciation: [bo.ˈli.βja]), officially the Plurinational State of Bolivia (Spanish: Estado Plurinacional de Bolivia Spanish pronunciation: [esˈtaðo pluɾinasjoˈnal de βoˈliβja] (listen)),[11][12] is a landlocked country located in western-central South America. The constitutional capital is Sucre, while the seat of government and executive capital is La Paz. The largest city and principal industrial center is Santa Cruz de la Sierra, located on the Llanos Orientales (tropical lowlands), a mostly flat region in the east of the country.
+
+The sovereign state of Bolivia is a constitutionally unitary state, divided into nine departments. Its geography varies from the peaks of the Andes in the West, to the Eastern Lowlands, situated within the Amazon Basin. It is bordered to the north and east by Brazil, to the southeast by Paraguay, to the south by Argentina, to the southwest by Chile, and to the northwest by Peru. One-third of the country is within the Andean mountain range. With 1,098,581 km2 (424,164 sq mi) of area, Bolivia is the fifth largest country in South America, after Brazil, Argentina, Peru, and Colombia (and alongside Paraguay, one of the only two landlocked countries in the Americas), the 27th largest in the world, the largest landlocked country in the Southern Hemisphere and the world's seventh largest landlocked country, after Kazakhstan, Mongolia, Chad, Niger, Mali and Ethiopia.
+
+The country's population, estimated at 11 million, is multiethnic, including Amerindians, Mestizos, Europeans, Asians and Africans. Spanish is the official and predominant language, although 36 indigenous languages also have official status, of which the most commonly spoken are Guarani, Aymara and Quechua languages.
+
+Before Spanish colonization, the Andean region of Bolivia was part of the Inca Empire, while the northern and eastern lowlands were inhabited by independent tribes. Spanish conquistadors arriving from Cuzco and Asunción took control of the region in the 16th century. During the Spanish colonial period Bolivia was administered by the Royal Audiencia of Charcas. Spain built its empire in large part upon the silver that was extracted from Bolivia's mines.
+After the first call for independence in 1809, 16 years of war followed before the establishment of the Republic, named for Simón Bolívar. Over the course of the 19th and early 20th century Bolivia lost control of several peripheral territories to neighboring countries including the seizure of its coastline by Chile in 1879. Bolivia remained relatively politically stable until 1971, when Hugo Banzer led a coup d'état which replaced the socialist government of Juan José Torres with a military dictatorship headed by Banzer; Torres was murdered in Buenos Aires, Argentina by a right-wing death squad in 1976. Banzer's regime cracked down on leftist and socialist opposition and other forms of dissent, resulting in the torture and deaths of a number of Bolivian citizens. Banzer was ousted in 1978 and later returned as the democratically elected president of Bolivia from 1997 to 2001.
+
+Modern Bolivia is a charter member of the UN, IMF, NAM, OAS, ACTO, Bank of the South, ALBA, and USAN. Bolivia remains the second poorest country in South America.[13] It is a developing country, with a medium ranking in the Human Development Index and a poverty level of 38.6%.[14] Its main economic activities include agriculture, forestry, fishing, mining, and manufacturing goods such as textiles, clothing, refined metals, and refined petroleum. Bolivia is very rich in minerals, including tin, silver, lithium, and copper.
+
+Bolivia is named after Simón Bolívar, a Venezuelan leader in the Spanish American wars of independence.[15] The leader of Venezuela, Antonio José de Sucre, had been given the option by Bolívar to either unite Charcas (present-day Bolivia) with the newly formed Republic of Peru, to unite with the United Provinces of Rio de la Plata, or to formally declare its independence from Spain as a wholly independent state. Sucre opted to create a brand new state and on 6 August 1825, with local support, named it in honor of Simón Bolívar.[16]
+
+The original name was Republic of Bolívar. Some days later, congressman Manuel Martín Cruz proposed: "If from Romulus, Rome, then from Bolívar, Bolivia" (Spanish: Si de Rómulo, Roma; de Bolívar, Bolivia). The name was approved by the Republic on 3 October 1825.[17] In 2009, a new constitution changed the country's official name to "Plurinational State of Bolivia" in recognition of the multi-ethnic nature of the country and the enhanced position of Bolivia's indigenous peoples under the new constitution.[17]
+
+The region now known as Bolivia had been occupied for over 2,500 years when the Aymara arrived. However, present-day Aymara associate themselves with the ancient civilization of the Tiwanaku culture which had its capital at Tiwanaku, in Western Bolivia. The capital city of Tiwanaku dates from as early as 1500 BC when it was a small, agriculturally based village.[18]
+
+The community grew to urban proportions between AD 600 and AD 800, becoming an important regional power in the southern Andes. According to early estimates,[when?] the city covered approximately 6.5 square kilometers (2.5 square miles) at its maximum extent and had between 15,000 and 30,000 inhabitants.[19] In 1996 satellite imaging was used to map the extent of fossilized suka kollus (flooded raised fields) across the three primary valleys of Tiwanaku, arriving at population-carrying capacity estimates of anywhere between 285,000 and 1,482,000 people.[20]
+
+Around AD 400, Tiwanaku went from being a locally dominant force to a predatory state. Tiwanaku expanded its reaches into the Yungas and brought its culture and way of life to many other cultures in Peru, Bolivia, and Chile. Tiwanaku was not a violent culture in many respects. In order to expand its reach, Tiwanaku exercised great political astuteness, creating colonies, fostering trade agreements (which made the other cultures rather dependent), and instituting state cults.[21]
+
+The empire continued to grow with no end in sight. William H. Isbell states "Tiahuanaco underwent a dramatic transformation between AD 600 and 700 that established new monumental standards for civic architecture and greatly increased the resident population."[22] Tiwanaku continued to absorb cultures rather than eradicate them. Archaeologists note a dramatic adoption of Tiwanaku ceramics into the cultures which became part of the Tiwanaku empire. Tiwanaku's power was further solidified through the trade it implemented among the cities within its empire.[21]
+
+Tiwanaku's elites gained their status through the surplus food they controlled, collected from outlying regions and then redistributed to the general populace. Further, this elite's control of llama herds became a powerful control mechanism as llamas were essential for carrying goods between the civic centre and the periphery. These herds also came to symbolize class distinctions between the commoners and the elites. Through this control and manipulation of surplus resources, the elite's power continued to grow until about AD 950. At this time a dramatic shift in climate occurred,[23][page needed] causing a significant drop in precipitation in the Titicaca Basin, believed by archaeologists to have been on the scale of a major drought.
+
+As the rainfall decreased, many of the cities farther away from Lake Titicaca began to tender fewer foodstuffs to the elites. As the surplus of food decreased, and thus the amount available to underpin their power, the control of the elites began to falter. The capital city became the last place viable for food production due to the resiliency of the raised field method of agriculture. Tiwanaku disappeared around AD 1000 because food production, the main source of the elites' power, dried up. The area remained uninhabited for centuries thereafter.[23]
+
+Between 1438 and 1527, the Inca empire expanded from its capital at Cuzco, Peru. It gained control over much of what is now Andean Bolivia and extended its control into the fringes of the Amazon basin.
+
+The Spanish conquest of the Inca empire began in 1524, and was mostly completed by 1533. The territory now called Bolivia was known as Charcas, and was under the authority of the Viceroy of Lima. Local government came from the Audiencia de Charcas located in Chuquisaca (La Plata—modern Sucre). Founded in 1545 as a mining town, Potosí soon produced fabulous wealth, becoming the largest city in the New World with a population exceeding 150,000 people.[24]
+
+By the late 16th century, Bolivian silver was an important source of revenue for the Spanish Empire.[25] A steady stream of natives served as labor force under the brutal, slave conditions of the Spanish version of the pre-Columbian draft system called the mita.[26] Charcas was transferred to the Viceroyalty of the Río de la Plata in 1776 and the people from Buenos Aires, the capital of the Viceroyalty, coined the term "Upper Peru" (Spanish: Alto Perú) as a popular reference to the Royal Audiencia of Charcas. Túpac Katari led the indigenous rebellion that laid siege to La Paz in March 1781,[27] during which 20,000 people died.[28] As Spanish royal authority weakened during the Napoleonic wars, sentiment against colonial rule grew.
+
+The struggle for independence started in the city of Sucre on 25 May 1809 and the Chuquisaca Revolution (Chuquisaca was then the name of the city) is known as the first cry of Freedom in Latin America. That revolution was followed by the La Paz revolution on 16 July 1809. The La Paz revolution marked a complete split with the Spanish government, while the Chuquisaca Revolution established a local independent junta in the name of the Spanish King deposed by Napoleon Bonaparte. Both revolutions were short-lived and defeated by the Spanish authorities in the Viceroyalty of the Rio de La Plata, but the following year the Spanish American wars of independence raged across the continent.
+
+Bolivia was captured and recaptured many times during the war by the royalists and patriots. Buenos Aires sent three military campaigns, all of which were defeated, and eventually limited itself to protecting the national borders at Salta. Bolivia was finally freed of Royalist dominion by Marshal Antonio José de Sucre, with a military campaign coming from the North in support of the campaign of Simón Bolívar. After 16 years of war the Republic was proclaimed on 6 August 1825.
+
+In 1836, Bolivia, under the rule of Marshal Andrés de Santa Cruz, invaded Peru to reinstall the deposed president, General Luis José de Orbegoso. Peru and Bolivia formed the Peru-Bolivian Confederation, with de Santa Cruz as the Supreme Protector. Following tension between the Confederation and Chile, Chile declared war on 28 December 1836. Argentina separately declared war on the Confederation on 9 May 1837. The Peruvian-Bolivian forces achieved several major victories during the War of the Confederation: the defeat of the Argentine expedition and the defeat of the first Chilean expedition on the fields of Paucarpata near the city of Arequipa. The Chilean army and its Peruvian rebel allies surrendered unconditionally and signed the Paucarpata Treaty. The treaty stipulated that Chile would withdraw from Peru-Bolivia, Chile would return captured Confederate ships, economic relations would be normalized, and the Confederation would pay Peruvian debt to Chile. However, the Chilean government and public rejected the peace treaty. Chile organized a second attack on the Confederation and defeated it in the Battle of Yungay. After this defeat, Santa Cruz resigned and went to exile in Ecuador and then Paris, and the Peruvian-Bolivian Confederation was dissolved.
+
+Following the renewed independence of Peru, Peruvian president General Agustín Gamarra invaded Bolivia. On 18 November 1841, the battle de Ingavi took place, in which the Bolivian Army defeated the Peruvian troops of Gamarra (killed in the battle). After the victory, Bolivia invaded Perú on several fronts.  The eviction of the Bolivian troops from the south of Peru would be achieved by the greater availability of material and human resources of Peru; the Bolivian Army did not have enough troops to maintain an occupation. In the district of Locumba – Tacna, a column of Peruvian soldiers and peasants defeated a Bolivian regiment in the so-called Battle of Los Altos de Chipe (Locumba). In the district of Sama and in Arica, the Peruvian colonel José María Lavayén organized a troop that managed to defeat the Bolivian forces of Colonel Rodríguez Magariños and threaten the port of Arica. In the battle of Tarapacá on 7 January 1842, Peruvian militias formed by the commander Juan Buendía defeated a detachment led by Bolivian colonel José María García, who died in the confrontation. Bolivian troops left Tacna, Arica and Tarapacá in February 1842, retreating towards Moquegua and Puno.[29] The battles of Motoni and  Orurillo forced the withdrawal of Bolivian forces occupying Peruvian territory and exposed Bolivia to the threat of counter-invasion. The Treaty of Puno was signed on 7 June 1842, ending the war. However, the climate of tension between Lima and La Paz would continue until 1847, when the signing of a Peace and Trade Treaty became effective.
+
+The estimated population of the main three cities in 1843 was La Paz 300,000, Cochabamba 250,000 and Potosi 200,000.[30]
+
+A period of political and economic instability in the early-to-mid-19th century weakened Bolivia. In addition, during the War of the Pacific (1879–83), Chile occupied vast territories rich in natural resources south west of Bolivia, including the Bolivian coast. Chile took control of today's Chuquicamata area, the adjoining rich salitre (saltpeter) fields, and the port of Antofagasta among other Bolivian territories.
+
+Since independence, Bolivia has lost over half of its territory to neighboring countries.[31] Through diplomatic channels in 1909, it lost the basin of the Madre de Dios River and the territory of the Purus in the Amazon, yielding 250,000 km² to Peru.[32] It also lost the state of Acre, in the Acre War, important because this region was known for its production of rubber. Peasants and the Bolivian army fought briefly but after a few victories, and facing the prospect of a total war against Brazil, it was forced to sign the Treaty of Petrópolis in 1903, in which Bolivia lost this rich territory. Popular myth has it that Bolivian president Mariano Melgarejo (1864–71) traded the land for what he called "a magnificent white horse" and Acre was subsequently flooded by Brazilians, which ultimately led to confrontation and fear of war with Brazil.[citation needed]
+
+In the late 19th century, an increase in the world price of silver brought Bolivia relative prosperity and political stability.
+
+During the early 20th century, tin replaced silver as the country's most important source of wealth. A succession of governments controlled by the economic and social elite followed laissez-faire capitalist policies through the first 30 years of the 20th century.[33]
+
+Living conditions of the native people, who constitute most of the population, remained deplorable. With work opportunities limited to primitive conditions in the mines and in large estates having nearly feudal status, they had no access to education, economic opportunity, and political participation. Bolivia's defeat by Paraguay in the Chaco War (1932–35), where Bolivia lost a great part of the Gran Chaco region in dispute, marked a turning-point.[34][35][36]
+
+The Revolutionary Nationalist Movement (MNR), the most historic political party, emerged as a broad-based party. Denied its victory in the 1951 presidential elections, the MNR led a successful revolution in 1952. Under President Víctor Paz Estenssoro, the MNR, having strong popular pressure, introduced universal suffrage into his political platform and carried out a sweeping land-reform promoting rural education and nationalization of the country's largest tin mines.
+
+Twelve years of tumultuous rule left the MNR divided. In 1964, a military junta overthrew President Estenssoro at the outset of his third term. The 1969 death of President René Barrientos Ortuño, a former member of the junta who was elected president in 1966, led to a succession of weak governments. Alarmed by the rising Popular Assembly and the increase in the popularity of President Juan José Torres, the military, the MNR, and others installed Colonel (later General) Hugo Banzer Suárez as president in 1971. He returned to the presidency in 1997 through 2001. Juan José Torres, who had fled Bolivia, was kidnapped and assassinated in 1976 as part of Operation Condor, the U.S.-supported campaign of political repression by South American right-wing dictators.[37]
+
+The United States' Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) financed and trained the Bolivian military dictatorship in the 1960s. The revolutionary leader Che Guevara was killed by a team of CIA officers and members of the Bolivian Army on 9 October 1967, in Bolivia. Félix Rodríguez was a CIA officer on the team with the Bolivian Army that captured and shot Guevara.[38] Rodriguez said that after he received a Bolivian presidential execution order, he told "the soldier who pulled the trigger to aim carefully, to remain consistent with the Bolivian government's story that Che had been killed in action during a clash with the Bolivian army." Rodriguez said the US government had wanted Che in Panama, and "I could have tried to falsify the command to the troops, and got Che to Panama as the US government said they had wanted", but that he had chosen to "let history run its course" as desired by Bolivia.[39]
+
+Elections in 1979 and 1981 were inconclusive and marked by fraud. There were coups d'état, counter-coups, and caretaker governments. In 1980, General Luis García Meza Tejada carried out a ruthless and violent coup d'état that did not have popular support. He pacified the people by promising to remain in power only for one year. At the end of the year, he staged a televised rally to claim popular support and announced, "Bueno, me quedo", or, "All right; I'll stay [in office]."[40] After a military rebellion forced out Meza in 1981, three other military governments in 14 months struggled with Bolivia's growing problems. Unrest forced the military to convoke the Congress, elected in 1980, and allow it to choose a new chief executive. In October 1982, Hernán Siles Zuazo again became president, 22 years after the end of his first term of office (1956–60).
+
+In 1993, Gonzalo Sánchez de Lozada was elected president in alliance with the Tupac Katari Revolutionary Liberation Movement, which inspired indigenous-sensitive and multicultural-aware policies.[41] Sánchez de Lozada pursued an aggressive economic and social reform agenda. The most dramatic reform was privatization under the "capitalization" program, under which investors, typically foreign, acquired 50% ownership and management control of public enterprises in return for agreed upon capital investments.[42][43] In 1993, Sanchez de Lozada introduced the Plan de Todos, which led to the decentralization of government, introduction of intercultural bilingual education, implementation of agrarian legislation, and privatization of state owned businesses. The plan explicitly stated that Bolivian citizens would own a minimum of 51% of enterprises; under the plan, most state-owned enterprises (SOEs), though not mines, were sold.[44] This privatization of SOEs led to a neoliberal structuring.[45]
+
+The reforms and economic restructuring were strongly opposed by certain segments of society, which instigated frequent and sometimes violent protests, particularly in La Paz and the Chapare coca-growing region, from 1994 through 1996. The indigenous population of the Andean region was not able to benefit from government reforms.[46] During this time, the umbrella labor-organization of Bolivia, the Central Obrera Boliviana (COB), became increasingly unable to effectively challenge government policy. A teachers' strike in 1995 was defeated because the COB could not marshal the support of many of its members, including construction and factory workers.
+
+In the 1997 elections, General Hugo Banzer, leader of the Nationalist Democratic Action party (ADN) and former dictator (1971–78), won 22% of the vote, while the MNR candidate won 18%. At the outset of his government, President Banzer launched a policy of using special police-units to eradicate physically the illegal coca of the Chapare region. The MIR of Jaime Paz Zamora remained a coalition-partner throughout the Banzer government, supporting this policy (called the Dignity Plan).[47] The Banzer government basically continued the free-market and privatization-policies of its predecessor. The relatively robust economic growth of the mid-1990s continued until about the third year of its term in office. After that, regional, global and domestic factors contributed to a decline in economic growth. Financial crises in Argentina and Brazil, lower world prices for export commodities, and reduced employment in the coca sector depressed the Bolivian economy. The public also perceived a significant amount of public sector corruption. These factors contributed to increasing social protests during the second half of Banzer's term.
+
+Between January 1999 and April 2000, large-scale protests erupted in Cochabamba, Bolivia's third largest city, in response to the privatisation of water resources by foreign companies and a subsequent doubling of water prices. On 6 August 2001, Banzer resigned from office after being diagnosed with cancer. He died less than a year later. Vice President Jorge Fernando Quiroga Ramírez completed the final year of his term.
+
+In the June 2002 national elections, former President Gonzalo Sánchez de Lozada (MNR) placed first with 22.5% of the vote, followed by coca-advocate and native peasant-leader Evo Morales (Movement Toward Socialism, MAS) with 20.9%. A July agreement between the MNR and the fourth-place MIR, which had again been led in the election by former President Jaime Paz Zamora, virtually ensured the election of Sánchez de Lozada in the congressional run-off, and on 6 August he was sworn in for the second time. The MNR platform featured three overarching objectives: economic reactivation (and job creation), anti-corruption, and social inclusion.
+
+In 2003 the Bolivian gas conflict broke out. On 12 October 2003 the government imposed martial law in El Alto after 16 people were shot by the police and several dozen wounded in violent clashes. Faced with the option of resigning or more bloodshed, Sánchez de Lozada offered his resignation in a letter to an emergency session of Congress. After his resignation was accepted and his vice president, Carlos Mesa, invested, he left on a commercially scheduled flight for the United States.
+
+The country's internal situation became unfavorable for such political action on the international stage. After a resurgence of gas protests in 2005, Carlos Mesa attempted to resign in January 2005, but his offer was refused by Congress. On 22 March 2005, after weeks of new street protests from organizations accusing Mesa of bowing to U.S. corporate interests, Mesa again offered his resignation to Congress, which was accepted on 10 June. The chief justice of the Supreme Court, Eduardo Rodríguez, was sworn as interim president to succeed the outgoing Carlos Mesa.
+
+Evo Morales won the 2005 presidential election with 53.7% of the votes, an absolute majority, unusual in Bolivian elections. On 1 May 2006, Morales caused controversy when he announced his intent to re-nationalize Bolivian hydrocarbon assets. Fulfilling a campaign promise, on 6 August 2006, Morales opened the Bolivian Constituent Assembly to begin writing a new constitution aimed at giving more power to the indigenous majority.[48]
+
+In August 2007, a conflict which came to be known as The Calancha Case arose in Sucre. Local citizens demanded that an official discussion of the seat of government be included in the agenda of the full body of the Bolivian Constituent Assembly. The people of Sucre wanted to make Sucre the full capital of the country, including returning the executive and legislative branches to the city, but the government rejected the demand as impractical. Three people died in the conflict and as many as 500 were wounded.[49] The result of the conflict was to include text in the constitution stating that the capital of Bolivia is officially Sucre, while leaving the executive and legislative branches in La Paz.  In May 2008, Evo Morales was a signatory to the UNASUR Constitutive Treaty of the Union of South American Nations.
+
+2009 marked the creation of a new constitution and the renaming of the country to the Plurinational State of Bolivia. This also triggered a new general election in which Evo Morales was re-elected with 61.36% of the vote. His party, Movement for Socialism, also won a two-thirds majority in both houses of the National Congress.[50] The previous constitution did not allow for consecutive reelection of a president, but the new constitution allowed for one reelection, and in 2013 the Bolivian Constitutional Court ruled that Morales' first term under the previous constitution, did not count towards his term limit. This allowed Evo Morales to run for a third term in 2014, and he was re-elected with 64.22% of the vote.[51] On 17 October 2015, Morales surpassed Andrés de Santa Cruz's nine years, eight months, and twenty-four days in office and became Bolivia's longest serving president.[52] During his third term, Evo Morales began to plan for a fourth, and the 2016 Bolivian constitutional referendum asked voters to override the constitution and allow Evo Morales to run for an additional term in office. Morales narrowly lost the referendum[53], however in 2017 his party then petitioned the Bolivian Constitutional Court to override the constitution on the basis that the American Convention on Human Rights made term limits a human rights violation.[54] The Inter-American Court of Human Rights determined that term limits are not a human rights violation in 2018,[55][56] however Morales had already been given permission to run for a fourth term in the 2019 elections, and the permission was not retracted.
+
+Amidst allegations that Morales rigged the 2019 Bolivian general election and after three weeks of widespread protests organized to dispute the election,[57] Morales resigned on 10 November 2019. International auditors as well as local investigators and analysts reported findings of irregularities and fraud. [58][59][60] Morales lost support from several key quarters, including trade unions, indigenous organizations, the police, and the military, who recommended his resignation in order to pacify the country.[61] He fled to Mexico and was granted asylum there, along with his vice president and several other members of his government.[62][63] Jeanine Áñez was declared acting president of Bolivia following the constitutional line of succession after the President, Vice President and Head of the Senate resigned.  She was confirmed Interim President by the Constitutional court who declared her succession to be constitutional and automatic after abdication by the previous president and vice president.[64][65] Morales and his supporters argue that the event was a coup d'état. International politicians, scholars and journalists are divided between describing the event as a coup or popular uprising.[66][67][68][69][70][71][72][73] Violent protests against Áñez followed, incited by Morales followers.[74]
+
+Because the election was declared invalid, previously elected members of the House of Deputies and Senate retained their seats. This resulted in Morales' MAS party still holding a majority in both chambers.[75] New elections were scheduled for 3 May 2020.[76] After declaration of a quarantine period to combat coronavirus, however, the Bolivian electoral body, the TSE, made an announcement postponing the election. All major parties agreed with this measure and a date for the new election will be chosen by the legislative assembly based on a public health evaluation at a later date.[77][78]A tentative date was proposed by the TSE as sometime between 7 June and 6 September.[79]
+
+Bolivia is located in the central zone of South America, between 57°26'–69°38'W and 9°38'–22°53'S. With an area of 1,098,581 square kilometres (424,164 sq mi), Bolivia is the world's 28th-largest country, and the fifth largest country in South America,[80] extending from the Central Andes through part of the Gran Chaco, Pantanal and as far as the Amazon. The geographic center of the country is the so-called Puerto Estrella ("Star Port") on the Río Grande, in Ñuflo de Chávez Province, Santa Cruz Department.
+
+The geography of the country exhibits a great variety of terrain and climates. Bolivia has a high level of biodiversity, considered one of the greatest in the world, as well as several ecoregions with ecological sub-units such as the Altiplano, tropical rainforests (including Amazon rainforest), dry valleys, and the Chiquitania, which is a tropical savanna. These areas feature enormous variations in altitude, from an elevation of 6,542 metres (21,463 ft) above sea level in Nevado Sajama to nearly 70 metres (230 ft) along the Paraguay River. Although a country of great geographic diversity, Bolivia has remained a landlocked country since the War of the Pacific. Puerto Suárez, San Matías and Puerto Quijarro are located in the Bolivian Pantanal.
+
+Bolivia can be divided into three physiographic regions:
+
+Bolivia has three drainage basins:
+
+The geology of Bolivia comprises a variety of different lithologies as well as tectonic and sedimentary environments. On a synoptic scale, geological units coincide with topographical units. Most elementally, the country is divided into a mountainous western area affected by the subduction processes in the Pacific and an eastern lowlands of stable platforms and shields.
+
+The climate of Bolivia varies drastically from one eco-region to the other, from the tropics in the eastern llanos to a polar climate in the western Andes. The summers are warm, humid in the east and dry in the west, with rains that often modify temperatures, humidity, winds, atmospheric pressure and evaporation, yielding very different climates in different areas. When the climatological phenomenon known as El Niño[84][85] takes place, it causes great alterations in the weather. Winters are very cold in the west, and it snows in the mountain ranges, while in the western regions, windy days are more common. The autumn is dry in the non-tropical regions.
+
+Bolivia is especially vulnerable to the negative consequences of climate change. Twenty percent of the world's tropical glaciers are located within the country,[86] and are more sensitive to change in temperature due to the tropical climate they are located in. Temperatures in the Andes increased by 0.1 °C per decade from 1939 to 1998, and have begun to triple (0.33 °C) annually from 1980 to 2005,[87] causing glaciers to recede at an accelerated pace and create unforeseen water shortages in Andean agricultural towns. Farmers have taken to temporary city jobs when there is poor yield for their crops, while others have started permanently leaving the agricultural sector and are migrating to nearby towns for other forms of work;[88] some view these migrants as the first generation of climate refugees.[89] Cities that neighboring agricultural land, like El Alto, face the challenge of providing services to the influx of new migrants; because there is no alternative water source, the city's water source is now being constricted.
+
+Bolivia's government and other agencies have acknowledged the need to instill new policies battling the effects of climate change. The World Bank has provided funding through the Climate Investment Funds (CIF) and are using the Pilot Program for Climate Resilience (PPCR II) to construct new irrigation systems, protect riverbanks and basins, and work on building water resources with the help of indigenous communities.[90] Bolivia has also implemented the Bolivian Strategy on Climate Change, which is based on taking action in these four areas:
+
+Bolivia, with an enormous variety of organisms and ecosystems, is part of the "Like-Minded Megadiverse Countries".[92]
+
+Bolivia's variable altitudes, ranging from 90–6,542 metres (295–21,463 ft) above sea level, allow for a vast biologic diversity. The territory of Bolivia comprises four types of biomes, 32 ecological regions, and 199 ecosystems. Within this geographic area there are several natural parks and reserves such as the Noel Kempff Mercado National Park, the Madidi National Park, the Tunari National Park, the Eduardo Avaroa Andean Fauna National Reserve, and the Kaa-Iya del Gran Chaco National Park and Integrated Management Natural Area, among others.
+
+Bolivia boasts over 17,000 species of seed plants, including over 1,200 species of fern, 1,500 species of marchantiophyta and moss, and at least 800 species of fungus. In addition, there are more than 3,000 species of medicinal plants. Bolivia is considered the place of origin for such species as peppers and chili peppers, peanuts, the common beans, yucca, and several species of palm. Bolivia also naturally produces over 4,000 kinds of potatoes.
+
+Bolivia has more than 2,900 animal species, including 398 mammals, over 1,400 birds (about 14% of birds known in the world, being the sixth most diverse country in terms of bird species)[93][unreliable source?], 204 amphibians, 277 reptiles, and 635 fish, all fresh water fish as Bolivia is a landlocked country. In addition, there are more than 3,000 types of butterfly, and more than 60 domestic animals.
+
+Bolivia has gained global attention for its 'Law of the Rights of Mother Earth', which accords nature the same rights as humans.[94]
+
+Bolivia has been governed by democratically elected governments since 1982; prior to that, it was governed by various dictatorships. Presidents Hernán Siles Zuazo (1982–85) and Víctor Paz Estenssoro (1985–89) began a tradition of ceding power peacefully which has continued, although two presidents have stepped down in the face of popular protests: Gonzalo Sánchez de Lozada in 2003 and Carlos Mesa in 2005.
+
+Bolivia's multiparty democracy has seen a wide variety of parties in the presidency and parliament, although the Revolutionary Nationalist Movement, Nationalist Democratic Action, and the Revolutionary Left Movement predominated from 1985 to 2005. On 11 November 2019, all senior governmental positions were vacated following the resignation of Evo Morales and his government. On 13 November 2019, Jeanine Áñez, a former senator representing Beni, declared herself acting president of Bolivia. She is currently the de facto President of Bolivia.
+
+The constitution, drafted in 2006–07 and approved in 2009, provides for balanced executive, legislative, judicial, and electoral powers, as well as several levels of autonomy. The traditionally strong executive branch tends to overshadow the Congress, whose role is generally limited to debating and approving legislation initiated by the executive. The judiciary, consisting of the Supreme Court and departmental and lower courts, has long been riddled with corruption and inefficiency. Through revisions to the constitution in 1994, and subsequent laws, the government has initiated potentially far-reaching reforms in the judicial system as well as increasing decentralizing powers to departments, municipalities, and indigenous territories.
+
+The executive branch is headed by a president and vice president, and consists of a variable number (currently, 20) of government ministries. The president is elected to a five-year term by popular vote, and governs from the Presidential Palace (popularly called the Burnt Palace, Palacio Quemado) in La Paz. In the case that no candidate receives an absolute majority of the popular vote or more than 40% of the vote with an advantage of more than 10% over the second-place finisher, a run-off is to be held among the two candidates most voted.[95]
+
+The Asamblea Legislativa Plurinacional (Plurinational Legislative Assembly or National Congress) has two chambers. The Cámara de Diputados (Chamber of Deputies) has 130 members elected to five-year terms, seventy from single-member districts (circunscripciones), sixty by proportional representation, and seven by the minority indigenous peoples of seven departments. The Cámara de Senadores (Chamber of Senators) has 36 members (four per department). Members of the Assembly are elected to five-year terms. The body has its headquarters on the Plaza Murillo in La Paz, but also holds honorary sessions elsewhere in Bolivia. The Vice President serves as titular head of the combined Assembly.
+
+The judiciary consists of the Supreme Court of Justice, the Plurinational Constitutional Court, the Judiciary Council, Agrarian and Environmental Court, and District (departmental) and lower courts. In October 2011, Bolivia held its first judicial elections to choose members of the national courts by popular vote, a reform brought about by Evo Morales.
+
+The Plurinational Electoral Organ is an independent branch of government which replaced the National Electoral Court in 2010. The branch consists of the Supreme Electoral Court, the nine Departmental Electoral Court, Electoral Judges, the anonymously selected Juries at Election Tables, and Electoral Notaries.[96] Wilfredo Ovando presides over the seven-member Supreme Electoral Court. Its operations are mandated by the Constitution and regulated by the Electoral Regime Law (Law 026, passed 2010). The Organ's first elections were the country's first judicial election in October 2011, and five municipal special elections held in 2011.
+
+Bolivia has its constitutionally recognized capital in Sucre, while La Paz is the seat of government. La Plata (now Sucre) was proclaimed provisional capital of the newly independent Alto Perú (later, Bolivia) on 1 July 1826.[97] On 12 July 1839, President José Miguel de Velasco proclaimed a law naming the city as the capital of Bolivia, and renaming it in honor of the revolutionary leader Antonio José de Sucre.[97] The Bolivian seat of government moved to La Paz at the start of the twentieth century, as a consequence of Sucre's relative remoteness from economic activity after the decline of Potosí and its silver industry and of the Liberal Party in the War of 1899.
+
+The 2009 Constitution assigns the role of national capital to Sucre, not referring to La Paz in the text.[95] In addition to being the constitutional capital, the Supreme Court of Bolivia is located in Sucre, making it the judicial capital. Nonetheless, the Palacio Quemado (the Presidential Palace and seat of Bolivian executive power) is located in La Paz, as are the National Congress and Plurinational Electoral Organ. La Paz thus continues to be the seat of government.
+
+There are 54 prisons in Bolivia, which incarcerate around 8,700 people as of 2010[update]. The prisons are managed by the Penitentiary Regime Directorate (Spanish: Dirección de Régimen Penintenciario). There are 17 prisons in departmental capital cities and 36 provincial prisons.[98]
+
+Despite losing its maritime coast, the so-called Litoral Department, after the War of the Pacific, Bolivia has historically maintained, as a state policy, a maritime claim to that part of Chile; the claim asks for sovereign access to the Pacific Ocean and its maritime space. The issue has also been presented before the Organization of American States; in 1979, the OAS passed the 426 Resolution,[99] which declared that the Bolivian problem is a hemispheric problem. On 4 April 1884, a truce was signed with Chile, whereby Chile gave facilities of access to Bolivian products through Antofagasta, and freed the payment of export rights in the port of Arica. In October 1904, the Treaty of Peace and Friendship was signed, and Chile agreed to build a railway between Arica and La Paz, to improve access of Bolivian products to the ports.
+
+The Special Economical Zone for Bolivia in Ilo (ZEEBI) is a special economic area of 5 kilometres (3.1 miles) of maritime coast, and a total extension of 358 hectares (880 acres), called Mar Bolivia ("Sea Bolivia"), where Bolivia may maintain a free port near Ilo, Peru under its administration and operation[100][unreliable source?] for a period of 99 years starting in 1992; once that time has passed, all the construction and territory revert to the Peruvian government. Since 1964, Bolivia has had its own port facilities in the Bolivian Free Port in Rosario, Argentina. This port is located on the Paraná River, which is directly connected to the Atlantic Ocean.
+
+The dispute with Chile was taken to the International Court of Justice. The court ruled in support of the Chilean position, and declared that although Chile may have held talks about a Bolivian corridor to the sea, the country was not required to actually negotiate one or to surrender its territory.[101]
+
+The Bolivian military comprises three branches: Ejército (Army), Naval (Navy) and Fuerza Aérea (Air Force). The legal age for voluntary admissions is 18; however, when numbers are small the government in the past has recruited people as young as 14.[3] The tour of duty is generally 12 months.
+
+The Bolivian army has around 31,500 men. There are six military regions (regiones militares—RMs) in the army. The army is organized into ten divisions. Although it is landlocked Bolivia keeps a navy. The Bolivian Naval Force (Fuerza Naval Boliviana in Spanish) is a naval force about 5,000 strong in 2008.[102] The Bolivian Air Force ('Fuerza Aérea Boliviana' or 'FAB') has nine air bases, located at La Paz, Cochabamba, Santa Cruz, Puerto Suárez, Tarija, Villamontes, Cobija, Riberalta, and Roboré.
+
+In 2018, Bolivia signed the UN treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons.[103][104]
+
+The Bolivian government annually spends $130 million on defense.[105]
+
+Bolivia has nine departments—Pando, La Paz, Beni, Oruro, Cochabamba, Santa Cruz, Potosí, Chuquisaca, Tarija.
+
+According to what is established by the Bolivian Political Constitution, the Law of Autonomies and Decentralization regulates the procedure for the elaboration of Statutes of Autonomy, the transfer and distribution of direct competences between the central government and the autonomous entities.[106]
+
+There are four levels of decentralization: Departmental government, constituted by the Departmental Assembly, with rights over the legislation of the department. The governor is chosen by universal suffrage. Municipal government, constituted by a Municipal Council, with rights over the legislation of the municipality. The mayor is chosen by universal suffrage. Regional government, formed by several provinces or municipalities of geographical continuity within a department. It is constituted by a Regional Assembly. Original indigenous government, self-governance of original indigenous people on the ancient territories where they live.
+
+Bolivia's estimated 2012 gross domestic product (GDP) totaled $27.43 billion at official exchange rate and $56.14 billion at purchasing power parity. Despite a series of mostly political setbacks, between 2006 and 2009 the Morales administration has spurred growth higher than at any point in the preceding 30 years. The growth was accompanied by a moderate decrease in inequality.[107] A surplus budget of 1.7% (GDP) was obtained by 2012, the government runs surpluses since Morales administration reflecting a prudent economic management.[citation needed]
+
+A major blow to the Bolivian economy came with a drastic fall in the price of tin during the early 1980s, which impacted one of Bolivia's main sources of income and one of its major mining industries.[108] Since 1985, the government of Bolivia has implemented a far-reaching program of macroeconomic stabilization and structural reform aimed at maintaining price stability, creating conditions for sustained growth, and alleviating scarcity. A major reform of the customs service has significantly improved transparency in this area. Parallel legislative reforms have locked into place market-liberal policies, especially in the hydrocarbon and telecommunication sectors, that have encouraged private investment. Foreign investors are accorded national treatment.[109]
+
+In April 2000, Hugo Banzer, the former president of Bolivia, signed a contract with Aguas del Tunari, a private consortium, to operate and improve the water supply in Bolivia's third-largest city, Cochabamba. Shortly thereafter, the company tripled the water rates in that city, an action which resulted in protests and rioting among those who could no longer afford clean water.[110][111] Amidst Bolivia's nationwide economic collapse and growing national unrest over the state of the economy, the Bolivian government was forced to withdraw the water contract.
+
+Bolivia has the second largest natural gas reserves in South America.[112] The government has a long-term sales agreement to sell natural gas to Brazil through 2019. The government held a binding referendum in 2005 on the Hydrocarbon Law.
+
+The US Geological Service estimates that Bolivia has 5.4 million cubic tonnes of lithium, which represent 50%–70% of world reserves. However, to mine for it would involve disturbing the country's salt flats (called Salar de Uyuni), an important natural feature which boosts tourism in the region. The government does not want to destroy this unique natural landscape to meet the rising world demand for lithium.[113] On the other hand, sustainable extraction of lithium is attempted by the government. This project is carried out by the public company "Recursos Evaporíticos" subsidiary of COMIBOL.
+
+It is thought that due to the importance of lithium for batteries for electric vehicles and stabilization of electric grids with large proportions of intermittent renewables in the electricity mix, Bolivia could be strengthened geopolitically. However, this perspective has also been criticized for underestimating the power of economic incentives for expanded production in other parts of the world.[114]
+
+Once Bolivia's government depended heavily on foreign assistance to finance development projects and to pay the public staff. At the end of 2002, the government owed $4.5 billion to its foreign creditors, with $1.6 billion of this amount owed to other governments and most of the balance owed to multilateral development banks. Most payments to other governments have been rescheduled on several occasions since 1987 through the Paris Club mechanism. External creditors have been willing to do this because the Bolivian government has generally achieved the monetary and fiscal targets set by IMF programs since 1987, though economic crises have undercut Bolivia's normally good record. However, by 2013 the foreign assistance is just a fraction of the government budget thanks to tax collection mainly from the profitable exports to Brazil and Argentina of natural gas.
+
+The amount in reserve currencies and gold held by Bolivia's Central Bank advanced from 1.085 billion US dollars in 2000, under Hugo Banzer Suarez's government, to 15.282 billion US dollars in 2014 under Evo Morales' government.
+
+The income from tourism has become increasingly important. Bolivia's tourist industry has placed an emphasis on attracting ethnic diversity.[117] The most visited places include Nevado Sajama, Torotoro National Park, Madidi National Park, Tiwanaku and the city of La Paz.
+
+The best known of the various festivals found in the country is the "Carnaval de Oruro", which was among the first 19 "Masterpieces of the Oral and Intangible Heritage of Humanity", as proclaimed by UNESCO in May 2001.[118]
+
+Bolivia's Yungas Road was called the "world's most dangerous road" by the Inter-American Development Bank, called (El Camino de la Muerte) in Spanish.[119] The northern portion of the road, much of it unpaved and without guardrails, was cut into the Cordillera Oriental Mountain in the 1930s. The fall from the narrow 12 feet (3.7 m) path is as much as 2,000 feet (610 m) in some places and due to the humid weather from the Amazon there are often poor conditions like mudslides and falling rocks.[120] Each year over 25,000 bikers cycle along the 40 miles (64 km) road. In 2018, an Israeli woman was killed by a falling rock while cycling on the road.[121]
+
+The Apolo road goes deep into La Paz. Roads in this area were originally built to allow access to mines located near Charazani. Other noteworthy roads run to Coroico, Sorata, the Zongo Valley (Illimani mountain), and along the Cochabamba highway (carretera).[122] According to researchers with the Center for International Forestry Research (CIFOR), Bolivia's road network was still underdeveloped as of 2014. In lowland areas of Bolivia there is less than 2,000 kilometres (2,000,000 m) of paved road. There have been some recent investments; animal husbandry has expanded in Guayaramerín, which might be due to a new road connecting Guayaramerín with Trinidad.[123]
+
+The General Directorate of Civil Aeronautics (Dirección General de Aeronáutica Civil—DGAC) formerly part of the FAB, administers a civil aeronautics school called the National Institute of Civil Aeronautics (Instituto Nacional de Aeronáutica Civil—INAC), and two commercial air transport services TAM and TAB.
+
+TAM – Transporte Aéreo Militar (the Bolivian Military Airline) was an airline based in La Paz, Bolivia. It was the civilian wing of the 'Fuerza Aérea Boliviana' (the Bolivian Air Force), operating passenger services to remote towns and communities in the North and Northeast of Bolivia. TAM (a.k.a. TAM Group 71) has been a part of the FAB since 1945. The airline company has suspended its operations since 23 September 2019.[124]
+
+Boliviana de Aviación, often referred to as simply BoA, is the flag carrier airline of Bolivia and is wholly owned by the country's government.[125]
+
+A private airline serving regional destinations is Línea Aérea Amaszonas,[126] with services including some international destinations.
+
+Although a civil transport airline, TAB – Transportes Aéreos Bolivianos, was created as a subsidiary company of the FAB in 1977. It is subordinate to the Air Transport Management (Gerencia de Transportes Aéreos) and is headed by an FAB general. TAB, a charter heavy cargo airline, links Bolivia with most countries of the Western Hemisphere; its inventory includes a fleet of Hercules C130 aircraft. TAB is headquartered adjacent to El Alto International Airport. TAB flies to Miami and Houston, with a stop in Panama.
+
+The three largest, and main international airports in Bolivia are El Alto International Airport in La Paz, Viru Viru International Airport in Santa Cruz, and Jorge Wilstermann International Airport in Cochabamba.  There are regional airports in other cities that connect to these three hubs.[127]
+
+Bolivia possesses an extensive but aged rail system, all in 1000 mm gauge, consisting of two disconnected networks.
+
+Bolivia owns a communications satellite which was offshored/outsourced and launched by China, named Túpac Katari 1.[128] In 2015, it was announced that electrical power advancements include a planned $300 million nuclear reactor developed by the Russian nuclear company Rosatom.[129]
+
+Bolivias's drinking water and sanitation coverage has greatly improved since 1990 due to a considerable increase in sectoral investment. However, the country has the continent's lowest coverage levels and services are of low quality. Political and institutional instability have contributed to the weakening of the sector's institutions at the national and local levels.
+
+Two concessions to foreign private companies in two of the three largest cities – Cochabamba and La Paz/El Alto – were prematurely ended in 2000 and 2006 respectively. The country's second largest city, Santa Cruz de la Sierra, manages its own water and sanitation system relatively successfully by way of cooperatives. The government of Evo Morales intends to strengthen citizen participation within the sector. Increasing coverage requires a substantial increase of investment financing.
+
+According to the government the main problems in the sector are low access to sanitation throughout the country; low access to water in rural areas; insufficient and ineffective investments; a low visibility of community service providers; a lack of respect of indigenous customs; "technical and institutional difficulties in the design and implementation of projects"; a lack of capacity to operate and maintain infrastructure; an institutional framework that is "not consistent with the political change in the country"; "ambiguities in the social participation schemes"; a reduction in the quantity and 
+quality of water due to climate change; pollution and a lack of integrated water resources management; and the lack of policies and programs for the reuse of wastewater.[130]
+
+Only 27% of the population has access to improved sanitation, 80 to 88% has access to improved water sources. Coverage in urban areas is bigger than in rural ones.[131]
+
+According to the last two censuses carried out by the Bolivian National Statistics Institute (Instituto Nacional de Estadística, INE), the population increased from 8,274,325 (from which 4,123,850 were men and 4,150,475 were women) in 2001 to 10,059,856 in 2012.[134]
+
+In the last fifty years the Bolivian population has tripled, reaching a population growth rate of 2.25%. The growth of the population in the inter-census periods (1950–1976 and 1976–1992) was approximately 2.05%, while between the last period, 1992–2001, it reached 2.74% annually.
+
+Some 67.49% of Bolivians live in urban areas, while the remaining 32.51% in rural areas. The most part of the population (70%) is concentrated in the departments of La Paz, Santa Cruz and Cochabamba. In the Andean Altiplano region the departments of La Paz and Oruro hold the largest percentage of population, in the valley region the largest percentage is held by the departments of Cochabamba and Chuquisaca, while in the Llanos region by Santa Cruz and Beni. At national level, the population density is 8.49, with variations marked between 0.8 (Pando Department) and 26.2 (Cochabamba Department).
+
+The largest population center is located in the so-called "central axis" and in the Llanos region. Bolivia has a young population. According to the 2011 census, 59% of the population is between 15 and 59 years old, 39% is less than 15 years old. Almost 60% of the population is younger than 25 years of age.
+
+According to a genetic study done on Bolivians, average values of Native American, European and African ancestry are 86%, 12.5%, and 1.5%, in individuals from La Paz and 76.8%, 21.4%, and 1.8% in individuals from Chuquisaca; respectively.[135]
+
+The vast majority of Bolivians are mestizo (with the indigenous component higher than the European one), although the government has not included the cultural self-identification "mestizo" in the November 2012 census.[136]
+There are approximately three dozen native groups totaling approximately half of the Bolivian population – the largest proportion of indigenous people in Latin America. Exact numbers vary based on the wording of the ethnicity question and the available response choices. For example, the 2001 census did not provide the racial category "mestizo" as a response choice, resulting in a much higher proportion of respondents identifying themselves as belonging to one of the available indigenous ethnicity choices. Mestizos are distributed throughout the entire country and make up 26% of the Bolivian population. Most people assume their mestizo identity while at the same time identifying themselves with one or more indigenous cultures. A 2018 estimate of racial classification put mestizo (mixed white and Amerindian) at 68%, indigenous at 20%, white at 5%, cholo at 2%, black at 1%, other at 4%, while 2% were unspecified; 44% attributed themselves to some indigenous group, predominantly the linguistic categories of Quechuas or Aymaras.[3] Whites comprised about 14% of the population in 2006, and are usually concentrated in the largest cities: La Paz, Santa Cruz de la Sierra and Cochabamba, but as well in some minor cities like Tarija and Sucre. The ancestry of Whites and the White ancestry of Mestizos lies within the continents of Europe and Middle East, most notably Spain, Italy, Germany, Croatia, Lebanon and Syria. In the Santa Cruz Department, there are several dozen colonies of German-speaking Mennonites from Russia totaling around 40,000 inhabitants (as of 2012[update]).[137]
+
+Afro-Bolivians, descendants of African slaves who arrived in the time of the Spanish Empire, inhabit the department of La Paz, and are located mainly in the provinces of Nor Yungas and Sud Yungas. Slavery was abolished in Bolivia in 1831.[138] There are also important communities of Japanese (14.000[139]) and Lebanese (12.900[140]).
+
+Indigenous peoples, also called "originarios" ("native" or "original") and less frequently, Amerindians, could be categorized by geographic area, such as Andean, like the Aymaras and Quechuas (who formed the ancient Inca Empire), who are concentrated in the western departments of La Paz, Potosí, Oruro, Cochabamba and Chuquisaca. There also are ethnic populations in the east, composed of the Chiquitano, Chané, Guaraní and Moxos, among others, who inhabit the departments of Santa Cruz, Beni, Tarija and Pando.
+
+There are small numbers of European citizens from Germany, France, Italy and Portugal, as well as from other countries of the Americas, as Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Cuba, Ecuador, the United States, Paraguay, Peru, Mexico and Venezuela, among others. There are important Peruvian colonies in La Paz, El Alto and Santa Cruz de la Sierra.
+
+There are around 140,000 mennonites in Bolivia of Friesian, Flemish and German ethnic origins.[141][142]
+
+The Indigenous peoples of Bolivia can be divided into two categories of ethnic groups: the Andeans, who are located in the Andean Altiplano and the valley region; and the lowland groups, who inhabit the warm regions of central and eastern Bolivia, including the valleys of Cochabamba Department, the Amazon Basin areas of northern La Paz Department, and the lowland departments of Beni, Pando, Santa Cruz, and Tarija (including the Gran Chaco region in the southeast of the country). Large numbers of Andean peoples have also migrated to form Quechua, Aymara, and intercultural communities in the lowlands.
+
+Bolivia has great linguistic diversity as a result of its multiculturalism. The Constitution of Bolivia recognizes 36 official languages besides Spanish: Aymara, Araona, Baure, Bésiro, Canichana, Cavineño, Cayubaba, Chácobo, Chimán, Ese Ejja, Guaraní, Guarasu'we, Guarayu, Itonama, Leco, Machajuyai-Kallawaya, Machineri, Maropa, Mojeño-Ignaciano, Mojeño-Trinitario, Moré, Mosetén, Movima, Pacawara, Puquina, Quechua, Sirionó, Tacana, Tapieté, Toromona, Uru-Chipaya, Weenhayek, Yaminawa, Yuki, Yuracaré, and Zamuco.[2]
+
+Spanish is the most spoken official language in the country, according to the 2001 census; as it is spoken by two-thirds of the population. All legal and official documents issued by the State, including the Constitution, the main private and public institutions, the media, and commercial activities, are in Spanish.
+
+The main indigenous languages are: Quechua (21.2% of the population in the 2001 census), Aymara (14.6%), Guarani (0.6%) and others (0.4%) including the Moxos in the department of Beni.[3]
+
+Plautdietsch, a German dialect, is spoken by about 70,000 Mennonites in Santa Cruz. Portuguese is spoken mainly in the areas close to Brazil.
+
+Religion in Bolivia (2014)[143]
+
+Bolivia is a constitutionally secular state that guarantees the freedom of religion and the independence of government from religion.[144]
+
+According to the 2001 census conducted by the National Institute of Statistics of Bolivia, 78% of the population is Roman Catholic, followed by 19% that are Protestant, as well as a small number of Bolivians that are Orthodox, and 3% non-religious.[145][146]
+
+The Association of Religion Data Archives (relying on the World Christian Database) records that in 2010, 92.5% of Bolivians identified as Christian (of any denomination), 3.1% identified with indigenous religion, 2.2% identified as Bahá'í, 1.9% identified as agnostic, and all other groups constituted 0.1% or less.[147]
+
+Much of the indigenous population adheres to different traditional beliefs marked by inculturation or syncretisim with Christianity. The cult of Pachamama,[148] or "Mother Earth", is notable. The veneration of the Virgin of Copacabana, Virgin of Urkupiña and Virgin of Socavón, is also an important feature of Christian pilgrimage. There also are important Aymaran communities near Lake Titicaca that have a strong devotion to James the Apostle.[149] Deities worshiped in Bolivia include Ekeko, the Aymaran god of abundance and prosperity, whose day is celebrated every 24 January, and Tupá, a god of the Guaraní people.
+
+Approximately 67% of Bolivians live in urban areas,[150] among the lowest proportion in South America. Nevertheless, the rate of urbanization is growing steadily, at around 2.5% annually. According to the 2012 census, there are total of 3,158,691 households in Bolivia – an increase of 887,960 from 2001.[134] In 2009, 75.4% of homes were classified as a house, hut, or Pahuichi; 3.3% were apartments; 21.1% were rental residences; and 0.1% were mobile homes.[151] Most of the country's largest cities are located in the highlands of the west and central regions.
+
+[152]
+
+Bolivian culture has been heavily influenced by the Aymara, the Quechua, as well as the popular cultures of Latin America as a whole.
+
+The cultural development is divided into three distinct periods: precolumbian, colonial, and republican. Important archaeological ruins, gold and silver ornaments, stone monuments, ceramics, and weavings remain from several important pre-Columbian cultures. Major ruins include Tiwanaku, El Fuerte de Samaipata, Inkallaqta and Iskanawaya. The country abounds in other sites that are difficult to reach and have seen little archaeological exploration.[153]
+
+The Spanish brought their own tradition of religious art which, in the hands of local native and mestizo builders and artisans, developed into a rich and distinctive style of architecture, painting, and sculpture known as "Mestizo Baroque". The colonial period produced not only the paintings of Pérez de Holguín, Flores, Bitti, and others but also the works of skilled but unknown stonecutters, woodcarvers, goldsmiths, and silversmiths. An important body of Native Baroque religious music of the colonial period was recovered and has been performed internationally to wide acclaim since 1994.[153]
+
+Bolivian artists of stature in the 20th century include María Luisa Pacheco, Roberto Mamani Mamani, Alejandro Mario Yllanes, Alfredo Da Silva, and Marina Núñez del Prado.
+
+Bolivia has a rich folklore. Its regional folk music is distinctive and varied. The "devil dances" at the annual carnival of Oruro are one of the great folkloric events of South America, as is the lesser known carnival at Tarabuco.[153]
+
+In 2008, following UNESCO standards, Bolivia was declared free of illiteracy, making it the fourth country in South America to attain this status.[154]
+
+Bolivia has public and private universities. Among them: Universidad Mayor, Real y Pontificia de San Francisco Xavier de Chuquisaca USFX – Sucre, founded in 1624; Universidad Mayor de San Andrés UMSA – La Paz, founded in 1830; Universidad Mayor de San Simon UMSS – Cochabamba, founded in 1832; Universidad Autónoma Gabriel René Moreno UAGRM – Santa Cruz de la Sierra, founded in 1880; Universidad Técnica de Oruro UTO – Oruro, founded in 1892; and Universidad Autónoma Tomás Frías UATF – Potosi, founded in 1892.
+
+Based on 2013 The World Factbook estimates, Bolivia is ranked 161st in life expectancy with a number of 68.2 years.[150] Life expectancy for men is 65.4 and for women is 71.1.[150] A study by the United Nations Development Programme and United Nations International Emergency Children's Fund reported over 230 babies died per day in Bolivia through lack of proper care.[155] The majority of the population has no health insurance or access to healthcare.[156] Demographic and Health Surveys has completed five surveys in Bolivia since 1989 on a wide range of topics.[157]
+
+Between 2006 and 2016, extreme poverty in Bolivia fell from 38.2% to 16.8%. Chronic malnutrition in children under five years of age also went down by 14% and the child mortality rate was reduced by more than 50%, according to World Health Organization.[158]
+
+Football is popular. The national team is the Bolivia national football team.
+
+Racquetball is the second most popular sport in Bolivia as for the results in the Odesur 2018 Games held in Cochabamba.[159][160]

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+
+
+Bologna (/bəˈloʊnjə/, UK also /bəˈlɒnjə/, Italian: [boˈloɲɲa] (listen); Emilian (Bolognese dialect): Bulåggna [buˈlʌɲːa]; Latin: Bononia) is the capital and largest city of the Emilia-Romagna region in Northern Italy. It is the seventh most populous city in Italy with about 390,000 inhabitants and 150 different nationalities.[4] Its metropolitan area is home to more than 1,000,000 people.[5]
+
+Originally Etruscan, the city has been one of the most important urban centres for centuries, first under the Etruscans (Felsina), then under the Celts as Bona, later under the Romans (Bononia), then again in the Middle Ages, as a free municipality and signoria, when it was among the largest European cities by population. Famous for its towers, churches and lengthy porticoes, Bologna has a well-preserved historical centre, thanks to a careful restoration and conservation policy which began at the end of the 1970s.[6] Home to the oldest university in the world,[7][8][9][10][11] the University of Bologna, established in AD 1088, the city has a large student population that gives it a cosmopolitan character.  In 2000 it was declared European capital of culture[12] and in 2006, a UNESCO "City of Music" and became part of the Creative Cities Network.[13]
+
+Bologna is an important agricultural, industrial, financial and transport hub, where many large mechanical, electronic and food companies have their headquarters as well as one of the largest permanent trade fairs in Europe. According to the most recent data gathered by the European Regional Economic Growth Index (E-REGI) of 2009, Bologna is the first Italian city and the 47th European city in terms of its economic growth rate.[14] As a consequence, Bologna is also one of the wealthiest cities in Italy, often ranking as one of the top cities in terms of quality of life in the country: in 2019 it ranked 14th out of 107 Italian provinces.[15]
+
+Traces of human habitation in the area of Bologna go back to the 3rd millennium BCE, with significant settlements from about the 9th century BCE (Villanova culture). 
+The influence of Etruscan civilization reached the area in the 7th to 6th centuries, and the Etruscan city of Felsina was founded at the site of Bologna by the end of the 6th century.
+By the 4th century BCE, the site was occupied by the Gaulish Boii, and it became a Roman colony and municipium with the name of Bononia in 196 BCE.[16] 
+After the fall of the Roman Empire, Bologna, then a frontier outpost of the Byzantine Exarchate of Ravenna, was repeatedly sacked by the Goths; it is in this period that legendary Bishop Petronius, according to ancient chronicles, rebuilt the ruined town and founded the basilica of Saint Stephen.[17] Petronius is still revered as patron saint of Bologna.
+
+In 727–28, the city was sacked and captured by the Lombards under King Liutprand, becoming part of that kingdom. These Germanic conquerors built an important new quarter, called "addizione longobarda" (Italian meaning "Longobard addition") near the complex of St. Stephen.[18] In the last quarter of the 8th century, Charlemagne, at the request of Pope Adrian I, invaded the Lombard Kingdom, causing its eventual demise. Occupied by Frankish troops in 774 on behalf of the papacy, Bologna remained under imperial authority and prospered as a frontier mark of the Carolingian empire.[19]
+
+After the death of Matilda of Tuscany in 1115, Bologna obtained substantial concessions from Emperor Henry V. However, when Frederick Barbarossa subsequently attempted to strike down the deal, Bologna joined the Lombard League, which then defeated the imperial armies at the Battle of Legnano and established an effective autonomy at the Peace of Constance in 1183. Subsequently, the town began to expand rapidly and became one of the main commercial trade centres of northern Italy thanks to a system of canals that allowed barges and ships to come and go.[20] Believed to have been established in 1088, the University of Bologna is widely considered the world's oldest university in continuous operation.[10][11] The university originated as a centre for the study of medieval Roman law under major glossators, including Irnerius. It numbered Dante, Boccaccio and Petrarch among its students.[21] The medical school was especially renowned.[22] By 1200, Bologna was a thriving commercial and artisanal centre of about 10,000 people.[23]
+
+During a campaign to support the imperial cities of Modena and Cremona against Bologna, Frederick II's son, King Enzo of Sardinia, was defeated and captured on 26 May 1249 at the Battle of Fossalta. Though the emperor demanded his release, Enzo was thenceforth kept a knightly prisoner in Bologna, in a palace that came to be named Palazzo Re Enzo after him. Every attempt to escape or to rescue him failed, and he died after more than 22 years in captivity.[24] After the death of his half-brothers Conrad IV in 1254, Frederick of Antioch in 1256 and Manfred in 1266, as well as the execution his nephew Conradin in 1268, he was the last of the Hohenstaufen heirs.
+
+During the late 1200s, Bologna was affected by political instability when the most prominent families incessantly fought for the control of the town. The free commune was severely weakened by decades of infighting, allowing the Pope to impose the rule of his envoy Cardinal Bertrand du Pouget in 1327. Du Pouget was eventually ousted by a popular rebellion and Bologna became a signoria under Taddeo Pepoli in 1334.[25] By the arrival of the Black Death in 1348, Bologna had 40,000 to 50,000 inhabitants, reduced to just 20,000 to 25,000 after the plague.[26]
+
+In 1350, Bologna was conquered by Archbishop Giovanni Visconti, the new lord of Milan. However, following a rebellion by the town's governor, a renegade member of the Visconti family, Bologna was recuperated to the papacy in 1363 by Cardinal Gil Álvarez Carrillo de Albornoz after a long negotiation involving a huge indemnity paid to Bernabò Visconti, Giovanni's heir, who died in 1354.[25] In 1376, Bologna again revolted against Papal rule and joined Florence in the unsuccessful War of the Eight Saints. However, extreme infighting inside the Holy See after the Western Schism prevented the papacy from restoring its domination over Bologna, so it remained relatively independent for some decades as an oligarchic republic. In 1401, Giovanni I Bentivoglio took power in a coup with the support of Milan, but the Milanese, having turned his back on them and allied with Florence, marched on Bologna and had Giovanni killed the following year. In 1442, Hannibal I Bentivoglio, Giovanni's nephew, recovered Bologna from the Milanese, only to be assassinated in a conspiracy plotted by Pope Eugene IV three years later. But the signoria of the Bentivoglio family was then firmly established, and the power passed to his cousin Sante Bentivoglio, who ruled until 1462, followed by Giovanni II. Giovanni II managed to resist the expansionist designs of Cesare Borgia for some time, but on 7 October 1506, Pope Julius II issued a bull deposing and excommunicating Bentivoglio and placing the city under interdict. When the papal troops, along with a contingent sent by Louis XII of France, marched against Bologna, Bentivoglio and his family fled. Julius II entered the city triumphantly on 10 November.
+
+The period of Papal rule over Bologna (1506–1796) has been generally evaluated by historians as one of severe decline. 
+However, this was not evident in the 1500s, which were marked by some major developments in Bologna. In 1530, Emperor Charles V was crowned in Bologna, the last of the Holy Roman Emperors to be crowned by the pope.
+In 1564, the Piazza del Nettuno and the Palazzo dei Banchi were built, along with the Archiginnasio, the main building of the university. The period of Papal rule saw also the construction of many churches and other religious establishments, and the restoration of older ones. At this time, Bologna had ninety-six convents, more than any other Italian city. Painters working in Bologna during this period established the Bolognese School which includes Annibale Carracci, Domenichino, Guercino and others of European fame.[27]
+
+It was only towards the end of the 16th century that severe signs of decline began to manifest. A series of plagues in the late 16th to early 17th century reduced the population of the city from some 72,000 in the mid-16th century to about 47,000 by 1630.  During the Italian Plague of 1629–31 alone Bologna lost up to a third of its population.[28] In the mid-17th century, population stabilized at roughly 60,000, slowly increasing to some 70,000 by the mid-18th century. The economy of Bologna started to show signs of severe decline as the global centres of trade shifted towards the Atlantic. The traditional silk industry was in a critical state.[29] The university was losing students, who once came from all over Europe, because of the illiberal attitudes of the Church towards culture (especially after the trial of Galileo).[30] Bologna continued to suffer a progressive deindustrialisation also in the 18th century.[31]
+
+In the mid-1700s pope Benedict XIV, a Bolognese, tried to reverse the decline of the city with a series of reforms intended to stimulate the economy and promote the arts. However, these reforms achieved only mixed results. The pope's efforts to stimulate the decaying textile industry had little success, while he was more successful in reforming the tax system, liberalising trade[32] and relaxing the oppressive system of censorship.[33]
+
+The economic and demographic decline of Bologna became even more noticeable starting from the second half of the 18th century. In 1790 the city had 72,000 inhabitants, ranking as the second largest in the Papal States; however this figure had remained unchanged for decades. The economy was stagnant because of Papal policies that distorted trade with heavy custom duties and sold concessions of monopolies to single manufacturers thus lowering competition, depressing productivity and incentivising corruption.[34]
+
+Napoleon entered Bologna on 19 June 1796. Napoleon briefly reinstated the ancient mode of government, giving power to the Senate, which however had to swear fealty to the short lived Cispadane Republic, created as a client state of the French Empire at the congress of Reggio (27 December 1796 – 9 January 1797) but succeeded by the Cisalpine Republic on 9 July 1797, later by the Italian Republic and finally the Kingdom of Italy. 
+After the fall of Napoleon, the Congress of Vienna of 1815 restored Bologna to the Papal States. 
+Papal rule was contested in the uprisings of 1831. The insurrected provinces planned to unite as the Province Italiane Unite with Bologna as capital. Pope Gregory XVI asked for 
+Austrian help against the rebels. Metternich warned French king Louis Philippe I against intervention in Italian affairs, and in the spring of 1831, Austrian forces marched across the Italian peninsula, defeating the rebellion by 26 April.[35]
+
+By the mid 1840s, unemployment levels were very high and traditional industries continued to languish or disappear; Bologna became a city of economic disparity with the top 10 percent of the population living off rent, another 20 percent exercising professions or commerce and 70 percent working in low-paid, often insecure manual jobs. The Papal census of 1841 reported 10,000 permanent beggars and another 30,000 (out of a total population of 70,000) who lived in poverty.[36] 
+In the revolutions of 1848 the Austrian garrisons which controlled the city on behalf of the Pope were temporarily expelled, but eventually came back and crushed the revolutionaries.
+
+Papal rule finally ended in the aftermath of Second War of Italian Independence, when the French and Pidemontese troops expelled the Austrians from Italian lands, on 11 and 12 March 1860, Bologna voted to join the new Kingdom of Italy.
+In the last decades of the 19th century, Bologna once again thrived economically and socially. In 1863 Naples was linked to Rome by railway, and the following year Bologna to Florence.[37] Bolognese moderate agrarian elites, that supported liberal insurgencies against the papacy and were admirers of the British political system and of free trade, envisioned a unified national state that would open a bigger market for the massive agricultural production of the Emilian plains.[38] Indeed, Bologna gave Italy one of its first prime ministers, Marco Minghetti.
+
+After World War I, Bologna was heavily involved in the Biennio Rosso socialist uprisings. As a consequence, the traditionally moderate elites of the city turned their back on the progressive faction and gave their support to the rising Fascist movement of Benito Mussolini.[39] Dino Grandi, a high-ranking Fascist party official and Ministry of Foreign Affairs, remembered for being an Anglophile, was from Bologna. During the interwar years, Bologna developed into an important manufacturing centre for food processing, agricultural machinery and metalworking. The Fascist regime poured in massive investments, for example with the setting up of a giant tobacco manufacturing plant in 1937.[40]
+
+Bologna suffered extensive damage during World War II. The strategic importance of the city as an industrial and railway hub connecting northern and central Italy made it a target for the Allied forces. On 24 July 1943, a massive aerial bombardment destroyed a significant part of the historic city centre and killed about 200 people. The main railway station and adjoining areas were severely hit, and 44% of the buildings in the centre were listed as having been destroyed or severely damaged. The city was heavily bombed again on 25 September. The raids, which this time were not confined to the city centre, left 2,481 people dead and 2,000 injured.[41][42] By the end of the war, 43% of all buildings in Bologna had been destroyed or damaged.[43][44]
+
+After the armistice of 1943, the city became a key centre of the Italian resistance movement. On 7 November 1944, a pitched battle around Porta Lame, waged by partisans of the 7th Brigade of the Gruppi d'Azione Patriottica against Fascist and Nazi occupation forces, did not succeed in triggering a general uprising, despite being one of the largest resistance-led urban conflicts in the European theatre.[45] Resistance forces entered Bologna on the morning of 21 April 1945. By this time, the Germans had already largely left the city in the face of the Allied advance, spearheaded by Polish forces advancing from the east during the Battle of Bologna which had been fought since 9 April. First to arrive in the centre was the 87th Infantry Regiment of the Friuli Combat Group under general Arturo Scattini, who entered the centre from Porta Maggiore to the south. Since the soldiers were dressed in British outfits, they were initially thought to be part of the allied forces; when the local inhabitants heard the soldiers were speaking Italian, they poured out onto the streets to celebrate.[citation needed]
+
+In the post-war years, Bologna became a thriving industrial centre as well as a political stronghold of the Italian Communist Party. Between 1945 and 1999, the city was helmed by an uninterrupted succession of mayors from the PCI and its successors, the Democratic Party of the Left and Democrats of the Left, the first of whom was Giuseppe Dozza. At the end of the 1960s the city authorities, worried by massive gentrification and suburbanisation, asked Japanese starchitect Kenzo Tange to sketch a master plan for a new town north of Bologna; however, the project that came out in 1970 was evaluated as too ambitious and expensive.[46] Eventually the city council, in spite of vetoing Tange's master plan, decided to keep his project for a new exhibition centre and business district.[47] At the end of 1978 the construction of a tower block and several diverse buildings and structures started.[48] In 1985 the headquarters of the regional government of Emilia-Romagna moved in the new district.[49]
+
+In 1977 Bologna was the scene of rioting linked to the Movement of 1977, a spontaneous political movement of the time. The police shooting of a far-left activist, Francesco Lorusso, sparked two days of street clashes.  On 2 August 1980, at the height of the "years of lead", a terrorist bomb was set off in the central railway station of Bologna killing 85 people and wounding 200, an event which is known in Italy as the Bologna massacre. In 1995, members of the neo-fascist group Nuclei Armati Rivoluzionari were convicted for carrying out the attack, while Licio Gelli—Grand Master of the underground Freemason lodge Propaganda Due (P2)—was convicted for hampering the investigation, together with three agents of the secret military intelligence service SISMI (including Francesco Pazienza and Pietro Musumeci). Commemorations take place in Bologna on 2 August each year, culminating in a concert in the main square.
+
+In 1999 the long tradition of left-wing mayors was interrupted by the victory of independent centre-right candidate Giorgio Guazzaloca. However, Bologna reverted to form in 2004 when Sergio Cofferati, a former trade union leader, unseated Guazzaloca. The next centre-left mayor, Flavio Delbono, elected in June 2009, resigned in January 2010 after being involved in a corruption scandal. After a 15-month period in which the city was administered under Anna Maria Cancellieri (as a state-appointed prefect), Virginio Merola was elected as mayor, leading a left-wing coalition comprising the Democratic Party, Left Ecology Freedom and Italy of Values.[50]
+
+Bologna is situated on the edge of the Po Plain at the foot of the Apennine Mountains, at the meeting of the Reno and Savena river valleys. As Bologna's two main watercourses flow directly to the sea, the town lies outside of the drainage basin of the River Po. The Province of Bologna stretches from the western edge of the Po Plain on the border with Ferrara to the Tuscan-Emilian Apennines. The centre of the town is 54 metres (177 ft) above sea level (while elevation within the municipality ranges from 29 metres (95 ft) in the suburb of Corticella to 300 metres (980 ft) in Sabbiuno and the Colle della Guardia). The Province of Bologna stretches from the Po Plain into the Apennines; the highest point in the province is the peak of Corno alle Scale (in Lizzano in Belvedere) at 1,945 metres (6,381 ft) above sea level.
+
+Bologna has a mid-latitude, four-season humid subtropical climate (Köppen climate classification: Cfa).
+
+Annual precipitation oscillates between around 450 mm (18 in) and 900 mm (35 in),[51] with the majority generally falling in spring and autumn. The last major snow event was in November 2012.[52]
+
+The legislative body of the municipality is the City Council (Consiglio Comunale), which is composed by 48 councillors elected every five years with a corrected proportional system (granting the majority to the list or alliance of lists which receives more votes), contextually to the mayoral elections.  The executive body is the City Committee (Giunta Comunale), composed by 12 assessors, that is nominated and presided over by a directly elected Mayor. The current mayor of Bologna is Virginio Merola (PD), elected on 16 May 2011 with the 50.5% of the votes.[56] On 19 June 2016 Merola was re-elected in a second-round ballot with 54.64% of votes.[57]
+
+The municipality of Bologna is subdivided into six administrative Boroughs (Quartieri), down from the former nine before the 2015 administrative reform. Each Borough is governed by a Council (Consiglio) and a President, elected contextually to the city Mayor. The urban organization is governed by the Italian Constitution (art. 114). The Boroughs have the power to advise the Mayor with nonbinding opinions on a large spectrum of topics (environment, construction, public health, local markets) and exercise the functions delegated to them by the City Council; in addition they are supplied with an autonomous founding in order to finance local activities.
+
+Bologna is the capital of the eponymous metropolitan city and of Emilia-Romagna, one of the twenty regions of Italy. While the Province of Bologna has a population of 1,007,644,[58] making it the twelfth most populated province of Italy, Emilia-Romagna ranks as the sixth most populated region of Italy, with about 4.5 million inhabitants, more than 7% of the national total. The seat of the regional government is Fiera District, a tower complex designed by Japanese architect Kenzo Tange in 1985.
+
+According to the last governmental dispositions concerning administrative reorganisation, the urban area of Bologna is one of the 15 Metropolitan municipalities (città metropolitane), new administrative bodies fully operative since 1 January 2015.[59] The new Metro municipalities, giving large urban areas the administrative powers of a province, are conceived for improving the performance of local administrations and to slash local spending by better co-ordinating the municipalities in providing basic services (including transport, school and social programs) and environment protection.[60] In this policy framework, the Mayor of Bologna is designated to exercise the functions of Metropolitan mayor (Sindaco metropolitano), presiding over a Metropolitan Council formed by 18 mayors of municipalities within the Metro municipality.
+
+The Metropolitan City of Bologna is headed by the Metropolitan Mayor (Sindaco metropolitano) and by the Metropolitan Council (Consiglio metropolitano). Since 21 June 2016 Virginio Merola, as mayor of the capital city, has been the mayor of the Metropolitan City.
+
+Until the late 19th century, when a large-scale urban renewal project was undertaken, Bologna was one of the few remaining large walled cities in Europe; to this day and despite having suffered considerable bombing damage in 1944, Bologna's 142 hectares (350 acres) historic centre is Europe's second largest,[61] containing an immense wealth of important medieval, renaissance, and baroque artistic monuments.
+
+Bologna developed along the Via Emilia as an Etruscan and later Roman colony; the Via Emilia still runs straight through the city under the changing names of Strada Maggiore, Rizzoli, Ugo Bassi, and San Felice. Due to its Roman heritage, the central streets of Bologna, today largely pedestrianized, follow the grid pattern of the Roman settlement. The original Roman ramparts were supplanted by a high medieval system of fortifications, remains of which are still visible, and finally by a third and final set of ramparts built in the 13th century, of which numerous sections survive. No more than twenty medieval defensive towers remain out of up to 180 that were built in the 12th and 13th centuries before the arrival of unified civic government. The most famous of the towers of Bologna are the central "Due Torri" (Asinelli and Garisenda), whose iconic leaning forms provide a popular symbol of the town.[62]
+
+The cityscape is further enriched by its elegant and extensive porticoes, for which the city is famous. In total, there are some 38 kilometres (24 miles) of porticoes in the city's historical centre[63] (over 45 km (28 mi) in the city proper), which make it possible to walk for long distances sheltered from the elements.
+
+The Portico di San Luca is possibly the world's longest.[64] It connects Porta Saragozza (one of the twelve gates of the ancient walls built in the Middle Ages, which circled a 7.5 km (4.7 mi) part of the city) with the Sanctuary of the Madonna di San Luca, a church begun in 1723 on the site of an 11th-century edifice which had already been enlarged in the 14th century, prominently located on a hill (289 metres (948 feet)) overlooking the town, which is one of Bologna's main landmarks. The windy 666 vault arcades, almost four kilometres (3,796 m or 12,454 ft) long, effectively links San Luca, as the church is commonly called, to the city centre. Its porticos provide shelter for the traditional procession which every year since 1433 has carried a Byzantine icon of the Madonna with Child attributed to Luke the Evangelist down to the Bologna Cathedral during the Feast of the Ascension.[63]
+
+San Petronio Basilica, built between 1388 and 1479 (but still unfinished), is the tenth-largest church in the world by volume, 132 metres long and 66 metres wide, while the vault reaches 45 metres inside and 51 metres in the facade. With its volume of 258,000 m3, it is the largest (Gothic or otherwise) church built of bricks of the world.[65] The Basilica of Saint Stephen and its sanctuary are among the oldest structures in Bologna, having been built starting from the 8th century, according to the tradition on the site of an ancient temple dedicated to Egyptian goddess Isis. The Basilica of Saint Dominic is an example of Romanic architecture from the 13th century, enriched by the monumental tombs of great Bolognese glossators Rolandino de'Passeggeri and Egidio Foscherari. Basilicas of St Francis, Santa Maria dei Servi and San Giacomo Maggiore are other magnificent examples of 14th-century architecture, the latter also featuring Renaissance artworks such as the Bentivoglio Altarpiece by Lorenzo Costa. Finally, the Church of San Michele in Bosco is a 15th-century religious complex located on a hill not far from the city's historical cente.
+
+In terms of total GDP, the Metropolitan City of Bologna generated a value of about €35 billion ($40.6 billion) in 2017, equivalent to €34,251 ($40,165) per capita, the third highest figure among Italian provinces (after Milan and Bolzano/Bozen).[66]
+
+The economy of Bologna is characterized by a flourishing industrial sector, traditionally centered on the transformation of agricultural and zootechnical products (Granarolo, Segafredo Zanetti, Conserve Italia), machinery (Coesia, IMA), energy (Hera Group), automotive (Ducati, Lamborghini), footwear, textile, engineering, chemical, printing and publishing (il Mulino, Monrif Group, Zanichelli).
+
+In particular, Bologna is considered the centre of the so-called "packaging valley", an area well known for its high concentration of firms specialised in the manufacturing of automatic packaging machines (COESIA, IMA).[67] Furthermore, Bologna is well known for its dense network of cooperatives, a feature that dates back to the social struggles of farmers and workers in the 1800s and that today produces up to a third of its GDP[68] and occupies 265 thousand people in the Emilia-Romagna region.[69]
+
+Bologna is home to the Guglielmo Marconi International Airport, the seventh busiest Italian airport for passenger traffic (8 million passengers handled in 2017).
+
+Bologna Centrale railway station is one of Italy's most important train hubs thanks to the city's strategic location as a crossroad between north–south and east–west routes. It serves 58 million passengers annually.[70] The city hosts several minor railway stations (see List of railway stations in Bologna).
+
+In addition, Bologna San Donato classification yard, with 33 railway tracks, is the largest freight hub in Italy by size and traffic.[71]
+
+The city is also served by a large network of public bus lines, including trolleybus lines, operated since 2012 by Trasporto Passeggeri Emilia-Romagna (TPER).
+
+A large commuter rail service is currently under development (see Bologna metropolitan railway service), and a four line tram network is also planned (see Trams in Bologna).[72]
+
+The average amount of time people spend commuting with public transit in Bologna, for example to and from work, on a weekday is 53 min. 9% of public transit riders ride for more than 2 hours every day. The average amount of time people wait at a stop or station for public transit is 12 min, while 16% of riders wait for over 20 minutes on average every day. The average distance people usually ride in a single trip with public transit is 5.4 km, while 7% travel for over 12 km in a single direction.[73]
+
+At the end of 2016, the city proper had a population of 388,254 (while 1 million live in the greater Bologna area), located in the province of Bologna, Emilia Romagna, of whom 46.7% were male and 53.3% were female. Minors (children ages 18 and younger) totalled 12.86 percent of the population compared to pensioners who number 27.02 percent. This compares with the Italian average of 18.06 percent (minors) and 19.94 percent (pensioners). The average age of Bologna resident is 51 compared to the Italian average of 42. In the five years between 2002 and 2007, the population of Bologna grew by 0.0 percent, while Italy as a whole grew by 3.56 percent.[74] The current birth rate of Bologna is 8.07 births per 1,000 inhabitants compared to the Italian average of 9.45 births.
+
+As of 2009[update], 89.47% of the population was Italian. The largest immigrant group came from other European countries (mostly Romanians and Albanians): 2.82%, East Asia (mostly Filipino): 1.50%, and South Asia (mostly from Bangladesh): 1.39%.[75]
+
+The University of Bologna, conventionally said to have been founded in 1088 by glossators Irnerius and Pepo,[76] is the oldest university in Europe. It was an important centre of European intellectual life during the Middle Ages, attracting scholars from Italy and throughout Europe.[77] The Studium, as it was originally known, began as a loosely organized teaching system with each master collecting fees from students on an individual basis. The location of the early University was thus spread throughout the city, with various colleges being founded to support students of a specific nationality.
+
+In the Napoleonic era, the headquarters of the university were moved to their present location on Via Zamboni, in the north-eastern sector of the city centre. Today, the University's 11 schools, 33 departments, and 93 libraries are spread across the city and include four subsidiary campuses in nearby Cesena, Forlì, Ravenna, and Rimini. Noteworthy students present at the university in centuries past included Dante, Petrarch, Thomas Becket, Pope Nicholas V, Erasmus of Rotterdam, Peter Martyr Vermigli, and Copernicus. Laura Bassi, appointed in 1732, became the first woman to officially teach at a university in Europe. In more recent history, Luigi Galvani, the discoverer of bioelectromagnetics, and Guglielmo Marconi, the pioneer of radio technology, also worked at the University. The University of Bologna remains one of the most respected and dynamic post-secondary educational institutions in Italy. To this day, Bologna is still very much a university town, with over 80,000 enrolled students in 2015. This community includes a great number of Erasmus, Socrates, and overseas students.[78] The university's botanical garden, the Orto Botanico dell'Università di Bologna, was established in 1568; it is the fourth oldest in Europe.
+
+Johns Hopkins University maintains its Bologna Center in the city, which hosts one of the overseas campuses of the School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS). SAIS Bologna was founded in 1955 as the first campus of a US post-graduate school to open in Europe.[79] It was inspired by Marshall Plan efforts to build a cultural bridge between America and Europe.[80] Today, the Bologna Center also hosts the Associazione italo-americana "Luciano Finelli", which supports cross-cultural awareness and exchange between Italy and the United States.[81]
+
+Dickinson College, Indiana University, Brown University, and the University of California also have campuses or antennas in the city.
+
+In addition, Bologna hosts a music school, Conservatorio Giovanni Battista Martini, established in 1804, and an art school, Accademia di Belle Arti di Bologna, founded in 1802. Both institutions were born as part of the reforms introduced by Napoleon Bonaparte.
+
+Over the centuries, Bologna has acquired many nicknames: "the fat" (la grassa) refers to its cuisine, in which the most famous specialities are prepared using rich meats (especially pork), egg pasta and dairy products, such as butter and Parmesan. Another nickname that has been given to the city is "the red" (la rossa), which was originally 
+used as a reference to the colour of the buildings in the city centre, has later become connected with the communist ideology supported by the majority of the population, in particular after World War II: until the election of a centre-right mayor in 1999, the city was renowned as a bastion of the Italian Communist Party.[82] The centre-left regained power again in the 2004 mayoral elections, with the election of Sergio Cofferati. It was one of the first European cities to experiment with the concept of free public transport.[83]
+Bologna has also two other nicknames: the first one, "the towered" (la turrita) refers to the high number of medieval towers that can be found in the city, even if today only 24 towers are still standing. The second one, "the learned" (la dotta) is a reference to its university.
+
+Bologna university was founded in 1088 and it is considered the oldest university of the Western world. According to the QS University Rankings, Bologna university is the 4th Italian university and the 180th in the world.
+The high number of students coming from all over Italy and the world (in Bologna there are several campuses of foreign universities such as Johns Hopkins University, Dickinson College, Indiana University, Brown University, University of California and more) considerably affects the everyday life: if on one hand it contributes to liven up the city centre (an area in which the average age of the residents is very high), and it also helps to promote cultural initiatives, on the other hand it creates public order and garbage problems which are related to the lively nightlife of the university district.
+
+The city of Bologna became a UNESCO City of Music on 26 May 2006. According to UNESCO, "As the first Italian city to be appointed to the Network, Bologna has demonstrated a rich musical tradition that is continuing to evolve as a vibrant factor of contemporary life and creation. It has also shown a strong commitment to promoting music as an important vehicle for inclusion in the fight against racism and in an effort to encourage economic and social development. Fostering a wide range of genres from classical to electronic, jazz, folk and opera, Bologna offers its citizens a musical vitality that deeply infiltrates the city's professional, academic, social and cultural facets."[84]
+
+The theatre was a popular form of entertainment in Bologna until the 16th century. The first public theater was the Teatro alla Scala, active since 1547 in Palazzo del Podestà. An important figure of Italian Bolognese theatre was Alfredo Testoni, the playwright, author of The Cardinal Lambertini, which has had great theatrical success since 1905, repeated on screen by the Bolognese actor Gino Cervi. In 1998, the City of Bologna initiated the project "Bologna dei Teatri" (Bologna of the Theatres), an association of the major theatrical facilities in the city. This is a circuit of theatres which offer diverse theatrical opportunities, ranging from Bolognese dialect to contemporary dance, but with a communications strategy and promoting unity. Specifically, the shows on the bill in various theatres participating in the project are advertised weekly through a single poster. Bologna's opera house is the Teatro Comunale di Bologna. The Orchestra Mozart, whose music director was Claudio Abbado until his death in 2014, was created in 2004.
+
+Bologna hosts a number of international music, art, dance and film festivals, including Angelica[85] Bologna and Contemporanea (festivals on contemporary music),[86] Bolognafestival (international classical music festival),[87]
+Bologna Jazz Festival,[88] Biografilm Festival (a film festival devote to biographic movies),[89] BilBolBul (a comics festival),[90] Danza Urbana (a street contemporary dance festival)[91] F.I.S.Co(festival on contemporary art, now merged in Live Arts Week) Future Film Festival (animation and special effects),[92]Il Cinema Ritrovato(film festival about rare and forgotten movies),[93] Live Arts Week, Gender Bender (festival on gender identity, sexual orientation and body representation),[94] Homework festival (electronic music festival),[95] Human Rights Film Festival,[96] Some Prefer Cake (lesbian film festival),[97] Zecchino d'Oro (a children's song contest).
+
+Bologna is renowned for its culinary tradition. It has baptised the famous Bolognese sauce, a meat-based pasta sauce that in Italy is called ragù and is substantially different from the variety found worldwide; moreover, in Bologna the sauce is used only as a dressing for tagliatelle, serving it with spaghetti being considered odd.[98] Situated in the fertile Po River Valley, the rich local cuisine depends heavily on meats and cheeses. As in all of Emilia-Romagna, the production of cured pork meats such as prosciutto, mortadella and salumi is an important part of the local food industry.[99] Well-regarded nearby vineyards include Pignoletto dei Colli Bolognesi, Lambrusco di Modena and Sangiovese di Romagna.[100] Tagliatelle with ragù, lasagne, tortellini served in broth, and mortadella, the original Bologna sausage, are among the local specialties.[101] Traditional Bolognese desserts are often linked to holidays, such as fave dei morti ("cookies of the dead"), multi-coloured almond paste cookies made for All Saints' Day, jam-filled raviole cookies that are served on Saint Joseph's Day, and carnival sweets known as sfrappole, a light and delicate fried pastry topped with powder sugar, certosino or panspeziale ("carthusian" o "apothecary-cake"), a spicy cake served on Christmas. Torta di riso, a custard-like cake made of almonds, rice and amaretto, is made throughout the year,[102] as the zuppa inglese.
+
+A sporting nickname for Bologna is Basket City in reference to the successes of the town's two rival historic basketball clubs, Virtus and Fortitudo, though the clubs are now often referred to by the names of their current sponsors.[103]
+Of the two, the former won 15 Italian basketball championships and two Euroleagues making them one of the most influential European basketball clubs; the latter won two league titles between 1999 and 2005.
+The rivalry is temporarily dormant since Fortitudo left the country's professional ranks when, following the 2008–09 season, the club was relegated from the top-level Lega A to LegADue, before being relegated further to the nominally amateur Serie A Dilettanti for financial reasons; in the 2012–13 season, Fortitudo will play in the LegADue.
+The Italian Basketball League, which operates both Lega A and LegADue, has its headquarters in Bologna.
+
+Football also has a strong tradition in Bologna. 
+The city's main club, Bologna F.C. 1909, have won seven Italian league championships (the latest in 1963–64), which make them the sixth most successful team in the history of the league; in their heyday in the 1930s Bologna FC were called "Lo squadrone che tremare il mondo fa" (Italian for "The Team that Shakes the World").
+The club play at the 38,000-capacity Stadio Renato Dall'Ara, which has hosted the Italian national team in both football and rugby union, as well as the San Marino national football team.
+It was also a venue at the 1990 FIFA World Cup.
+
+Rugby union is also present in the city: Rugby Bologna 1928 is not only one of the oldest Italian rugby union clubs but also the first ever club affiliated to the Italian rugby union federation.[104] and, to date (2014) is Italy's oldest rugby union club still in operation.
+The club took part to the top tier of the Italian championship for the first 25 years of their history never winning the title but getting to the runner-up place several times; they returned in top division (Serie A1 then Super 10), in the late 1990s and faced serious financial problems which led them to the relegation and almost to disappearance.[citation needed]
+
+Gianni Falchi Stadium is a baseball stadium located in Bologna.[105][106][107] It is home to the home games of Fortitudo Baseball Bologna, in the Italian Baseball League.[105][108]
+
+In addition to the natives of the city listed above, the following have made Bologna their home:
+
+Bologna is twinned with:[109]
+
+L'Aquila, AbruzzoAosta, Aosta ValleyBari, ApuliaPotenza, Basilicata
+
+Catanzaro, CalabriaNaples, CampaniaBologna, Emilia-RomagnaTrieste, Friuli-Venezia Giulia
+
+Rome, LazioGenoa, LiguriaMilan, LombardyAncona, Marche
+
+Campobasso, MoliseTurin, PiedmontCagliari, SardiniaPalermo, Sicily
+
+Trento, Trentino-Alto Adige/SüdtirolFlorence, TuscanyPerugia, UmbriaVenice, Veneto

en/7.html.txt

@@ -0,0 +1,172 @@
+
+
+
+
+
+
+Apiformes (from Latin 'apis')
+
+Bees are flying insects closely related to wasps and ants, known for their role in pollination and, in the case of the best-known bee species, the western honey bee, for producing honey. Bees are a monophyletic lineage within the superfamily Apoidea. They are presently considered a clade, called Anthophila. There are over 16,000 known species of bees in seven recognized biological families.[1][2] Some species — including honey bees, bumblebees, and stingless bees — live socially in colonies while some species — including mason bees, carpenter bees, leafcutter bees, and sweat bees — are solitary.
+
+Bees are found on every continent except for Antarctica, in every habitat on the planet that contains insect-pollinated flowering plants. The most common bees in the Northern Hemisphere are the Halictidae, or sweat bees, but they are small and often mistaken for wasps or flies. Bees range in size from tiny stingless bee species, whose workers are less than 2 millimetres (0.08 in) long, to Megachile pluto, the largest species of leafcutter bee, whose females can attain a length of 39 millimetres (1.54 in).
+
+Bees feed on nectar and pollen, the former primarily as an energy source and the latter primarily for protein and other nutrients. Most pollen is used as food for their larvae. Vertebrate predators of bees include birds such as bee-eaters; insect predators include beewolves and dragonflies.
+
+Bee pollination is important both ecologically and commercially, and the decline in wild bees has increased the value of pollination by commercially managed hives of honey bees. The analysis of 353 wild bee and hoverfly species across Britain from 1980 to 2013 found the insects have been lost from a quarter of the places they inhabited in 1980.[3]
+
+Human beekeeping or apiculture has been practised for millennia, since at least the times of Ancient Egypt and Ancient Greece. Bees have appeared in mythology and folklore, through all phases of art and literature from ancient times to the present day, although primarily focused in the Northern Hemisphere where beekeeping is far more common.
+
+The ancestors of bees were wasps in the family Crabronidae, which were predators of other insects. The switch from insect prey to pollen may have resulted from the consumption of prey insects which were flower visitors and were partially covered with pollen when they were fed to the wasp larvae. This same evolutionary scenario may have occurred within the vespoid wasps, where the pollen wasps evolved from predatory ancestors. Until recently, the oldest non-compression bee fossil had been found in New Jersey amber, Cretotrigona prisca of Cretaceous age, a corbiculate bee.[4] A bee fossil from the early Cretaceous (~100 mya), Melittosphex burmensis, is considered "an extinct lineage of pollen-collecting Apoidea sister to the modern bees".[5] Derived features of its morphology (apomorphies) place it clearly within the bees, but it retains two unmodified ancestral traits (plesiomorphies) of the legs (two mid-tibial spurs, and a slender hind basitarsus), showing its transitional status.[5] By the Eocene (~45 mya) there was already considerable diversity among eusocial bee lineages.[6][a]
+
+The highly eusocial corbiculate Apidae appeared roughly 87 Mya, and the Allodapini (within the Apidae) around 53 Mya.[9]
+The Colletidae appear as fossils only from the late Oligocene (~25 Mya) to early Miocene.[10]
+The Melittidae are known from Palaeomacropis eocenicus in the Early Eocene.[11]
+The Megachilidae are known from trace fossils (characteristic leaf cuttings) from the Middle Eocene.[12]
+The Andrenidae are known from the Eocene-Oligocene boundary, around 34 Mya, of the Florissant shale.[13]
+The Halictidae first appear in the Early Eocene[14] with species[15][16] found in amber. The Stenotritidae are known from fossil brood cells of Pleistocene age.[17]
+
+The earliest animal-pollinated flowers were shallow, cup-shaped blooms pollinated by insects such as beetles, so the syndrome of insect pollination was well established before the first appearance of bees. The novelty is that bees are specialized as pollination agents, with behavioral and physical modifications that specifically enhance pollination, and are the most efficient pollinating insects. In a process of coevolution, flowers developed floral rewards[18] such as nectar and longer tubes, and bees developed longer tongues to extract the nectar.[19] Bees also developed structures known as scopal hairs and pollen baskets to collect and carry pollen. The location and type differ among and between groups of bees. Most species have scopal hairs on their hind legs or on the underside of their abdomens. Some species in the family Apidae have pollen baskets on their hind legs, while very few lack these and instead collect pollen in their crops.[2] The appearance of these structures drove the adaptive radiation of the angiosperms, and, in turn, bees themselves.[7] Bees coevolved not only with flowers but it is believed that some species coevolved with mites. Some provide tufts of hairs called acarinaria that appear to provide lodgings for mites; in return, it is believed that mites eat fungi that attack pollen, so the relationship in this case may be mutualistc.[20][21]
+
+This phylogenetic tree is based on Debevic et al, 2012, which used molecular phylogeny to demonstrate that the bees (Anthophila) arose from deep within the Crabronidae, which is therefore paraphyletic. The placement of the Heterogynaidae is uncertain.[22] The small subfamily Mellininae was not included in this analysis.
+
+Ampulicidae (Cockroach wasps)
+
+Heterogynaidae (possible placement #1)
+
+Sphecidae (sensu stricto)
+
+Crabroninae (part of "Crabronidae")
+
+Bembicini
+
+Nyssonini, Astatinae
+
+Heterogynaidae (possible placement #2)
+
+Pemphredoninae, Philanthinae
+
+Anthophila (bees)
+
+This cladogram of the bee families is based on Hedtke et al., 2013, which places the former families Dasypodaidae and Meganomiidae as subfamilies inside the Melittidae.[23] English names, where available, are given in parentheses.
+
+Melittidae (inc. Dasypodainae, Meganomiinae) at least 50 Mya
+
+Apidae (inc. honeybees, cuckoo bees, carpenter bees) ≈87 Mya
+
+Megachilidae (mason, leafcutter bees) ≈50 Mya
+
+Andrenidae (mining bees) ≈34 Mya
+
+Halictidae (sweat bees) ≈50 Mya
+
+Colletidae (plasterer bees) ≈25 Mya
+
+Stenotritidae (large Australian bees) ≈2 Mya
+
+Bees differ from closely related groups such as wasps by having branched or plume-like setae (hairs), combs on the forelimbs for cleaning their antennae, small anatomical differences in limb structure, and the venation of the hind wings; and in females, by having the seventh dorsal abdominal plate divided into two half-plates.[24]
+
+Bees have the following characteristics:
+
+The largest species of bee is thought to be Wallace's giant bee Megachile pluto, whose females can attain a length of 39 millimetres (1.54 in).[26] The smallest species may be dwarf stingless bees in the tribe Meliponini whose workers are less than 2 millimetres (0.08 in) in length.[27]
+
+According to inclusive fitness theory, organisms can gain fitness not just through increasing their own reproductive output, but also that of close relatives. In evolutionary terms, individuals should help relatives when Cost < Relatedness * Benefit. The requirements for eusociality are more easily fulfilled by haplodiploid species such as bees because of their unusual relatedness structure.[28]
+
+In haplodiploid species, females develop from fertilized eggs and males from unfertilized eggs. Because a male is haploid (has only one copy of each gene), his daughters (which are diploid, with two copies of each gene) share 100% of his genes and 50% of their mother's. Therefore, they share 75% of their genes with each other. This mechanism of sex determination gives rise to what W. D. Hamilton termed "supersisters", more closely related to their sisters than they would be to their own offspring.[29] Workers often do not reproduce, but they can pass on more of their genes by helping to raise their sisters (as queens) than they would by having their own offspring (each of which would only have 50% of their genes), assuming they would produce similar numbers. This unusual situation has been proposed as an explanation of the multiple (at least 9) evolutions of eusociality within Hymenoptera.[30][31]
+
+Haplodiploidy is neither necessary nor sufficient for eusociality. Some eusocial species such as termites are not haplodiploid. Conversely, all bees are haplodiploid but not all are eusocial, and among eusocial species many queens mate with multiple males, creating half-sisters that share only 25% of each-other's genes.[32] But, monogamy (queens mating singly) is the ancestral state for all eusocial species so far investigated, so it is likely that haplodiploidy contributed to the evolution of eusociality in bees.[30]
+
+Bees may be solitary or may live in various types of communities. Eusociality appears to have originated from at least three independent origins in halictid bees.[33] The most advanced of these are species with eusocial colonies; these are characterised by cooperative brood care and a division of labour into reproductive and non-reproductive adults, plus overlapping generations.[34] This division of labour creates specialized groups within eusocial societies which are called castes. In some species, groups of cohabiting females may be sisters, and if there is a division of labour within the group, they are considered semisocial. The group is called eusocial if, in addition, the group consists of a mother (the queen) and her daughters (workers). When the castes are purely behavioural alternatives, with no morphological differentiation other than size, the system is considered primitively eusocial, as in many paper wasps; when the castes are morphologically discrete, the system is considered highly eusocial.[19]
+
+True honey bees (genus Apis, of which seven species are currently recognized) are highly eusocial, and are among the best known insects. Their colonies are established by swarms, consisting of a queen and several hundred workers. There are 29 subspecies of one of these species, Apis mellifera, native to Europe, the Middle East, and Africa. Africanized bees are a hybrid strain of A. mellifera that escaped from experiments involving crossing European and African subspecies; they are extremely defensive.[35]
+
+Stingless bees are also highly eusocial. They practise mass provisioning, with complex nest architecture and perennial colonies also established via swarming.[36]
+
+Many bumblebees are eusocial, similar to the eusocial Vespidae such as hornets in that the queen initiates a nest on her own rather than by swarming. Bumblebee colonies typically have from 50 to 200 bees at peak population, which occurs in mid to late summer. Nest architecture is simple, limited by the size of the pre-existing nest cavity, and colonies rarely last more than a year.[37]  In 2011, the International Union for Conservation of Nature set up the Bumblebee Specialist Group to review the threat status of all bumblebee species worldwide using the IUCN Red List criteria.[38]
+
+There are many more species of primitively eusocial than highly eusocial bees, but they have been studied less often. Most are in the family Halictidae, or "sweat bees". Colonies are typically small, with a dozen or fewer workers, on average. Queens and workers differ only in size, if at all. Most species have a single season colony cycle, even in the tropics, and only mated females hibernate. A few species have long active seasons and attain colony sizes in the hundreds, such as Halictus hesperus.[39] Some species are eusocial in parts of their range and solitary in others,[40] or have a mix of eusocial and solitary nests in the same population.[41] The orchid bees (Apidae) include some primitively eusocial species with similar biology. Some allodapine bees (Apidae) form primitively eusocial colonies, with progressive provisioning: a larva's food is supplied gradually as it develops, as is the case in honey bees and some bumblebees.[42]
+
+Most other bees, including familiar insects such as carpenter bees, leafcutter bees and mason bees are solitary in the sense that every female is fertile, and typically inhabits a nest she constructs herself. There is no division of labor so these nests lack queens and worker bees for these species. Solitary bees typically produce neither honey nor beeswax. 
+Bees collect pollen to feed their young, and have the necessary adaptations to do this. However, certain wasp species such as pollen wasps have similar behaviours, and a few species of bee scavenge from carcases to feed their offspring.[24] Solitary bees are important pollinators; they gather pollen to provision their nests with food for their brood. Often it is mixed with nectar to form a paste-like consistency. Some solitary bees have advanced types of pollen-carrying structures on their bodies. Very few species of solitary bee are being cultured for commercial pollination. Most of these species belong to a distinct set of genera which are commonly known by their nesting behavior or preferences, namely: carpenter bees, sweat bees, mason bees, plasterer bees, squash bees, dwarf carpenter bees, leafcutter bees, alkali bees and digger bees.[43]
+
+Most solitary bees nest in the ground in a variety of soil textures and conditions while others create nests in hollow reeds or twigs, holes in wood. The female typically creates a compartment (a "cell") with an egg and some provisions for the resulting larva, then seals it off. A nest may consist of numerous cells. When the nest is in wood, usually the last (those closer to the entrance) contain eggs that will become males. The adult does not provide care for the brood once the egg is laid, and usually dies after making one or more nests. The males typically emerge first and are ready for mating when the females emerge. Solitary bees are either stingless or very unlikely to sting (only in self-defense, if ever).[44][45]
+
+While solitary, females each make individual nests. Some species, such as the European mason bee Hoplitis anthocopoides,[46] and the Dawson's Burrowing bee, Amegilla dawsoni,[47] are gregarious, preferring to make nests near others of the same species, and giving the appearance of being social. Large groups of solitary bee nests are called aggregations, to distinguish them from colonies. In some species, multiple females share a common nest, but each makes and provisions her own cells independently. This type of group is called "communal" and is not uncommon. The primary advantage appears to be that a nest entrance is easier to defend from predators and parasites when there are multiple females using that same entrance on a regular basis.[46]
+
+The life cycle of a bee, be it a solitary or social species, involves the laying of an egg, the development through several moults of a legless larva, a pupation stage during which the insect undergoes complete metamorphosis, followed by the emergence of a winged adult. Most solitary bees and bumble bees in temperate climates overwinter as adults or pupae and emerge in spring when increasing numbers of flowering plants come into bloom. The males usually emerge first and search for females with which to mate. The sex of a bee is determined by whether or not the egg is fertilised; after mating, a female stores the sperm, and determines which sex is required at the time each individual egg is laid, fertilised eggs producing female offspring and unfertilised eggs, males. Tropical bees may have several generations in a year and no diapause stage.[48][49][50][51]
+
+The egg is generally oblong, slightly curved and tapering at one end. Solitary bees, lay each egg in a separate cell with a supply of mixed pollen and nectar next to it. This may be rolled into a pellet or placed in a pile and is known as mass provisioning. Social bee species provision progressively, that is, they feed the larva regularly while it grows. The nest varies from a hole in the ground or in wood, in solitary bees, to a substantial structure with wax combs in bumblebees and honey bees.[52]
+
+In most species, larvae are whitish grubs, roughly oval and bluntly-pointed at both ends. They have 15 segments and spiracles in each segment for breathing. They have no legs but move within the cell, helped by tubercles on their sides. They have short horns on the head, jaws for chewing food and an appendage on either side of the mouth tipped with a bristle. There is a gland under the mouth that secretes a viscous liquid which solidifies into the silk they use to produce a cocoon. The cocoon is semi-transparent and the pupa can be seen through it. Over the course of a few days, the larva undergoes metamorphosis into a winged adult. When ready to emerge, the adult splits its skin dorsally and climbs out of the exuviae and breaks out of the cell.[52]
+
+Nest of common carder bumblebee, wax canopy removed to show winged workers and pupae in irregularly placed wax cells
+
+Carpenter bee nests in a cedar wood beam (sawn open)
+
+Honeybees on brood comb with eggs and larvae in cells
+
+Antoine Magnan's 1934 book Le vol des insectes, says that he and André Sainte-Laguë had applied the equations of air resistance to insects and found that their flight could not be explained by fixed-wing calculations, but that "One shouldn't be surprised that the results of the calculations don't square with reality".[53] This has led to a common misconception that bees "violate aerodynamic theory". In fact it merely confirms that bees do not engage in fixed-wing flight, and that their flight is explained by other mechanics, such as those used by helicopters.[54] In 1996 it was shown that vortices created by many insects' wings helped to provide lift.[55] High-speed cinematography[56] and robotic mock-up of a bee wing[57] showed that lift was generated by "the unconventional combination of short, choppy wing strokes, a rapid rotation of the wing as it flops over and reverses direction, and a very fast wing-beat frequency". Wing-beat frequency normally increases as size decreases, but as the bee's wing beat covers such a small arc, it flaps approximately 230 times per second, faster than a fruitfly (200 times per second) which is 80 times smaller.[58]
+
+The ethologist Karl von Frisch studied navigation in the honey bee. He showed that honey bees communicate by the waggle dance, in which a worker indicates the location of a food source to other workers in the hive. He demonstrated that bees can recognize a desired compass direction in three different ways: by the sun, by the polarization pattern of the blue sky, and by the earth's magnetic field. He showed that the sun is the preferred or main compass; the other mechanisms are used under cloudy skies or inside a dark beehive.[59] Bees navigate using spatial memory with a "rich, map-like organization".[60]
+
+The gut of bees is relatively simple, but multiple metabolic strategies exist in the gut microbiota.[61] Pollinating bees consume nectar and pollen, which require different digestion strategies by somewhat specialized bacteria. While nectar is a liquid of mostly monosaccharide sugars and so easily absorbed, pollen contains complex polysaccharides: branching pectin and hemicellulose.[62] Approximately five groups of bacteria are involved in digestion. Three groups specialize in simple sugars (Snodgrassella and two groups of Lactobacillus), and two other groups in complex sugars (Gilliamella and Bifidobacterium). Digestion of pectin and hemicellulose is dominated by bacterial clades Gilliamella and Bifidobacterium respectively. Bacteria that cannot digest polysaccharides obtain enzymes from their neighbors, and bacteria that lack certain amino acids do the same, creating multiple ecological niches.[63]
+
+Although most bee species are nectarivorous and palynivorous, some are not. Particularly unusual are vulture bees in the genus Trigona, which consume carrion and wasp brood, turning meat into a honey-like substance.[64]
+
+Most bees are polylectic (generalist) meaning they collect pollen from a range of flowering plants, but some are oligoleges (specialists), in that they only gather pollen from one or a few species or genera of closely related plants.[65] Specialist pollinators also include bee species which gather floral oils instead of pollen, and male orchid bees, which gather aromatic compounds from orchids (one of the few cases where male bees are effective pollinators). Bees are able to sense the presence of desirable flowers through ultraviolet patterning on flowers, floral odors,[66] and even electromagnetic fields.[67] Once landed, a bee then uses nectar quality[66] and pollen taste[68] to determine whether to continue visiting similar flowers.
+
+In rare cases, a plant species may only be effectively pollinated by a single bee species, and some plants are endangered at least in part because their pollinator is also threatened. But, there is a pronounced tendency for oligolectic bees to be associated with common, widespread plants visited by multiple pollinator species. For example, the creosote bush in the arid parts of the United States southwest is associated with some 40 oligoleges.[69]
+
+Many bees are aposematically coloured, typically orange and black, warning of their ability to defend themselves with a powerful sting. As such they are models for Batesian mimicry by non-stinging insects such as bee-flies, robber flies and hoverflies,[70] all of which gain a measure of protection by superficially looking and behaving like bees.[70]
+
+Bees are themselves Müllerian mimics of other aposematic insects with the same colour scheme, including wasps, lycid and other beetles, and many butterflies and moths (Lepidoptera) which are themselves distasteful, often through acquiring bitter and poisonous chemicals from their plant food. All the Müllerian mimics, including bees, benefit from the reduced risk of predation that results from their easily recognised warning coloration.[71]
+
+Bees are also mimicked by plants such as the bee orchid which imitates both the appearance and the scent of a female bee; male bees attempt to mate (pseudocopulation) with the furry lip of the flower, thus pollinating it.[72]
+
+Brood parasites occur in several bee families including the apid subfamily Nomadinae.[73] Females of these species lack pollen collecting structures (the scopa) and do not construct their own nests. They typically enter the nests of pollen collecting species, and lay their eggs in cells provisioned by the host bee. When the "cuckoo" bee larva hatches, it consumes the host larva's pollen ball, and often the host egg also.[74] In particular, the Arctic bee species, Bombus hyperboreus is an aggressive species that attacks and enslaves other bees of the same subgenus. However, unlike many other bee brood parasites, they have pollen baskets and often collect pollen.[75]
+
+In Southern Africa, hives of African honeybees (A. mellifera scutellata) are being destroyed by parasitic workers of the Cape honeybee, A. m. capensis. These lay diploid eggs ("thelytoky"), escaping normal worker policing, leading to the colony's destruction; the parasites can then move to other hives.[76]
+
+The cuckoo bees in the Bombus subgenus Psithyrus are closely related to, and resemble, their hosts in looks and size. This common pattern gave rise to the ecological principle "Emery's rule". Others parasitize bees in different families, like Townsendiella, a nomadine apid, two species of which are cleptoparasites of the dasypodaid genus Hesperapis,[77] while the other species in the same genus attacks halictid bees.[78]
+
+Four bee families (Andrenidae, Colletidae, Halictidae, and Apidae) contain some species that are crepuscular. Most are tropical or subtropical, but some live in arid regions at higher latitudes. These bees have greatly enlarged ocelli, which are extremely sensitive to light and dark, though incapable of forming images. Some have refracting superposition compound eyes: these combine the output of many elements of their compound eyes to provide enough light for each retinal photoreceptor. Their ability to fly by night enables them to avoid many predators, and to exploit flowers that produce nectar only or also at night.[79]
+
+Vertebrate predators of bees include bee-eaters, shrikes and flycatchers, which make short sallies to catch insects in flight.[80] Swifts and swallows[80] fly almost continually, catching insects as they go. The honey buzzard attacks bees' nests and eats the larvae.[81] The greater honeyguide interacts with humans by guiding them to the nests of wild bees. The humans break open the nests and take the honey and the bird feeds on the larvae and the wax.[82] Among mammals, predators such as the badger dig up bumblebee nests and eat both the larvae and any stored food.[83]
+
+Specialist ambush predators of visitors to flowers include crab spiders, which wait on flowering plants for pollinating insects; predatory bugs, and praying mantises,[80] some of which (the flower mantises of the tropics) wait motionless, aggressive mimics camouflaged as flowers.[84] Beewolves are large wasps that habitually attack bees;[80] the ethologist Niko Tinbergen estimated that a single colony of the beewolf Philanthus triangulum might kill several thousand honeybees in a day: all the prey he observed were honeybees.[85] Other predatory insects that sometimes catch bees include robber flies and dragonflies.[80] Honey bees are affected by parasites including acarine and Varroa mites.[86] However, some bees are believed to have a mutualistic relationship with mites.[21]
+
+Homer's Hymn to Hermes describes three bee-maidens with the power of divination and thus speaking truth, and identifies the food of the gods as honey. Sources associated the bee maidens with Apollo and, until the 1980s, scholars followed Gottfried Hermann (1806) in incorrectly identifying the bee-maidens with the Thriae.[87] Honey, according to a Greek myth, was discovered by a nymph called Melissa ("Bee"); and honey was offered to the Greek gods from Mycenean times. Bees were also associated with the Delphic oracle and the prophetess was sometimes called a bee.[88]
+
+The image of a community of honey bees has been used from ancient to modern times, in Aristotle and Plato; in Virgil and Seneca; in Erasmus and Shakespeare; Tolstoy, and by political and social theorists such as Bernard Mandeville and Karl Marx as a model for human society.[89] In English folklore, bees would be told of important events in the household, in a custom known as "Telling the bees".[90]
+
+Some of the oldest examples of bees in art are rock paintings in Spain which have been dated to 15,000 BC.[91]
+
+W. B. Yeats's poem The Lake Isle of Innisfree (1888) contains the couplet "Nine bean rows will I have there, a hive for the honey bee, / And live alone in the bee loud glade." At the time he was living in Bedford Park in the West of London.[92] Beatrix Potter's illustrated book The Tale of Mrs Tittlemouse (1910) features Babbity Bumble and her brood (pictured). Kit Williams' treasure hunt book The Bee on the Comb (1984) uses bees and beekeeping as part of its story and puzzle. Sue Monk Kidd's The Secret Life of Bees (2004), and the 2009 film starring Dakota Fanning, tells the story of a girl who escapes her abusive home and finds her way to live with a family of beekeepers, the Boatwrights.
+
+The humorous 2007 animated film Bee Movie used Jerry Seinfeld's first script and was his first work for children; he starred as a bee named Barry B. Benson, alongside Renée Zellweger. Critics found its premise awkward and its delivery tame.[93] Dave Goulson's A Sting in the Tale (2014) describes his efforts to save bumblebees in Britain, as well as much about their biology. The playwright Laline Paull's fantasy The Bees (2015) tells the tale of a hive bee named Flora 717 from hatching onwards.[94]
+
+Humans have kept honey bee colonies, commonly in hives, for millennia. Beekeepers collect honey, beeswax, propolis, pollen, and royal jelly from hives; bees are also kept to pollinate crops and to produce bees for sale to other beekeepers.
+
+Depictions of humans collecting honey from wild bees date to 15,000 years ago; efforts to domesticate them are shown in Egyptian art around 4,500 years ago.[95] Simple hives and smoke were used;[96][97] jars of honey were found in the tombs of pharaohs such as Tutankhamun. From the 18th century, European understanding of the colonies and biology of bees allowed the construction of the moveable comb hive so that honey could be harvested without destroying the colony.[98][99] Among Classical Era authors, beekeeping with the use of smoke is described in Aristotle's History of Animals Book 9.[100] The account mentions that bees die after stinging; that workers remove corpses from the hive, and guard it; castes including workers and non-working drones, but "kings" rather than queens; predators including toads and bee-eaters; and the waggle dance, with the "irresistible suggestion" of άpοσειονται ("aroseiontai", it waggles) and παρακολουθούσιν ("parakolouthousin", they watch).[101][b]
+
+Beekeeping is described in detail by Virgil in his Eclogues; it is also mentioned in his Aeneid, and in Pliny's Natural History.[101]
+
+Bees play an important role in pollinating flowering plants, and are the major type of pollinator in many ecosystems that contain flowering plants. It is estimated that one third of the human food supply depends on pollination by insects, birds and bats, most of which is accomplished by bees, whether wild or domesticated.[102][103] Over the last half century, there has been a general decline in the species richness of wild bees and other pollinators, probably attributable to stress from increased parasites and disease, the use of pesticides, and a general decrease in the number of wild flowers. Climate change probably exacerbates the problem.[104]
+
+Contract pollination has overtaken the role of honey production for beekeepers in many countries. After the introduction of Varroa mites, feral honey bees declined dramatically in the US, though their numbers have since recovered.[105][106] The number of colonies kept by beekeepers declined slightly, through urbanization, systematic pesticide use, tracheal and Varroa mites, and the closure of beekeeping businesses. In 2006 and 2007 the rate of attrition increased, and was described as colony collapse disorder.[107] In 2010 invertebrate iridescent virus and the fungus Nosema ceranae were shown to be in every killed colony, and deadly in combination.[108][109][110][111] Winter losses increased to about 1/3.[112][113] Varroa mites were thought to be responsible for about half the losses.[114]
+
+Apart from colony collapse disorder, losses outside the US have been attributed to causes including pesticide seed dressings, using neonicotinoids such as Clothianidin, Imidacloprid and Thiamethoxam.[115][116] From 2013 the European Union restricted some pesticides to stop bee populations from declining further.[117] In 2014 the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report warned that bees faced increased risk of extinction because of global warming.[118] In 2018 the European Union decided to ban field use of all three major neonicotinoids; they remain permitted in veterinary, greenhouse, and vehicle transport usage.[119]
+
+Farmers have focused on alternative solutions to mitigate these problems. By raising native plants, they provide food for native bee pollinators like Lasioglossum vierecki[120] and L. leucozonium,[121] leading to less reliance on honey bee populations.
+
+Honey is a natural product produced by bees and stored for their own use, but its sweetness has always appealed to humans. Before domestication of bees was even attempted, humans were raiding their nests for their honey. Smoke was often used to subdue the bees and such activities are depicted in rock paintings in Spain dated to 15,000 BC.[91]
+
+Honey bees are used commercially to produce honey.[122] They also produce some substances used as dietary supplements with possible health benefits, pollen,[123] propolis,[124] and royal jelly,[125] though all of these can also cause allergic reactions.
+
+Bees are partly considered edible insects. Indigenous people in many countries eat insects, including the larvae and pupae of bees, mostly stingless species. They also gather larvae, pupae and surrounding cells, known as bee brood, for consumption.[126] In the Indonesian dish botok tawon from Central and East Java, bee larvae are eaten as a companion to rice, after being mixed with shredded coconut,  wrapped in banana leaves, and steamed.[127][128]
+
+Bee brood (pupae and larvae) although low in calcium, has been found to be high in protein  and carbohydrate, and a useful source of phosphorus, magnesium, potassium, and trace minerals iron, zinc, copper, and selenium. In addition, while bee brood was high in fat, it contained no fat soluble vitamins (such as A, D, and E) but it was a good source of most of the water-soluble B-vitamins including choline as well as vitamin C. The fat was composed mostly of saturated and monounsaturated fatty acids with 2.0% being polyunsaturated fatty acids.[129][130]
+
+Apitherapy is a branch of alternative medicine that uses honey bee products, including raw honey, royal jelly, pollen, propolis, beeswax and apitoxin (Bee venom).[131] The claim that apitherapy treats cancer, which some proponents of apitherapy make, remains unsupported by evidence-based medicine.[132][133]
+
+The painful stings of bees are mostly associated with the poison gland and the Dufour's gland which are abdominal exocrine glands containing various chemicals. In Lasioglossum leucozonium, the Dufour's Gland mostly contains octadecanolide as well as some eicosanolide. There is also evidence of n-triscosane, n-heptacosane,[134] and 22-docosanolide.[135] However, the secretions of these glands could also be used for nest construction.[134]
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+Aphrodite[a] is an ancient Greek goddess associated with love, beauty, pleasure, passion and procreation. She was syncretized with the Roman goddess Venus. Aphrodite's major symbols include myrtles, roses, doves, sparrows, and swans. The cult of Aphrodite was largely derived from that of the Phoenician goddess Astarte, a cognate of the East Semitic goddess Ishtar, whose cult was based on the Sumerian cult of Inanna. Aphrodite's main cult centers were Cythera, Cyprus, Corinth, and Athens. Her main festival was the Aphrodisia, which was celebrated annually in midsummer. In Laconia, Aphrodite was worshipped as a warrior goddess. She was also the patron goddess of prostitutes, an association which led early scholars to propose the concept of "sacred prostitution" in Greco-Roman culture, an idea which is now generally seen as erroneous.
+
+In Hesiod's Theogony, Aphrodite is born off the coast of Cythera from the foam (aphrós) produced by Uranus's genitals, which his son Cronus has severed and thrown into the sea. In Homer's Iliad, however, she is the daughter of Zeus and Dione. Plato, in his Symposium 180e, asserts that these two origins actually belong to separate entities: Aphrodite Ourania (a transcendent, "Heavenly" Aphrodite) and Aphrodite Pandemos (Aphrodite common to "all the people"). Aphrodite had many other epithets, each emphasizing a different aspect of the same goddess, or used by a different local cult. Thus she was also known as Cytherea (Lady of Cythera) and Cypris (Lady of Cyprus), because both locations claimed to be the place of her birth.
+
+In Greek mythology, Aphrodite was married to Hephaestus, the god of blacksmiths and metalworking. Despite this, Aphrodite was frequently unfaithful to him and had many lovers; in the Odyssey, she is caught in the act of adultery with Ares, the god of war. In the First Homeric Hymn to Aphrodite, she seduces the mortal shepherd Anchises. Aphrodite was also the surrogate mother and lover of the mortal shepherd Adonis, who was killed by a wild boar. Along with Athena and Hera, Aphrodite was one of the three goddesses whose feud resulted in the beginning of the Trojan War and she plays a major role throughout the Iliad. Aphrodite has been featured in Western art as a symbol of female beauty and has appeared in numerous works of Western literature. She is a major deity in modern Neopagan religions, including the Church of Aphrodite, Wicca, and Hellenismos.
+
+Hesiod derives Aphrodite from aphrós (ἀφρός) "sea-foam",[4] interpreting the name as "risen from the foam",[5][4] but most modern scholars regard this as a spurious folk etymology.[4][6] Early modern scholars of classical mythology attempted to argue that Aphrodite's name was of Greek or Indo-European origin,[6] but these efforts have now been mostly abandoned.[6] Aphrodite's name is generally accepted to be of non-Greek, probably Semitic, origin,[6] but its exact derivation cannot be determined.[6]
+
+Scholars in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, accepting Hesiod's "foam" etymology as genuine, analyzed the second part of Aphrodite's name as *-odítē "wanderer"[7] or *-dítē "bright".[8][9] Michael Janda, also accepting Hesiod's etymology, has argued in favor of the latter of these interpretations and claims the story of a birth from the foam as an Indo-European mytheme.[10][11] Similarly, Krzysztof Tomasz Witczak proposes an Indo-European compound *abʰor- "very" and *dʰei- "to shine", also referring to Eos.[12] Other scholars have argued that these hypotheses are unlikely since Aphrodite's attributes are entirely different from those of both Eos and the Vedic deity Ushas.[13][14]
+
+A number of improbable non-Greek etymologies have also been suggested. One Semitic etymology compares Aphrodite to the Assyrian barīrītu, the name of a female demon that appears in Middle Babylonian and Late Babylonian texts.[15] Hammarström[16] looks to Etruscan, comparing (e)prϑni "lord", an Etruscan honorific loaned into Greek as πρύτανις.[17][18][19] This would make the theonym in origin an honorific, "the lady".[17][18] Most scholars reject this etymology as implausible,[17][18][19] especially since Aphrodite actually appears in Etruscan in the borrowed form Apru (from Greek Aphrō, clipped form of Aphrodite).[18] The medieval Etymologicum Magnum (c. 1150) offers a highly contrived etymology, deriving Aphrodite from the compound habrodíaitos (ἁβροδίαιτος), "she who lives delicately", from habrós and díaita. The alteration from b to ph is explained as a "familiar" characteristic of Greek "obvious from the Macedonians".[20]
+
+The cult of Aphrodite in Greece was imported from, or at least influenced by, the cult of Astarte in Phoenicia,[21][22][23][24] which, in turn, was influenced by the cult of the Mesopotamian goddess known as "Ishtar" to the East Semitic peoples and as "Inanna" to the Sumerians.[25][23][24] Pausanias states that the first to establish a cult of Aphrodite were the Assyrians, followed by the Paphians of Cyprus and then the Phoenicians at Ascalon. The Phoenicians, in turn, taught her worship to the people of Cythera.[26]
+
+Aphrodite took on Inanna-Ishtar's associations with sexuality and procreation.[27] Furthermore, she was known as Ourania (Οὐρανία), which means "heavenly",[28] a title corresponding to Inanna's role as the Queen of Heaven.[28][29] Early artistic and literary portrayals of Aphrodite are extremely similar on Inanna-Ishtar.[27] Like Inanna-Ishtar, Aphrodite was also a warrior goddess;[27][22][30] the second-century AD Greek geographer Pausanias records that, in Sparta, Aphrodite was worshipped as Aphrodite Areia, which means "warlike".[31][32] He also mentions that Aphrodite's most ancient cult statues in Sparta and on Cythera showed her bearing arms.[31][32][33][27] Modern scholars note that Aphrodite's warrior-goddess aspects appear in the oldest strata of her worship[34] and see it as an indication of her Near Eastern origins.[34][35]
+
+Nineteenth century classical scholars had a general aversion to the idea that ancient Greek religion was at all influenced by the cultures of the Near East,[36] but, even Friedrich Gottlieb Welcker, who argued that Near Eastern influence on Greek culture was largely confined to material culture,[36] admitted that Aphrodite was clearly of Phoenician origin.[36] The significant influence of Near Eastern culture on early Greek religion in general, and on the cult of Aphrodite in particular,[37] is now widely recognized as dating to a period of orientalization during the eighth century BC,[37] when archaic Greece was on the fringes of the Neo-Assyrian Empire.[38]
+
+Some early comparative mythologists opposed to the idea of a Near Eastern origin argued that Aphrodite originated as an aspect of the Greek dawn goddess Eos[39][40] and that she was therefore ultimately derived from the Proto-Indo-European dawn goddess *Haéusōs (properly Greek Eos, Latin Aurora, Sanskrit Ushas).[39][40] Most modern scholars have now rejected the notion of a purely Indo-European Aphrodite,[6][41][14][42] but it is possible that Aphrodite, originally a Semitic deity, may have been influenced by the Indo-European dawn goddess.[42] Both Aphrodite and Eos were known for their erotic beauty and aggressive sexuality[40] and both had relationships with mortal lovers.[40] Both goddesses were associated with the colors red, white, and gold.[40] Michael Janda etymologizes Aphrodite's name as an epithet of Eos meaning "she who rises from the foam [of the ocean]"[11] and points to Hesiod's Theogony account of Aphrodite's birth as an archaic reflex of Indo-European myth.[11] Aphrodite rising out of the waters after Cronus defeats Uranus as a mytheme would then be directly cognate to the Rigvedic myth of Indra defeating Vrtra, liberating Ushas.[10][11] Another key similarity between Aphrodite and the Indo-European dawn goddess is her close kinship to the Greek sky deity,[42] since both of the main claimants to her paternity (Zeus and Uranus) are sky deities.[43]
+
+Aphrodite's most common cultic epithet was Ourania, meaning "heavenly",[47][48] but this epithet almost never occurs in literary texts, indicating a purely cultic significance.[49] Another common name for Aphrodite was Pandemos ("For All the Folk").[50] In her role as Aphrodite Pandemos, Aphrodite was associated with Peithō (Πείθω), meaning "persuasion",[51] and could be prayed to for aid in seduction.[51] The character of Pausanias in Plato's Symposium, takes differing cult-practices associated with different epithets of the goddess to claim that Ourania and Pandemos are, in fact, separate goddesses. He asserts that Aphrodite Ourania is the celestial Aphrodite, born from the sea foam after Cronus castrated Uranus, and the older of the two goddesses. According to the Symposium, Aphrodite Ourania is the inspiration of male homosexual desire, specifically the ephebic eros, and pederasty. Aphrodite Pandemos, by contrast, is the younger of the two goddesses: the common Aphrodite, born from the union of Zeus and Dione, and the inspiration of heterosexual desire and sexual promiscuity, the "lesser" of the two loves.[52][53] Paphian (Παφία), was one of her epithets, after the Paphos in Cyprus where she had emerged from the sea at her birth.[54]
+
+Among the Neoplatonists and, later, their Christian interpreters, Ourania is associated with spiritual love, and Pandemos with physical love (desire). A representation of Ourania with her foot resting on a tortoise came to be seen as emblematic of discretion in conjugal love; it was the subject of a chryselephantine sculpture by Phidias for Elis, known only from a parenthetical comment by the geographer Pausanias.[55]
+
+One of Aphrodite's most common literary epithets is Philommeidḗs (φιλομμειδής),[56] which means "smile-loving",[56] but is sometimes mistranslated as "laughter-loving".[56] This epithet occurs throughout both of the Homeric epics and the First Homeric Hymn to Aphrodite.[56] Hesiod references it once in his Theogony in the context of Aphrodite's birth,[57] but interprets it as "genital-loving" rather than "smile-loving".[57] Monica Cyrino notes that the epithet may relate to the fact that, in many artistic depictions of Aphrodite, she is shown smiling.[57] Other common literary epithets are Cypris and Cythereia,[58] which derive from her associations with the islands of Cyprus and Cythera respectively.[58]
+
+On Cyprus, Aphrodite was sometimes called Eleemon ("the merciful").[48] In Athens, she was known as Aphrodite en kopois ("Aphrodite of the Gardens").[48] At Cape Colias, a town along the Attic coast, she was venerated as Genetyllis "Mother".[48] The Spartans worshipped her as Potnia "Mistress", Enoplios "Armed", Morpho "Shapely", Ambologera "She who Postpones Old Age".[48] Across the Greek world, she was known under epithets such as Melainis "Black One", Skotia "Dark One", Androphonos "Killer of Men", Anosia "Unholy", and Tymborychos "Gravedigger",[46] all of which indicate her darker, more violent nature.[46]
+
+A male version of Aphrodite known as Aphroditus was worshipped in the city of Amathus on Cyprus.[44][45][46] Aphroditus was depicted with the figure and dress of a woman,[44][45] but had a beard,[44][45] and was shown lifting his dress to reveal an erect phallus.[44][45] This gesture was believed to be an apotropaic symbol,[59] and was thought to convey good fortune upon the viewer.[59] Eventually, the popularity of Aphroditus waned as the mainstream, fully feminine version of Aphrodite became more popular,[45] but traces of his cult are preserved in the later legends of Hermaphroditus.[45]
+
+Aphrodite's main festival, the Aphrodisia, was celebrated across Greece, but particularly in Athens and Corinth. In Athens, the Aphrodisia was celebrated on the fourth day of the month of Hekatombaion in honor of Aphrodite's role in the unification of Attica.[60][61] During this festival, the priests of Aphrodite would purify the temple of Aphrodite Pandemos on the southwestern slope of the Acropolis with the blood of a sacrificed dove.[62] Next, the altars would be anointed[62] and the cult statues of Aphrodite Pandemos and Peitho would be escorted in a majestic procession to a place where they would be ritually bathed.[63] Aphrodite was also honored in Athens as part of the Arrhephoria festival.[64] The fourth day of every month was sacred to Aphrodite.[65]
+
+Pausanias records that, in Sparta, Aphrodite was worshipped as Aphrodite Areia, which means "warlike".[31][32] This epithet stresses Aphrodite's connections to Ares, with whom she had extramarital relations.[31][32] Pausanias also records that, in Sparta[31][32] and on Cythera, a number of extremely ancient cult statues of Aphrodite portrayed her bearing arms.[33][48] Other cult statues showed her bound in chains.[48]
+
+Aphrodite was the patron goddess of prostitutes of all varieties,[66][48] ranging from pornai (cheap street prostitutes typically owned as slaves by wealthy pimps) to hetairai (expensive, well-educated hired companions, who were usually self-employed and sometimes provided sex to their customers).[67] The city of Corinth was renowned throughout the ancient world for its many hetairai,[68] who had a widespread reputation for being among the most skilled, but also the most expensive, prostitutes in the Greek world.[68] Corinth also had a major temple to Aphrodite located on the Acrocorinth[68] and was one of the main centers of her cult.[68] Records of numerous dedications to Aphrodite made by successful courtesans have survived in poems and in pottery inscriptions.[67] References to Aphrodite in association with prostitution are found in Corinth as well as on the islands of Cyprus, Cythera, and Sicily.[69] Aphrodite's Mesopotamian precursor Inanna-Ishtar was also closely associated with prostitution.[70][71][69]
+
+Scholars in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries believed that the cult of Aphrodite may have involved ritual prostitution,[71][69] an assumption based on ambiguous passages in certain ancient texts, particularly a fragment of a skolion by the Boeotian poet Pindar,[72] which mentions prostitutes in Corinth in association with Aphrodite.[72] Modern scholars now dismiss the notion of ritual prostitution in Greece as a "historiographic myth" with no factual basis.[73]
+
+During the Hellenistic period, the Greeks identified Aphrodite with the ancient Egyptian goddesses Hathor and Isis.[74][75][76] Aphrodite was the patron goddess of the Lagid queens[77] and Queen Arsinoe II was identified as her mortal incarnation.[77] Aphrodite was worshipped in Alexandria[77] and had numerous temples in and around the city.[77] Arsinoe II introduced the cult of Adonis to Alexandria and many of the women there partook in it.[77] The Tessarakonteres, a gigantic catamaran galley designed by Archimedes for Ptolemy IV Philopator, had a circular temple to Aphrodite on it with a marble statue of the goddess herself.[77] In the second century BC, Ptolemy VIII Physcon and his wives Cleopatra II and Cleopatra III dedicated a temple to Aphrodite Hathor at Philae.[77] Statuettes of Aphrodite for personal devotion became common in Egypt starting in the early Ptolemaic times and extending until long after Egypt became a Roman province.[77]
+
+The ancient Romans identified Aphrodite with their goddess Venus,[78] who was originally a goddess of agricultural fertility, vegetation, and springtime.[78] According to the Roman historian Livy, Aphrodite and Venus were officially identified in the third century BC[79] when the cult of Venus Erycina was introduced to Rome from the Greek sanctuary of Aphrodite on Mount Eryx in Sicily.[79] After this point, Romans adopted Aphrodite's iconography and myths and applied them to Venus.[79] Because Aphrodite was the mother of the Trojan hero Aeneas in Greek mythology[79] and Roman tradition claimed Aeneas as the founder of Rome,[79] Venus became venerated as Venus Genetrix, the mother of the entire Roman nation.[79] Julius Caesar claimed to be directly descended from Aeneas's son Iulus[80] and became a strong proponent of the cult of Venus.[80] This precedent was later followed by his nephew Augustus and the later emperors claiming succession from him.[80]
+
+This syncretism greatly impacted Greek worship of Aphrodite.[81] During the Roman era, the cults of Aphrodite in many Greek cities began to emphasize her relationship with Troy and Aeneas.[81] They also began to adopt distinctively Roman elements,[81] portraying Aphrodite as more maternal, more militaristic, and more concerned with administrative bureaucracy.[81] She was claimed as a divine guardian by many political magistrates.[81] Appearances of Aphrodite in Greek literature also vastly proliferated, usually showing Aphrodite in a characteristically Roman manner.[82]
+
+Aphrodite is usually said to have been born near her chief center of worship, Paphos, on the island of Cyprus, which is why she is sometimes called "Cyprian", especially in the poetic works of Sappho. The Sanctuary of Aphrodite Paphia, marking her birthplace, was a place of pilgrimage in the ancient world for centuries.[83] Other versions of her myth have her born near the island of Cythera, hence another of her names, "Cytherea".[84] Cythera was a stopping place for trade and culture between Crete and the Peloponesus,[85] so these stories may preserve traces of the migration of Aphrodite's cult from the Middle East to mainland Greece.[86]
+
+According to the version of her birth recounted by Hesiod in his Theogony,[87][88] Cronus severed Uranus' genitals and threw them behind him into the sea.[88][89][90] The foam from his genitals gave rise to Aphrodite[4] (hence her name, which Hesiod interprets as "foam-arisen"),[4] while the Giants, the Erinyes (furies), and the Meliae emerged from the drops of his blood.[88][89] Hesiod states that the genitals "were carried over the sea a long time, and white foam arose from the immortal flesh; with it a girl grew." Hesiod's account of Aphrodite's birth following Uranus's castration is probably derived from The Song of Kumarbi,[91][92] an ancient Hittite epic poem in which the god Kumarbi overthrows his father Anu, the god of the sky, and bites off his genitals, causing him to become pregnant and give birth to Anu's children, which include Ishtar and her brother Teshub, the Hittite storm god.[91][92]
+
+In the Iliad,[93] Aphrodite is described as the daughter of Zeus and Dione.[4] Dione's name appears to be a feminine cognate to Dios and Dion,[4] which are oblique forms of the name Zeus.[4] Zeus and Dione shared a cult at Dodona in northwestern Greece.[4] In Theogony, Hesiod describes Dione as an Oceanid.[94]
+
+Aphrodite is consistently portrayed as a nubile, infinitely desirable adult, having had no childhood.[95] She is often depicted nude.[96] In the Iliad, Aphrodite is the apparently unmarried consort of Ares, the god of war,[97] and the wife of Hephaestus is a different goddess named Charis.[98] Likewise, in Hesiod's Theogony, Aphrodite is unmarried and the wife of Hephaestus is Aglaea, the youngest of the three Charites.[98]
+
+In Book Eight of the Odyssey,[99] however, the blind singer Demodocus describes Aphrodite as the wife of Hephaestus and tells how she committed adultery with Ares during the Trojan War.[98][100] The sun-god Helios saw Aphrodite and Ares having sex in Hephaestus's bed and warned Hephaestus, who fashioned a net of gold.[100] The next time Ares and Aphrodite had sex together, the net trapped them both.[100] Hephaestus brought all the gods into the bedchamber to laugh at the captured adulterers,[101] but Apollo, Hermes, and Poseidon had sympathy for Ares[102] and Poseidon agreed to pay Hephaestus for Ares's release.[103] Humiliated, Aphrodite returned to Cyprus, where she was attended by the Charites.[103] This narrative probably originated as a Greek folk tale, originally independent of the Odyssey.[104]
+
+Later stories were invented to explain Aphrodite's marriage to Hephaestus. In the most famous story, Zeus hastily married Aphrodite to Hephaestus in order to prevent the other gods from fighting over her.[105] In another version of the myth, Hephaestus gave his mother Hera a golden throne, but when she sat on it, she became trapped and he refused to let her go until she agreed to give him Aphrodite's hand in marriage.[106] Hephaestus was overjoyed to be married to the goddess of beauty, and forged her beautiful jewelry, including a strophion (στρόφιον) known as the keston himanta (κεστὸν ἱμάντα),[107] a saltire-shaped undergarment (usually translated as "girdle"),[108] which accentuated her breasts[109] and made her even more irresistible to men.[108] Such strophia were commonly used in depictions of the Near Eastern goddesses Ishtar and Atargatis.[108]
+
+Aphrodite is almost always accompanied by Eros, the god of lust and sexual desire.[110] In his Theogony, Hesiod describes Eros as one of the four original primeval forces born at the beginning of time,[110] but, after the birth of Aphrodite from the sea foam, he is joined by Himeros and, together, they become Aphrodite's constant companions.[111] In early Greek art, Eros and Himeros are both shown as idealized handsome youths with wings.[112] The Greek lyric poets regarded the power of Eros and Himeros as dangerous, compulsive, and impossible for anyone to resist.[113] In modern times, Eros is often seen as Aphrodite's son,[114] but this is actually a comparatively late innovation.[115] A scholion on Theocritus's Idylls remarks that the sixth-century BC poet Sappho had described Eros as the son of Aphrodite and Uranus,[116] but the first surviving reference to Eros as Aphrodite's son comes from Apollonius of Rhodes's Argonautica, written in the third century BC, which makes him the son of Aphrodite and Ares.[117] Later, the Romans, who saw Venus as a mother goddess, seized on this idea of Eros as Aphrodite's son and popularized it,[117] making it the predominant portrayal in works on mythology until the present day.[117]
+
+Aphrodite's main attendants were the three Charites, whom Hesiod identifies as the daughters of Zeus and Eurynome and names as Aglaea ("Splendor"), Euphrosyne ("Good Cheer"), and Thalia ("Abundance").[118] The Charites had been worshipped as goddesses in Greece since the beginning of Greek history, long before Aphrodite was introduced to the pantheon.[98] Aphrodite's other set of attendants was the three Horae (the "Hours"),[98] whom Hesiod identifies as the daughters of Zeus and Themis and names as Eunomia (“Good Order”), Dike (“Justice”), and Eirene (“Peace”).[119] Aphrodite was also sometimes accompanied by Harmonia, her daughter by Ares, and Hebe, the daughter of Zeus and Hera.[120]
+
+The fertility god Priapus was usually considered to be Aphrodite's son by Dionysus,[121][122] but he was sometimes also described as her son by Hermes, Adonis, or even Zeus.[121] A scholion on Apollonius of Rhodes's Argonautica[123] states that, while Aphrodite was pregnant with Priapus, Hera envied her and applied an evil potion to her belly while she was sleeping to ensure that the child would be hideous.[121] When Aphrodite gave birth, she was horrified to see that the child had a massive, permanently erect penis, a potbelly, and a huge tongue.[121] Aphrodite abandoned the infant to die in the wilderness, but a herdsman found him and raised him, later discovering that Priapus could use his massive penis to aid in the growth of plants.[121]
+
+The First Homeric Hymn to Aphrodite (Hymn 5), which was probably composed sometime in the mid-seventh century BC,[124] describes how Zeus once became annoyed with Aphrodite for causing deities to fall in love with mortals,[124] so he caused her to fall in love with Anchises, a handsome mortal shepherd who lived in the foothills beneath Mount Ida near the city of Troy.[124] Aphrodite appears to Anchises in the form of a tall, beautiful, mortal virgin while he is alone in his home.[125] Anchises sees her dressed in bright clothing and gleaming jewelry, with her breasts shining with divine radiance.[126] He asks her if she is Aphrodite and promises to build her an altar on top of the mountain if she will bless him and his family.[127]
+
+Aphrodite lies and tells him that she is not a goddess, but the daughter of one of the noble families of Phrygia.[127] She claims to be able to understand the Trojan language because she had a Trojan nurse as a child and says that she found herself on the mountainside after she was snatched up by Hermes while dancing in a celebration in honor of Artemis, the goddess of virginity.[127] Aphrodite tells Anchises that she is still a virgin[127] and begs him to take her to his parents.[127] Anchises immediately becomes overcome with mad lust for Aphrodite and swears that he will have sex with her.[127] Anchises takes Aphrodite, with her eyes cast downwards, to his bed, which is covered in the furs of lions and bears.[128] He then strips her naked and makes love to her.[128]
+
+After the lovemaking is complete, Aphrodite reveals her true divine form.[129] Anchises is terrified, but Aphrodite consoles him and promises that she will bear him a son.[129] She prophesies that their son will be the demigod Aeneas, who will be raised by the nymphs of the wilderness for five years before going to Troy to become a nobleman like his father.[130] The story of Aeneas's conception is also mentioned in Hesiod's Theogony and in Book II of Homer's Iliad.[130][131]
+
+The myth of Aphrodite and Adonis is probably derived from the ancient Sumerian legend of Inanna and Dumuzid.[132][133][134] The Greek name Ἄδωνις (Adōnis, Greek pronunciation: [ádɔːnis]) is derived from the Canaanite word ʼadōn, meaning "lord".[135][134] The earliest known Greek reference to Adonis comes from a fragment of a poem by the Lesbian poetess Sappho (c. 630 – c. 570 BC), in which a chorus of young girls asks Aphrodite what they can do to mourn Adonis's death.[136] Aphrodite replies that they must beat their breasts and tear their tunics.[136] Later references flesh out the story with more details.[137] According to the retelling of the story found in the poem Metamorphoses by the Roman poet Ovid (43 BC – 17/18 AD), Adonis was the son of Myrrha, who was cursed by Aphrodite with insatiable lust for her own father, King Cinyras of Cyprus, after Myrrha's mother bragged that her daughter was more beautiful than the goddess.[138] Driven out after becoming pregnant, Myrrha was changed into a myrrh tree, but still gave birth to Adonis.[139]
+
+Aphrodite found the baby, and took him to the underworld to be fostered by Persephone.[140] She returned for him once he was grown and discovered him to be strikingly handsome.[140] Persephone wanted to keep Adonis, resulting in a custody battle between the two goddesses over whom should rightly possess Adonis.[140] Zeus settled the dispute by decreeing that Adonis would spend one third of the year with Aphrodite, one third with Persephone, and one third with whomever he chose.[140] Adonis chose to spend that time with Aphrodite.[140] Then, one day, while Adonis was hunting, he was wounded by a wild boar and bled to death in Aphrodite's arms.[140]
+
+In different versions of the story, the boar was either sent by Ares, who was jealous that Aphrodite was spending so much time with Adonis, or by Artemis, who wanted revenge against Aphrodite for having killed her devoted follower Hippolytus.[141] The story also provides an etiology for Aphrodite's associations with certain flowers.[141] Reportedly, as she mourned Adonis's death, she caused anemones to grow wherever his blood fell,[141] and declared a festival on the anniversary of his death.[140] In one version of the story, Aphrodite injured herself on a thorn from a rose bush and the rose, which had previously been white, was stained red by her blood.[141] According to Lucian's On the Syrian Goddess,[99] each year during the festival of Adonis, the Adonis River in Lebanon (now known as the Abraham River) ran red with blood.[140]
+
+The myth of Adonis is associated with the festival of the Adonia, which was celebrated by Greek women every year in midsummer.[134] The festival, which was evidently already celebrated in Lesbos by Sappho's time, seems to have first become popular in Athens in the mid-fifth century BC.[134] At the start of the festival, the women would plant a "garden of Adonis", a small garden planted inside a small basket or a shallow piece of broken pottery containing a variety of quick-growing plants, such as lettuce and fennel, or even quick-sprouting grains such as wheat and barley.[134] The women would then climb ladders to the roofs of their houses, where they would place the gardens out under the heat of the summer sun.[134] The plants would sprout in the sunlight,[134] but wither quickly in the heat.[142] Then the women would mourn and lament loudly over the death of Adonis,[143] tearing their clothes and beating their breasts in a public display of grief.[143]
+
+In Hesiod's Works and Days, Zeus orders Aphrodite to make Pandora, the first woman, physically beautiful and sexually attractive,[144] so that she may become "an evil men will love to embrace".[145] Aphrodite "spills grace" over Pandora's head[144] and equips her with "painful desire and knee-weakening anguish", thus making her the perfect vessel for evil to enter the world.[146] Aphrodite's attendants, Peitho, the Charites, and the Horae, adorn Pandora with gold and jewelry.[147]
+
+According to one myth, Aphrodite aided Hippomenes, a noble youth who wished to marry Atalanta, a maiden who was renowned throughout the land for her beauty, but who refused to marry any man unless he could outrun her in a footrace.[148][149] Atalanta was an exceedingly swift runner and she beheaded all of the men who lost to her.[148][149] Aphrodite gave Hippomenes three golden apples from the Garden of the Hesperides and instructed him to toss them in front of Atalanta as he raced her.[148][150] Hippomenes obeyed Aphrodite's order[148] and Atalanta, seeing the beautiful, golden fruits, bent down to pick up each one, allowing Hippomenes to outrun her.[148][150] In the version of the story from Ovid's Metamorphoses, Hippomenes forgets to repay Aphrodite for her aid,[151][148] so she causes the couple to become inflamed with lust while they are staying at the temple of Cybele.[148] The couple desecrate the temple by having sex in it, leading Cybele to turn them into lions as punishment.[151][148]
+
+The myth of Pygmalion is first mentioned by the third-century BC Greek writer Philostephanus of Cyrene,[152][153] but is first recounted in detail in Ovid's Metamorphoses.[152] According to Ovid, Pygmalion was an exceedingly handsome sculptor from the island of Cyprus, who was so sickened by the immorality of women that he refused to marry.[154][155] He fell madly and passionately in love with the ivory cult statue he was carving of Aphrodite and longed to marry it.[154][156] Because Pygmalion was extremely pious and devoted to Aphrodite,[154][157] the goddess brought the statue to life.[154][157] Pygmalion married the girl the statue became and they had a son named Paphos, after whom the capital of Cyprus received its name.[154][157] Pseudo-Apollodorus later mentions "Metharme, daughter of Pygmalion, king of Cyprus".[158]
+
+Aphrodite generously rewarded those who honored her, but also punished those who disrespected her, often quite brutally.[160] A myth described in Apollonius of Rhodes's Argonautica and later summarized in the Bibliotheca of Pseudo-Apollodorus tells how, when the women of the island of Lemnos refused to sacrifice to Aphrodite, the goddess cursed them to stink horribly so that their husbands would never have sex with them.[161] Instead, their husbands started having sex with their Thracian slave-girls.[161] In anger, the women of Lemnos murdered the entire male population of the island, as well as all the Thracian slaves.[161] When Jason and his crew of Argonauts arrived on Lemnos, they mated with the sex-starved women under Aphrodite's approval and repopulated the island.[161] From then on, the women of Lemnos never disrespected Aphrodite again.[161]
+
+In Euripides's tragedy Hippolytus, which was first performed at the City Dionysia in 428 BC, Theseus's son Hippolytus worships only Artemis, the goddess of virginity, and refuses to engage in any form of sexual contact.[161] Aphrodite is infuriated by his prideful behavior[162] and, in the prologue to the play, she declares that, by honoring only Artemis and refusing to venerate her, Hippolytus has directly challenged her authority.[163] Aphrodite therefore causes Hippolytus's stepmother, Phaedra, to fall in love with him, knowing Hippolytus will reject her.[164] After being rejected, Phaedra commits suicide and leaves a suicide note to Theseus telling him that she killed herself because Hippolytus attempted to rape her.[164] Theseus prays to Poseidon to kill Hippolytus for his transgression.[165] Poseidon sends a wild bull to scare Hippolytus's horses as he is riding by the sea in his chariot, causing the horses to bolt and smash the chariot against the cliffs, dragging Hippolytus to a bloody death across the rocky shoreline.[165] The play concludes with Artemis vowing to kill Aphrodite's own mortal beloved (presumably Adonis) in revenge.[166]
+
+Glaucus of Corinth angered Aphrodite by refusing to let his horses for chariot racing mate, since doing so would hinder their speed.[167] During the chariot race at the funeral games of King Pelias, Aphrodite drove his horses mad and they tore him apart.[168] Polyphonte was a young woman who chose a virginal life with Artemis instead of marriage and children, as favoured by Aphrodite. Aphrodite cursed her, causing her to have children by a bear. The resulting offspring, Agrius and Oreius, were wild cannibals who incurred the hatred of Zeus. Ultimately, he transformed all the members of the family into birds of ill omen.[169]
+
+The myth of the Judgement of Paris is mentioned briefly in the Iliad,[170] but is described in depth in an epitome of the Cypria, a lost poem of the Epic Cycle,[171] which records that all the gods and goddesses as well as various mortals were invited to the marriage of Peleus and Thetis (the eventual parents of Achilles).[170] Only Eris, goddess of discord, was not invited.[171] She was annoyed at this, so she arrived with a golden apple inscribed with the word καλλίστῃ (kallistēi, "for the fairest"), which she threw among the goddesses.[172] Aphrodite, Hera, and Athena all claimed to be the fairest, and thus the rightful owner of the apple.[172]
+
+The goddesses chose to place the matter before Zeus, who, not wanting to favor one of the goddesses, put the choice into the hands of Paris, a Trojan prince.[172] After bathing in the spring of Mount Ida where Troy was situated, the goddesses appeared before Paris for his decision.[172] In the extant ancient depictions of the Judgement of Paris, Aphrodite is only occasionally represented nude, and Athena and Hera are always fully clothed.[173] Since the Renaissance, however, Western paintings have typically portrayed all three goddesses as completely naked.[173]
+
+All three goddesses were ideally beautiful and Paris could not decide between them, so they resorted to bribes.[172] Hera tried to bribe Paris with power over all Asia and Europe,[172] and Athena offered wisdom, fame and glory in battle,[172] but Aphrodite promised Paris that, if he were to choose her as the fairest, she would let him marry the most beautiful woman on earth.[174] This woman was Helen, who was already married to King Menelaus of Sparta.[174] Paris selected Aphrodite and awarded her the apple.[174] The other two goddesses were enraged and, as a direct result, sided with the Greeks in the Trojan War.[174]
+
+Aphrodite plays an important and active role throughout the entirety of Homer's Iliad.[175] In Book III, she rescues Paris from Menelaus after he foolishly challenges him to a one-on-one duel.[176] She then appears to Helen in the form of an old woman and attempts to persuade her to have sex with Paris,[177] reminding her of his physical beauty and athletic prowess.[178] Helen immediately recognizes Aphrodite by her beautiful neck, perfect breasts, and flashing eyes[179] and chides the goddess, addressing her as her equal.[180] Aphrodite sharply rebukes Helen, reminding her that, if she vexes her, she will punish her just as much as she has favored her already.[181] Helen demurely obeys Aphrodite's command.[181]
+
+In Book V, Aphrodite charges into battle to rescue her son Aeneas from the Greek hero Diomedes.[182] Diomedes recognizes Aphrodite as a "weakling" goddess[182] and, thrusting his spear, nicks her wrist through her "ambrosial robe".[183] Aphrodite borrows Ares's chariot to ride back to Mount Olympus.[184] Zeus chides her for putting herself in danger,[184][185] reminding her that "her specialty is love, not war."[184] According to Walter Burkert, this scene directly parallels a scene from Tablet VI of the Epic of Gilgamesh in which Ishtar, Aphrodite's Akkadian precursor, cries to her mother Antu after the hero Gilgamesh rejects her sexual advances, but is mildly rebuked by her father Anu.[186] In Book XIV of the Iliad, during the Dios Apate episode, Aphrodite lends her kestos himas to Hera for the purpose of seducing Zeus and distracting him from the combat while Poseidon aids the Greek forces on the beach.[187] In the Theomachia in Book XXI, Aphrodite again enters the battlefield to carry Ares away after he is wounded.[184][188]
+
+Rich-throned immortal Aphrodite,scheming daughter of Zeus, I pray you,with pain and sickness, Queen, crush not my heart,but come, if ever in the past you heard my voice from afar and hearkened,and left your father's halls and came, with goldchariot yoked; and pretty sparrowsbrought you swiftly across the dark earthfluttering wings from heaven through the air.
+
+Aphrodite's most prominent avian symbol was the dove,[201] which was originally an important symbol of her Near Eastern precursor Inanna-Ishtar.[202][203] (In fact, the ancient Greek word for "dove", peristerá, may be derived from a Semitic phrase peraḥ Ištar, meaning "bird of Ishtar".[202][203]) Aphrodite frequently appears with doves in ancient Greek pottery[201] and the temple of Aphrodite Pandemos on the southwest slope of the Athenian Acropolis was decorated with relief sculptures of doves with knotted fillets in their beaks.[204] Votive offerings of small, white, marble doves were also discovered in the temple of Aphrodite at Daphni.[204] In addition to her associations with doves, Aphrodite was also closely linked with sparrows[201] and she is described riding in a chariot pulled by sparrows in Sappho's "Ode to Aphrodite".[204]
+
+Because of her connections to the sea, Aphrodite was associated with a number of different types of water fowl,[205] including swans, geese, and ducks.[205] Aphrodite's other symbols included the sea, conch shells, and roses.[206] The rose and myrtle flowers were both sacred to Aphrodite.[207] Her most important fruit emblem was the apple,[208] but she was also associated with pomegranates,[209] possibly because the red seeds suggested sexuality[210] or because Greek women sometimes used pomegranates as a method of birth control.[210] In Greek art, Aphrodite is often also accompanied by dolphins and Nereids.[211]
+
+A scene of Aphrodite rising from the sea appears on the back of the Ludovisi Throne (c. 460 BC),[214] which was probably originally part of a massive altar that was constructed as part of the Ionic temple to Aphrodite in the Greek polis of Locri Epizephyrii in Magna Graecia in southern Italy.[214] The throne shows Aphrodite rising from the sea, clad in a diaphanous garment, which is drenched with seawater and clinging to her body, revealing her upturned breasts and the outline of her navel.[215] Her hair hangs dripping as she reaches to two attendants standing barefoot on the rocky shore on either side of her, lifting her out of the water.[215] Scenes with Aphrodite appear in works of classical Greek pottery,[216] including a famous white-ground kylix by the Pistoxenos Painter dating the between c. 470 and 460 BC, showing her riding on a swan or goose.[216]
+
+In c. 364/361 BC, the Athenian sculptor Praxiteles carved the marble statue Aphrodite of Knidos,[217][213] which Pliny the Elder later praised as the greatest sculpture ever made.[217] The statue showed a nude Aphrodite modestly covering her pubic region while resting against a water pot with her robe draped over it for support.[218][219] The Aphrodite of Knidos was the first full-sized statue to depict Aphrodite completely naked[220] and one of the first sculptures that was intended to be viewed from all sides.[221][220] The statue was purchased by the people of Knidos in around 350 BC[220] and proved to be tremendously influential on later depictions of Aphrodite.[221] The original sculpture has been lost,[217][219] but written descriptions of it as well several depictions of it on coins are still extant[222][217][219] and over sixty copies, small-scale models, and fragments of it have been identified.[222]
+
+The Greek painter Apelles of Kos, a contemporary of Praxiteles, produced the panel painting Aphrodite Anadyomene (Aphrodite Rising from the Sea).[212] According to Athenaeus, Apelles was inspired to paint the painting after watching the courtesan Phryne take off her clothes, untie her hair, and bathe naked in the sea at Eleusis.[212] The painting was displayed in the Asclepeion on the island of Kos.[212] The Aphrodite Anadyomene went unnoticed for centuries,[212] but Pliny the Elder records that, in his own time, it was regarded as Apelles's most famous work.[212]
+
+During the Hellenistic and Roman periods, statues depicting Aphrodite proliferated;[223] many of these statues were modeled at least to some extent on Praxiteles's Aphrodite of Knidos.[223] Some statues show Aphrodite crouching naked;[224] others show her wringing water out of her hair as she rises from the sea.[224] Another common type of statue is known as Aphrodite Kallipygos, the name of which is Greek for "Aphrodite of the Beautiful Buttocks";[224] this type of sculpture shows Aphrodite lifting her peplos to display her buttocks to the viewer while looking back at them from over her shoulder.[224] The ancient Romans produced massive numbers of copies of Greek sculptures of Aphrodite[223] and more sculptures of Aphrodite have survived from antiquity than of any other deity.[224]
+
+The Ludovisi Throne (possibly c. 460 BC) is believed to be a classical Greek bas-relief, although it has also been alleged to be a 19th-century forgery.
+
+Attic white-ground red-figured kylix of Aphrodite riding a swan (c. 46-470) found at Kameiros (Rhodes)
+
+Aphrodite and Himeros, detail from a silver kantharos (c. 420-410 BC), part of the Vassil Bojkov collection, Sofia, Bulgaria
+
+Red-figure vase painting of Aphrodite and Phaon (c. 420-400 BC)
+
+Apuleian vase painting of Zeus plotting with Aphrodite to seduce Leda while Eros sits on her arm (c. 330 BC)
+
+Aphrodite Leaning Against a Pillar (third century BC)
+
+Aphrodite Kallipygos ("Aphrodite of the Beautiful Buttocks")
+
+Aphrodite Binding Her Hair (second century BC)
+
+Aphrodite Heyl (second century BC)
+
+Greek sculpture group of Aphrodite, Eros, and Pan (c. 100 BC)
+
+Aphrodite of Milos (c. 100 BC), Louvre
+
+Aphrodite of Menophantos (first century BC)
+
+The Ludovisi Aphrodite of Knidos
+
+The Lely Venus (c. second century AD)
+
+Early Christians frequently adapted pagan iconography to suit Christian purposes.[225][226][227] In the Early Middle Ages, Christians adapted elements of Aphrodite/Venus's iconography and applied them to Eve and prostitutes,[226] but also female saints and even the Virgin Mary.[226] Christians in the east reinterpreted the story of Aphrodite's birth as a metaphor for baptism;[228] in a Coptic stele from the sixth century AD, a female orant is shown wearing Aphrodite's conch shell as a sign that she is newly baptized.[228] Throughout the Middle Ages, villages and communities across Europe still maintained folk tales and traditions about Aphrodite/Venus[229] and travelers reported a wide variety of stories.[229] Numerous Roman mosaics of Venus survived in Britain, preserving memory of the pagan past.[206] In North Africa in the late fifth century AD, Fulgentius of Ruspe encountered mosaics of Aphrodite[206] and reinterpreted her as a symbol of the sin of Lust,[206] arguing that she was shown naked because "the sin of lust is never cloaked"[206] and that she was often shown "swimming" because "all lust suffers shipwreck of its affairs."[206] He also argued that she was associated with doves and conchs because these are symbols of copulation,[206] and that she was associated with roses because "as the rose gives pleasure, but is swept away by the swift movement of the seasons, so lust is pleasant for a moment, but is swept away forever."[206]
+
+While Fulgentius had appropriated Aphrodite as a symbol of Lust,[230] Isidore of Seville (c. 560–636) interpreted her as a symbol of marital procreative sex[230] and declared that the moral of the story of Aphrodite's birth is that sex can only be holy in the presence of semen, blood, and heat, which he regarded as all being necessary for procreation.[230] Meanwhile, Isidore denigrated Aphrodite/Venus's son Eros/Cupid as a "demon of fornication" (daemon fornicationis).[230] Aphrodite/Venus was best known to Western European scholars through her appearances in Virgil's Aeneid and Ovid's Metamorphoses.[231] Venus is mentioned in the Latin poem Pervigilium Veneris ("The Eve of Saint Venus"), written in the third or fourth century AD,[232] and in Giovanni Boccaccio's Genealogia Deorum Gentilium.[233]
+
+Since the Late Middle Ages. the myth of the  Venusberg (German; French Mont de Vénus, "Mountain of Venus") - a subterranean realm ruled by Venus, hidden underneath Christian Europe - became a motif of European folklore rendered in various legends and epics. In German folklore of the 16th century, the narrative becomes associated with the minnesinger Tannhäuser, and in that form the myth was taken up in later literature and opera.
+
+Aphrodite is the central figure in Sandro Botticelli's painting Primavera, which has been described as "one of the most written about, and most controversial paintings in the world",[234] and "one of the most popular paintings in Western art".[235] The story of Aphrodite's birth from the foam was a popular subject matter for painters during the Italian Renaissance,[236] who were attempting to consciously reconstruct Apelles of Kos's lost masterpiece Aphrodite Anadyomene based on the literary ekphrasis of it preserved by Cicero and Pliny the Elder.[237] Artists also drew inspiration from Ovid's description of the birth of Venus in his Metamorphoses.[237] Sandro Botticelli's The Birth of Venus (c. 1485) was also partially inspired by a description by Poliziano of a relief on the subject.[237] Later Italian renditions of the same scene include Titian's Venus Anadyomene (c. 1525)[237] and Raphael's painting in the Stufetta del cardinal Bibbiena (1516).[237] Titian's biographer Giorgio Vasari identified all of Titian's paintings of naked women as paintings of "Venus",[238] including an erotic painting from c. 1534, which he called the Venus of Urbino, even though the painting does not contain any of Aphrodite/Venus's traditional iconography and the woman in it is clearly shown in a contemporary setting, not a classical one.[238]
+
+Primavera (late 1470s or early 1480s) by Sandro Botticelli
+
+Venus Anadyomene (c. 1525) by Titian
+
+Venus of Urbino (c. 1534) by Titian
+
+Venus, Cupid, Folly and Time (c. 1545) by Bronzino
+
+Venus and Adonis (1554) by Titian
+
+Venus with a Mirror (c. 1555) by Titian
+
+Venus, Adonis and Cupid (c. 1595) by Annibale Carracci
+
+The Toilet of Venus (c. 1612-1615) by Peter Paul Rubens
+
+The Death of Adonis (c. 1614) by Peter Paul Rubens
+
+Rokeby Venus (c. 1647–51) by Diego Velázquez
+
+Venus and Cupid Lamenting the Dead Adonis (1656) by Cornelis Holsteyn
+
+Jacques-Louis David's final work was his 1824 magnum opus, Mars Being Disarmed by Venus,[240] which combines elements of classical, Renaissance, traditional French art, and contemporary artistic styles.[240] While he was working on the painting, David described it, saying, "This is the last picture I want to paint, but I want to surpass myself in it. I will put the date of my seventy-five years on it and afterwards I will never again pick up my brush."[241] The painting was exhibited first in Brussels and then in Paris, where over 10,000 people came to see it.[241] Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres's painting Venus Anadyomene was one of his major works.[242] Louis Geofroy described it as a "dream of youth realized with the power of maturity, a happiness that few obtain, artists or others."[242] Théophile Gautier declared: "Nothing remains of the marvelous painting of the Greeks, but surely if anything could give the idea of antique painting as it was conceived following the statues of Phidias and the poems of Homer, it is M. Ingres's painting: the Venus Anadyomene of Apelles has been found."[242] Other critics dismissed it as a piece of unimaginative, sentimental kitsch,[242] but Ingres himself considered it to be among his greatest works and used the same figure as the model for his later 1856 painting La Source.[242]
+
+Paintings of Venus were favorites of the late nineteenth-century Academic artists in France.[243][244] In 1863, Alexandre Cabanel won widespread critical acclaim at the Paris Salon for his painting The Birth of Venus, which the French emperor Napoleon III immediately purchased for his own personal art collection.[245] Édouard Manet's 1865 painting Olympia parodied the nude Venuses of the Academic painters, particularly Cabanel's Birth of Venus.[246] In 1867, the English Academic painter Frederic Leighton displayed his Venus Disrobing for the Bath at the Academy.[247] The art critic J. B. Atkinson praised it, declaring that "Mr Leighton, instead of adopting corrupt Roman notions regarding Venus such as Rubens embodied, has wisely reverted to the Greek idea of Aphrodite, a goddess worshipped, and by artists painted, as the perfection of female grace and beauty."[248] A year later, the English painter Dante Gabriel Rossetti, a founding member of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, painted Venus Verticordia (Latin for "Aphrodite, the Changer of Hearts"), showing Aphrodite as a nude red-headed woman in a garden of roses.[247] Though he was reproached for his outré subject matter,[247] Rossetti refused to alter the painting and it was soon purchased by J. Mitchell of Bradford.[248] In 1879, William Adolphe Bouguereau exhibited at the Paris Salon his own Birth of Venus,[245] which imitated the classical tradition of contrapposto and was met with widespread critical acclaim, rivalling the popularity of Cabanel's version from nearly two decades prior.[245]
+
+Venus and Adonis (1729) by François Lemoyne
+
+Mars Being Disarmed by Venus (1824) by Jacques-Louis David
+
+Mars and Venus Surprised by Vulcan (1827) by Alexandre Charles Guillemot
+
+Venus Anadyomene (1848) by Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres
+
+Venus Disrobing for the Bath (1867) by Frederic Leighton
+
+Venus Verticordia (1868) by Dante Gabriel Rossetti
+
+The Birth of Venus (c. 1879) by William-Adolphe Bouguereau
+
+William Shakespeare's erotic narrative poem Venus and Adonis (1593), a retelling of the courtship of Aphrodite and Adonis from Ovid's Metamorphoses,[249][250] was the most popular of all his works published within his own lifetime.[251][252] Six editions of it were published before Shakespeare's death (more than any of his other works)[252] and it enjoyed particularly strong popularity among young adults.[251] In 1605, Richard Barnfield lauded it,[252] declaring that the poem had placed Shakespeare's name "in fames immortall Booke".[252] Despite this, the poem has received mixed reception from modern critics;[251] Samuel Taylor Coleridge defended it,[251] but Samuel Butler complained that it bored him[251] and C. S. Lewis described an attempted reading of it as "suffocating".[251]
+
+Aphrodite appears in Richard Garnett's short story collection The Twilight of the Gods and Other Tales (1888),[253] in which the gods' temples have been destroyed by Christians.[254] Stories revolving around sculptures of Aphrodite were common in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.[255] Examples of such works of literature include the novel The Tinted Venus: A Farcical Romance (1885) by Thomas Anstey Guthrie and the short story The Venus of Ille (1887) by Prosper Mérimée,[256] both of which are about statues of Aphrodite that come to life.[256] Another noteworthy example is Aphrodite in Aulis by the Anglo-Irish writer George Moore,[257] which revolves around an ancient Greek family who moves to Aulis.[258] The French writer Pierre Louÿs titled his erotic historical novel Aphrodite: mœurs antiques (1896) after the Greek goddess.[259] The novel enjoyed widespread commercial success,[259] but scandalized French audiences due to its sensuality and its decadent portrayal of Greek society.[259]
+
+In the early twentieth century, stories of Aphrodite were used by feminist poets,[260] such as Amy Lowell and Alicia Ostriker.[261] Many of these poems dealt with Aphrodite's legendary birth from the foam of the sea.[260] Other feminist writers, including Claude Cahun, Thit Jensen, and Anaïs Nin also made use of the myth of Aphrodite in their writings.[262] Ever since the publication of Isabel Allende's book Aphrodite: A Memoir of the Senses in 1998, the name "Aphrodite" has been used as a title for dozens of books dealing with all topics even superficially connected to her domain.[263] Frequently these books do not even mention Aphrodite,[263] or mention her only briefly, but make use of her name as a selling point.[264]
+
+In 1938, Gleb Botkin, a Russian immigrant to the United States, founded the Church of Aphrodite, a neopagan religion centered around the worship of a mother goddess, whom its practitioners identified as Aphrodite.[265][266] The Church of Aphrodite's theology was laid out in the book In Search of Reality, published in 1969, two years before Botkin's death.[267] The book portrayed Aphrodite in a drastically different light than the one in which the Greeks envisioned her,[267] instead casting her as "the sole Goddess of a somewhat Neoplatonic Pagan monotheism".[267] It claimed that the worship of Aphrodite had been brought to Greece by the mystic teacher Orpheus,[267] but that the Greeks had misunderstood Orpheus's teachings and had not realized the importance of worshipping Aphrodite alone.[267]
+
+Aphrodite is a major deity in Wicca,[268][269] a contemporary nature-based syncretic Neopagan religion.[270] Wiccans regard Aphrodite as one aspect of the Goddess[269] and she is frequently invoked by name during enchantments dealing with love and romance.[271][272] Wiccans regard Aphrodite as the ruler of human emotions, erotic spirituality, creativity, and art.[273] As one of the twelve Olympians, Aphrodite is a major deity within Hellenismos (Hellenic Polytheistic Reconstructionism),[274][275] a Neopagan religion which seeks to authentically revive and recreate the religion of ancient Greece in the modern world.[276] Unlike Wiccans, Hellenists are usually strictly polytheistic or pantheistic.[277] Hellenists venerate Aphrodite primarily as the goddess of romantic love,[275] but also as a goddess of sexuality, the sea, and war.[275] Her many epithets include "Sea Born", "Killer of Men", "She upon the Graves", "Fair Sailing", and "Ally in War".[275]
+
+The statuette portrays Aphrodite on the point of untying the laces of the sandal on her left foot, under which a small Eros squats, touching the sole of her shoe with his right hand. The Goddess is leaning with her left arm (the hand is missing) against a figure of Priapus standing, naked and bearded, positioned on a small cylindrical altar while, next to her left thigh, there is a tree trunk over which the garment of the Goddess is folded. Aphrodite, almost completely naked, wears only a sort of costume, consisting of a corset held up by two pairs of straps and two short sleeves on the upper part of her arm, from which a long chain leads to her hips and forms a star-shaped motif at the level of her navel. The 'bikini', for which the statuette is famous, is obtained by the masterly use of the technique of gilding, also employed on her groin, in the pendant necklace and in the armilla on Aphrodite's right wrist, as well as on Priapus' phallus. Traces of the red paint are evident on the tree trunk, on the short curly hair gathered back in a bun and on the lips of the Goddess, as well as on the heads of Priapus and the Eros. Aphrodite's eyes are made of glass paste, while the presence of holes at the level of the ear-lobes suggest the existence of precious metal ear-rings which have since been lost. An interesting insight into the female ornaments of Roman times, the statuette, probably imported from the area of Alexandria, reproduces with a few modifications the statuary type of Aphrodite untying her sandal, known from copies in bronze and terracotta.
+
+For extensive research and a bibliography on the subject, see: de Franciscis 1963, p. 78, tav. XCI; Kraus 1973, nn. 270–271, pp. 194–195; Pompei 1973, n. 132; Pompeji 1973, n. 199, pp. 142 e 144; Pompeji 1974, n. 281, pp. 148–149; Pompeii A.D. 79 1976, p. 83 e n. 218; Pompeii A.D. 79 1978, I, n. 208, pp. 64–65, II, n. 208, p. 189; Döhl, Zanker 1979, p. 202, tav. Va; Pompeii A.D. 79 1980, p. 79 e n. 198; Pompeya 1981, n. 198, p. 107; Pompeii lives 1984, fig. 10, p. 46; Collezioni Museo 1989, I, 2, n. 254, pp. 146–147; PPM II, 1990, n. 7, p. 532; Armitt 1993, p. 240; Vésuve 1995, n. 53, pp. 162–163; Vulkan 1995, n. 53, pp. 162–163; LIMC VIII, 1, 1997, p. 210, s.v. Venus, n. 182; LIMC VIII, 2, 1997, p. 144; LIMC VIII, 1, 1997, p. 1031, s.v. Priapos, n. 15; LIMC VIII, 2, 1997, p. 680; Romana Pictura 1998, n. 153, p. 317 e tav. a p. 245; Cantarella 1999, p. 128; De Caro 1999, pp. 100–101; De Caro 2000, p. 46 e tav. a p. 62; Pompeii 2000, n. 1, p. 62.

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+Mumbai (English: /mʊmˈbaɪ/, Marathi: [ˈmumbəi]; colloquially known as Bombay /bɒmˈbeɪ/, the official name until 1995) is the capital city of the Indian state of Maharashtra. According to United Nations, as of 2018, Mumbai was the second-most populous city in India after Delhi and the seventh-most populous city in the world with a population of roughly 20 million.[14] As per Indian government population census of 2011, Mumbai was the most populous city in India with an estimated city proper population of 12.5 million living under Municipal Corporation of Greater Mumbai.[15] Mumbai is the centre of the Mumbai Metropolitan Region, the sixth most populous metropolitan area in the world with a population of over 23 million.[16] Mumbai lies on the Konkan coast on the west coast of India and has a deep natural harbour. In 2008, Mumbai was named an alpha world city.[17][18] It has the highest number of millionaires and billionaires among all cities in India.[19][20]  Mumbai is home to three UNESCO World Heritage Sites: the Elephanta Caves, Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj Terminus, and the city's distinctive ensemble of Victorian and Art Deco buildings.[21][22]
+
+The seven islands that constitute Mumbai were originally home to communities of Marathi language speaking Koli people, [23][24][25] For centuries, the islands were under the control of successive indigenous empires before being ceded to the Portuguese Empire and subsequently to the East India Company when in 1661 Charles II of England married Catherine of Braganza and as part of her dowry Charles received the ports of Tangier and Seven Islands of Bombay.[26] During the mid-18th century, Bombay was reshaped by the Hornby Vellard project,[27] which undertook reclamation of the area between the seven islands from the sea.[28] Along with construction of major roads and railways, the reclamation project, completed in 1845, transformed Bombay into a major seaport on the Arabian Sea. Bombay in the 19th century was characterised by economic and educational development. During the early 20th century it became a strong base for the Indian independence movement. Upon India's independence in 1947 the city was incorporated into Bombay State. In 1960, following the Samyukta Maharashtra Movement, a new state of Maharashtra was created with Bombay as the capital.[29]
+
+Mumbai is the financial, commercial,[30] and the entertainment capital of India. It is also one of the world's top ten centres of commerce in terms of global financial flow,[31] generating 6.16% of India's GDP,[32] and accounting for 25% of industrial output, 70% of maritime trade in India (Mumbai Port Trust and JNPT),[33] and 70% of capital transactions to India's economy.[34][35] Mumbai has the eighth-highest number of billionaires of any city in the world,[36] and Mumbai's billionaires had the highest average wealth of any city in the world in 2008.[37][38] The city houses important financial institutions and the corporate headquarters of numerous Indian companies and multinational corporations. It is also home to some of India's premier scientific and nuclear institutes. The city is also home to Bollywood and Marathi cinema industries. Mumbai's business opportunities attract migrants from all over India.
+
+The name Mumbai is derived from Mumbā or Mahā-Ambā—the name of the patron goddess (kuladevata) Mumbadevi of the native Koli community—[39] and ā'ī meaning "mother" in the Marathi language, which is the mother tongue of the Koli people and the official language of Maharashtra.[23][40] The Koli people originated in Kathiawad and Central Gujarat, and according to some sources they brought their goddess Mumba with them from Kathiawad (Gujarat), where she is still worshipped.[24][25] However, other sources disagree that Mumbai's name was derived from the goddess Mumba.[25]
+
+The oldest known names for the city are Kakamuchee and Galajunkja; these are sometimes still used.[41][42] In 1508, Portuguese writer Gaspar Correia used the name "Bombaim" in his Lendas da Índia ("Legends of India").[43][44] This name possibly originated as the Galician-Portuguese phrase bom baim, meaning "good little bay",[45] and Bombaim is still commonly used in Portuguese.[46] In 1516, Portuguese explorer Duarte Barbosa used the name Tana-Maiambu: Tana appears to refer to the adjoining town of Thane and Maiambu to Mumbadevi.[47]
+
+Other variations recorded in the 16th and the 17th centuries include: Mombayn (1525), Bombay (1538), Bombain (1552), Bombaym (1552), Monbaym (1554), Mombaim (1563), Mombaym (1644), Bambaye (1666), Bombaiim (1666), Bombeye (1676), Boon Bay (1690),[46][48] and Bon Bahia.[49] After the English gained possession of the city in the 17th century, the Portuguese name was anglicised as Bombay.[50] Ali Muhammad Khan, imperial dewan or revenue minister of the Gujarat province, in the Mirat-i Ahmedi (1762) referred to the city as Manbai.[51]
+
+The French traveller Louis Rousselet, who visited in 1863 and 1868, states in his book L’Inde des Rajahs, which was first published in 1877: "Etymologists have wrongly derived this name from the Portuguese Bôa Bahia, or (French: "bonne bai", English: "good bay"), not knowing that the tutelar goddess of this island has been, from remote antiquity, Bomba, or Mamba Dévi, and that she still..., possesses a temple".[52]
+
+By the late 20th century, the city was referred to as Mumbai or Mambai in Marathi, Konkani, Gujarati, Kannada and Sindhi, and as Bambai in Hindi.[53] The Government of India officially changed the English name to Mumbai in November 1995.[54] This came at the insistence of the Marathi nationalist Shiv Sena party, which had just won the Maharashtra state elections, and mirrored similar name changes across the country and particularly in Maharashtra.[55] According to Slate magazine, "they argued that 'Bombay' was a corrupted English version of 'Mumbai' and an unwanted legacy of British colonial rule."[56] Slate also said "The push to rename Bombay was part of a larger movement to strengthen Marathi identity in the Maharashtra region."[57] While the city is still referred to as Bombay by some of its residents and by Indians from other regions,[58][59] mention of the city by a name other than Mumbai has been controversial, resulting in emotional outbursts sometimes of a violently political nature.[60][61]
+
+A resident of Mumbai is called Mumbaikar in Marathi, in which the suffix kar means a resident of. The term had been in use for quite some time but it gained popularity after the official name change to Mumbai.[62] Older terms such as Bombayite are also in use.[63][64]
+
+Mumbai is built on what was once an archipelago of seven islands: Isle of Bombay, Parel, Mazagaon, Mahim, Colaba, Worli, and Old Woman's Island (also known as Little Colaba).[65] It is not exactly known when these islands were first inhabited. Pleistocene sediments found along the coastal areas around Kandivali in northern Mumbai suggest that the islands were inhabited since the South Asian Stone Age.[66] Perhaps at the beginning of the Common Era, or possibly earlier, they came to be occupied by the Koli fishing community.[67][68]
+
+In the third century BCE, the islands formed part of the Maurya Empire, during its expansion in the south, ruled by the Buddhist emperor Ashoka of Magadha.[69] The Kanheri Caves in Borivali were excavated from basalt rock in the first century CE,[70] and served as an important centre of Buddhism in Western India during ancient Times.[71] The city then was known as Heptanesia (Ancient Greek: A Cluster of Seven Islands) to the Greek geographer Ptolemy in 150 CE.[72] The Mahakali Caves in Andheri were cut out between the 1st century BCE and the 6th century .[73][74]
+
+Between the second century BCE and ninth century CE, the islands came under the control of successive indigenous dynasties: Satavahanas, Western Satraps, Abhira, Vakataka, Kalachuris, Konkan Mauryas, Chalukyas and Rashtrakutas,[75] before being ruled by the Shilaharas from 810 to 1260.[76] Some of the oldest edifices in the city built during this period are the Jogeshwari Caves (between 520 and 525),[77] Elephanta Caves (between the sixth to seventh century),[78] Walkeshwar Temple (10th century),[79][80] and Banganga Tank (12th century).[81][82]
+
+King Bhimdev founded his kingdom in the region in the late 13th century and established his capital in Mahikawati (present day Mahim).[83] The Pathare Prabhus, among the earliest known settlers of the city, were brought to Mahikawati from Saurashtra in Gujarat around 1298 by Bhimdev.[84] The Delhi Sultanate annexed the islands in 1347–48 and controlled it until 1407. During this time, the islands were administered by the Muslim Governors of Gujarat, who were appointed by the Delhi Sultanate.[85][86]
+
+The islands were later governed by the independent Gujarat Sultanate, which was established in 1407. The Sultanate's patronage led to the construction of many mosques, prominent being the Haji Ali Dargah in Worli, built in honour of the Muslim saint Haji Ali in 1431.[87] From 1429 to 1431, the islands were a source of contention between the Gujarat Sultanate and the Bahmani Sultanate of Deccan.[88][89] In 1493, Bahadur Khan Gilani of the Bahmani Sultanate attempted to conquer the islands but was defeated.[90]
+
+The Mughal Empire, founded in 1526, was the dominant power in the Indian subcontinent during the mid-16th century.[91] Growing apprehensive of the power of the Mughal emperor Humayun, Sultan Bahadur Shah of Gujarat was obliged to sign the Treaty of Bassein with the Portuguese Empire on 23 December 1534. According to the treaty, the Seven Islands of Bombay, the nearby strategic town of Bassein and its dependencies were offered to the Portuguese. The territories were later surrendered on 25 October 1535.[92]
+
+The Portuguese were actively involved in the foundation and growth of their Roman Catholic religious orders in Bombay.[93] They called the islands by various names, which finally took the written form Bombaim. The islands were leased to several Portuguese officers during their regime. The Portuguese Franciscans and Jesuits built several churches in the city, prominent being the St. Michael's Church at Mahim (1534),[94] St. John the Baptist Church at Andheri (1579),[95] St. Andrew's Church at Bandra (1580),[96] and Gloria Church at Byculla (1632).[97] The Portuguese also built several fortifications around the city like the Bombay Castle, Castella de Aguada (Castelo da Aguada or Bandra Fort), and Madh Fort. The English were in constant struggle with the Portuguese vying for hegemony over Bombay, as they recognised its strategic natural harbour and its natural isolation from land attacks. By the middle of the 17th century the growing power of the Dutch Empire forced the English to acquire a station in western India. On 11 May 1661, the marriage treaty of Charles II of England and Catherine of Braganza, daughter of King John IV of Portugal, placed the islands in possession of the English Empire, as part of Catherine's dowry to Charles.[98] However, Salsette, Bassein, Mazagaon, Parel, Worli, Sion, Dharavi, and Wadala still remained under Portuguese possession. From 1665 to 1666, the English managed to acquire Mahim, Sion, Dharavi, and Wadala.[99]
+
+In accordance with the Royal Charter of 27 March 1668, England leased these islands to the English East India Company in 1668 for a sum of £10 per annum.[100] The population quickly rose from 10,000 in 1661, to 60,000 in 1675.[101] The islands were subsequently attacked by Yakut Khan, the Muslim Koli[102][103][104][105] admiral of the Mughal Empire, in October 1672,[106] Rickloffe van Goen, the Governor-General of Dutch India on 20 February 1673,[107] and Siddi admiral Sambal on 10 October 1673.[106]
+
+In 1687, the English East India Company transferred its headquarters from Surat to Bombay. The city eventually became the headquarters of the Bombay Presidency.[108] Following the transfer, Bombay was placed at the head of all the company's establishments in India.[109] Towards the end of the 17th century, the islands again suffered incursions from Yakut Khan in 1689–90.[110] The Portuguese presence ended in Bombay when the Marathas under Peshwa Baji Rao I captured Salsette in 1737, and Bassein in 1739.[111]
+By the middle of the 18th century, Bombay began to grow into a major trading town, and received a huge influx of migrants from across India.[112] Later, the British occupied Salsette on 28 December 1774. With the Treaty of Surat (1775), the British formally gained control of Salsette and Bassein, resulting in the First Anglo-Maratha War.[113] The British were able to secure Salsette from the Marathas without violence through the Treaty of Purandar (1776),[114] and later through the Treaty of Salbai (1782), signed to settle the outcome of the First Anglo-Maratha War.[115]
+
+From 1782 onwards, the city was reshaped with large-scale civil engineering projects aimed at merging all the seven islands of Bombay into a single amalgamated mass by way of a causeway called the Hornby Vellard, which was completed by 1784.[27] In 1817, the British East India Company under Mountstuart Elphinstone defeated Baji Rao II, the last of the Maratha Peshwa in the Battle of Khadki.[116] Following his defeat, almost the whole of the Deccan Plateau came under British suzerainty, and was incorporated into the Bombay Presidency. The success of the British campaign in the Deccan marked the end of all attacks by native powers.[117]
+
+By 1845, the seven islands coalesced into a single landmass by the Hornby Vellard project via large scale land reclamation.[28][118] On 16 April 1853, India's first passenger railway line was established, connecting Bombay to the neighbouring town of Thana (now Thane).[119] During the American Civil War (1861–1865), the city became the world's chief cotton-trading market, resulting in a boom in the economy that subsequently enhanced the city's stature.[120]
+
+The opening of the Suez Canal in 1869 transformed Bombay into one of the largest seaports on the Arabian Sea.[121] In September 1896, Bombay was hit by a bubonic plague epidemic where the death toll was estimated at 1,900 people per week.[122] About 850,000 people fled Bombay and the textile industry was adversely affected.[123] While the city was the capital of the Bombay Presidency, the Indian independence movement fostered the Quit India Movement in 1942 and the Royal Indian Navy mutiny in 1946.[124][125]
+
+After India's independence in 1947, the territory of the Bombay Presidency retained by India was restructured into Bombay State. The area of Bombay State increased, after several erstwhile princely states that joined the Indian union were integrated into the state. Subsequently, the city became the capital of Bombay State.[126] In April 1950, Municipal limits of Bombay were expanded by merging the Bombay Suburban District and Bombay City to form the Greater Bombay Municipal Corporation.[127]
+
+The Samyukta Maharashtra movement to create a separate Maharashtra state including Bombay was at its height in the 1950s. In the Lok Sabha discussions in 1955, the Congress party demanded that the city be constituted as an autonomous city-state.[128] The States Reorganisation Committee recommended a bilingual state for Maharashtra–Gujarat with Bombay as its capital in its 1955 report. Bombay Citizens' Committee, an advocacy group of leading Gujarati industrialists lobbied for Bombay's independent status.[129]
+
+Following protests during the movement in which 105 people lost their lives in clashes with the police, Bombay State was reorganised on linguistic lines on 1 May 1960.[130] Gujarati-speaking areas of Bombay State were partitioned into the state of Gujarat.[131] Maharashtra State with Bombay as its capital was formed with the merger of Marathi-speaking areas of Bombay State, eight districts from Central Provinces and Berar, five districts from Hyderabad State, and numerous princely states enclosed between them.[132] As a memorial to the martyrs of the Samyukta Maharashtra movement, Flora Fountain was renamed as Hutatma Chowk (Martyr's Square) and a memorial was erected.[133]
+
+The following decades saw massive expansion of the city and its suburbs. In the late 1960s, Nariman Point and Cuffe Parade were reclaimed and developed.[134] The Bombay Metropolitan Region Development Authority (BMRDA) was established on 26 January 1975 by the Government of Maharashtra as an apex body for planning and co-ordination of development activities in the Bombay metropolitan region.[135] In August 1979, a sister township of New Bombay was founded by the City and Industrial Development Corporation (CIDCO) across the Thane and Raigad districts to help the dispersal and control of Bombay's population. The textile industry in Bombay largely disappeared after the widespread 1982 Great Bombay Textile Strike, in which nearly 250,000 workers in more than 50 textile mills went on strike.[136] Mumbai's defunct cotton mills have since become the focus of intense redevelopment.[137][138]
+
+The Jawaharlal Nehru Port, which handles 55–60% of India's containerised cargo, was commissioned on 26 May 1989 across the creek at Nhava Sheva with a view to de-congest Bombay Harbour and to serve as a hub port for the city.[139] The geographical limits of Greater Bombay were coextensive with municipal limits of Greater Bombay. On 1 October 1990, the Greater Bombay district was bifurcated to form two revenue districts namely, Bombay City and Bombay Suburban, though they continued to be administered by same Municipal Administration.[140]
+
+The years from 1990 to 2010 saw an increase in violence and terrorism activities. Following the demolition of the Babri Masjid in Ayodhya, the city was rocked by the Hindu-Muslim riots of 1992–93 in which more than 1,000 people were killed. In March 1993, a series of 13 coordinated bombings at several city landmarks by Islamic extremists and the Bombay underworld resulted in 257 deaths and over 700 injuries.[141] In 2006, 209 people were killed and over 700 injured when seven bombs exploded on the city's commuter trains.[142] In 2008, a series of ten coordinated attacks by armed terrorists for three days resulted in 173 deaths, 308 injuries, and severe damage to several heritage landmarks and prestigious hotels.[143] The three coordinated bomb explosions in July 2011 that occurred at the Opera house, Zaveri Bazaar and Dadar were the latest in the series of terrorist attacks in Mumbai which resulted in 26 deaths and 130 injuries.[144][145]
+
+Mumbai is the commercial capital of India and has evolved into a global financial hub.[146] For several decades it has been the home of India's main financial services, and a focus for both infrastructure development and private investment.[147] From being an ancient fishing community and a colonial centre of trade, Mumbai has become South Asia's largest city and home of the world's most prolific film industry.[148]
+
+Mumbai is on a narrow peninsula on the southwest of Salsette Island, which lies between the Arabian Sea to the west, Thane Creek to the east and Vasai Creek to the north. Mumbai's suburban district occupies most of the island. Navi Mumbai is east of Thane Creek and Thane is north of Vasai Creek. Mumbai consists of two distinct regions: Mumbai City district and Mumbai Suburban district, which form two separate revenue districts of Maharashtra.[149] The city district region is also commonly referred to as the Island City or South Mumbai.[32] The total area of Mumbai is 603.4 km2 (233 sq mi).[150] Of this, the island city spans 67.79 km2 (26 sq mi), while the suburban district spans 370 km2 (143 sq mi), together accounting for 437.71 km2 (169 sq mi) under the administration of Municipal Corporation of Greater Mumbai (MCGM). The remaining areas belong to various Defence establishments, the Mumbai Port Trust, the Atomic Energy Commission and the Borivali National Park, which are out of the jurisdiction of the MCGM.[151] The Mumbai Metropolitan Region which includes portions of Thane, Palghar and Raigad districts in addition to Greater Mumbai, covers an area of 4,355 km2 (1681.5 sq mi).[6]
+Mumbai lies at the mouth of the Ulhas River on the western coast of India, in the coastal region known as the Konkan. It sits on Salsette Island (Sashti Island), which it partially shares with the Thane district.[152] Mumbai is bounded by the Arabian Sea to the west.[153] Many parts of the city lie just above sea level, with elevations ranging from 10 m (33 ft) to 15 m (49 ft);[154] the city has an average elevation of 14 m (46 ft).[155] Northern Mumbai (Salsette) is hilly,[156] and the highest point in the city is 450 m (1,476 ft) at Salsette in the Powai–Kanheri ranges.[157] The Sanjay Gandhi National Park (Borivali National Park) is located partly in the Mumbai suburban district, and partly in the Thane district, and it extends over an area of 103.09 km2 (39.80 sq mi).[158]
+
+Apart from the Bhatsa Dam, there are six major lakes that supply water to the city: Vihar, Lower Vaitarna, Upper Vaitarna, Tulsi, Tansa and Powai. Tulsi Lake and Vihar Lake are located in Borivili National Park, within the city's limits. The supply from Powai lake, also within the city limits, is used only for agricultural and industrial purposes.[159] Three small rivers, the Dahisar River, Poinsar (or Poisar) and Ohiwara (or Oshiwara) originate within the park, while the polluted Mithi River originates from Tulsi Lake and gathers water overflowing from Vihar and Powai Lakes.[160] The coastline of the city is indented with numerous creeks and bays, stretching from the Thane creek on the
+eastern to Madh Marve on the western front.[161] The eastern coast of Salsette Island is covered with large mangrove swamps, rich in biodiversity, while the western coast is mostly sandy and rocky.[162]
+
+Soil cover in the city region is predominantly sandy due to its proximity to the sea. In the suburbs, the soil cover is largely alluvial and loamy.[163] The underlying rock of the region is composed of black Deccan basalt flows, and their acidic and basic variants dating back to the late Cretaceous and early Eocene eras.[164] Mumbai sits on a seismically active zone owing to the presence of 23 fault lines in the vicinity.[165] The area is classified as a Seismic Zone III region,[166] which means an earthquake of up to magnitude 6.5 on the Richter magnitude scale may be expected.[167]
+
+Mumbai has a tropical climate, specifically a tropical wet and dry climate (Aw) under the Köppen climate classification. It varies between a dry period extending from October to May and a wet period peaking in June.[168] The cooler season from December to February is followed by the hotter season from March to May. The period from June to about the end of September constitutes the south west monsoon season, and October and November form the post-monsoon season.[169]
+
+Flooding during monsoon is a major problem for Mumbai.[170][171] Between June and September, the south west monsoon rains lash the city. Pre-monsoon showers are received in May. Occasionally, north-east monsoon showers occur in October and November. The maximum annual rainfall ever recorded was 3,452 mm (136 in) for 1954.[172] The highest rainfall recorded in a single day was 944 mm (37 in) on 26 July 2005.[173] The average total annual rainfall is 2,146.6 mm (85 in) for the Island City, and 2,457 mm (97 in) for the suburbs.[172]
+
+The average annual temperature is 27 °C (81 °F), and the average annual precipitation is 2,167 mm (85 in).[174] In the Island City, the average maximum temperature is 31 °C (88 °F), while the average minimum temperature is 24 °C (75 °F). In the suburbs, the daily mean maximum temperature range from 29 °C (84 °F) to 33 °C (91 °F), while the daily mean minimum temperature ranges from 16 °C (61 °F) to 26 °C (79 °F).[172] The record high is 42.2 °C (108 °F) set on 14 April 1952,[175] and the record low is 7.4 °C (45 °F) set on 27 January 1962.[175][176]
+
+
+
+Air pollution is a major issue in Mumbai.[181][182][183] According to the 2016 World Health Organization Global Urban Ambient Air Pollution Database,[184] the annual average PM2.5 concentration in 2013 was 63 μg/m3, which is 6.3 times higher than that recommended by the WHO Air Quality Guidelines[185] for the annual mean PM2.5. The Central Pollution Control Board for the Government of India and the Consulate General of the United States, Mumbai monitor and publicly share real-time air quality data.[186][187] In December 2019, IIT Bombay, in partnership with the McKelvey School of Engineering of Washington University in St. Louis, launched the Aerosol and Air Quality Research Facility to study air pollution in Mumbai, among other Indian cities.[188]
+
+Mumbai is India's largest city (by population) and is the financial and commercial capital of the country as it generates 6.16% of the total GDP.[32][146][189] It serves as an economic hub of India, contributing 10% of factory employment, 25% of industrial output, 33% of income tax collections, 60% of customs duty collections, 20% of central excise tax collections, 40% of India's foreign trade and ₹40 billion (US$560 million) in corporate taxes.[190] Along with the rest of India, Mumbai has witnessed an economic boom since the liberalisation of 1991, the finance boom in the mid-nineties and the IT, export, services and outsourcing boom in the 2000s.[191] Although Mumbai had prominently figured as the hub of economic activity of India in the 1990s, the Mumbai Metropolitan Region is presently witnessing a reduction in its contribution to India's GDP.[192]
+
+Recent estimates of the economy of the Mumbai Metropolitan Region is estimated to $151 to $368 billion (PPP metro GDP) ranking it either the most or second-most productive metro area of India.[10] Many of India's numerous conglomerates (including Larsen & Toubro, State Bank of India (SBI), Life Insurance Corporation of India (LIC), Tata Group, Godrej and Reliance),[146] and five of the Fortune Global 500 companies are based in Mumbai.[193] This is facilitated by the presence of the Reserve Bank of India (RBI), the Bombay Stock Exchange (BSE), the National Stock Exchange of India (NSE), and financial sector regulators such as the Securities and Exchange Board of India (SEBI).[192]
+
+Until the 1970s, Mumbai owed its prosperity largely to textile mills and the seaport, but the local economy has since then diversified to include finance, engineering, diamond-polishing, healthcare and information technology.[194]
+The key sectors contributing to the city's economy are: finance, gems & jewellery, leather processing, IT and ITES, textiles, and entertainment. Nariman Point and Bandra Kurla Complex (BKC) are Mumbai's major financial centres.[192] Despite competition from Bangalore, Hyderabad and Pune, Mumbai has carved a niche for itself in the information technology industry. The Santacruz Electronic Export Processing Zone (SEEPZ) and the International Infotech Park (Navi Mumbai) offer excellent facilities to IT companies.[195]
+
+State and central government employees make up a large percentage of the city's workforce. Mumbai also has a large unskilled and semi-skilled self-employed population, who primarily earn their livelihood as hawkers, taxi drivers, mechanics and other such blue collar professions. The port and shipping industry is well established, with Mumbai Port being one of the oldest and most significant ports in India.[196] Dharavi, in central Mumbai, has an increasingly large recycling industry, processing recyclable waste from other parts of the city; the district has an estimated 15,000 single-room factories.[197]
+
+Mumbai has been ranked sixth among top ten global cities on the billionaire count with 28[198] and 46000 millionaires, with total wealth around $820 billion[199] 48th on the Worldwide Centres of Commerce Index 2008,[200] seventh in the list of "Top Ten Cities for Billionaires" by Forbes magazine (April 2008),[201] and first in terms of those billionaires' average wealth.[202]  As of 2008[update], the Globalization and World Cities Study Group (GaWC) has ranked Mumbai as an "Alpha world city", third in its categories of Global cities.[17] Mumbai is the third most expensive office market in the world, and was ranked among the fastest cities in the country for business startup in 2009.[203]
+
+Greater Mumbai, an area of 603 square kilometres (233 sq mi),[204] consisting of the Mumbai City and Mumbai Suburban districts, extends from Colaba in the south, to Mulund and Dahisar in the north, and Mankhurd in the east. Its population as per the 2011 census was 12,442,373.[205]
+
+It is administered by the Municipal Corporation of Greater Mumbai (MCGM) (sometimes referred to as the Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation), formerly known as the Bombay Municipal Corporation (BMC).[153] The MCGM is in charge of the civic and infrastructure needs of the metropolis.[206] The mayor, who serves for a term of two and a half years, is chosen through an indirect election by the councillors from among themselves.[207]
+
+The municipal commissioner is the chief executive officer and head of the executive arm of the municipal corporation. All executive powers are vested in the municipal commissioner who is an Indian Administrative Service (IAS) officer appointed by the state government. Although the municipal corporation is the legislative body that lays down policies for the governance of the city, it is the commissioner who is responsible for the execution of the policies. The commissioner is appointed for a fixed term as defined by state statute. The powers of the commissioner are those provided by statute and those delegated by the corporation or the standing committee.[208]
+
+The Municipal Corporation of Greater Mumbai was ranked 9th out of 21 cities for best governance & administrative practices in India in 2014. It scored 3.5 on 10 compared to the national average of 3.3.[209]
+
+The two revenue districts of Mumbai come under the jurisdiction of a district collector. The collectors are in charge of property records and revenue collection for the central government, and oversee the national elections held in the city.
+
+The Mumbai Police is headed by a police commissioner, who is an Indian Police Service (IPS) officer. The Mumbai Police is a division of the Maharashtra Police, under the state Home Ministry.[210] The city is divided into seven police zones and seventeen traffic police zones,[151] each headed by a deputy commissioner of police.[211] The Mumbai Traffic Police is a semi-autonomous body under the Mumbai Police. The Mumbai Fire Brigade, under the jurisdiction of the municipal corporation, is headed by the chief fire officer, who is assisted by four deputy chief fire officers and six divisional officers.[151] The Mumbai Metropolitan Region Development Authority (MMRDA) is responsible for infrastructure development and planning of Mumbai Metropolitan Region.[212]
+
+Mumbai is the seat of the Bombay High Court, which exercises jurisdiction over the states of Maharashtra and Goa, and the union territory of Dadra and Nagar Haveli and Daman and Diu.[213] Mumbai also has two lower courts, the small causes court for civil matters, and the sessions court for criminal cases. Mumbai also has a special Terrorist and Disruptive Activities (TADA) court for people accused of conspiring and abetting acts of terrorism in the city.[214]
+
+Mumbai had been a traditional stronghold and birthplace of the Indian National Congress, also known as the Congress Party.[215] The first session of the Indian National Congress was held in Bombay from 28–31 December 1885.[216] The city played host to the Indian National Congress six times during its
+first 50 years, and became a strong base for the Indian independence movement during the 20th century.[217]
+
+The 1960s saw the rise of regionalist politics in Bombay, with the formation of the Shiv Sena on 19 June 1966, out of a feeling of resentment about the relative marginalisation of the native Marathi people in Bombay.[218] Shiv Sena switched from 'Marathi Cause' to larger 'Hindutva Cause' in 1985 and joined hands with Bhartiya Janata Party (BJP) in the same year.[219] The Congress had dominated the politics of Bombay from independence until the early 1980s, when the Shiv Sena won the 1985 Bombay Municipal Corporation elections.[220]
+
+In 1989, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), a major national political party, forged an electoral alliance with the Shiv Sena to dislodge the Congress in the Maharashtra Legislative Assembly elections. In 1999, several members left the Congress to form the Nationalist Congress Party (NCP) but later allied with the Congress as part of an alliance known as the Democratic Front.[221] Other parties such as Maharashtra Navnirman Sena (MNS), Samajwadi Party (SP), Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP), and several independent candidates also contest elections in the city.[222]
+
+In the Indian national elections held every five years, Mumbai is represented by six parliamentary constituencies: North, North West, North East, North Central, South Central, and South.[223] A member of parliament (MP) to the Lok Sabha, the lower house of the Indian Parliament, is elected from each of the parliamentary constituencies. In the 2019 national election, all six parliamentary constituencies were won by the BJP and Shiv Sena in alliance, with both parties winning three seats each.[224]
+
+In the Maharashtra state assembly elections held every five years, Mumbai is represented by 36 assembly constituencies.[225][226] A member of the legislative assembly (MLA) to the Maharashtra Vidhan Sabha (legislative assembly) is elected from each of the assembly constituencies. In the 2019 state assembly election, out of the 36 assembly constituencies, 16 were won by the BJP, 11 by the Shiv Sena, 6 by the Congress, 2 by the NCP and one by independent candidate.[227]
+
+Elections are also held every five years to elect corporators to power in the MCGM.[228] The Corporation comprises 227 directly elected Councillors representing the 24 municipal wards, five nominated Councillors having special knowledge or experience in municipal administration, and a mayor whose role is mostly ceremonial.[229][230][231] In the 2012 municipal corporation elections, out of the 227 seats, the Shiv Sena-BJP alliance secured 107 seats, holding power with the support of independent candidates in the MCGM, while the Congress-NCP alliance bagged 64 seats.[232] The tenure of the mayor, deputy mayor, and municipal commissioner is two and a half years.[233]
+
+Public transport systems in Mumbai include the Mumbai Suburban Railway, Monorail, Metro, Brihanmumbai Electric Supply and Transport (BEST) buses, black-and-yellow meter taxis, auto rickshaws and ferries. Suburban railway and BEST bus services together accounted for about 88% of the passenger traffic in 2008.[234] Auto rickshaws are allowed to operate only in the suburban areas of Mumbai, while taxis are allowed to operate throughout Mumbai, but generally operate in South Mumbai.[235] Taxis and rickshaws in Mumbai are required by law to run on compressed natural gas (CNG),[236] and are a convenient, economical, and easily available means of transport.[235]
+
+The Mumbai Suburban Railway, popularly referred to as Locals forms the backbone of the city's transport system.[237] It is operated by the Central Railway and Western Railway zones of the Indian Railways.[238] Mumbai's suburban rail systems carried a total of 6.3 million passengers every day in 2007.[239] Trains are overcrowded during peak hours, with nine-car trains of rated capacity 1,700 passengers, actually carrying around 4,500 passengers at peak hours.[240] The Mumbai rail network is spread at an expanse of 319 route kilometres. 191 rakes (train-sets) of 9 car and 12 car composition are utilised to run a total of 2,226 train services in the city.[241]
+
+The Mumbai Monorail and Mumbai Metro have been built and are being extended in phases to relieve overcrowding on the existing network.  The Monorail opened in early February 2014.[242] The first line of the Mumbai Metro opened in early June 2014.[243]
+
+Mumbai is the headquarters of two zones of the Indian Railways: the Central Railway (CR) headquartered at Chhatrapati Shivaji Terminus (formerly Victoria Terminus), and the Western Railway (WR) headquartered at Churchgate.[244] Mumbai is also well connected to most parts of India by the Indian Railways. Long-distance trains originate from Chhatrapati Shivaji Terminus, Dadar, Lokmanya Tilak Terminus, Mumbai Central, Bandra Terminus, Andheri and Borivali.[245]
+
+Mumbai's bus services carried over 5.5 million passengers per day in 2008,[234] which dropped to 2.8 million in 2015.[246] Public buses run by BEST cover almost all parts of the metropolis, as well as parts of Navi Mumbai, Mira-Bhayandar and Thane.[247] The BEST operates a total of 4,608 buses[248] with CCTV cameras installed, ferrying 4.5 million passengers daily[234] over 390 routes. Its fleet consists of single-decker, double-decker, vestibule, low-floor, disabled-friendly, air-conditioned and Euro III compliant diesel and compressed natural gas powered buses.[249] BEST introduced air-conditioned buses in 1998.[250] BEST buses are red in colour, based originally on the Routemaster buses of London.[251]
+Maharashtra State Road Transport Corporation (MSRTC, also known as ST)[252] buses provide intercity transport connecting Mumbai with other towns and cities of Maharashtra and nearby states.[253][254] The Navi Mumbai Municipal Transport (NMMT) and Thane Municipal Transport (TMT) also operate their buses in Mumbai, connecting various nodes of Navi Mumbai and Thane to parts of Mumbai.[255][256]
+
+Buses are generally favoured for commuting short to medium distances, while train fares are more economical for longer distance commutes.[257]
+
+The Mumbai Darshan is a tourist bus service which explores numerous tourist attractions in Mumbai.[258] Bus Rapid Transit System (BRTS) lanes have been planned throughout Mumbai.[259] Though 88% of the city's commuters travel by public transport, Mumbai still continues to struggle with traffic congestion.[260] Mumbai's transport system has been categorised as one of the most congested in the world.[261]
+
+Water transport in Mumbai consists of ferries, hovercrafts and catamarans. Services are provided by both government agencies as well as private partners.[262] Hovercraft services plied briefly in the late 1990s between the Gateway of India and CBD Belapur in Navi Mumbai. They were subsequently scrapped due to lack of adequate infrastructure.[263]
+
+Mumbai is served by National Highway 3, National Highway 4, National Highway 8, National Highway 17 and National Highway 222 of India's National Highways system.[264] The Mumbai-Pune Expressway was the first expressway built in India.[265] The Eastern Freeway was opened in 2013. The Mumbai Nashik Expressway, Mumbai-Vadodara Expressway,[266] are under construction. The Bandra-Worli Sea Link bridge, along with Mahim Causeway, links the island city to the western suburbs.[267] The three major road arteries of the city are the Eastern Express Highway from Sion to Thane, the Sion Panvel Expressway from Sion to Panvel and the Western Express Highway from Bandra to Dahisar.[268] Mumbai has approximately 1,900 km (1,181 mi) of roads.[269] There are five tolled entry points to the city by road.[270]
+
+Mumbai had about 721,000 private vehicles as of March 2014,[271] 56,459 black and yellow taxis as of 2005[update],[272] and 106,000 auto rickshaws, as of May 2013.[273]
+
+The Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj International Airport (formerly Sahar International Airport) is the main aviation hub in the city and the second busiest airport in India in terms of passenger traffic.[274] It handled 36.6 million passengers and 694,300 tonnes of cargo during FY 2014–2015.[275] An upgrade plan was initiated in 2006, targeted at increasing the capacity of the airport to handle up to 40 million passengers annually[276] and the new terminal T2 was opened in February 2014.[277]
+
+The proposed Navi Mumbai International airport to be built in the Kopra-Panvel area has been sanctioned by the Indian Government and will help relieve the increasing traffic burden on the existing airport.[278]
+
+The Juhu Aerodrome was India's first airport, and now hosts the Bombay Flying Club and a heliport operated by state-owned Pawan Hans.[279]
+
+Mumbai is served by two major ports, Mumbai Port Trust and Jawaharlal Nehru Port Trust, which lies just across the creek in Navi Mumbai.[280] Mumbai Port has one of the best natural harbours in the world, and has extensive wet and dry dock accommodation facilities.[281] Jawaharlal Nehru Port, commissioned on 26 May 1989, is the busiest and most modern major port in India.[282] It handles 55–60% of the country's total containerised cargo.[283] Ferries from Ferry Wharf in Mazagaon allow access to islands near the city.[284]
+
+The city is also the headquarters of the Western Naval Command, and also an important base for the Indian Navy.[153]
+
+Under colonial rule, tanks were the only source of water in Mumbai, with many localities having been named after them. The MCGM supplies potable water to the city from six lakes,[285][286] most of which comes from the Tulsi and Vihar lakes. The Tansa lake supplies water to the western suburbs and parts of the island city along the Western Railway.[287] The water is filtered at Bhandup,[287] which is Asia's largest water filtration plant.[288][289][290] India's first underground water tunnel was completed in Mumbai to supply water to the Bhandup filtration plant.[291][292]
+
+About 700 million litres of water, out of a daily supply of 3500 million litres, is lost by way of water thefts, illegal connections and leakages, per day in Mumbai.[293] Almost all of Mumbai's daily refuse of 7,800 metric tonnes, of which 40 metric tonnes is plastic waste,[294] is transported to dumping grounds in Gorai in the northwest, Mulund in the northeast, and to the Deonar dumping ground in the east.[295] Sewage treatment is carried out at Worli and Bandra, and disposed of by two independent marine outfalls of 3.4 km (2.1 mi) and 3.7 km (2.3 mi) at Bandra and Worli respectively.[296]
+
+Electricity is distributed by the Brihanmumbai Electric Supply and Transport (BEST) undertaking in the island city, and by Reliance Energy, Tata Power, and the Maharashtra State Electricity Distribution Co. Ltd (Mahavitaran) in the suburbs.[297] Power supply cables are underground, which reduces pilferage, thefts and other losses.[298][299]
+
+Cooking gas is supplied in the form of liquefied petroleum gas cylinders sold by state-owned oil companies,[300] as well as through piped natural gas supplied by Mahanagar Gas Limited.[301]
+
+The largest telephone service provider is the state-owned MTNL, which held a monopoly over fixed line and cellular services up until 2000, and provides fixed line as well as mobile WLL services.[302] Mobile phone coverage is extensive, and the main service providers are Vodafone Essar, Airtel, MTNL, Loop Mobile, Reliance Communications, Idea Cellular and Tata Indicom. Both GSM and CDMA services are available in the city.[303] Mumbai, along with the area served by telephone exchanges in Navi Mumbai and Kalyan is classified as a Metro telecom circle.[304] Many of the above service providers also provide broadband internet and wireless internet access in Mumbai. As of 2014[update], Mumbai had the highest number of internet users in India with 16.4 million users.[305]
+
+The architecture of the city is a blend of Gothic Revival, Indo-Saracenic, Art Deco, and other contemporary styles. Most of the buildings during the British period, such as the Victoria Terminus and Bombay University, were built in Gothic Revival style.[306] Their architectural features include a variety of European influences such as German gables, Dutch roofs, Swiss timbering, Romance arches, Tudor casements, and traditional Indian features.[307] There are also a few Indo-Saracenic styled buildings such as the Gateway of India.[308] Art Deco styled landmarks can be found along the Marine Drive and west of the Oval Maidan. Mumbai has the second largest number of Art Deco buildings in the world after Miami. In the newer suburbs, modern buildings dominate the landscape. Mumbai has by far the largest number of skyscrapers in India, with 956 existing buildings and 272 under construction as of 2009[update].
+
+The Mumbai Heritage Conservation Committee (MHCC), established in 1995, formulates special regulations and by-laws to assist in the conservation of the city's heritage structures. Mumbai has three UNESCO World Heritage Sites, the Chhatrapati Shivaji Terminus, the Elephanta Caves and the Victorian and Art Deco Ensemble.[309] In the south of Mumbai, there are colonial-era buildings and Soviet-style offices.[310] In the east are factories and some slums. On the West coast are former-textile mills being demolished and skyscrapers built on top. There are 31 buildings taller than 100 m, compared with 200 in Shanghai, 500 in Hong Kong and 500 in New York.[310]
+
+According to the 2011 census, the population of Mumbai city was 12,479,608. The population density is estimated to be about 20,482 persons per square kilometre. The living space is 4.5 square metres per person.[313] Mumbai Metropolitan Region was home to 20,748,395 people by 2011.[8] Greater Mumbai, the area under the administration of the MCGM, has a literacy rate of 94.7%, higher than the national average of 86.7%. The number of slum-dwellers is estimated to be 9 million, up from 6 million in 2001;[314] that is, 62% of all Mumbaikars live in informal slums.
+
+The sex ratio in 2011 was 838 females per 1,000 males in the island city, 857 in the suburbs, and 848 as a whole in Greater Mumbai, all numbers lower than the national average of 914 females per 1,000 males. The low sex ratio is partly because of the large number of male migrants who come to the city to work.[315]
+
+Residents of Mumbai call themselves Mumbaikar,[62] Mumbaiite,[316] Bombayite or Bombaiite.
+
+Mumbai suffers from the same major urbanisation problems seen in many fast growing cities in developing countries: widespread poverty and unemployment, poor public health and poor civic and educational standards for a large section of the population. With available land at a premium, Mumbai residents often reside in cramped, relatively expensive housing, usually far from workplaces, and therefore requiring long commutes on crowded mass transit, or clogged roadways. Many of them live in close proximity to bus or train stations although suburban residents spend significant time travelling southward to the main commercial district.[317] Dharavi, Asia's second largest slum (if Karachi's Orangi Town is counted as a single slum)[318] is located in central Mumbai and houses between 800,000 and one million people[319] in 2.39 square kilometres (0.92 sq mi), making it one of the most densely populated areas on Earth[320] with a population density of at least 334,728 persons per square kilometre.[321]
+
+The number of migrants to Mumbai from outside Maharashtra during the 1991–2001 decade was 1.12 million, which amounted to 54.8% of the net addition to the population of Mumbai.[322]
+
+The number of households in Mumbai is forecast to rise from 4.2 million in 2008 to 6.6 million in 2020. The number of households with annual incomes of 2 million rupees will increase from 4% to 10% by 2020, amounting to 660,000 families. The number of households with incomes from 1–2 million rupees is also estimated to increase from 4% to 15% by 2020.[323] According to the 2016 report of the Central Pollution Control Board, Mumbai is the noisiest city in India, ahead of Lucknow, Hyderabad and Delhi.[324]
+
+The religious groups represented in Mumbai as of 2011 include Hindus (65.99%), Muslims (20.65%), Buddhists (4.85%), Jains (4.10%), Christians (3.27%) and Sikhs (0.49%).[325][326][327] The linguistic/ethnic demographics are: Maharashtrians (42%), Gujaratis (19%), with the rest hailing from other parts of India.[328]
+
+Native Christians include East Indian Catholics, who were converted by the Portuguese during the 16th century,[329] while Goan and Mangalorean Catholics also constitute a significant portion of the Christian community of the city.[330] Jews settled in Bombay during the 18th century. The Bene Israeli Jewish community of Bombay, who migrated from the Konkan villages, south of Bombay, are believed to be the descendants of the Jews of Israel who were shipwrecked off the Konkan coast, probably in the year 175 BCE, during the reign of the Greek ruler, Antiochus IV Epiphanes.[331] Mumbai is also home to the largest population of Parsi Zoroastrians in the world,[citation needed] numbering about 60,000 though with a sharply declining population.[332] Parsis migrated to India from Greater Iran following the Muslim conquest of Persia in the seventh century.[333] The oldest Muslim communities in Mumbai include the Dawoodi Bohras, Ismaili Khojas, and Konkani Muslims.[334]
+
+Mumbai has a large polyglot population like all other metropolitan cities of India. Sixteen major languages of India are spoken in Mumbai, with the most common being Marathi and its dialect East Indian; as well as Hindi, Gujarati and English.[335] English is extensively spoken and is the principal language of the city's white collar workforce. A colloquial form of Hindi, known as Bambaiya – a blend of Hindi, Marathi, Gujarati, Konkani, Urdu, Indian English and some invented words – is spoken on the streets.[336]
+
+Among minority languages of Maharashtra, Hindi is spoken by 57.78% of the population of suburban Mumbai, Urdu by 32.21% and Gujarati by 31.21%.[337]
+
+Mumbai's culture is a blend of traditional festivals, food, music, and theatres. The city offers a cosmopolitan and diverse lifestyle with a variety of food, entertainment, and night life, available in a form and abundance comparable to that in other world capitals. Mumbai's history as a major trading centre has led to a diverse range of cultures, religions, and cuisines coexisting in the city. This unique blend of cultures is due to the migration of people from all over India since the British period.
+
+Mumbai is the birthplace of Indian cinema[338]—Dadasaheb Phalke laid the foundations with silent movies followed by Marathi talkies—and the oldest film broadcast took place in the early 20th century.[339] Mumbai also has a large number of cinema halls that feature Bollywood, Marathi and Hollywood movies. The Mumbai International Film Festival[340] and the award ceremony of the Filmfare Awards, the oldest and prominent film awards given for Hindi film industry in India, are held in Mumbai.[341] Despite most of the professional theatre groups that formed during the British Raj having disbanded by the 1950s, Mumbai has developed a thriving "theatre movement" tradition in Marathi, Hindi, English, and other regional languages.[342][343]
+
+Contemporary art is featured in both government-funded art spaces and private commercial galleries. The government-funded institutions include the Jehangir Art Gallery and the National Gallery of Modern Art. Built in 1833, the Asiatic Society of Bombay is one of the oldest public libraries in the city.[344] The Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj Vastu Sangrahalaya (formerly The Prince of Wales Museum) is a renowned museum in South Mumbai which houses rare ancient exhibits of Indian history.[345]
+
+Mumbai has a zoo named Jijamata Udyaan (formerly Victoria Gardens), which also harbours a garden. The rich literary traditions of the city have been highlighted internationally by Booker Prize winners Salman Rushdie, Aravind Adiga. Marathi literature has been modernised in the works of Mumbai-based authors such as Mohan Apte, Anant Kanekar, and Gangadhar Gadgil, and is promoted through an annual Sahitya Akademi Award, a literary honour bestowed by India's National Academy of Letters.[346]
+
+Mumbai residents celebrate both Western and Indian festivals. Diwali, Holi, Eid, Christmas, Navratri, Good Friday, Dussera, Moharram, Ganesh Chaturthi, Durga Puja and Maha Shivratri are some of the popular festivals in the city. The Kala Ghoda Arts Festival is an exhibition of a world of arts that encapsulates works of artists in the fields of music, dance, theatre, and films.[347] A week-long annual fair known as Bandra Fair, starting on the following Sunday after 8 September, is celebrated by people of all faiths, to commemorate the Nativity of Mary, mother of Jesus, on 8 September.[348]
+
+The Banganga Festival is a two-day music festival, held annually in the month of January, which is organised by the Maharashtra Tourism Development Corporation (MTDC) at the historic Banganga Tank in Mumbai.[349][350] The Elephanta Festival—celebrated every February on the Elephanta Islands—is dedicated to classical Indian dance and music and attracts performers from across the country.[349][351] Public holidays specific to the city and the state include Maharashtra Day on 1 May, to celebrate the formation of Maharashtra state on 1 May 1960,[352][353] and Gudi Padwa which is the New Year's Day for Marathi people.
+
+Beaches are a major tourist attraction in the city. The major beaches in Mumbai are Girgaum Chowpatty, Juhu Beach, Dadar Chowpatty, Gorai Beach, Marve Beach, Versova Beach, Madh Beach, Aksa Beach, and Manori Beach.[354] Most of the beaches are unfit for swimming, except Girgaum Chowpatty and Juhu Beach.[355] Essel World is a theme park and amusement centre situated close to Gorai Beach,[356] and includes Asia's largest theme water park, Water Kingdom.[357] Adlabs Imagica opened in April 2013 is located near the city of Khopoli off the Mumbai-Pune Expressway.[358]
+
+Mumbai has numerous newspaper publications, television and radio stations. Marathi dailies enjoy the maximum readership share in the city and the top Marathi language newspapers are Maharashtra Times, Navakaal, Lokmat, Loksatta, Mumbai Chaufer, Saamana and Sakaal.[360] Popular Marathi language magazines are Saptahik Sakaal, Grihashobhika, Lokrajya, Lokprabha & Chitralekha.[361] Popular English language newspapers published and sold in Mumbai include The Times of India, Mid-day, Hindustan Times, DNA India, and The Indian Express. Newspapers are also printed in other Indian languages.[362] Mumbai is home to Asia's oldest newspaper, Bombay Samachar, which has been published in Gujarati since 1822.[363] Bombay Durpan, the first Marathi newspaper, was started by Balshastri Jambhekar in Mumbai in 1832.[364]
+
+Numerous Indian and international television channels can be watched in Mumbai through one of the Pay TV companies or the local cable television provider. The metropolis is also the hub of many international media corporations, with many news channels and print publications having a major presence. The national television broadcaster, Doordarshan, provides two free terrestrial channels, while three main cable networks serve most households.[365]
+
+The wide range of cable channels available includes Zee Marathi, Zee Talkies, ETV Marathi, Star Pravah, Mi Marathi, DD Sahyadri (All Marathi channels), news channels such as ABP Majha, IBN-Lokmat, Zee 24 Taas, sports channels like ESPN, Star Sports, National entertainment channels like Colors, Sony, Zee TV and Star Plus, business news channels like CNBC Awaaz, Zee Business, ET Now and Bloomberg UTV. News channels entirely dedicated to Mumbai include Sahara Samay Mumbai. Zing a popular Bollywood gossip channel is also based out of Mumbai. Satellite television (DTH) has yet to gain mass acceptance, due to high installation costs.[366] Prominent DTH entertainment services in Mumbai include Dish TV and Tata Sky.[367]
+
+There are twelve radio stations in Mumbai, with nine broadcasting on the FM band, and three All India Radio stations broadcasting on the AM band.[368] Mumbai also has access to Commercial radio providers such as Sirius. The Conditional Access System (CAS) started by the Union Government in 2006 met a poor response in Mumbai due to competition from its sister technology Direct-to-Home (DTH) transmission service.[369]
+
+Bollywood, the Hindi film industry based in Mumbai, produces around 150–200 films every year.[370] The name Bollywood is a blend of Bombay and Hollywood.[371] The 2000s saw a growth in Bollywood's popularity overseas. This led filmmaking to new heights in terms of quality, cinematography and innovative story lines as well as technical advances such as special effects and animation.[372] Studios in Goregaon, including Film City, are the location for most movie sets.[373] The city also hosts the Marathi film industry which has seen increased popularity in recent years, and TV production companies. Mumbai is a hub of Indian film making. Several other Indian language films such as Bengali, Bhojpuri, Gujarati, Malayalam, Tamil, Telugu and Urdu are also occasionally shot in Mumbai. Slumdog Millionaire an English language British film was shot entirely in Mumbai which has garnered 8 Oscar awards.
+
+Schools in Mumbai are either "municipal schools" (run by the MCGM) or private schools (run by trusts or individuals), which in some cases receive financial aid from the government.[374] The schools are affiliated with either of the following boards:
+
+The primary education system of the MCGM is the largest urban primary education system in Asia. The MCGM operates 1,188 primary schools imparting primary education to 485,531 students in eight languages (Marathi, Hindi, Gujarati, Urdu, English, Tamil, Telugu, and Kannada). The MCGM also imparts secondary education to 55,576 students through its 49 secondary schools.[377]
+
+Under the 10+2+3/4 plan, students complete ten years of schooling and then enrol for two years in junior college, where they select one of three streams: arts, commerce, or science.[379] This is followed by either a general degree course in a chosen field of study, or a professional degree course, such as law, engineering and medicine.[380] Most colleges in the city are affiliated with the University of Mumbai, one of the largest universities in the world in terms of the number of graduates.[381]
+
+The University of Mumbai is one of the premier[382] universities in India. It was ranked 41 among the Top 50 Engineering Schools of the world by America's news broadcasting firm Business Insider in 2012 and was the only university in the list from the five emerging BRICS nations viz Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa.[383] Moreover, the University of Mumbai was ranked 5th in the list of best universities in India by India Today in 2013[384] and ranked at 62 in the QS BRICS University rankings for 2013, a ranking of leading universities in the five BRICS countries (Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa).[385]
+Its strongest scores in the QS University Rankings: BRICS are for papers per faculty (8th), employer reputation (20th) and citations per paper (28th).[386]
+It was ranked 10th among the top Universities of India by QS in 2013.[386] With 7 of the top ten Indian Universities being purely science and technology universities, it was India's 3rd best Multi Disciplinary University in the QS University ranking.[386]
+
+The Indian Institute of Technology (IIT Bombay),[387] Institute of Chemical Technology (formerly UDCT / UICT),[388] Veermata Jijabai Technological Institute (VJTI),[389] which are India's premier engineering and technology schools, along with SNDT Women's University are the autonomous universities located in Mumbai.[390] In April 2015, IIT Bombay launched the first U.S.-India joint EMBA program alongside Washington University in St. Louis.[391] Thadomal Shahani Engineering College is the first and the oldest private engineering college affiliated to the federal University of Mumbai and is also pioneered to be the first institute in the city's university to offer undergraduate level courses in Computer Engineering, Information Technology, Biomedical Engineering and Biotechnology.[392] Grant Medical College established in 1845 and Seth G.S. Medical College are the leading medical institutes affiliated with Sir Jamshedjee Jeejeebhoy Group of Hospitals and KEM Hospital respectively. Mumbai is also home to National Institute of Industrial Engineering (NITIE), Jamnalal Bajaj Institute of Management Studies (JBIMS), Narsee Monjee Institute of Management Studies (NMIMS), S P Jain Institute of Management and Research, Tata Institute of Social Sciences (TISS) and several other management schools.[393] Government Law College and Sydenham College, respectively the oldest law and commerce colleges in India, are based in Mumbai.[394][395] The Sir J. J. School of Art is Mumbai's oldest art institution.[396]
+
+Mumbai is home to two prominent research institutions: the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research (TIFR), and the Bhabha Atomic Research Centre (BARC).[397] The BARC operates CIRUS, a 40 MW nuclear research reactor at their facility in Trombay.[398]
+
+Cricket is more popular than any other sport in the city. Due to a shortage of grounds, various modified versions (generally referred to as gully cricket) are played everywhere. Mumbai is home to the Board of Control for Cricket in India (BCCI)[399] and Indian Premier League (IPL).[400] The Mumbai cricket team represents the city in the Ranji Trophy and has won 40 titles, the most by any team.[401] The Indian Premier League team Mumbai Indians is also based in the city. Mumbai has two international cricket grounds, the Wankhede Stadium and the Brabourne Stadium. The first cricket test match in India was played in Mumbai at the Bombay Gymkhana.[402] The biggest cricketing event to be staged in the city so far is the final of the 2011 ICC Cricket World Cup which was played at the Wankhede Stadium. Mumbai and London are the only two cities to have hosted both a World Cup final and the final of an ICC Champions Trophy which was played at the Brabourne Stadium in 2006.[403]
+
+Football is another popular sport in the city, with the FIFA World Cup and the English Premier League being followed widely.[404] In the Indian Super League, Mumbai City FC represents the city;
+while in the I-League (matches in the city are played at the Cooperage Ground), the city is represented by two teams: Mumbai FC[405] and Air-India.[406]
+When the Elite Football League of India was introduced in August 2011, Mumbai was noted as one of eight cities to be awarded a team for the inaugural season.
+
+Mumbai's first professional American football franchise,[407] the Mumbai Gladiators, played its first season, in Pune, in late 2012.[408]
+
+In Hockey, Mumbai is home to the Mumbai Marines and Mumbai Magicians in the World Series Hockey and Hockey India League respectively. Matches in the city are played at the Mahindra Hockey Stadium.[409][410]
+
+The Indian Badminton League (IBL), now known as the Premier Badminton League is also visiting Mumbai since its inaugural edition in 2013 when the final was held in Mumbai's National Sports Club of India.[411] In the second season, the final of the 2016 Premier Badminton League was held between home-squad Mumbai Rockets and the Delhi Dashers (formerly Delhi Acers), the visitors eventually claiming the title. The opening ceremony was also held in Mumbai while the finals in Delhi.[412]
+In the 2017 Premier Badminton League (also known as Vodafone PBL 2017 for sponsorship reasons) the Mumbai Rockets[413] beat the Hyderabad Hunters 3–1 to proceed to the final. In the final they lost 3–4 to the Chennai Smashers.
+
+U Mumba is the team representing Mumbai in the country's professional Kabaddi league, Pro Kabaddi. The Mumbai Leg of Pro Kabaddi is held at the NSCI, Worli.
+
+Rugby is another growing sport in Mumbai with league matches being held at the Bombay Gymkhana from June to November.[414]
+
+Every February, Mumbai holds derby races at the Mahalaxmi Racecourse. Mcdowell's Derby is also held in February at the Turf Club in Mumbai.[415] In March 2004, the Mumbai Grand Prix was part of the F1 powerboat world championship,[416] and the Force India F1 team car was unveiled in the city, in 2008.[417] The city is planning to build its own F1 track and various sites in the city were being chalked out, of which the authorities have planned to zero down on Marve-Malad or Panvel-Kalyan land. If approved, the track will be clubbed with a theme park and will spread over an area of some 160 to 200 ha (400 to 500 acres).[418] In 2004, the annual Mumbai Marathon was established as a part of "The Greatest Race on Earth". Mumbai had also played host to the Kingfisher Airlines Tennis Open, an International Series tournament of the ATP World Tour, in 2006 and 2007.[419]
+
+Regional and Professional Sports Teams from Mumbai
+
+Vijay Hazare Trophy
+
+Syed Musthaq Ali Trophy
+
+Brabourne Stadium
+
+Brabourne Stadium
+
+Former Regional and Professional Sports Teams from Mumbai
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+
+The bonobo (/bəˈnoʊboʊ, ˈbɒnəboʊ/; Pan paniscus), also historically called the pygmy chimpanzee and less often, the dwarf or gracile chimpanzee,[3] is an endangered great ape and one of the two species making up the genus Pan; the other being the common chimpanzee (Pan troglodytes).[4] Although bonobos are not a subspecies of chimpanzee (Pan troglodytes), but rather a distinct species in their own right, both species are sometimes referred to collectively using the generalized term chimpanzees, or chimps. Taxonomically, the members of the chimpanzee/bonobo subtribe Panina (comprised entirely by the genus Pan) are collectively termed panins.[5][6]
+
+The bonobo is distinguished by relatively long legs, pink lips, dark face, tail-tuft through adulthood, and parted long hair on its head. The bonobo is found in a 500,000 km2 (190,000 sq mi) area of the Congo Basin in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Central Africa. The species is omnivorous and inhabits primary and secondary forests, including seasonally inundated swamp forests. Because of political instability in the region and the timidity of bonobos, there has been relatively little field work done observing the species in its natural habitat.
+
+Along with the common chimpanzee, the bonobo is the closest extant relative to humans.[4] As the two species are not proficient swimmers, the formation of the Congo River 1.5–2 million years ago possibly led to the speciation of the bonobo. Bonobos live south of the river, and thereby were separated from the ancestors of the common chimpanzee, which live north of the river. There are no concrete data on population numbers, but the estimate is between 29,500 and 50,000 individuals. The species is listed as Endangered on the IUCN Red List and is threatened by habitat destruction and human population growth and movement, though commercial poaching is the most prominent threat. Bonobos typically live 40 years in captivity; their lifespan in the wild is unknown, but it is almost certainly much shorter.[7]
+
+Despite the species' common name "pygmy chimpanzee", the bonobo is not especially diminutive when compared to the common chimpanzee, with exception of its head. The appellative "pygmy" is attributable to the species' namer, Ernst Schwarz, who classified the species on the basis of a previously mislabeled bonobo cranium, noting its diminutive size compared to chimpanzee skulls.[8]
+
+The name "bonobo" first appeared in 1954, when Austrian zoologist Eduard Paul Tratz and German biologist Heinz Heck proposed it as a new and separate generic term for pygmy chimpanzees. The name is thought to derive from a misspelling on a shipping crate from the town of Bolobo on the Congo River near the location from which the first bonobo specimens were collected in the 1920s.[9][10]
+
+The bonobo was first recognised as a distinct taxon in 1928 by German anatomist Ernst Schwarz, based on a skull in the Tervuren Museum in Belgium which had previously been classified as a juvenile chimp (Pan troglodytes). Schwarz published his findings in 1929, classifying the bonobo as a subspecies of chimp.[11][12] In 1933, American anatomist Harold Coolidge elevated it to species status.[12][13] Major behavioural differences between bonobos and chimps were first discussed in detail by Tratz and Heck in the early 1950s.[14] American psychologist and primatologist Robert Yerkes was also one of the first to notice major behavioural differences.[15]
+
+The first official publication of the sequencing and assembly of the bonobo genome was published in June 2012. The genome of a female bonobo from the Leipzig zoo was deposited with the International Nucleotide Sequence Database Collaboration (DDBJ/EMBL/GenBank) under the EMBL accession number AJFE01000000[16] after a previous analysis by the National Human Genome Research Institute confirmed that the bonobo genome is about 0.4% divergent from the chimpanzee genome.[17]
+
+Bonobos and chimps are the two species which make up the genus Pan, and are the closest living relatives to humans (Homo sapiens).[18][19]
+
+The exact timing of the Pan–Homo last common ancestor is contentious, but DNA comparison suggests continual interbreeding between ancestral Pan and Homo groups, post-divergence, until about 4 million years ago.[20]
+DNA evidence suggests the bonobo and common chimpanzee species diverged approximately 890,000–860,000 years ago due to separation of these two populations possibly due to acidification and the spread of savannas at this time. Currently, these two species are separated by the Congo River, which had existed well before the divergence date, though ancestral Pan may have dispersed across the river using corridors which no longer exist.[21] The first Pan fossils were reported in 2005 from the Middle Pleistocene (after the bonobo–chimp split) of Kenya, alongside early Homo fossils.[22]
+
+According to A. Zihlman, bonobo body proportions closely resemble those of Australopithecus,[23] leading evolutionary biologist Jeremy Griffith to suggest that bonobos may be a living example of our distant human ancestors.[24] According to Australian anthropologists Gary Clark and Maciej Henneberg, human ancestors went through a bonobo-like phase featuring reduced aggression and associated anatomical changes, exemplified in Ardipithecus ramidus.[25]
+
+The bonobo is commonly considered to be more gracile than the common chimpanzee. Although large male chimpanzees can exceed any bonobo in bulk and weight, the two species actually broadly overlap in body size. Adult female bonobos are somewhat smaller than adult males. Body mass in males ranges from 34 to 60 kg (75 to 132 lb), against an average of 30 kg (66 lb) in females. The total length of bonobos (from the nose to the rump while on all fours) is 70 to 83 cm (28 to 33 in).[26][27][28][29] When adult bonobos and chimpanzees stand up on their legs, they can both attain a height of 115 cm (45 in).[30] The bonobo's head is relatively smaller than that of the common chimpanzee with less prominent brow ridges above the eyes. It has a black face with pink lips, small ears, wide nostrils, and long hair on its head that forms a parting. Females have slightly more prominent breasts, in contrast to the flat breasts of other female apes, although not so prominent as those of humans. The bonobo also has a slim upper body, narrow shoulders, thin neck, and long legs when compared to the common chimpanzee.
+
+Bonobos are both terrestrial and arboreal. Most ground locomotion is characterized by quadrupedal knuckle walking. Bipedal walking has been recorded as less than 1% of terrestrial locomotion in the wild, a figure that decreased with habituation,[31] while in captivity there is a wide variation. Bipedal walking in captivity, as a percentage of bipedal plus quadrupedal locomotion bouts, has been observed from 3.9% for spontaneous bouts to nearly 19% when abundant food is provided.[32] These physical characteristics and its posture give the bonobo an appearance more closely resembling that of humans than the common chimpanzee does. The bonobo also has highly individuated facial features,[33] as humans do, so that one individual may look significantly different from another, a characteristic adapted for visual facial recognition in social interaction.
+
+Multivariate analysis has shown bonobos are more neotenized than the common chimpanzee, taking into account such features as the proportionately long torso length of the bonobo.[34] Other researchers challenged this conclusion.[35]
+
+Primatologist Frans de Waal states bonobos are capable of altruism, compassion, empathy, kindness, patience, and sensitivity,[3] and described "bonobo society" as a "gynecocracy".[36][a] Primatologists who have studied bonobos in the wild have documented a wide range of behaviors, including aggressive behavior and more cyclic sexual behavior similar to chimpanzees, even though bonobos show more sexual behavior in a greater variety of relationships. An analysis of female bonding among wild bonobos by Takeshi Furuichi stresses female sexuality and shows how female bonobos spend much more time in estrus than female chimpanzees.[37]
+
+Some primatologists have argued that de Waal's data reflect only the behavior of captive bonobos, suggesting that wild bonobos show levels of aggression closer to what is found among chimpanzees. De Waal has responded that the contrast in temperament between bonobos and chimpanzees observed in captivity is meaningful, because it controls for the influence of environment. The two species behave quite differently even if kept under identical conditions.[38] A 2014 study also found bonobos to be less aggressive than chimpanzees, particularly eastern chimpanzees. The authors argued that the relative peacefulness of western chimpanzees and bonobos was primarily due to ecological factors.[39] Bonobos warn each other of danger less efficiently than chimpanzees in the same situation.[40]
+
+Many studies indicate that females have a higher social status in bonobo society. Aggressive encounters between males and females are rare, and males are tolerant of infants and juveniles. A male derives his status from the status of his mother.[41] The mother–son bond often stays strong and continues throughout life. While social hierarchies do exist, and although the son of a high ranking female may outrank a lower female, rank plays a less prominent role than in other primate societies.[42]
+
+Due to the promiscuous mating behavior of female bonobos, a male cannot be sure which offspring are his. As a result, the entirety of parental care in bonobos is assumed by the mothers.[43]
+
+Bonobo party size tends to vary because the groups exhibit a fission–fusion pattern. A community of approximately 100 will split into small groups during the day while looking for food, and then will come back together to sleep. They sleep in nests that they construct in trees.
+
+Sexual activity generally plays a major role in bonobo society, being used as what some scientists perceive as a greeting, a means of forming social bonds, a means of conflict resolution, and postconflict reconciliation.[44][4] Bonobos are the only non-human animal to have been observed engaging in tongue kissing.[45] Bonobos and humans are the only primates to typically engage in face-to-face genital sex, although a pair of western gorillas has been photographed in this position.[46]
+
+Bonobos do not form permanent monogamous sexual relationships with individual partners. They also do not seem to discriminate in their sexual behavior by sex or age, with the possible exception of abstaining from sexual activity between mothers and their adult sons. When bonobos come upon a new food source or feeding ground, the increased excitement will usually lead to communal sexual activity, presumably decreasing tension and encouraging peaceful feeding.[47]
+
+Bonobo clitorises are larger and more externalized than in most mammals;[48] while the weight of a young adolescent female bonobo "is maybe half" that of a human teenager, she has a clitoris that is "three times bigger than the human equivalent, and visible enough to waggle unmistakably as she walks".[49] In scientific literature, the female–female behavior of bonobos pressing genitals together is often referred to as genito-genital (GG) rubbing,[47][50] which is the non-human analogue of tribadism, engaged in by some human females. This sexual activity happens within the immediate female bonobo community and sometimes outside of it. Ethologist Jonathan Balcombe stated that female bonobos rub their clitorises together rapidly for ten to twenty seconds, and this behavior, "which may be repeated in rapid succession, is usually accompanied by grinding, shrieking, and clitoral engorgement"; he added that it is estimated that they engage in this practice "about once every two hours" on average.[48] As bonobos occasionally copulate face-to-face, "evolutionary biologist Marlene Zuk has suggested that the position of the clitoris in bonobos and some other primates has evolved to maximize stimulation during sexual intercourse".[48] The position of the clitoris may alternatively permit GG-rubbings, which has been hypothesized to function as a means for female bonobos to evaluate their intrasocial relationships.[51]
+
+Bonobo males engage in various forms of male–male genital behavior.[47][52] The most common form of male–male mounting is similar to that of a heterosexual mounting: one of the males sits "passively on his back [with] the other male thrusting on him", with the penises rubbing together due to both males' erections.[3] In another, rarer form of genital rubbing, which is the non-human analogue of frotting, engaged in by some human males, two bonobo males hang from a tree limb face-to-face while penis fencing.[47][53] This also may occur when two males rub their penises together while in face-to-face position. Another form of genital interaction (rump rubbing) often occurs to express reconciliation between two males after a conflict, when they stand back-to-back and rub their scrotal sacs together, but such behavior also occurs outside agonistic contexts: Kitamura (1989) observed rump–rump contacts between adult males following sexual solicitation behaviors similar to those between female bonobos prior to GG-rubbing.[54] Takayoshi Kano observed similar practices among bonobos in the natural habitat. Tongue kissing, oral sex, and genital massaging have also been recorded among male bonobos.[55][3]
+
+More often than the males, female bonobos engage in mutual genital behavior, possibly to bond socially with each other, thus forming a female nucleus of bonobo society. The bonding among females enables them to dominate most of the males.[47] Adolescent females often leave their native community to join another community. This migration mixes the bonobo gene pools, providing genetic diversity. Sexual bonding with other females establishes these new females as members of the group.
+
+Bonobo reproductive rates are no higher than those of the common chimpanzee.[47] During oestrus, females undergo a swelling of the perineal tissue lasting 10 to 20 days. The gestation period is on average 240 days. Postpartum amenorrhea (absence of menstruation) lasts less than one year and a female may resume external signs of oestrus within a year of giving birth, though the female is probably not fertile at this point. Female bonobos carry and nurse their young for four years and give birth on average every 4.6 years.[56] Compared to common chimpanzees, bonobo females resume the genital swelling cycle much sooner after giving birth, enabling them to rejoin the sexual activities of their society. Also, bonobo females which are sterile or too young to reproduce still engage in sexual activity. Mothers will help their sons get more matings from females in oestrus.[42] Adult male bonobos have sex with infants,[57] although without penetration.[58]
+
+It is unknown how the bonobo avoids simian immunodeficiency virus (SIV) and its effects.[59]
+
+Observations in the wild indicate that the males among the related common chimpanzee communities are hostile to males from outside the community. Parties of males 'patrol' for the neighboring males that might be traveling alone, and attack those single males, often killing them.[60] This does not appear to be the behavior of bonobo males or females, which seem to prefer sexual contact over violent confrontation with outsiders.[4]
+
+While bonobos are more peaceful than chimpanzees, it is not true that they are unaggressive.[61] In the wild, among males, bonobos are half as aggressive as chimpanzees, while female bonobos are more aggressive than female chimpanzees.[61] Both bonobos and chimpanzees exhibit physical aggression more than 100 times as often as humans do.[61]
+
+The ranges of bonobos and chimpanzees are separated by the Congo River, with bonobos living to the south of it, and chimpanzees to the north.[62][63] It has been hypothesized that bonobos are able to live a more peaceful lifestyle in part because of an abundance of nutritious vegetation in their natural habitat, allowing them to travel and forage in large parties.[64]
+
+Recent studies show that there are significant brain differences between bonobos and chimps. The brain anatomy of bonobos has more developed and larger regions assumed to be vital for feeling empathy, sensing distress in others and feeling anxiety, which makes them less aggressive and more empathic than their close relatives. They also have a thick connection between the amygdala, an important area that can spark aggression, and the ventral anterior cingulate cortex, which helps control impulses. This thicker connection may make them better at regulating their emotional impulses and behavior.[65]
+
+Bonobo society is dominated by females, and severing the lifelong alliance between mothers and their male offspring may make them vulnerable to female aggression.[4] De Waal has warned of the danger of romanticizing bonobos: "All animals are competitive by nature and cooperative only under specific circumstances" and that "when first writing about their behaviour, I spoke of 'sex for peace' precisely because bonobos had plenty of conflicts. There would obviously be no need for peacemaking if they lived in perfect harmony."[66]
+
+Surbeck and Hohmann showed in 2008 that bonobos sometimes do hunt monkey species. Five incidents were observed in a group of bonobos in Salonga National Park, which seemed to reflect deliberate cooperative hunting. On three occasions, the hunt was successful, and infant monkeys were captured and eaten.[67]
+
+The bonobo is an omnivorous frugivore; 57% of its diet is fruit, but this is supplemented with leaves, honey, eggs,[68] meat from small vertebrates such as anomalures, flying squirrels and duikers,[69] and invertebrates.[70] In some instances, bonobos have been shown to consume lower-order primates.[67] Some claim bonobos have also been known to practise cannibalism in captivity, a claim disputed by others.[71][72] However, at least one confirmed report of cannibalism in the wild of a dead infant was described in 2008.[73][74]
+
+Bonobos are capable of passing the mirror-recognition test for self-awareness,[75] as are all great apes. They communicate primarily through vocal means, although the meanings of their vocalizations are not currently known. However, most humans do understand their facial expressions[76] and some of their natural hand gestures, such as their invitation to play. The communication system of wild bonobos includes a characteristic that was earlier only known in humans: bonobos use the same call to mean different things in different situations, and the other bonobos have to take the context into account when determining the meaning.[77] Two bonobos at the Great Ape Trust, Kanzi and Panbanisha, have been taught how to communicate using a keyboard labeled with lexigrams (geometric symbols) and they can respond to spoken sentences. Kanzi's vocabulary consists of more than 500 English words,[78] and he has comprehension of around 3,000 spoken English words.[79] Kanzi is also known for learning by observing people trying to teach his mother; Kanzi started doing the tasks that his mother was taught just by watching, some of which his mother had failed to learn. Some, such as philosopher and bioethicist Peter Singer, argue that these results qualify them for "rights to survival and life"—rights which humans theoretically accord to all persons (See great ape personhood). In the 1990s, Kanzi was taught to make and use  simple stone tools. This resulted from a study undertaken by researchers Kathy Schick and Nicholas Toth, and later Gary Garufi. The researchers wanted to know if Kanzi possessed the cognitive and biomechanical abilities required to make and use stone tools. Though Kanzi was able to form flakes, he did not create them in same way as humans, who hold the core in one hand and knap it with the other, Kanzi threw the cobble against a hard surface or against another cobble. This allowed him to produce a larger force to initiate a fracture as opposed to knapping it in his hands.[80]
+
+As in other great apes and humans, third party affiliation toward the victim—the affinitive contact made toward the recipient of an aggression by a group member other than the aggressor—is present in bonobos.[81] A 2013 study[82] found that both the affiliation spontaneously offered by a bystander to the victim and the affiliation requested by the victim (solicited affiliation) can reduce the probability of further aggression by group members on the victim (this fact supporting the Victim-Protection Hypothesis). Yet, only spontaneous affiliation reduced victim anxiety—measured via self-scratching rates—thus suggesting not only that non-solicited affiliation has a consolatory function but also that the spontaneous gesture—more than the protection itself—works in calming the distressed subject. The authors hypothesize that the victim may perceive the motivational autonomy of the bystander, who does not require an invitation to provide post-conflict affinitive contact. Moreover, spontaneous—but not solicited—third party affiliation was affected by the bond between consoler and victim (this supporting the Consolation Hypothesis). Importantly, spontaneous affiliation followed the empathic gradient described for humans, being mostly offered to kin, then friends, then acquaintances (these categories having been determined using affiliation rates between individuals). Hence, consolation in the bonobo may be an empathy-based phenomenon.
+
+Instances in which non-human primates have expressed joy have been reported. One study analyzed and recorded sounds made by human infants and bonobos when they were tickled.[83] Although the bonobos' laugh was at a higher frequency, the laugh was found to follow a spectrographic pattern similar to that of human babies.[83]
+
+Bonobos are found only south of the Congo River and north of the Kasai River (a tributary of the Congo),[84] in the humid forests of the Democratic Republic of Congo. Ernst Schwarz's 1927 paper “Le Chimpanzé de la Rive Gauche du Congo”, announcing his discovery, has been read as an association between the Parisian Left Bank and the left bank of the Congo River; the bohemian culture in Paris, and an unconventional ape in the Congo.[85]
+
+The IUCN Red List classifies bonobos as an endangered species, with conservative population estimates ranging from 29,500 to 50,000 individuals.[2] Major threats to bonobo populations include habitat loss and hunting for bushmeat, the latter activity having increased dramatically during the first and second Congo wars in the Democratic Republic of Congo due to the presence of heavily armed militias even in remote "protected" areas such as Salonga National Park. This is part of a more general trend of ape extinction.
+
+As the bonobos' habitat is shared with people, the ultimate success of conservation efforts still rely on local and community involvement. The issue of parks versus people[86] is salient in the Cuvette Centrale the bonobos' range. There is strong local and broad-based Congolese resistance to establishing national parks, as indigenous communities have often been driven from their forest homes by the establishment of parks. In Salonga National Park, the only national park in the bonobo habitat, there is no local involvement, and surveys undertaken since 2000 indicate the bonobo, the African forest elephant, and other species have been devastated by poachers and the thriving bushmeat trade.[87] In contrast, areas exist where the bonobo and biodiversity still thrive without any established parks, due to the indigenous beliefs and taboos against killing bonobos.
+
+During the wars in the 1990s, researchers and international non-governmental organizations (NGOs) were driven out of the bonobo habitat. In 2002, the Bonobo Conservation Initiative initiated the Bonobo Peace Forest Project supported by the Global Conservation Fund of Conservation International and in cooperation with national institutions, local NGOs, and local communities. The Peace Forest Project works with local communities to establish a linked constellation of community-based reserves, managed by local and indigenous people. This model, implemented mainly through DRC organizations and local communities, has helped bring about agreements to protect over 50,000 square miles (130,000 km2) of the bonobo habitat. According to Dr. Amy Parish, the Bonobo Peace Forest "is going to be a model for conservation in the 21st century".[88]
+
+The port town of Basankusu is situated on the Lulonga River, at the confluence of the Lopori and Maringa Rivers, in the north of the country, making it well placed to receive and transport local goods to the cities of Mbandaka and Kinshasa. With Basankusu being the last port of substance before the wilderness of the Lopori Basin and the Lomako River—the bonobo heartland—conservation efforts for the bonobo[89] use the town as a base.[90][91]
+
+In 1995, concern over declining numbers of bonobos in the wild led the Zoological Society of Milwaukee, in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, with contributions from bonobo scientists around the world, to publish the Action Plan for Pan paniscus: A Report on Free Ranging Populations and Proposals for their Preservation. The Action Plan compiles population data on bonobos from 20 years of research conducted at various sites throughout the bonobo's range. The plan identifies priority actions for bonobo conservation and serves as a reference for developing conservation programs for researchers, government officials, and donor agencies.
+
+Acting on Action Plan recommendations, the ZSM developed the Bonobo and Congo Biodiversity Initiative. This program includes habitat and rain-forest preservation, training for Congolese nationals and conservation institutions, wildlife population assessment and monitoring, and education. The Zoological Society has conducted regional surveys within the range of the bonobo in conjunction with training Congolese researchers in survey methodology and biodiversity monitoring. The Zoological Society’s initial goal was to survey Salonga National Park to determine the conservation status of the bonobo within the park and to provide financial and technical assistance to strengthen park protection. As the project has developed, the Zoological Society has become more involved in helping the Congolese living in bonobo habitat. The Zoological Society has built schools, hired teachers, provided some medicines, and started an agriculture project to help the Congolese learn to grow crops and depend less on hunting wild animals.[92]
+
+With grants from the United Nations, USAID, the U.S. Embassy, the World Wildlife Fund, and many other groups and individuals, the Zoological Society also has been working to:
+
+Starting in 2003, the U.S. government allocated $54 million to the Congo Basin Forest Partnership. This significant investment has triggered the involvement of international NGOs to establish bases in the region and work to develop bonobo conservation programs. This initiative should improve the likelihood of bonobo survival, but its success still may depend upon building greater involvement and capability in local and indigenous communities.[93]
+
+The bonobo population is believed to have declined sharply in the last 30 years, though surveys have been hard to carry out in war-ravaged central Congo. Estimates range from 60,000 to fewer than 50,000 living, according to the World Wildlife Fund.
+
+In addition, concerned parties have addressed the crisis on several science and ecological websites. Organizations such as the World Wide Fund for Nature, the African Wildlife Foundation, and others, are trying to focus attention on the extreme risk to the species. Some have suggested that a reserve be established in a more stable part of Africa, or on an island in a place such as Indonesia. Awareness is ever increasing, and even nonscientific or ecological sites have created various groups to collect donations to help with the conservation of this species.

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+Paul David Hewson, KBE OL (born 10 May 1960), known by his stage name Bono (/ˈbɒnoʊ/), is an Irish singer-songwriter, venture capitalist, businessman, and philanthropist.[1] He is best known as the lead vocalist and primary lyricist of rock band U2.
+
+Born and raised in Dublin, Ireland, he attended Mount Temple Comprehensive School where he met his future wife, Alison Stewart, as well as schoolmates with whom he formed U2 in 1976.[2][3][4]  Bono soon established himself as a passionate frontman for the band through his expressive vocal style and grandiose gestures and songwriting. His lyrics are known for their social and political themes, and for their religious imagery inspired by his Christian beliefs.[5][6] During U2's early years, Bono's lyrics contributed to the group's rebellious and spiritual tone.[5] As the band matured, his lyrics became inspired more by personal experiences shared with the other members.[3][5] As a member of U2, Bono has received 22 Grammy Awards and has been inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.
+
+Bono is well known for his activism for social justice causes, both through U2 and as an individual. He is particularly active in campaigning for Africa, for which he co-founded DATA, EDUN, the ONE Campaign, and Product Red.[3][7] In pursuit of these causes, he has participated in benefit concerts and met with influential politicians.[7][8][9] Bono has been praised for his philanthropic efforts;[10][11][12] he was granted an honorary knighthood by Elizabeth II of the United Kingdom for "his services to the music industry and for his humanitarian work", and has been made a Commandeur of the French Ordre des Arts et des Lettres (Order of Arts and Letters). In 2005, Bono was named one of the Time Persons of the Year.[10][13][14]
+
+Outside the band, he has recorded with numerous artists.[15][16][17] He has collaborated with U2 bandmate the Edge on several projects, including: songs for Roy Orbison and Tina Turner; the soundtracks to the musical Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark and a London stage adaptation of A Clockwork Orange; and the refurbishment of the Clarence Hotel in Dublin. He is managing director and a managing partner of the private equity firm Elevation Partners, which has invested in several companies.[18][19][20]
+
+Bono was born in the Rotunda Hospital, Dublin, on 10 May 1960.[21] He was raised in the Northside suburb of Finglas[22] with his brother (who is eight years older than Bono) by their mother, Iris (née Rankin), a member of the Church of Ireland, and their father, Brendan Robert "Bob" Hewson, a Roman Catholic.[2][3] His parents initially agreed that the first child would be raised Anglican and the second Catholic.[23] Although Bono was the second child, he also attended Church of Ireland services with his mother and brother.[23] Bono's teenage musical idols were Bob Dylan, Leonard Cohen, David Bowie and Marc Bolan of T. Rex.[24]
+
+He went to the local primary Glasnevin National School.[25] Bono's mother died on 10 September 1974, after suffering a cerebral aneurysm at her father's funeral.[3] Many U2 songs, including "I Will Follow", "Mofo", "Out of Control", "Lemon" and "Tomorrow" focus on the loss of his mother.[3][26][27]
+
+Bono attended Mount Temple Comprehensive School, a multi-denominational school in Clontarf. During his childhood and adolescence, Bono and his friends were part of a surrealist street gang called "Lypton Village". Bono met one of his closest friends, Guggi, in Lypton Village.[28] The gang had a ritual of nickname-giving. Bono had several names: first, he was "Steinhegvanhuysenolegbangbangbang",[28] then just "Huyseman", followed by "Houseman", "Bon Murray", "Bono Vox of O'Connell Street", and finally just "Bono".[3] "Bono Vox" is an alteration of Bonavox, a Latin phrase which translates to "good voice". It is said he was nicknamed "Bono Vox" by his friend Gavin Friday. He initially disliked the name; however, when he learned it translated to "good voice", he accepted it. Hewson has been known as "Bono" since the late 1970s. Although he uses Bono as his stage name, close family and friends also refer to him as Bono, including fellow band members.[3]
+
+After he left school, his father Bob Hewson told him he could live at home for one year, but if he was not able to pay his own way, he would have to leave the house.[28]
+
+On 25 September 1976, Bono, David Evans ("The Edge"), his brother Dik and Adam Clayton responded to an advertisement on a bulletin board at Mount Temple posted by fellow student Larry Mullen Jr. to form a rock band. The band had occasional jam sessions in which they did covers of other bands. Tired of long guitar solos and hard rock, Bono wanted to play The Rolling Stones and Beach Boys songs.[citation needed] The band could not play covers very well, so they started writing their own songs.[29]
+
+The band went by the name "Feedback" for a few months, before changing to "The Hype" later on. After Dik Evans left the group to join another local band, the Virgin Prunes, the remaining four officially changed the name from "The Hype" to "U2". Initially Bono sang, played guitar and wrote the band's songs. He said of his early guitar playing in a 1982 interview, "When we started out I was the guitar player, along with the Edge—except I couldn't play guitar. I still can't. I was such a lousy guitar player that one day they broke it to me that maybe I should sing instead. I had tried before, but I had no voice at all. I remember the day I found I could sing. I said, 'Oh, that's how you do it.'"[30] When The Edge's guitar playing improved, Bono was relegated mostly to the microphone, although he occasionally still plays rhythm guitar and harmonica. As of 2006, Bono has taken piano lessons from his children's piano teacher as a means to improve his songwriting.[31]
+
+Bono writes the lyrics for almost all U2 songs, which often have social and political themes.[5] His lyrics frequently allude to a religious connection or meaning, evident in songs such as "Gloria" from the band's album October and "I Still Haven't Found What I'm Looking For" from The Joshua Tree.[6] During the band's early years, Bono was known for his rebellious tone which turned to political anger and rage during the band's War, The Joshua Tree and Rattle and Hum eras.[5] Following the Enniskillen bombing that left 11 dead and 63 injured on 8 November 1987, the Provisional IRA paramilitaries threatened to kidnap Bono.[3] IRA supporters also attacked a vehicle carrying the band members.[3] These acts were in response to his speech condemning the Enniskillen bombing during a live performance of "Sunday Bloody Sunday".[3] The singer had been advised to cut his on-stage outburst from the Rattle and Hum film, but it was left in.[32] Also featured in the film is footage of Bono spray-painting a monument during an outdoor performance; Bono was forced to pay a fine.
+
+U2's sound and focus dramatically changed with their 1991 album, Achtung Baby. Bono's lyrics became more personal, inspired by experiences related to the private lives of the members of the band.[3][5] During the band's Zoo TV Tour several of his stage personae were showcased; these included "The Fly", a stereotypical rock star; "Mirror Ball Man", a parody of American televangelists; and "MacPhisto", a combination of a corrupted rock star and the Devil.[3][5]
+
+During performances, Bono attempts to interact with the crowd as often as possible. He is known for pulling audience members onto the stage or moving himself down to the physical level of the audience.[3] At the Live Aid concert in 1985, Bono leapt off the stage and pulled a woman from the crowd to dance with her as the band played "Bad". In 2005, during U2's Vertigo Tour stop in Chicago, he pulled a boy onto the stage during the song "An Cat Dubh / Into the Heart".[3][33] Bono has often allowed fans to come on stage and perform songs with the band.
+
+Bono has won numerous awards with U2, including 22 Grammy Awards and the 2003 Golden Globe Award for Best Original Song, "The Hands That Built America", for the film Gangs of New York.[11][34] During the live broadcast of the Golden Globe ceremony, Bono called the award "really, really fucking brilliant!".[35] In response, the Parents Television Council condemned Bono for his profanity and started a campaign for its members to file complaints with the FCC.[36] Although Bono's use of "fuck" violated FCC indecency standards, the FCC refused to fine NBC because the network did not receive advance notice of the consequences of broadcasting such profanity and the profanity in question was not used in its literal sexual meaning.[37]
+In apparent reaction to the refusal,[38] a group of congressmen introduced House Resolution 3687, the "Clean Airwaves Act",[39] on 8 December 2003,[40] aiming to amend section 1464 of title 18 of the United States Code to provide an explicit list of profane words and phrases and remove ambiguity that could enable certain uses of the phrases to be allowed.[41] The bill was not enacted.[40] The incident has had a long-term impact in the handling of profanity on live broadcasts.[39]
+
+In 2005, the U2 band members were inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, in their first year of eligibility.[42] In November 2008, Rolling Stone ranked Bono the 32nd-greatest singer of all time.[43] In 2015, the magazine ranked Bono and the Edge at number 35 on its list of the 100 Greatest Songwriters of All Time.[44]
+
+U2 were criticised in 2007 for moving part of their multimillion-euro song catalogue from Ireland to Amsterdam six months before Ireland ended a tax exemption on musicians' royalties.[12][45] Under Dutch tax law, bands are subject to low to non-existent tax rates.[12] U2 manager Paul McGuinness stated that the arrangement was legal and customary and businesses often sought to minimise their tax burdens.[12] The move prompted criticisms in the Irish parliament.[46][47] The band later responded by stating that approximately 95% of their business took place outside Ireland, and that they were taxed globally because of this.[48] Bono was one of several wealthy figures whose tax arrangements were singled out for criticism in a report by the charity Christian Aid in 2008.[49]
+
+In addition to his work with U2, Bono has collaborated with Frank Sinatra,[15] Johnny Cash,[16] Willie Nelson,[50] Luciano Pavarotti,[51] Sinéad O'Connor,[52] Green Day, Tom Petty, Roy Orbison,[53] Bob Dylan,[17] Patti Smith, Tina Turner,[54] B.B. King and Zucchero.[55][56][57] He has recorded with Ray Charles,[58] Quincy Jones, Kirk Franklin,[59] Bruce Springsteen,[60] Tony Bennett,[61] Clannad,[62] The Corrs,[63] Wyclef Jean,[64] Kylie Minogue,[65] Carl Perkins,[66] Herbert Grönemeyer,[67] Jay-Z and Rihanna, as well as reportedly completing an unreleased duet with Jennifer Lopez.[68] On Robbie Robertson's 1987 eponymous album, he plays bass guitar and vocals.[69] On Michael Hutchence's 1999 posthumous eponymous album, Bono completed a recording of "Slide Away" as a duet with Hutchence.[70] Bono collaborated with African stars D'banj, Waje and Omotola Jalade Ekeinde for a women's empowerment song entitled "Strong Girl".[71]
+
+Bono and the Edge also wrote the music and lyrics for the Broadway musical Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark. On 25 May 2011, a single titled "Rise Above 1" by Reeve Carney featuring Bono and The Edge was released digitally.[72] The music video was released on 28 July 2011.[73]
+
+On 17 March 2020, Bono performed a new song, "Let Your Love Be Known", via livestream to fans during the COVID-19 pandemic.[74] On 24 March, the song was released on YouTube,[75] retitled "#SING4LIFE", as a collaboration with will.i.am, Jennifer Hudson, and Yoshiki.[76]
+
+Bono has become one of the world's best-known philanthropic performers and was named the most politically effective celebrity of all time by the National Journal.[77][78][79] He has been dubbed "the face of fusion philanthropy",[80] both for his success enlisting powerful allies from a diverse spectrum of leaders in government, religious institutions, philanthropic organisations, popular media, and the business world, as well as for spearheading new organizational networks that bind global humanitarian relief with geopolitical activism and corporate commercial enterprise.[81]
+
+In a 1986 interview with Rolling Stone magazine, Bono explained that he was motivated to become involved in social and political causes by seeing one of the Secret Policeman's Ball benefit shows, staged by Monty Python member John Cleese and producer Martin Lewis for the human-rights organisation Amnesty International in 1979.[82] Bono stated, "I saw The Secret Policeman's Ball and it became a part of me. It sowed a seed...".[83] In 2001, Bono arranged for U2 to videotape a special live performance for that year's Amnesty benefit show.
+
+In 1984, Bono sang on the Band Aid single "Do They Know it's Christmas?/Feed the World" (a role that was reprised on the 2004 Band Aid 20 and 2014 Band Aid 30 singles of the same name).[84] Bob Geldof and Bono later collaborated to organise the 2005 Live 8 project, where U2 also performed.[9]
+Bono and U2 performed on Amnesty's Conspiracy of Hope Tour of the United States in 1986 alongside Sting.[8] U2 also performed in the Band Aid and Live Aid projects, organised by Geldof.[85]
+
+Since 1999, Bono has become increasingly involved in campaigning for third-world debt relief and raising awareness of the plight of Africa, including the AIDS pandemic. In the past decade Bono has met with several influential politicians, including former United States President George W. Bush and former Canadian Prime Minister Paul Martin.[86] During a March 2002 visit to the White House, after President Bush unveiled a $5 billion aid package, Bono accompanied the President for a speech on the White House lawn where he stated: "This is an important first step, and a serious and impressive new level of commitment. (...) This must happen urgently, because this is a crisis."[86] In May of that year, Bono took US Treasury Secretary Paul H. O'Neill on a four-country tour of Africa. In contrast, in 2005, Bono spoke on CBC Radio, alleging then Prime Minister Martin was being slow about increasing Canada's foreign aid.[87]
+
+In 2004, he was awarded the Pablo Neruda International Presidential Medal of Honour from the Government of Chile.[88] Time Magazine named Bono one of the "100 Most Influential People" in its May 2004 special issue[89] and again in the 2006 Time 100 special issue.[90] In 2005, Time, named Bono, Bill and Melinda Gates the Persons of the Year.[14] Also in 2005, he received the Portuguese Order of Liberty for his humanitarian work.[91] That year Bono was also among the first three recipients of the TED Prize, which grants each winner "A wish to change the world".[92] Bono made three wishes,[93] the first two related to the ONE campaign and the third that every hospital, health clinic and school in Ethiopia should be connected to the Internet. TED rejected the third wish as being a sub-optimal way for TED to help Africa[93] and instead organised a TED conference in Arusha, Tanzania. Bono attended the conference, which was held in June 2007.
+
+In 2005, he recorded a version of "Don't Give Up" with Alicia Keys, with proceeds going to Keep a Child Alive.[94] On 3 April 2005, Bono paid a personal tribute to John Paul II and called him "a street fighter and a wily campaigner on behalf of the world's poor. We would never have gotten the debts of 23 countries completely cancelled without him."[95] Bono spoke in advance of President Bush at the 54th Annual National Prayer Breakfast, held at the Hilton Washington Hotel on 2 February 2006. He encouraged the care of the socially and economically depressed. His comments included a call for an extra one percent tithe of the United States' national budget. He praised Bush received for the United States' increase in aid for the African continent.[7]
+
+Also in 2005, Bono, Ali Hewson and designer Rogan Gregory co-founded the EDUN fashion label ("nude" spelled backwards, to suggest both "natural" and the Garden of Eden).[96] It was intended to help bring about positive change in Africa through a fair trade-based relationship rather than by direct aid.[97][98]
+
+On 15 December 2005, Paul Theroux published an op-ed in The New York Times called The Rock Star's Burden (cf. Kipling's The White Man's Burden) that criticised stars such as Bono, Brad Pitt, and Angelina Jolie, labelling them as "mythomaniacs, people who wish to convince the world of their worth." Theroux, who lived in Africa as a Peace Corps Volunteer, added that "the impression that Africa is fatally troubled and can be saved only by outside help—not to mention celebrities and charity concerts—is a destructive and misleading conceit."[99]
+
+In 2007, Bono was named in the UK's New Years Honours List as an honorary Knight Commander of the Order of the British Empire.[13][100] He was formally granted knighthood on 29 March 2007 in a ceremony at the residence of British Ambassador David Reddaway in Dublin, Ireland.[101]
+
+Bono also received the NAACP Image Award's chairman's Award in 2007.[102] On 24 May 2007, the National Constitution Center in Philadelphia announced that Bono would receive the Philadelphia Liberty Medal on 27 September 2007 for his work to end world poverty and hunger.[103] On 28 September 2007, in accepting the Liberty Medal, Bono said, "When you are trapped by poverty, you are not free. When trade laws prevent you from selling the food you grew, you are not free ... When you are a monk in Burma this very week, barred from entering a temple because of your gospel of peace ... well, then none of us are truly free". Bono donated the $100,000 prize to the organisation. Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala accepted the award for the Washington-based Debt AIDS Trade Africa.[104]
+
+The organisation DATA (Debt, AIDS, Trade, Africa) was established in 2002 by Bono and Bobby Shriver, along with activists from the Jubilee 2000 Drop the Debt Campaign.[105] DATA aims to eradicate poverty and HIV/AIDS in Africa.[105] DATA encourages Americans to contact senators and other legislators and elected officials to voice their opinions.[105]
+
+Bono was a special guest editor of the July 2007 issue of Vanity Fair magazine. The issue was named "The Africa Issue: Politics & Power" and featured an assortment of 20 different covers, with photographs by Annie Leibovitz of a number of prominent celebrities, political leaders, and philanthropists. Each one showcased in the issue for their contributions to the humanitarian relief in Africa.[106]
+
+In an article in Bloomberg Markets in March 2007, journalists Richard Tomlinson and Fergal O'Brien noted that Bono used his band's 2006 Vertigo world tour to promote his ONE Campaign while at the same time "U2 was racking up $389 million in gross ticket receipts, making Vertigo the second-most lucrative tour of all time, according to Billboard magazine ... Revenue from the Vertigo tour is funnelled through companies that are mostly registered in Ireland and structured to minimise taxes."[107]
+
+Further criticism came in November 2007, when Bono's various charity campaigns were targeted by Jobs Selasie, head of African Aid Action. Selasie claimed that these charities had increased corruption and dependency in Africa because they failed to work with African entrepreneurs and grassroots organisations, and as a result, Africa has become more dependent on international handouts.[108] Bono responded to his critics in Times Online on 19 February 2006, calling them "cranks carping from the sidelines. A lot of them wouldn't know what to do if they were on the field. They're the party who will always be in opposition so they'll never have to take responsibility for decisions because they know they'll never be able to implement them."[109]
+
+In November 2007, Bono was honoured by NBC Nightly News as someone "making a difference" in the world.[110] He and anchor Brian Williams had travelled to Africa in May 2007 to showcase the humanitarian crisis on the continent.[111] On 11 December 2008, Bono was given the annual Man of Peace prize, awarded by several Nobel Peace Prize laureates in Paris, France.[112]
+
+Product Red is another initiative begun by Bono and Bobby Shriver to raise money for the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis, and Malaria.[113] Bobby Shriver has been announced as the CEO of Product Red, while Bono is currently an active public spokesperson for the brand. Product Red is a brand that is licensed to partner companies, such as American Express, Apple, Converse, Motorola, Microsoft, Dell, The Gap and Giorgio Armani.[114] Each company creates a product with the Product Red logo and a percentage of the profits from the sale of these labelled products will go to the Global Fund.[115]
+
+In 2016, Glamour named him "Man of the Year", breaking the 26-year tradition that saw the "Woman of the Year" accolade reserved only for women. Bono was recognized for establishing a campaign called "Poverty is Sexist," which is "specifically aimed at helping the world's poorest women".[116]
+
+In 1992, Bono, along with the Edge, bought and refurbished Dublin's two-star 70-bedroom Clarence Hotel, and converted it into a five-star 49-bedroom hotel.[20] The Edge and Bono have recorded several songs together, exclusive of the band. They also worked on the score for the 2011 rock musical Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark.[117]
+
+In May 2007, MTV reported that Bono was writing the foreword for a collection of poetry entitled Third Rail.[118] The book's foreword details the meanings of its poetry, stating "The poets who fill the pews here have come to testify, to bear witness to the mysterious power of rock and roll...Rock and roll is truly a broad church, but each lights a candle to their vision of what it is."[118] The collection, edited by poet Jonathan Wells, contains titles such as "Punk Rock You're My Big Crybaby" by Allen Ginsberg, "Variation on a Theme by Whitesnake" by Dan Hoy, and "Vince Neil Meets Josh in a Chinese Restaurant in Malibu (After Ezra Pound)" by Josh Bell.[118]
+
+Bono is on the board of the Elevation Partners private-equity firm, which attempted to purchase Eidos Interactive in 2005 and has since gone on to invest in other entertainment businesses.[19][119] Bono has invested in the Forbes Media group in the US through Elevation Partners. Elevation Partners became the first outsider to invest in the company, taking a minority stake in Forbes Media LLC, a new company encompassing the 89-year-old business which includes Forbes magazine, the Forbes.com website and other assets. The terms of the deal were not disclosed, but reports said the stake was worth about €194 million ($250 million).[120][121][122] The firm also owns a 1.5 percent stake in social networking site Facebook, originally purchased for $210 million.[18] Although it was reported that Bono's stake was valued at approximately US$ 1 billion in February 2012,[123][124] a 2015 article in Forbes stated that this estimate was based on an incorrect attribution of shares.[125]
+
+Bono was among those cited in the Paradise Papers after he was named as a passive minority investor in Nude Estates, which bought a shopping mall in Lithuania in 2007 and transferred ownership to Nude Estates 1 in Guernsey in an apparent attempt to avoid tax. Bono welcomed the subsequent investigation by the Lithuanian tax authority, stating that he welcomed transparency and had personally campaigned for it.[126] Nude Estates paid €53,000 in taxes and fines after the investigation was completed and Bono severed ties with the company.[127]
+
+In September 2019, it was announced that Bono joined the Board of Directors of Zipline.[128]
+
+Bono is married to activist and businesswoman Alison Hewson (née Stewart).[4] The couple have four children: daughters Jordan (born 10 May 1989) and Memphis Eve (7 July 1991) and sons Elijah Bob Patricius Guggi Q (17 August 1999) and John Abraham (20 May 2001).[129]
+
+Bono was a close friend to INXS frontman Michael Hutchence.[130]
+
+Bono is almost never seen in public without sunglasses, as he suffers from glaucoma.[131] During a Rolling Stone interview, he stated:
+
+[I have] very sensitive eyes to light. If somebody takes my photograph, I will see the flash for the rest of the day. My right eye swells up. I've a blockage there, so that my eyes go red a lot. So it's part vanity, it's part privacy and part sensitivity.[132]
+
+—Bob Dylan, 2005[133]
+
+In the late 1980s or early 1990s, Bono bought a top-floor duplex apartment in Manhattan's San Remo apartment building from Steve Jobs for $15 million. Jobs had renovated it for his own use, but never moved in.[134] In 2004, Bono was given an honorary Doctor of Laws degree from the University of Pennsylvania.[135]
+
+Bono was named one of the 17 Irish artists to be proud of by the Irish Post on 9 April 2013.[136] Time magazine ranked him at the 8th place on its list of the "Most Influential Celebrities" in 2013; he was the only person from the music industry in the Top 10.[137]
+
+Bono's work as an activist, which is due largely to his Christian beliefs,[138] began in earnest when, inspired by Live Aid, he travelled to Ethiopia to work in a feeding camp with his wife Alison and the charity World Vision, an Evangelical Christian humanitarian aid, development, and advocacy organisation.[138] With regard to Bono's 2013 declarations in interviews published and videotaped of his faith in Jesus Christ,[139] he states that Christ was either who he said he was, or he is "a complete and utter nutcase".[140] As early as 2005, Bono was invoking this argument,[141][142] identified as the "Lewis trilemma".
+
+In May 2010, Bono suffered a spinal injury while preparing for a U2 tour, and was taken to a German clinic in Munich for emergency neurosurgery.[143][144] The North American leg of the tour was postponed and rescheduled for 2011.[145][146]
+
+On 16 November 2014, Bono was involved in a "high energy bicycle accident" when he attempted to avoid another rider. Bono was rushed to NewYork–Presbyterian Hospital/Weill Cornell Medical Center's Emergency Department and underwent "multiple X-rays and CAT scans" followed by five hours of surgery. Bono suffered fractures of the shoulder blade, humerus, orbit and pinky finger. Orthopedic trauma surgeon Dean Lorich, MD, stated that "[Bono] was taken urgently to the operating room... where the elbow was washed out and debrided, a nerve trapped in the break was moved and the bone was repaired with three metal plates and 18 screws."[147][148] Bono posted to U2's official website, "As I write this, it is not clear that I will ever play guitar again," as reported in Cycling Weekly.[149][150]
+
+In 2016, during the recording sessions for U2's album Songs of Experience, Bono had what the Edge called a "brush with mortality".[151] The Irish Times reported that sometime in late 2016 between Christmas and New Year's Day, Bono had a near-death experience.[152] Other than clarifying that it was a physical health scare, he declined to elaborate any further on what happened.[153] As a result of the episode, he decided to rework the album's lyrics.[151]
+
+In addition to his acting credits Bono has contributed music to films, as part of U2 and other collaborations.
+

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+
+Bordeaux (French pronunciation: [bɔʁdo] (listen); Gascon Occitan: Bordèu [buɾˈðɛw]) is a port city on the Garonne in the Gironde department in Southwestern France.
+
+The municipality (commune) of Bordeaux proper has a population of 257,804 (2019). Bordeaux is the centre of Bordeaux Métropole that has a population of 796,273 (2019), the 5th largest in France after Paris, Marseille, Lyon and Lille with its immediate suburbs and closest satellite towns. The larger metropolitan area has a population of 1,232,550 (2016). It is the capital of the Nouvelle-Aquitaine region, as well as the prefecture of the Gironde department. Its inhabitants are called "Bordelais" (for men) or "Bordelaises" (women). The term "Bordelais" may also refer to the city and its surrounding region.
+
+Being France's most prominent wine region, with 3,37 Billion € turnover[5] it is both the center of a major wine-growing and wine-producing region hosting the world's most renowned estates, and a prominent powerhouse exercising significant influence on the world's wine and spirits industry, although no wine production is conducted within the city limits. It is home to the world's main wine fair, Vinexpo,[6] and the wine economy in the metro area takes in 14.5 billion euros each year. Bordeaux wine has been produced in the region since the 8th century. The historic part of the city is on the UNESCO World Heritage List as "an outstanding urban and architectural ensemble" of the 18th century.[7] After Paris, Bordeaux has the highest number of preserved historical buildings of any city in France.[8]
+
+Around 300 BC, the region was the settlement of a Celtic tribe, the Bituriges Vivisci, named the town Burdigala, probably of Aquitanian origin.
+
+In 107 BC, the Battle of Burdigala was fought by the Romans who were defending the Allobroges, a Gallic tribe allied to Rome, and the Tigurini led by Divico. The Romans were defeated and their commander, the consul Lucius Cassius Longinus, was killed in battle.[9]
+
+The city came under Roman rule around 60 BC, and it became an important commercial centre for tin and lead.[10] It continued to flourish, especially during the Severan dynasty (3rd century), and acquired the status of capital of Roman Aquitaine. During this period were built the amphitheatre and the monument Les Piliers de Tutelle.
+
+Les Piliers de Tutelle
+
+The Roman amphitheatre
+
+In 276, it was sacked by the Vandals. The Vandals attacked again in 409, followed by the Visigoths in 414, and the Franks in 498, and afterwards the city fell into a period of relative obscurity.
+
+In the late 6th century the city re-emerged as the seat of a county and an archdiocese within the Merovingian kingdom of the Franks, but royal Frankish power was never strong. The city started to play a regional role as a major urban center on the fringes of the newly founded Frankish Duchy of Vasconia. Around 585 Gallactorius was made count of Bordeaux and fought the Basques.
+
+In 732, the city was plundered by the troops of Abd er Rahman who stormed the fortifications and overwhelmed the Aquitanian garrison. Duke Eudes mustered a force to engage the Umayyads, eventually engaging them in the Battle of the River Garonne somewhere near the river Dordogne. The battle had a high death toll, and although Eudes was defeated he had enough troops to engage in the Battle of Poitiers and so retain his grip on Aquitaine.
+
+In 773, following his father Eudes's death, the Aquitanian duke Hunald led a rebellion to which Charles responded by launching an expedition that captured Bordeaux.  However, it was not retained for long, during the following year the Frankish commander clashed in battle with the Aquitanians but then left to take on hostile Burgundian authorities and magnates. In 745 Aquitaine faced another expedition where Charles's sons Pepin and Carloman challenged Hunald's power and defeated him. Hunald's son Waifer replaced him and confirmed Bordeaux as the capital city (along with Bourges in the north).
+
+During the last stage of the war against Aquitaine (760–768), it was one of Waifer's last important strongholds to fall to the troops of King Pepin the Short.  Charlemagne built the fortress of Fronsac (Frontiacus, Franciacus) near Bordeaux on a hill across the border with the Basques (Wascones), where Basque commanders came and pledged their loyalty (769).
+
+In 778, Seguin (or Sihimin) was appointed count of Bordeaux, probably undermining the power of the Duke Lupo, and possibly leading to the Battle of Roncevaux Pass[9]-. In 814, Seguin was made Duke of Vasconia, but was deposed in 816 for failing to suppress a Basque rebellion. Under the Carolingians, sometimes the Counts of Bordeaux held the title concomitantly with that of Duke of Vasconia. They were to keep the Basques in check and defend the mouth of the Garonne from the Vikings when they appeared in c. 844. In Autumn 845, the Vikings were raiding Bordeaux and Saintes, count Seguin II marched on them but was captured and executed.
+
+Although the port of Bordeaux was a buzzing trade center, the stability and success of the city was constantly threatened by Germanic and Norman invasions. It wasn't until the marriage of Eleanor of Aquitaine and Henry Plantagenet in 1152 established some sort of protection, as it provided a connection with the English[11] After this union, Bordeaux suddenly had access to naval protection, which made the attacks from the nomadic groups few and far between.[12]
+
+From the 12th to the 15th century, Bordeaux regained importance following the marriage of Duchess Eléonore of Aquitaine to the French-speaking Count Henri Plantagenet, born in Le Mans, who within months of their wedding became King Henry II of England. The city flourished, primarily due to the wine trade, and the cathedral of St. André and the belfry (Grosse Cloche) were built. After granting a tax-free trade status with England, King Henry II was adored by the locals as they could be even more profitable in the wine trade, their main source of income. The city cathedral St. Cathédrale St-André was built in 1227, incorporating the artisan quarter of Saint-Paul.[13] It was also the capital of an independent state under Edward, the Black Prince (1362–1372), but after the Battle of Castillon (1453) it was annexed by France, and so extended its territory.
+
+In 1462, Bordeaux created a local parliament. However, it only begun to regain its importance during the 17th century when it became a major trading centre for sugar and slaves from the West Indies, along with its traditional wine exports.[14]
+
+Bordeaux adhered to the Fronde, being effectively annexed to the Kingdom of France only in 1653, when the army of Louis XIV entered the city.
+
+The 18th century saw another golden age of Bordeaux.[15] The Port of the Moon supplied the majority of Europe with coffee, cocoa, sugar, cotton and indigo, becoming France's busiest port and the second busiest port in the world after London.[12] Many downtown buildings (about 5,000), including those on the quays, are from this period. Victor Hugo found the town so beautiful he said: "Take Versailles, add Antwerp, and you have Bordeaux". Georges-Eugène Haussmann, a long-time prefect of Bordeaux, used Bordeaux's 18th-century large-scale rebuilding as a model when he was asked by Emperor Napoleon III to transform a then still quasi-medieval Paris into a "modern" capital that would make France proud.
+
+Towards the end of the Peninsula war on 12 March 1814, the Duke of Wellington sent William Beresford with two divisions and seized Bordeaux encountering little resistance. Bordeaux was largely anti-Bonapartist and the majority supported the Bourbons, so the British troops were treated as liberators.
+
+Port of the Moon in 1759
+
+Aerial view of the Port of the Moon in 1899
+
+In 1870, at the beginning of the Franco-Prussian war against Prussia, the French government temporarily relocated to Bordeaux from Paris.[16] This recurred during the World War I and again very briefly during the World War II, when it became clear that Paris would fall into German hands.
+
+During World War II, Bordeaux fell under German Occupation.
+
+In May and June 1940, Bordeaux was the site of the life-saving actions of the Portuguese consul-general, Aristides de Sousa Mendes, who illegally granted thousands of Portuguese visas, which were needed to pass the Spanish border, to refugees fleeing the German Occupation.
+
+From 1941 to 1943, the Italian Royal Navy established BETASOM, a submarine base at Bordeaux. Italian submarines participated in the Battle of the Atlantic from this base, which was also a major base for German U-boats as headquarters of 12th U-boat Flotilla. The massive, reinforced concrete U-boat pens have proved impractical to demolish and are now partly used as a cultural center for exhibitions.[17]
+
+Bordeaux is located close to the European Atlantic coast, in the southwest of France and in the north of the Aquitaine region. It is around 500 km (310 mi) southwest of Paris. The city is built on a bend of the river Garonne, and is divided into two parts: the right bank to the east and left bank in the west. Historically the left bank is more developed because when flowing outside the bend, the water makes a furrow of the required depth to allow the passing of merchant ships, which used to offload on this side of the river. But, today, the right bank is developing, including new urban projects. In Bordeaux, the Garonne River is accessible to ocean liners through the Gironde estuary. The right bank of the Garonne is a low-lying, often marshy plain.
+
+Bordeaux's climate is classified as a temperate oceanic climate (Köppen climate classification Cfb), or in the Trewartha climate classification system as temperate oceanic or Do climate. Bordeaux lies close to the humid subtropical climate zone, its summers not quite warm enough for that classification.
+
+Winters are cool because of the prevalence of westerly winds from the Atlantic. Summers are warm and long due to the influence from the Bay of Biscay (surface temperature reaches 21 to 22 °C (70 to 72 °F)). The average seasonal winter temperature is 7.1 °C (44.8 °F), but recent winters have been warmer than this. Frosts in the winter occur several times during a winter, but snowfall is very rare, occurring only once every three years. The average summer seasonal temperature is 20.7 °C (69.3 °F). The summer of 2003 set a record with an average temperature of 23.3 °C (73.9 °F).[18]
+
+
+
+Bordeaux is a major centre for business in France as it has the sixth largest metropolitan population in France. It serves as a major regional center for trade, administration, services and industry.
+
+As of 2014[update], the GDP of Bordeaux is €32.7 Billion.[citation needed]
+
+The vine was introduced to the Bordeaux region by the Romans, probably in the mid-first century, to provide wine for local consumption, and wine production has been continuous in the region since.[23]
+
+Bordeaux wine growing area has about 116,160 hectares (287,000 acres) of vineyards, 57 appellations, 10,000 wine-producing estates (châteaux) and 13,000 grape growers. With an annual production of approximately 960 million bottles,[24] the Bordeaux area produces large quantities of everyday wine as well as some of the most expensive wines in the world. Included among the latter are the area's five premier cru (first growth) red wines (four from Médoc and one, Château Haut-Brion, from Graves), established by the Bordeaux Wine Official Classification of 1855:
+
+Both red and white wines are made in the Bordeaux region. Red Bordeaux wine is called claret in the United Kingdom. Red wines are generally made from a blend of grapes, and may be made from Cabernet Sauvignon, Merlot, Cabernet Franc, Petit verdot, Malbec, and, less commonly in recent years, Carménère.
+
+White Bordeaux is made from Sauvignon blanc, Sémillon, and Muscadelle. Sauternes is a sub-region of Graves known for its intensely sweet, white, dessert wines such as Château d'Yquem.
+
+Because of a wine glut (wine lake) in the generic production, the price squeeze induced by an increasingly strong international competition, and vine pull schemes, the number of growers has recently dropped from 14,000 and the area under vine has also decreased significantly. In the meantime, the global demand for first growths and the most famous labels markedly increased and their prices skyrocketed.
+
+The Cité du Vin, a museum as well as a place of exhibitions, shows, movie projections and academic seminars on the theme of wine opened its doors in June 2016.[25]
+
+The Laser Mégajoule will be one of the most powerful lasers in the world, allowing fundamental research and the development of the laser and plasma technologies. This project, carried by the French Ministry of Defence, involves an investment of 2 billion euros.[citation needed] The "Road of the lasers", a major project of regional planning, promotes regional investment in optical and laser related industries leading to the Bordeaux area having the most important concentration of optical and laser expertise in Europe.[citation needed]
+
+Some 20,000 people work for the aeronautic industry in Bordeaux.[citation needed] The city has some of the biggest companies including Dassault, EADS Sogerma, Snecma, Thales, SNPE, and others. The Dassault Falcon private jets are built there as well as the military aircraft Rafale and Mirage 2000, the Airbus A380 cockpit, the boosters of Ariane 5, and the M51 SLBM missile.
+
+Tourism, especially wine tourism, is a major industry. Globelink.co.uk mentioned Bordeaux as the best tourist destination in Europe in 2015.[26]
+
+Access to the port from the Atlantic is via the Gironde estuary. Almost nine million tonnes of goods arrive and leave each year.[citation needed]
+
+This list includes indigenous Bordeaux-based companies and companies that have major presence in Bordeaux, but are not necessarily headquartered there.
+
+At the January 2011 census, there were 239,399 inhabitants in the city proper (commune) of Bordeaux. Bordeaux in its hey day had a population of 262,662 in 1968.[27] The majority of the population is French, but there are sizable groups of Italians, Spaniards (Up to 20% of the Bordeaux population claim some degree of Spanish heritage), Portuguese, Turks, Germans.[28]
+
+The built-up area has grown for more than a century beyond the municipal borders of Bordeaux due to urban sprawl, so that by the January 2011 census there were 1,140,668 people living in the overall metropolitan area of Bordeaux,[4] only a fifth of whom lived in the city proper.
+
+
+
+Population Over Time
+
+Largest communities of foreigners :
+
+The Mayor of the city is the environmentalist Pierre Hurmic.
+
+Bordeaux is the capital of five cantons and the Prefecture of the Gironde and Aquitaine.
+
+The town is divided into three districts, the first three of Gironde. The headquarters of Urban Community of Bordeaux Mériadeck is located in the neighbourhood and the city is at the head of the Chamber of Commerce and Industry that bears his name.
+
+The number of inhabitants of Bordeaux is greater than 250,000 and less than 299,999 so the number of municipal councilors is 65[30]. They are divided according to the following composition:
+
+Since the Liberation (1944), there have been 6 mayors of Bordeaux:
+
+At the 2007 presidential election, the Bordelais gave 31.37% of their votes to Ségolène Royal of the Socialist Party against 30.84% to Nicolas Sarkozy, president of the UMP. Then came François Bayrou with 22.01%, followed by Jean-Marie Le Pen who recorded 5.42%. None of the other candidates exceeded the 5% mark. Nationally, Nicolas Sarkozy led with 31.18%, then Ségolène Royal with 25.87%, followed by François Bayrou with 18.57%. After these came Jean-Marie Le Pen with 10.44%, none of the other candidates exceeded the 5% mark. In the second round, the city of Bordeaux gave Ségolène Royal 52.44% against 47.56% for Nicolas Sarkozy, the latter being elected President of the Republic with 53.06% against 46.94% for Ségolène Royal. The abstention rates for Bordeaux were 14.52% in the first round and 15.90% in the second round.
+
+In the parliamentary elections of 2007, the left won eight constituencies against only three for the right. It should be added that after the partial 2008 elections, the eighth district of Gironde switched to the left, bringing the count to nine. In Bordeaux, the left was for the first time in its history the majority as it held two of three constituencies following the elections. In the first division of the Gironde, the outgoing UMP MP Chantal Bourragué was well ahead with 44.81% against 25.39% for the Socialist candidate Beatrice Desaigues. In the second round, it was Chantal Bourragué who was re-elected with 54.45% against 45.55% for his socialist opponent. In the second district of Gironde the UMP mayor and all new Minister of Ecology, Energy, Sustainable Development and the Sea Alain Juppé confronted the General Counsel PS Michèle Delaunay. In the first round, Alain Juppé was well ahead with 43.73% against 31.36% for Michèle Delaunay. In the second round, it was finally Michèle Delaunay who won the election with 50.93% of the votes against 49.07% for Alain Juppé, the margin being only 670 votes. The defeat of the so-called constituency "Mayor" showed that Bordeaux was rocking increasingly left. Finally, in the third constituency of the Gironde, Noël Mamère was well ahead with 39.82% against 28.42% for the UMP candidate Elizabeth Vine. In the second round, Noël Mamère was re-elected with 62.82% against 37.18% for his right-wing rival.
+
+In 2008 municipal elections saw the clash between mayor of Bordeaux, Alain Juppé and the President of the Regional Council of Aquitaine Socialist Alain Rousset. The PS had put up a Socialist heavyweight in the Gironde and had put great hopes in this election after the victory of Ségolène Royal and Michèle Delaunay in 2007. However, after a rather exciting campaign it was Alain Juppé who was widely elected in the first round with 56.62%, far ahead of Alain Rousset who has managed to get 34.14%. At present, of the eight cantons that has Bordeaux, five are held by the PS and three by the UMP, the left eating a little each time into the right's numbers.
+
+In the European elections of 2009, Bordeaux voters largely voted for the UMP candidate Dominique Baudis, who won 31.54% against 15.00% for PS candidate Kader Arif. The candidate of Europe Ecology José Bové came second with 22.34%. None of the other candidates reached the 10% mark. The 2009 European elections were like the previous ones in eight constituencies. Bordeaux is located in the district "Southwest", here are the results:
+
+UMP candidate Dominique Baudis: 26.89%. His party gained four seats. PS candidate Kader Arif: 17.79%, gaining two seats in the European Parliament. Europe Ecology candidate Bove: 15.83%, obtaining two seats. MoDem candidate Robert Rochefort: 8.61%, winning a seat. Left Front candidate Jean-Luc Mélenchon: 8.16%, gaining the last seat. At regional elections in 2010, the Socialist incumbent president Alain Rousset won the first round by totaling 35.19% in Bordeaux, but this score was lower than the plan for Gironde and Aquitaine. Xavier Darcos, Minister of Labour followed with 28.40% of the votes, scoring above the regional and departmental average. Then came Monique De Marco, Green candidate with 13.40%, followed by the member of Pyrenees-Atlantiques and candidate of the MoDem Jean Lassalle who registered a low 6.78% while qualifying to the second round on the whole Aquitaine, closely followed by Jacques Colombier, candidate of the National Front, who gained 6.48%. Finally the candidate of the Left Front Gérard Boulanger with 5.64%, no other candidate above the 5% mark. In the second round, Alain Rousset had a tidal wave win as national totals rose to 55.83%. If Xavier Darcos largely lost the election, he nevertheless achieved a score above the regional and departmental average obtaining 33.40%. Jean Lassalle, who qualified for the second round, passed the 10% mark by totaling 10.77%. The ballot was marked by abstention amounting to 55.51% in the first round and 53.59% in the second round.
+
+Only candidates obtaining more than 5% are listed
+
+After 73 years of right-of-centre rule, the ecologist Pierre Hurmic (EELV) came in ahead of Nicolas Florian (LR/LaREM).[33]
+
+During Antiquity, a first university had been created by the Roman in 286.[34] The city was an important administrative centre and the new university had to train administrators. Only rhetoric and grammar were taught. Ausonius and Sulpicius Severus were two of the teachers.
+
+In 1441, when Bordeaux was an English town, the Pope Eugene IV created a university by demand of the archbishop Pey Berland. In 1793, during the French Revolution, the National Convention abolished the university, and replace them with the École centrale in 1796. In Bordeaux, this one was located in the former buildings of the college of Guyenne.
+In 1808, the University reappeared with Napoleon. Bordeaux accommodates approximately 70,000 students on one of the largest campuses of Europe (235 ha).[35]
+
+The University of Bordeaux is divided into four:
+
+Bordeaux has numerous public and private schools offering undergraduate and postgraduate programs.
+
+Engineering schools:
+
+Business and management schools:
+
+Other:
+
+The École Compleméntaire Japonaise de Bordeaux (ボルドー日本語補習授業校 Borudō Nihongo Hoshū Jugyō Kō), a part-time Japanese supplementary school, is held in the Salle de L'Athenee Municipal in Bordeaux.[36]
+
+Bordeaux is classified "City of Art and History". The city is home to 362 monuments historiques (only Paris has more in France) with some buildings dating back to Roman times. Bordeaux, Port of the moon, has been inscribed on UNESCO World Heritage List as "an outstanding urban and architectural ensemble".
+
+Bordeaux is home to one of Europe's biggest 18th-century architectural urban areas, making it a sought-after destination for tourists and cinema production crews. It stands out as one of the first French cities, after Nancy, to have entered an era of urbanism and metropolitan big scale projects, with the team Gabriel father and son, architects for King Louis XV, under the supervision of two intendants (Governors), first Nicolas-François Dupré de Saint-Maur then the Marquis de Tourny.
+
+Saint-André Cathedral, Saint-Michel Basilica and Saint-Seurin Basilica are part of the World Heritage Sites of the Routes of Santiago de Compostela in France.
+
+Main sights include:
+
+Remains of the Roman amphitheatre
+
+Saint Andrew's Cathedral
+
+Porte Cailhau
+
+Grand Théâtre
+
+the church Notre Dame
+
+Pont de Pierre
+
+Basilica of Saint Michael
+
+Grosse cloche
+
+Palais Rohan (town hall)
+
+Église Sainte-Croix
+
+Place du Parlement
+
+The Grand Synagogue
+
+Facades of the Art déco district
+
+Darwin district
+
+Submarine Pen
+
+Cité Frugès, at Pessac
+
+Mériadeck district
+
+Court of first instance
+
+Seeko'o hotel
+
+Cité du Vin
+
+MECA
+
+Musée des Beaux-Arts
+
+Musée d'Aquitaine
+
+Musée des Arts Décoratifs et du Design
+
+CAPC musée d'art contemporain de Bordeaux
+
+Musée du vin et du négoce de Bordeaux
+
+Slavery was part of a growing drive for the city. Firstly, during the 18th and 19th centuries, Bordeaux was an important slave port, which saw some 500 slave expeditions that cause the deportation of 150,000 Africans by Bordeaux shipowners.[38] Secondly, even though the "Triangular trade" represented only 5% of Bordeaux's wealth, the city's direct trade with the Caribbean, that accounted for the other 95%, concerns the colonial stuffs made by the slave (sugar, coffee, cocoa).[39] And thirdly, in that same period, a major migratory movement by Aquitanians took place to the Caribbean colonies, with Saint-Domingue (now Haiti) being the most popular destination. 40% of the white population of the island came from Aquitaine.[40] They prospered with plantations incomes, until the first slave revolts which concluded in 1848 in the final abolition of slavery in France.[41]
+
+Today a lot of traces and memorial sites are visible in the city. Moreover, in May 2009, the Museum of Aquitaine opened the spaces dedicated to "Bordeaux in the 18th century, trans-Atlantic trading and slavery". This work, richly illustrated with original documents, contributes to disseminate the state of knowledge on this question, presenting above all the facts and their chronology.[41]
+
+The region of Bordeaux was also the land of several prominent abolitionists, as Montesquieu, Laffon deLadébat and Elisée Reclus. Others were members of the Society of the Friends of the Blacks as the revolutionaries Boyer-Fonfrède, Gensonné, Guadet and Ducos.
+
+African face mascaron on the place de la Bourse.
+
+Allegory of Bordeaux and her wealth, including two african slaves, ceiling of the Grand-Théâtre de Bordeaux.
+
+Spaces dedicaded to slave trade, Musée d'Aquitaine.
+
+Fon fetish, Musée d'Aquitaine.
+
+Bronze bust of Toussaint Louverture.
+
+Bronze Statue of Modeste Testas, african slave deported by two Bordeaux traders and plantation owners.
+
+Jardin public
+
+Jardin botanique
+
+Jardin des Lumières
+
+Parc floral, Casablanca pavilion
+
+Europe's longest-span vertical-lift bridge, the Pont Jacques Chaban-Delmas, was opened in 2013 in Bordeaux, spanning the River Garonne. The central lift span is 117-metre-long (384-foot) and can be lifted vertically up to 53 metres (174 feet) to let tall ships pass underneath. The €160 million bridge was inaugurated by President François Hollande and Mayor Alain Juppé on 16 March 2013. The bridge was named after the late Jacques Chaban-Delmas, who was a former Prime Minister and Mayor of Bordeaux.
+
+Bordeaux has many shopping options. In the heart of Bordeaux is Rue Sainte-Catherine. This pedestrian-only shopping street has 1.2 kilometers (0.75 mi) of shops, restaurants and cafés; it is also one of the longest shopping streets in Europe. Rue Sainte-Catherine starts at Place de la Victoire and ends at Place de la Comédie by the Grand Théâtre. The shops become progressively more upmarket as one moves towards Place de la Comédie and the nearby Cours de l'Intendance is where one finds the more exclusive shops and boutiques.
+
+Bordeaux is also the first city in France to have created, in the 1980s, an architecture exhibition and research centre, Arc en rêve.[citation needed] Bordeaux offers a large number of cinemas, theatres, and is the home of the Opéra national de Bordeaux. There are many music venues of varying capacity. The city also offers several festivals throughout the year.
+
+Grand Théâtre de Bordeaux
+
+Théâtre Femina
+
+MECA, Maison de l’Économie Créative et de la Culture en Aquitaine
+
+Bordeaux is an important road and motorway junction. The city is connected to Paris by the A10 motorway, with Lyon by the A89, with Toulouse by the A62, and with Spain by the A63. There is a 45 km (28 mi) ring road called the "Rocade" which is often very busy. Another ring road is under consideration.
+
+Bordeaux has five road bridges that cross the Garonne, the Pont de pierre built in the 1820s and three modern bridges built after 1960: the Pont Saint Jean, just south of the Pont de pierre (both located downtown), the Pont d'Aquitaine, a suspended bridge downstream from downtown, and the Pont François Mitterrand, located upstream of downtown. These two bridges are part of the ring road around Bordeaux. A fifth bridge, the Pont Jacques-Chaban-Delmas, was constructed in 2009–2012 and opened to traffic in March 2013. Located halfway between the Pont de pierre and the Pont d'Aquitaine and serving downtown rather than highway traffic, it is a vertical-lift bridge with a height comparable to the Pont de pierre in closed position, and to the Pont d'Aquitaine in open position. All five road bridges, including the two highway bridges, are open to cyclists and pedestrians as well.
+Another bridge, the Pont Jean-Jacques Bosc, is to be built in 2018.[42]
+
+Lacking any steep hills, Bordeaux is relatively friendly to cyclists. Cycle paths (separate from the roadways) exist on the highway bridges, along the riverfront, on the university campuses, and incidentally elsewhere in the city. Cycle lanes and bus lanes that explicitly allow cyclists exist on many of the city's boulevards. A paid bicycle-sharing system with automated stations has been established in 2010.
+
+The main railway station, Gare de Bordeaux Saint-Jean, near the center of the city, has 12 million passengers a year. It is served by the French national (SNCF) railway's high speed train, the TGV, that gets to Paris in two hours, with connections to major European centers such as Lille, Brussels, Amsterdam, Cologne, Geneva and London. The TGV also serves Toulouse and Irun (Spain) from Bordeaux. A regular train service is provided to Nantes, Nice, Marseille and Lyon. The Gare Saint-Jean is the major hub for regional trains (TER) operated by the SNCF to Arcachon, Limoges, Agen, Périgueux, Langon, Pau, Le Médoc, Angoulême and Bayonne.
+
+Historically the train line used to terminate at a station on the right bank of the river Garonne near the Pont de Pierre, and passengers crossed the bridge to get into the city. Subsequently, a double-track steel railway bridge was constructed in the 1850s, by Gustave Eiffel, to bring trains across the river direct into Gare de Bordeaux Saint-Jean. The old station was later converted and in 2010 comprised a cinema and restaurants.
+
+The two-track Eiffel bridge with a speed limit of 30 km/h (19 mph) became a bottleneck and a new bridge was built, opening in 2009. The new bridge has four tracks and allows trains to pass at 60 km/h (37 mph).[43] During the planning there was much lobbying by the Eiffel family and other supporters to preserve the old bridge as a footbridge across the Garonne, with possibly a museum to document the history of the bridge and Gustave Eiffel's contribution. The decision was taken to save the bridge, but by early 2010 no plans had been announced as to its future use. The bridge remains intact, but unused and without any means of access.
+
+Since July 2017, the LGV Sud Europe Atlantique is fully operational and makes Bordeaux city 2h04 from Paris.
+
+Bordeaux is served by Bordeaux–Mérignac Airport, located 8 km (5.0 mi) from the city centre in the suburban city of Mérignac.
+
+Bordeaux has an important public transport system called Transports Bordeaux Métropole (TBM). This company is run by the Keolis group. The network consists of:
+
+This network is operated from 5 am to 2 am.
+
+There had been several plans for a subway network to be set up, but they stalled for both geological and financial reasons. Work on the Tramway de Bordeaux system was started in the autumn of 2000, and services started in December 2003 connecting Bordeaux with its suburban areas. The tram system uses ground-level power supply technology (APS), a new cable-free technology developed by French company Alstom and designed to preserve the aesthetic environment by eliminating overhead cables in the historic city. Conventional overhead cables are used outside the city. The system was controversial for its considerable cost of installation, maintenance and also for the numerous initial technical problems that paralysed the network. Many streets and squares along the tramway route became pedestrian areas, with limited access for cars.
+
+The planned Bordeaux tramway system is to link with the airport to the city centre towards the end of 2019.[44]
+
+There are more than 400 taxicabs in Bordeaux.
+
+The average amount of time people spend commuting with public transit in Bordeaux, for example to and from work, on a weekday is 51 min. 12.% of public transit riders, ride for more than 2 hours every day. The average amount of time people wait at a stop or station for public transit is 13 min, while 15.5% of riders wait for over 20 minutes on average every day. The average distance people usually ride in a single trip with public transit is 7 km (4.3 mi), while 8% travel for over 12 km (7.5 mi) in a single direction.[45]
+
+The 41,458-capacity Nouveau Stade de Bordeaux is the largest stadium in Bordeaux. The stadium was opened in 2015 and replaced the Stade Chaban-Delmas, which was a venue for the FIFA World Cup in 1938 and 1998, as well as the 2007 Rugby World Cup. In the 1938 FIFA World Cup, it hosted a violent quarter-final known as the Battle of Bordeaux. The ground was formerly known as the Stade du Parc Lescure until 2001, when it was renamed in honour of the city's long-time mayor, Jacques Chaban-Delmas.
+
+There are two major sport teams in Bordeaux, Girondins de Bordeaux is the football team, playing in Ligue 1 in the French football championship. Union Bordeaux Bègles is a rugby team in the Top 14 in the Ligue Nationale de Rugby.
+Skateboarding, rollerblading, and BMX biking are activities enjoyed by many young inhabitants of the city. Bordeaux is home to a beautiful quay which runs along the Garonne river. On the quay there is a skate-park divided into three sections. One section is for Vert tricks, one for street style tricks, and one for little action sports athletes with easier features and softer materials. The skate-park is very well maintained by the municipality.
+
+Bordeaux is also the home to one of the strongest cricket teams in France and are champions of the South West League.
+
+There is a 250 m (820 ft) wooden velodrome, Vélodrome du Lac, in Bordeaux which hosts international cycling competition in the form of UCI Track Cycling World Cup events.
+
+The 2015 Trophee Eric Bompard was in Bordeaux. But the Free Skate was cancelled in all of the divisions due to the Paris bombing(s) and aftermath. The Short Program occurred hours before the bombing. French skaters Chafik Besseghier (68.36) in 10th place, Romain Ponsart (62.86) in 11th. Mae-Berenice-Meite (46.82) in 11th and Laurine Lecavelier (46.53) in 12th. Vanessa James/Morgan Cipres (65.75) in 2nd.
+
+Between 1951 and 1955, an annual Formula 1 motor race was held on a 2.5-kilometre circuit which looped around the Esplanade des Quinconces and along the waterfront, attracting drivers such as Juan Manuel Fangio, Stirling Moss, Jean Behra and Maurice Trintignant.[46]
+
+Ausonius
+
+Eleanor of Aquitaine
+
+Richard II of England
+
+Michel de Montaigne
+
+Sainte Jeanne de Lestonnac
+
+Montesquieu
+
+Rosa Bonheur
+
+Odilon Redon
+
+Albert Marquet
+
+Bordeaux is twinned with:[47][48][49]

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+
+
+
+
+Boron is a chemical element with the symbol B and atomic number 5. Produced entirely by cosmic ray spallation and supernovae and not by stellar nucleosynthesis, it is a low-abundance element in the Solar System and in the Earth's crust.[11] Boron is concentrated on Earth by the water-solubility of its more common naturally occurring compounds, the borate minerals. These are mined industrially as evaporites, such as borax and kernite. The largest known boron deposits are in Turkey, the largest producer of boron minerals.
+
+Elemental boron is a metalloid that is found in small amounts in meteoroids but chemically uncombined boron is not otherwise found naturally on Earth. Industrially, very pure boron is produced with difficulty because of refractory contamination by carbon or other elements. Several allotropes of boron exist: amorphous boron is a brown powder; crystalline boron is silvery to black, extremely hard (about 9.5 on the Mohs scale), and a poor electrical conductor at room temperature. The primary use of elemental boron is as boron filaments with applications similar to carbon fibers in some high-strength materials.
+
+Boron is primarily used in chemical compounds. About half of all boron consumed globally is an additive in fiberglass for insulation and structural materials. The next leading use is in polymers and ceramics in high-strength, lightweight structural and refractory materials. Borosilicate glass is desired for its greater strength and thermal shock resistance than ordinary soda lime glass. Boron as sodium perborate is used as a bleach. A small amount of boron is used as a dopant in semiconductors, and reagent intermediates in the synthesis of organic fine chemicals. A few boron-containing organic pharmaceuticals are used or are in study. Natural boron is composed of two stable isotopes, one of which (boron-10) has a number of uses as a neutron-capturing agent.
+
+In biology, borates have low toxicity in mammals (similar to table salt), but are more toxic to arthropods and are used as insecticides. Boric acid is mildly antimicrobial, and several natural boron-containing organic antibiotics are known.[12] Boron is an essential plant nutrient and boron compounds such as borax and boric acid are used as fertilizers in agriculture, although it's only required in small amounts, with excess being toxic. Boron compounds play a strengthening role in the cell walls of all plants. There is no consensus on whether boron is an essential nutrient for mammals, including humans, although there is some evidence it supports bone health.
+
+The word boron was coined from borax, the mineral from which it was isolated, by analogy with carbon, which boron resembles chemically.
+
+Borax, its mineral form then known as tincal, glazes were used in China from AD 300, and some crude borax reached the West, where the Perso-Arab alchemist Jābir ibn Hayyān apparently mentioned it in AD 700. Marco Polo brought some glazes back to Italy in the 13th century. Agricola, around 1600, reports the use of borax as a flux in metallurgy. In 1777, boric acid was recognized in the hot springs (soffioni) near Florence, Italy, and became known as sal sedativum, with primarily medical uses. The rare mineral is called sassolite, which is found at Sasso, Italy. Sasso was the main source of European borax from 1827 to 1872, when American sources replaced it.[13][14] Boron compounds were relatively rarely used until the late 1800s when Francis Marion Smith's Pacific Coast Borax Company first popularized and produced them in volume at low cost.[15]
+
+Boron was not recognized as an element until it was isolated by Sir Humphry Davy[8] and by Joseph Louis Gay-Lussac and Louis Jacques Thénard.[7] In 1808 Davy observed that electric current sent through a solution of borates produced a brown precipitate on one of the electrodes. In his subsequent experiments, he used potassium to reduce boric acid instead of electrolysis. He produced enough boron to confirm a new element and named the element boracium.[8] Gay-Lussac and Thénard used iron to reduce boric acid at high temperatures. By oxidizing boron with air, they showed that boric acid is an oxidation product of boron.[7][16] Jöns Jacob Berzelius identified boron as an element in 1824.[17] Pure boron was arguably first produced by the American chemist Ezekiel Weintraub in 1909.[18][19][20]
+
+The earliest routes to elemental boron involved the reduction of boric oxide with metals such as magnesium or aluminium. However, the product is almost always contaminated with borides of those metals. Pure boron can be prepared by reducing volatile boron halides with hydrogen at high temperatures. Ultrapure boron for use in the semiconductor industry is produced by the decomposition of diborane at high temperatures and then further purified by the zone melting or Czochralski processes.[21]
+
+The production of boron compounds does not involve the formation of elemental boron, but exploits the convenient availability of borates.
+
+Boron is similar to carbon in its capability to form stable covalently bonded molecular networks. Even nominally disordered (amorphous) boron contains regular boron icosahedra which are, however, bonded randomly to each other without long-range order.[22][23] Crystalline boron is a very hard, black material with a melting point of above 2000 °C. It forms four major polymorphs: α-rhombohedral and β-rhombohedral (α-R and β-R), γ and β-tetragonal (β-T); α-tetragonal phase also exists (α-T), but is very difficult to produce without significant contamination. Most of the phases are based on B12 icosahedra, but the γ-phase can be described as a rocksalt-type arrangement of the icosahedra and B2 atomic pairs.[24] It can be produced by compressing other boron phases to 12–20 GPa and heating to 1500–1800 °C; it remains stable after releasing the temperature and pressure. The T phase is produced at similar pressures, but higher temperatures of 1800–2200 °C. As to the α and β phases, they might both coexist at ambient conditions with the β phase being more stable.[24][25][26] Compressing boron above 160 GPa produces a boron phase with an as yet unknown structure, and this phase is a superconductor at temperatures 6–12 K.[27] Borospherene (fullerene-like B40) molecules) and borophene (proposed graphene-like structure) have been described in 2014.
+
+Elemental boron is rare and poorly studied because the pure material is extremely difficult to prepare. Most studies of "boron" involve samples that contain small amounts of carbon. The chemical behavior of boron resembles that of silicon more than aluminium. Crystalline boron is chemically inert and resistant to attack by boiling hydrofluoric or hydrochloric acid. When finely divided, it is attacked slowly by hot concentrated hydrogen peroxide, hot concentrated nitric acid, hot sulfuric acid or hot mixture of sulfuric and chromic acids.[19]
+
+The rate of oxidation of boron depends on the crystallinity, particle size, purity and temperature. Boron does not react with air at room temperature, but at higher temperatures it burns to form boron trioxide:[36]
+
+Boron undergoes halogenation to give trihalides; for example,
+
+The trichloride in practice is usually made from the oxide.[36]
+
+Boron is the lightest element having an electron in a p-orbital in its ground state. But, unlike most other p-elements, it rarely obeys the octet rule and usually places only six electrons[37] (in three molecular orbitals) onto its valence shell. Boron is the prototype for the boron group (the IUPAC group 13), although the other members of this group are metals and more typical p-elements (only aluminium to some extent shares boron's aversion to the octet rule).
+
+In the most familiar compounds, boron has the formal oxidation state III. These include oxides, sulfides, nitrides, and halides.[36]
+
+The trihalides adopt a planar trigonal structure. These compounds are Lewis acids in that they readily form adducts with electron-pair donors, which are called Lewis bases. For example, fluoride (F−) and boron trifluoride (BF3) combined to give the tetrafluoroborate anion, BF4−. Boron trifluoride is used in the petrochemical industry as a catalyst. The halides react with water to form boric acid.[36]
+
+Boron is found in nature on Earth almost entirely as various oxides of B(III), often associated with other elements. More than one hundred borate minerals contain boron in oxidation state +3. These minerals resemble silicates in some respect, although boron is often found not only in a tetrahedral coordination with oxygen, but also in a trigonal planar configuration. Unlike silicates, the boron minerals never contain boron with coordination number greater than four. A typical motif is exemplified by the tetraborate anions of the common mineral borax, shown at left. The formal negative charge of the tetrahedral borate center is balanced by metal cations in the minerals, such as the sodium (Na+) in borax.[36] The tourmaline group of borate-silicates is also a very important boron-bearing mineral group, and a number of borosilicates are also known to exist naturally.[38]
+
+Boranes are chemical compounds of boron and hydrogen, with the generic formula of BxHy. These compounds do not occur in nature. Many of the boranes readily oxidise on contact with air, some violently. The parent member BH3 is called borane, but it is known only in the gaseous state, and dimerises to form diborane, B2H6. The larger boranes all consist of boron clusters that are polyhedral, some of which exist as isomers. For example, isomers of B20H26 are based on the fusion of two 10-atom clusters.
+
+The most important boranes are diborane B2H6 and two of its pyrolysis products, pentaborane B5H9 and decaborane B10H14. A large number of anionic boron hydrides are known, e.g. [B12H12]2−.
+
+The formal oxidation number in boranes is positive, and is based on the assumption that hydrogen is counted as −1 as in active metal hydrides. The mean oxidation number for the borons is then simply the ratio of hydrogen to boron in the molecule. For example, in diborane B2H6, the boron oxidation state is +3, but in decaborane B10H14, it is 7/5 or +1.4. In these compounds the oxidation state of boron is often not a whole number.
+
+The boron nitrides are notable for the variety of structures that they adopt. They exhibit structures analogous to various allotropes of carbon, including graphite, diamond, and nanotubes. In the diamond-like structure, called cubic boron nitride (tradename Borazon), boron atoms exist in the tetrahedral structure of carbons atoms in diamond, but one in every four B-N bonds can be viewed as a coordinate covalent bond, wherein two electrons are donated by the nitrogen atom which acts as the Lewis base to a bond to the Lewis acidic boron(III) centre. Cubic boron nitride, among other applications, is used as an abrasive, as it has a hardness comparable with diamond (the two substances are able to produce scratches on each other). In the BN compound analogue of graphite, hexagonal boron nitride (h-BN), the positively charged boron and negatively charged nitrogen atoms in each plane lie adjacent to the oppositely charged atom in the next plane. Consequently, graphite and h-BN have very different properties, although both are lubricants, as these planes slip past each other easily. However, h-BN is a relatively poor electrical and thermal conductor in the planar directions.[39][40]
+
+A large number of organoboron compounds are known and many are useful in organic synthesis. Many are produced from hydroboration, which employs diborane, B2H6, a simple borane chemical. Organoboron(III) compounds are usually tetrahedral or trigonal planar, for example, tetraphenylborate, [B(C6H5)4]− vs. triphenylborane, B(C6H5)3. However, multiple boron atoms reacting with each other have a tendency to form novel dodecahedral (12-sided) and icosahedral (20-sided) structures composed completely of boron atoms, or with varying numbers of carbon heteroatoms.
+
+Organoboron chemicals have been employed in uses as diverse as boron carbide (see below), a complex very hard ceramic composed of boron-carbon cluster anions and cations, to carboranes, carbon-boron cluster chemistry compounds that can be halogenated to form reactive structures including carborane acid, a superacid. As one example, carboranes form useful molecular moieties that add considerable amounts of boron to other biochemicals in order to synthesize boron-containing compounds for boron neutron capture therapy for cancer.
+
+Although these are not found on Earth naturally, boron forms a variety of stable compounds with formal oxidation state less than three. As for many covalent compounds, formal oxidation states are often of little meaning in boron hydrides and metal borides. The halides also form derivatives of B(I) and B(II). BF, isoelectronic with N2, cannot be isolated in condensed form, but B2F4 and B4Cl4 are well characterized.[41]
+
+Binary metal-boron compounds, the metal borides, contain boron in negative oxidation states. Illustrative is magnesium diboride (MgB2). Each boron atom has a formal −1 charge and magnesium is assigned a formal charge of +2. In this material, the boron centers are trigonal planar with an extra double bond for each boron, forming sheets akin to the carbon in graphite. However, unlike hexagonal boron nitride, which lacks electrons in the plane of the covalent atoms, the delocalized electrons in magnesium diboride allow it to conduct electricity similar to isoelectronic graphite. In 2001, this material was found to be a high-temperature superconductor.[42][43] It is a superconductor under active development. A project at CERN to make MgB2 cables has resulted in superconducting test cables able to carry 20,000 amperes for extremely high current distribution applications, such as the contemplated high luminosity version of the large hadron collider.[44]
+
+Certain other metal borides find specialized applications as hard materials for cutting tools.[45] Often the boron in borides has fractional oxidation states, such as −1/3 in calcium hexaboride (CaB6).
+
+From the structural perspective, the most distinctive chemical compounds of boron are the hydrides. Included in this series are the cluster compounds dodecaborate (B12H2−12), decaborane (B10H14), and the carboranes such as C2B10H12. Characteristically such compounds contain boron with coordination numbers greater than four.[36]
+
+Boron has two naturally occurring and stable isotopes, 11B (80.1%) and 10B (19.9%). The mass difference results in a wide range of δ11B values, which are defined as a fractional difference between the 11B and 10B and traditionally expressed in parts per thousand, in natural waters ranging from −16 to +59. There are 13 known isotopes of boron, the shortest-lived isotope is 7B which decays through proton emission and alpha decay. It has a half-life of 3.5×10−22 s. Isotopic fractionation of boron is controlled by the exchange reactions of the boron species B(OH)3 and [B(OH)4]−. Boron isotopes are also fractionated during mineral crystallization, during H2O phase changes in hydrothermal systems, and during hydrothermal alteration of rock. The latter effect results in preferential removal of the [10B(OH)4]− ion onto clays. It results in solutions enriched in 11B(OH)3 and therefore may be responsible for the large 11B enrichment in seawater relative to both oceanic crust and continental crust; this difference may act as an isotopic signature.[46]
+
+The exotic 17B exhibits a nuclear halo, i.e. its radius is appreciably larger than that predicted by the liquid drop model.[47]
+
+The 10B isotope is useful for capturing thermal neutrons (see neutron cross section#Typical cross sections). The nuclear industry enriches natural boron to nearly pure 10B. The less-valuable by-product, depleted boron, is nearly pure 11B.
+
+Because of its high neutron cross-section, boron-10 is often used to control fission in nuclear reactors as a neutron-capturing substance.[48] Several industrial-scale enrichment processes have been developed; however, only the fractionated vacuum distillation of the dimethyl ether adduct of boron trifluoride (DME-BF3) and column chromatography of borates are being used.[49][50]
+
+Enriched boron or 10B is used in both radiation shielding and is the primary nuclide used in neutron capture therapy of cancer. In the latter ("boron neutron capture therapy" or BNCT), a compound containing 10B is incorporated into a pharmaceutical which is selectively taken up by a malignant tumor and tissues near it. The patient is then treated with a beam of low energy neutrons at a relatively low neutron radiation dose. The neutrons, however, trigger energetic and short-range secondary alpha particle and lithium-7 heavy ion radiation that are products of the boron + neutron nuclear reaction, and this ion radiation additionally bombards the tumor, especially from inside the tumor cells.[51][52][53][54]
+
+In nuclear reactors, 10B is used for reactivity control and in emergency shutdown systems. It can serve either function in the form of borosilicate control rods or as boric acid. In pressurized water reactors, boric acid is added to the reactor coolant when the plant is shut down for refueling. It is then slowly filtered out over many months as fissile material is used up and the fuel becomes less reactive.[55]
+
+In future manned interplanetary spacecraft, 10B has a theoretical role as structural material (as boron fibers or BN nanotube material) which would also serve a special role in the radiation shield. One of the difficulties in dealing with cosmic rays, which are mostly high energy protons, is that some secondary radiation from interaction of cosmic rays and spacecraft materials is high energy spallation neutrons. Such neutrons can be moderated by materials high in light elements, such as polyethylene, but the moderated neutrons continue to be a radiation hazard unless actively absorbed in the shielding. Among light elements that absorb thermal neutrons, 6Li and 10B appear as potential spacecraft structural materials which serve both for mechanical reinforcement and radiation protection.[56]
+
+Cosmic radiation will produce secondary neutrons if it hits spacecraft structures. Those neutrons will be captured in 10B, if it is present in the spacecraft's semiconductors, producing a gamma ray, an alpha particle, and a lithium ion. Those resultant decay products may then irradiate nearby semiconductor "chip" structures, causing data loss (bit flipping, or single event upset). In radiation-hardened semiconductor designs, one countermeasure is to use depleted boron, which is greatly enriched in 11B and contains almost no 10B. This is useful because 11B is largely immune to radiation damage. Depleted boron is a byproduct of the nuclear industry.[55]
+
+11B is also a candidate as a fuel for aneutronic fusion. When struck by a proton with energy of about 500 keV, it produces three alpha particles and 8.7 MeV of energy. Most other fusion reactions involving hydrogen and helium produce penetrating neutron radiation, which weakens reactor structures and induces long-term radioactivity, thereby endangering operating personnel. However, the alpha particles from 11B fusion can be turned directly into electric power, and all radiation stops as soon as the reactor is turned off.[57]
+
+Both 10B and 11B possess nuclear spin. The nuclear spin of 10B is 3 and that of 11B is 3/2. These isotopes are, therefore, of use in nuclear magnetic resonance spectroscopy; and spectrometers specially adapted to detecting the boron-11 nuclei are available commercially. The 10B and 11B nuclei also cause splitting in the resonances of attached nuclei.[58]
+
+Boron is rare in the Universe and solar system due to trace formation in the Big Bang and in stars. It is formed in minor amounts in cosmic ray spallation nucleosynthesis and may be found uncombined in cosmic dust and meteoroid materials.
+
+In the high oxygen environment of Earth, boron is always found fully oxidized to borate. Boron does not appear on Earth in elemental form. Extremely small traces of elemental boron were detected in Lunar regolith.[59][60]
+
+Although boron is a relatively rare element in the Earth's crust, representing only 0.001% of the crust mass, it can be highly concentrated by the action of water, in which many borates are soluble.
+It is found naturally combined in compounds such as borax and boric acid (sometimes found in volcanic spring waters). About a hundred borate minerals are known.
+
+On September 5, 2017, scientists reported that the Curiosity rover detected boron, an essential ingredient for life on Earth, on the planet Mars. Such a finding, along with previous discoveries that water may have been present on ancient Mars, further supports the possible early habitability of Gale Crater on Mars.[61][62]
+
+Economically important sources of boron are the minerals colemanite, rasorite (kernite), ulexite and tincal. Together these constitute 90% of mined boron-containing ore. The largest global borax deposits known, many still untapped, are in Central and Western Turkey, including the provinces of Eskişehir, Kütahya and Balıkesir.[63][64][65] Global proven boron mineral mining reserves exceed one billion metric tonnes, against a yearly production of about four million tonnes.[66]
+
+Turkey and the United States are the largest producers of boron products. Turkey produces about half of the global yearly demand, through Eti Mine Works (Turkish: Eti Maden İşletmeleri) a Turkish state-owned mining and chemicals company focusing on boron products. It holds a government monopoly on the mining of borate minerals in Turkey, which possesses 72% of the world's known deposits.[67] In 2012, it held a 47% share of production of global borate minerals, ahead of its main competitor, Rio Tinto Group.[68]
+
+Almost a quarter (23%) of global boron production comes from the single Rio Tinto Borax Mine (also known as the U.S. Borax Boron Mine) 35°2′34.447″N 117°40′45.412″W / 35.04290194°N 117.67928111°W / 35.04290194; -117.67928111 (Rio Tinto Borax Mine) near Boron, California.[69][70]
+
+The average cost of crystalline boron is $5/g.[71] Free boron is chiefly used in making boron fibers, where it is deposited by chemical vapor deposition on a tungsten core (see below). Boron fibers are used in lightweight composite applications, such as high strength tapes. This use is a very small fraction of total boron use. Boron is introduced into semiconductors as boron compounds, by ion implantation.
+
+Estimated global consumption of boron (almost entirely as boron compounds) was about 4 million tonnes of B2O3 in 2012. Boron mining and refining capacities are considered to be adequate to meet expected levels of growth through the next decade.
+
+The form in which boron is consumed has changed in recent years. The use of ores like colemanite has declined following concerns over arsenic content. Consumers have moved toward the use of refined borates and boric acid that have a lower pollutant content.
+
+Increasing demand for boric acid has led a number of producers to invest in additional capacity. Turkey's state-owned Eti Mine Works opened a new boric acid plant with the production capacity of 100,000 tonnes per year at Emet in 2003. Rio Tinto Group increased the capacity of its boron plant from 260,000 tonnes per year in 2003 to 310,000 tonnes per year by May 2005, with plans to grow this to 366,000 tonnes per year in 2006. Chinese boron producers have been unable to meet rapidly growing demand for high quality borates. This has led to imports of sodium tetraborate (borax) growing by a hundredfold between 2000 and 2005 and boric acid imports increasing by 28% per year over the same period.[72][73]
+
+The rise in global demand has been driven by high growth rates in glass fiber, fiberglass and borosilicate glassware production. A rapid increase in the manufacture of reinforcement-grade boron-containing fiberglass in Asia, has offset the development of boron-free reinforcement-grade fiberglass in Europe and the US. The recent rises in energy prices may lead to greater use of insulation-grade fiberglass, with consequent growth in the boron consumption. Roskill Consulting Group forecasts that world demand for boron will grow by 3.4% per year to reach 21 million tonnes by 2010. The highest growth in demand is expected to be in Asia where demand could rise by an average 5.7% per year.[72][74]
+
+Nearly all boron ore extracted from the Earth is destined for refinement into boric acid and sodium tetraborate pentahydrate. In the United States, 70% of the boron is used for the production of glass and ceramics.[75][76]
+The major global industrial-scale use of boron compounds (about 46% of end-use) is in production of glass fiber for boron-containing insulating and structural fiberglasses, especially in Asia. Boron is added to the glass as borax pentahydrate or boron oxide, to influence the strength or fluxing qualities of the glass fibers.[77] Another 10% of global boron production is for borosilicate glass as used in high strength glassware. About 15% of global boron is used in boron ceramics, including super-hard materials discussed below. Agriculture consumes 11% of global boron production, and bleaches and detergents about 6%.[78]
+
+Boron fibers (boron filaments) are high-strength, lightweight materials that are used chiefly for advanced aerospace structures as a component of composite materials, as well as limited production consumer and sporting goods such as golf clubs and fishing rods.[79][80] The fibers can be produced by chemical vapor deposition of boron on a tungsten filament.[81][82]
+
+Boron fibers and sub-millimeter sized crystalline boron springs are produced by laser-assisted chemical vapor deposition. Translation of the focused laser beam allows production of even complex helical structures. Such structures show good mechanical properties (elastic modulus 450 GPa, fracture strain 3.7%, fracture stress 17 GPa) and can be applied as reinforcement of ceramics or in micromechanical systems.[83]
+
+Fiberglass is a fiber reinforced polymer made of plastic reinforced by glass fibers, commonly woven into a mat. The glass fibers used in the material are made of various types of glass depending upon the fiberglass use. These glasses all contain silica or silicate, with varying amounts of oxides of calcium, magnesium, and sometimes boron. The boron is present as borosilicate, borax, or boron oxide, and is added to increase the strength of the glass, or as a fluxing agent to decrease the melting temperature of silica, which is too high to be easily worked in its pure form to make glass fibers.
+
+The highly boronated glasses used in fiberglass are E-glass (named for "Electrical" use, but now the most common fiberglass for general use). E-glass is alumino-borosilicate glass with less than 1% w/w alkali oxides, mainly used for glass-reinforced plastics. Other common high-boron glasses include C-glass, an alkali-lime glass with high boron oxide content, used for glass staple fibers and insulation, and D-glass, a borosilicate glass, named for its low Dielectric constant).[84]
+
+Not all fiberglasses contain boron, but on a global scale, most of the fiberglass used does contain it. Because the ubiquitous use of fiberglass in construction and insulation, boron-containing fiberglasses consume half the global production of boron, and are the single largest commercial boron market.
+
+Borosilicate glass, which is typically 12–15% B2O3, 80% SiO2, and 2% Al2O3, has a low coefficient of thermal expansion, giving it a good resistance to thermal shock. Schott AG's "Duran" and Owens-Corning's trademarked Pyrex are two major brand names for this glass, used both in laboratory glassware and in consumer cookware and bakeware, chiefly for this resistance.[85]
+
+Several boron compounds are known for their extreme hardness and toughness.
+Boron carbide is a ceramic material which is obtained by decomposing B2O3 with carbon in an electric furnace:
+
+Boron carbide's structure is only approximately B4C, and it shows a clear depletion of carbon from this suggested stoichiometric ratio. This is due to its very complex structure. The substance can be seen with empirical formula B12C3 (i.e., with B12 dodecahedra being a motif), but with less carbon, as the suggested C3 units are replaced with C-B-C chains, and some smaller (B6) octahedra are present as well (see the boron carbide article for structural analysis). The repeating polymer plus semi-crystalline structure of boron carbide gives it great structural strength per weight. It is used in tank armor, bulletproof vests, and numerous other structural applications.
+
+Boron carbide's ability to absorb neutrons without forming long-lived radionuclides (especially when doped with extra boron-10) makes the material attractive as an absorbent for neutron radiation arising in nuclear power plants.[87] Nuclear applications of boron carbide include shielding, control rods and shut-down pellets. Within control rods, boron carbide is often powdered, to increase its surface area.[88]
+
+Boron carbide and cubic boron nitride powders are widely used as abrasives. Boron nitride is a material isoelectronic to carbon. Similar to carbon, it has both hexagonal (soft graphite-like h-BN) and cubic (hard, diamond-like c-BN) forms. h-BN is used as a high temperature component and lubricant. c-BN, also known under commercial name borazon,[91] is a superior abrasive. Its hardness is only slightly smaller than, but its chemical stability is superior, to that of diamond. Heterodiamond (also called BCN) is another diamond-like boron compound.
+
+Boron is added to boron steels at the level of a few parts per million to increase hardenability. Higher percentages are added to steels used in the nuclear industry due to boron's neutron absorption ability.
+
+Boron can also increase the surface hardness of steels and alloys through boriding. Additionally metal borides are used for coating tools through chemical vapor deposition or physical vapor deposition. Implantation of boron ions into metals and alloys, through ion implantation or ion beam deposition, results in a spectacular increase in surface resistance and microhardness. Laser alloying has also been successfully used for the same purpose. These borides are an alternative to diamond coated tools, and their (treated) surfaces have similar properties to those of the bulk boride.[92]
+
+For example, rhenium diboride can be produced at ambient pressures, but is rather expensive because of rhenium. The hardness of ReB2 exhibits considerable anisotropy because of its hexagonal layered structure. Its value is comparable to that of tungsten carbide, silicon carbide, titanium diboride or zirconium diboride.[90]
+Similarly, AlMgB14 + TiB2 composites possess high hardness and wear resistance and are used in either bulk form or as coatings for components exposed to high temperatures and wear loads.[93]
+
+Borax is used in various household laundry and cleaning products,[94] including the "20 Mule Team Borax" laundry booster and "Boraxo" powdered hand soap. It is also present in some tooth bleaching formulas.[76]
+
+Sodium perborate serves as a source of active oxygen in many detergents, laundry detergents, cleaning products, and laundry bleaches. However, despite its name, "Borateem" laundry bleach no longer contains any boron compounds, using sodium percarbonate instead as a bleaching agent.[95]
+
+Boric acid is used as an insecticide, notably against ants, fleas, and cockroaches.[96]
+
+Boron is a useful dopant for such semiconductors as silicon, germanium, and silicon carbide. Having one fewer valence electron than the host atom, it donates a hole resulting in p-type conductivity. Traditional method of introducing boron into semiconductors is via its atomic diffusion at high temperatures. This process uses either solid (B2O3), liquid (BBr3), or gaseous boron sources (B2H6 or BF3). However, after the 1970s, it was mostly replaced by ion implantation, which relies mostly on BF3 as a boron source.[97] Boron trichloride gas is also an important chemical in semiconductor industry, however, not for doping but rather for plasma etching of metals and their oxides.[98] Triethylborane is also injected into vapor deposition reactors as a boron source.[citation needed] Examples are the plasma deposition of boron-containing hard carbon films, silicon nitride–boron nitride films, and for doping of diamond film with boron.[99]
+
+Boron is a component of neodymium magnets (Nd2Fe14B), which are among the strongest type of permanent magnet. These magnets are found in a variety of electromechanical and electronic devices, such as magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) medical imaging systems, in compact and relatively small motors and actuators. As examples, computer HDDs (hard disk drives), CD (compact disk) and DVD (digital versatile disk) players rely on neodymium magnet motors to deliver intense rotary power in a remarkably compact package. In mobile phones 'Neo' magnets provide the magnetic field which allows tiny speakers to deliver appreciable audio power.[100]
+
+Boron shielding is used as a control for nuclear reactors, taking advantage of its high cross-section for neutron capture.[101]
+
+In pressurized water reactors a variable concentration of boronic acid in the cooling water is used as a neutron poison to compensate the variable reactivity of the fuel. When new rods are inserted the concentration of boronic acid is maximal, and is reduced during the lifetime.[102]
+
+Boric acid has antiseptic, antifungal, and antiviral properties and for these reasons is applied as a water clarifier in swimming pool water treatment.[112] Mild solutions of boric acid have been used as eye antiseptics.
+
+Bortezomib (marketed as Velcade and Cytomib). Boron appears as an active element in its first-approved organic pharmaceutical in the pharmaceutical bortezomib, a new class of drug called the proteasome inhibitors, which are active in myeloma and one form of lymphoma (it is in currently in experimental trials against other types of lymphoma). The boron atom in bortezomib binds the catalytic site of the 26S proteasome[113] with high affinity and specificity.
+
+Tavaborole (marketed as Kerydin) is an Aminoacyl tRNA synthetase inhibitor which is used to treat toenail fungus. It gained FDA approval in July 2014.[116]
+
+Dioxaborolane chemistry enables radioactive fluoride (18F) labeling of antibodies or red blood cells, which allows for positron emission tomography (PET) imaging of cancer[117] and hemorrhages,[118] respectively. A Human-Derived, Genetic, Positron-emitting and Fluorescent (HD-GPF) reporter system uses a human protein, PSMA and non-immunogenic, and a small molecule that is positron-emitting (boron bound 18F) and fluorescent for dual modality PET and fluorescence imaging of genome modified cells, e.g. cancer, CRISPR/Cas9, or CAR T-cells, in an entire mouse.[119]
+
+Magnesium diboride is an important superconducting material with the transition temperature of 39 K. MgB2 wires are produced with the powder-in-tube process and applied in superconducting magnets.[120][121]
+
+Amorphous boron is used as a melting point depressant in nickel-chromium braze alloys.[122]
+
+Hexagonal boron nitride forms atomically thin layers, which have been used to enhance the electron mobility in graphene devices.[123][124] It also forms nanotubular structures (BNNTs), which have high strength, high chemical stability, and high thermal conductivity, among its list of desirable properties.[125]
+
+Boron is an essential plant nutrient, required primarily for maintaining the integrity of cell walls. However, high soil concentrations of greater than 1.0 ppm lead to marginal and tip necrosis in leaves as well as poor overall growth performance. Levels as low as 0.8 ppm produce these same symptoms in plants that are particularly sensitive to boron in the soil. Nearly all plants, even those somewhat tolerant of soil boron, will show at least some symptoms of boron toxicity when soil boron content is greater than 1.8 ppm. When this content exceeds 2.0 ppm, few plants will perform well and some may not survive.[126][127][128]
+
+It is thought that boron plays several essential roles in animals, including humans, but the exact physiological role is poorly understood.[129][130] A small human trial published in 1987 reported on postmenopausal women first made boron deficient and then repleted with 3 mg/day. Boron supplementation markedly reduced urinary calcium excretion and elevated the serum concentrations of 17 beta-estradiol and testosterone.[131]
+
+The U.S. Institute of Medicine has not confirmed that boron is an essential nutrient for humans, so neither a Recommended Dietary Allowance (RDA) nor an Adequate Intake have been established. Adult dietary intake is estimated at 0.9 to 1.4 mg/day, with about 90% absorbed. What is absorbed is mostly excreted in urine. The Tolerable Upper Intake Level for adults is 20 mg/day.[132]
+
+In 2013, a hypothesis suggested it was possible that boron and molybdenum catalyzed the production of RNA on Mars with life being transported to Earth via a meteorite around 3 billion years ago.[133]
+
+There exist several known boron-containing natural antibiotics. The first one found was boromycin, isolated from streptomyces.[134][135]
+
+Congenital endothelial dystrophy type 2, a rare form of corneal dystrophy, is linked to mutations in SLC4A11 gene that encodes a transporter reportedly regulating the intracellular concentration of boron.[136]
+
+For determination of boron content in food or materials, the colorimetric curcumin method is used. Boron is converted to boric acid or borates and on reaction with curcumin in acidic solution, a red colored boron-chelate complex, rosocyanine, is formed.[137]
+
+Elemental boron, boron oxide, boric acid, borates, and many organoboron compounds are relatively nontoxic to humans and animals (with toxicity similar to that of table salt). The LD50 (dose at which there is 50% mortality) for animals is about 6 g per kg of body weight. Substances with LD50 above 2 g are considered nontoxic. An intake of 4 g/day of boric acid was reported without incident, but more than this is considered toxic in more than a few doses. Intakes of more than 0.5 grams per day for 50 days cause minor digestive and other problems suggestive of toxicity.[140] Dietary supplementation of boron may be helpful for bone growth, wound healing, and antioxidant activity,[141] and insufficient amount of boron in diet may result in boron deficiency.
+
+Single medical doses of 20 g of boric acid for neutron capture therapy have been used without undue toxicity.
+
+Boric acid is more toxic to insects than to mammals, and is routinely used as an insecticide.[96]
+
+The boranes (boron hydrogen compounds) and similar gaseous compounds are quite poisonous. As usual, it is not an element that is intrinsically poisonous, but their toxicity depends on structure.[13][14] The boranes are also highly flammable and require special care when handling. Sodium borohydride presents a fire hazard owing to its reducing nature and the liberation of hydrogen on contact with acid. Boron halides are corrosive.[142]
+
+Boron is necessary for plant growth, but an excess of boron is toxic to plants, and occurs particularly in acidic soil.[143][144] It presents as a yellowing from the tip inwards of the oldest leaves and black spots in barley leaves, but it can be confused with other stresses such as magnesium deficiency in other plants.[145]
+

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+in Europe (dark grey)
+
+Bosnia and Herzegovina,[a] abbreviated BiH or B&H,[b] sometimes called Bosnia–Herzegovina and often known informally as Bosnia, is a country in South and Southeast Europe, located within the Balkans. Sarajevo is the capital and largest city.
+
+Bosnia and Herzegovina is bordered by Serbia to the east, Montenegro to the southeast, and Croatia to the north and southwest. It is not entirely landlocked; to the south it has a narrow coast on the Adriatic Sea, which is about 20 kilometres (12 miles) long and surrounds the town of Neum. The inland Bosnia region has a moderate continental climate, with hot summers and cold, snowy winters. In the central and eastern interior of the country the geography is mountainous, in the northwest moderately hilly, and in the northeast predominantly flatland. The smaller southern region, Herzegovina, has a Mediterranean climate and mostly mountainous topography.
+
+Bosnia and Herzegovina was settled at least from Upper Palaeolithic and has preserved prehistoric art found in Badanj cave. The permanent human settlement traces back to the Neolithic age, inhabited by cultures such as Butmir, Kakanj, and Vučedol. After arrival of the first Indo-Europeans it was populated by several Illyrian and Celtic civilizations. Culturally, politically, and socially, the country has a rich but complex history, having been first settled by the South Slavic peoples that populate the area today from the 6th through to the 9th centuries. In the 12th century the Banate of Bosnia was established, which evolved into the Kingdom of Bosnia in the 14th century, after which it was annexed into the Ottoman Empire, under whose rule it remained from the mid-15th to the late 19th centuries. The Ottomans brought Islam to the region, and altered much of the cultural and social outlook of the country. This was followed by annexation into the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy, which lasted up until World War I. In the interwar period, Bosnia and Herzegovina was part of the Kingdom of Yugoslavia and after World War II, it was granted full republic status in the newly formed Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia. Following the dissolution of Yugoslavia, the republic proclaimed independence in 1992, which was followed by the Bosnian War, lasting until late 1995 with the Dayton Agreement.
+
+The country is home to three main ethnic groups or, officially, constituent peoples, as specified in the constitution. Bosniaks are the largest group of the three, with Serbs second, and Croats third. A native of Bosnia and Herzegovina, regardless of ethnicity, is usually identified in English as a Bosnian. Minorities, defined under the constitutional nomenclature "Others", include Jews, Roma, Ukrainians, and Turks. Bosnia and Herzegovina has a bicameral legislature and a three-member Presidency composed of a member of each major ethnic group. However, the central government's power is highly limited, as the country is largely decentralized and comprises two autonomous entities: the Federation of Bosnia and Herzegovina and Republika Srpska, with a third unit, the Brčko District, governed under local government. The Federation of Bosnia and Herzegovina consists of 10 cantons.
+
+Bosnia and Herzegovina is a developing country and ranks 75th in terms of human development. Its economy is dominated by the industry and agriculture sectors, followed by the tourism and service sectors.[14] The country has a social security and universal healthcare system, and primary- and secondary-level education is tuition-free. It is a member of the UN, OSCE, Council of Europe, PfP, CEFTA, and a founding member of the Union for the Mediterranean upon its establishment in July 2008.[15] The country is an applicant for membership to the European Union and has been a candidate for NATO membership since April 2010, when it received a Membership Action Plan.[16] Bosnia and Herzegovina also experienced a significant rise in tourism in recent years.[17][18]
+
+The first preserved widely acknowledged mention of Bosnia is in De Administrando Imperio, a politico-geographical handbook written by the Byzantine emperor Constantine VII in the mid-10th century (between 948 and 952) describing the "small land" (χωρίον in Greek) of "Bosona" (Βοσώνα).[19]
+
+The name is believed to have derived from the hydronym of the river Bosna coursing through the Bosnian heartland. According to philologist Anton Mayer the name Bosna could derive from Illyrian *"Bass-an-as"), which would derive from the Proto-Indo-European root "bos" or "bogh"—meaning "the running water".[20] According to English medievalist William Miller the Slavic settlers in Bosnia "adapted the Latin designation [...] Basante, to their own idiom by calling the stream Bosna and themselves Bosniaks [...]".[21]
+
+The name Herzegovina ("herzog's [land]", from German word for "duke")[20] originates from Bosnian magnate Stjepan Vukčić Kosača's title, "Herceg (Herzog) of Hum and the Coast" (1448).[22] Hum, formerly Zahumlje, was an early medieval principality that was conquered by the Bosnian Banate in the first half of the 14th century. The region was administered by the Ottomans as the Sanjak of Herzegovina (Hersek) within the Eyalet of Bosnia up until the formation of the short-lived Herzegovina Eyalet in the 1830s, which remerged in the 1850s, after which the entity became commonly known as Bosnia and Herzegovina.[citation needed]
+
+On initial proclamation of independence in 1992, the country's official name was the Republic of Bosnia and Herzegovina but following the 1995 Dayton Agreement and the new constitution that accompanied it the official name was changed to Bosnia and Herzegovina.[23]
+
+Bosnia has been inhabited by humans since at least the Paleolithic, as one of the oldest cave paintings was found in Badanj cave. Major Neolithic cultures such as the Butmir and Kakanj were present along the river Bosna dated from c. 6230 BC – c. 4900 BC.
+
+The bronze culture of the Illyrians, an ethnic group with a distinct culture and art form, started to organize itself in today's Slovenia, Croatia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Serbia, Kosovo, Montenegro and Albania.
+
+From 8th century BC, Illyrian tribes evolved into kingdoms. The earliest recorded kingdom in Illyria (a region in the western part of the Balkan Peninsula inhabited by the Illyrians, as recorded in classical antiquity) was the Enchele in the 8th century BC. The era in which we observe other Illyrian kingdoms begins approximately at 400 BC and ends at 167 BC. The Autariatae under Pleurias (337 BC) were considered to have been a kingdom. The Kingdom of the Ardiaei (originally a tribe from the Neretva valley region) began at 230 BC and ended at 167 BC. The most notable Illyrian kingdoms and dynasties were those of Bardyllis of the Dardani and of Agron of the Ardiaei who created the last and best-known Illyrian kingdom. Agron ruled over the Ardiaei and had extended his rule to other tribes as well.
+
+From the 7th century BC, bronze was replaced by iron, after which only jewelry and art objects were still made out of bronze. Illyrian tribes, under the influence of Hallstatt cultures to the north, formed regional centers that were slightly different. Parts of Central Bosnia were inhabited by Daesitiates tribe most commonly associated with Central Bosnian cultural group. Iron Age Glasinac culture is associated with Autariatae tribe.
+
+A very important role in their life was the cult of the dead, which is seen in their careful burials and burial ceremonies, as well as the richness of their burial sites. In northern parts, there was a long tradition of cremation and burial in shallow graves, while in the south the dead were buried in large stone or earth tumuli (natively called gromile) that in Herzegovina were reaching monumental sizes, more than 50 m wide and 5 m high. Japodian tribes had an affinity to decoration (heavy, oversized necklaces out of yellow, blue or white glass paste, and large bronze fibulas, as well as spiral bracelets, diadems and helmets out of bronze foil).
+
+In the 4th century BC, the first invasion of Celts is recorded. They brought the technique of the pottery wheel, new types of fibulas and different bronze and iron belts. They only passed on their way to Greece, so their influence in Bosnia and Herzegovina is negligible. Celtic migrations displaced many Illyrian tribes from their former lands, but some Celtic and Illyrian tribes mixed. Concrete historical evidence for this period is scarce, but overall it appears the region was populated by a number of different peoples speaking distinct languages.
+
+In the Neretva Delta in the south, there were important Hellenistic influence of the Illyrian Daors tribe. Their capital was Daorson in Ošanići near Stolac. Daorson in the 4th century BC was surrounded by megalithic, 5 m high stonewalls (as large as those of Mycenae in Greece), composed of large trapezoid stone blocks. Daors made unique bronze coins and sculptures.
+
+Conflict between the Illyrians and Romans started in 229 BC, but Rome did not complete its annexation of the region until AD 9. It was precisely in modern-day Bosnia and Herzegovina that Rome fought one of the most difficult battles in its history since the Punic Wars, as described by the Roman historian Suetonius.[24] This was the Roman campaign against Illyricum, known as Bellum Batonianum.[25] The conflict arose after an attempt to recruit Illyrians, and a revolt spanned for four years (6–9 AD), after which they were subdued.[26] In the Roman period, Latin-speaking settlers from the entire Roman Empire settled among the Illyrians, and Roman soldiers were encouraged to retire in the region.[20]
+
+Following the split of the Empire between 337 and 395 AD, Dalmatia and Pannonia became parts of the Western Roman Empire. The region was conquered by the Ostrogoths in 455 AD. It subsequently changed hands between the Alans and the Huns. By the 6th century, Emperor Justinian had reconquered the area for the Byzantine Empire. Slavs overwhelmed the Balkans in the 6th and 7th centuries. Illyrian cultural traits were adopted by the South Slavs, as evidenced in certain customs and traditions, placenames, etc.[27]
+Timothy Gregory explains:
+
+Gregory, Timothy E. (2010). A History of Byzantium (2 ed.). Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell. p. 169.
+
+The Early Slavs raided the Western Balkans, including Bosnia, in the 6th and early 7th century (amid the Migration Period), and were composed of small tribal units drawn from a single Slavic confederation known to the Byzantines as the Sclaveni (whilst the related Antes, roughly speaking, colonized the eastern portions of the Balkans).[28][29]
+Tribes recorded by the ethnonyms of "Serb" and "Croat" are described as a second, latter, migration of different people during the second quarter of the 7th century who do not seem to have been particularly numerous;[28][30] these early "Serb" and "Croat" tribes, whose exact identity is subject to scholarly debate,[31] came to predominate over the Slavs in the neighbouring regions. The bulk of Bosnia proper, however, appears to have been a territory between Serb and Croat rule and is not enumerated as one of the regions settled by those tribes.[30]
+
+Bosnia is first mentioned as a land (horion Bosona) in Byzantine Emperor Constantine Porphyrogenitus' De Administrando Imperio in the mid 10th century, at the end of a chapter (Chap. 32) entitled Of the Serbs and the country in which they now dwell.[32] This has been scholarly interpreted in several ways and used especially by the Serb national ideologists to prove Bosnia as originally a "Serb" land. Other scholars have asserted the inclusion of Bosnia into Chapter 32 to merely be the result of Serbian Grand Duke Časlav's temporary rule over Bosnia at the time, while also pointing out Porphyrogenitus does not say anywhere explicitly that Bosnia is a "Serb land".[33] In fact, the very translation of the critical sentence where the word Bosona (Bosnia) appears is subject to varying interpretation.[32]
+
+In time, Bosnia formed a unit under its own ruler, who called himself Bosnian.[30] Bosnia, along with other territories, became part of Duklja in the 11th century, although it retained its own nobility and institutions.[34]
+
+In the High Middle Ages political circumstance led to the area being contested between the Kingdom of Hungary and the Byzantine Empire. Following another shift of power between the two in the early 12th century, Bosnia found itself outside the control of both and emerged as the Banate of Bosnia (under the rule of local bans).[20][35] The first Bosnian ban known by name was Ban Borić.[36] The second was Ban Kulin whose rule marked the start of a controversy involving the Bosnian Church – considered heretical by the Roman Catholic Church. In response to Hungarian attempts to use church politics regarding the issue as a way to reclaim sovereignty over Bosnia, Kulin held a council of local church leaders to renounce the heresy and embraced Catholicism in 1203. Despite this, Hungarian ambitions remained unchanged long after Kulin's death in 1204, waning only after an unsuccessful invasion in 1254. During this time the population was called Dobri Bošnjani ("Good Bosnians").[37][38] The names Serb and Croat, though occasionally appearing in peripheral areas, were not used in Bosnia proper.[39]
+
+Bosnian history from then until the early 14th century was marked by a power struggle between the Šubić and Kotromanić families. This conflict came to an end in 1322, when Stephen II Kotromanić became Ban. By the time of his death in 1353, he was successful in annexing territories to the north and west, as well as Zahumlje and parts of Dalmatia. He was succeeded by his ambitious nephew Tvrtko who, following a prolonged struggle with nobility and inter-family strife, gained full control of the country in 1367. By the year 1377, Bosnia was elevated into a kingdom with the coronation of Tvrtko as the first Bosnian King in Mile near Visoko in the Bosnian heartland.[40][41][42]
+
+Following his death in 1391 however, Bosnia fell into a long period of decline. The Ottoman Empire had started its conquest of Europe and posed a major threat to the Balkans throughout the first half of the 15th century. Finally, after decades of political and social instability, the Kingdom of Bosnia ceased to exist in 1463 after its conquest by the Ottoman Empire.[citation needed]
+
+The Ottoman conquest of Bosnia marked a new era in the country's history and introduced drastic changes in the political and cultural landscape. The Ottomans incorporating Bosnia as an integral province of the Ottoman Empire with its historical name and territorial integrity.[43]
+
+Within Bosnia the Ottomans introduced a number of key changes in the territory's socio-political administration; including a new landholding system, a reorganization of administrative units, and a complex system of social differentiation by class and religious affiliation.[20]
+
+The four centuries of Ottoman rule also had a drastic impact on Bosnia's population make-up, which changed several times as a result of the empire's conquests, frequent wars with European powers, forced and economic migrations, and epidemics. A native Slavic-speaking Muslim community emerged and eventually became the largest of the ethno-religious groups due to lack of strong Christian church organizations and continuous rivalry between the Orthodox and Catholic churches, while the indigenous Bosnian Church disappeared altogether (ostensibly by conversion of its members to Islam). The Ottomans referred to them as kristianlar while the Orthodox and Catholics were called gebir or kafir, meaning "unbeliever".[44] The Bosnian Franciscans (and the Catholic population as a whole) were protected by official imperial decrees and in accordance and full extent of Ottoman laws, however in effect, these often merely affected arbitrary rule and behavior of powerful local elite.[20]
+
+As the Ottoman Empire continued their rule in the Balkans (Rumelia), Bosnia was somewhat relieved of the pressures of being a frontier province, and experienced a period of general welfare. A number of cities, such as Sarajevo and Mostar, were established and grew into regional centers of trade and urban culture and were then visited by Ottoman traveler Evliya Çelebi in 1648. Within these cities, various Ottoman Sultans financed the construction of many works of Bosnian architecture such as the country's first library in Sarajevo, madrassas, a school of Sufi philosophy, and a clock tower (Sahat Kula), bridges such as the Stari Most, the Tsar's Mosque and the Gazi Husrev-beg's Mosque.[citation needed]
+
+Furthermore, several Bosnian Muslims played influential roles in the Ottoman Empire's cultural and political history during this time.[45] Bosnian recruits formed a large component of the Ottoman ranks in the battles of Mohács and Krbava field, while numerous other Bosnians rose through the ranks of the Ottoman military to occupy the highest positions of power in the Empire, including admirals such as Matrakçı Nasuh; generals such as Isa-Beg Isaković, Gazi Husrev-beg and Hasan Predojević and Sarı Süleyman Paşa; administrators such as Ferhat-paša Sokolović and Osman Gradaščević; and Grand Viziers such as the influential Mehmed Paša Sokolović and Damad Ibrahim Pasha. Some Bosnians emerged as Sufi mystics, scholars such as Muhamed Hevaji Uskufi Bosnevi, Ali Džabič; and poets in the Turkish, Albanian, Arabic, and Persian languages.[46]
+
+However, by the late 17th century the Empire's military misfortunes caught up with the country, and the end of the Great Turkish War with the treaty of Karlowitz in 1699 again made Bosnia the Empire's westernmost province. The 18th century was marked by further military failures, numerous revolts within Bosnia, and several outbursts of plague.[47]
+
+The Porte's efforts at modernizing the Ottoman state were met with distrust growing to hostility in Bosnia, where local aristocrats stood to lose much through the proposed Tanzimat reforms. This, combined with frustrations over territorial, political concessions in the north-east, and the plight of Slavic Muslim refugees arriving from the Sanjak of Smederevo into Bosnia Eyalet, culminated in a partially unsuccessful revolt by Husein Gradaščević, who endorsed a Bosnia Eyalet autonomous from the authoritarian rule of the Ottoman Sultan Mahmud II, who persecuted, executed and abolished the Janissaries and reduced the role of autonomous Pashas in Rumelia. Mahmud II sent his Grand Vizier to subdue Bosnia Eyalet and succeeded only with the reluctant assistance of Ali-paša Rizvanbegović.[46] Related rebellions were extinguished by 1850, but the situation continued to deteriorate.
+
+New nationalist movements appeared in Bosnia by the middle of the 19th century. Bolstered by Serbia's breakaway from the Ottoman Empire in the early 19th century, Serbian nationalists began making contacts and sending nationalist propaganda claiming Bosnia as a Serbian province. In the neighboring Habsburg Empire across the Ottoman border, Croatian nationalists made similar claims about Bosnia as a Croatian province. The rise of these competing movements marked the beginning of nationalist politics in Bosnia, which continued to grow in the rest of the 19th and 20th centuries.[48]
+
+Agrarian unrest eventually sparked the Herzegovinian rebellion, a widespread peasant uprising, in 1875. The conflict rapidly spread and came to involve several Balkan states and Great Powers, a situation that led to the Congress of Berlin and the Treaty of Berlin in 1878.[20]
+
+At the Congress of Berlin in 1878, the Austro-Hungarian Foreign Minister Gyula Andrássy obtained the occupation and administration of Bosnia and Herzegovina, and he also obtained the right to station garrisons in the Sanjak of Novi Pazar, which would remain under Ottoman administration until 1908, when the Austro-Hungarian troops withdrew from the Sanjak.
+
+Although Austro-Hungarian officials quickly came to an agreement with Bosnians, tensions remained and a mass emigration of Bosnians occurred.[20] However, a state of relative stability was reached soon enough and Austro-Hungarian authorities were able to embark on a number of social and administrative reforms they intended would make Bosnia and Herzegovina into a "model" colony.
+
+Habsburg rule had several key concerns in Bosnia. It tried to dissipate the South Slav nationalism by disputing the earlier Serb and Croat claims to Bosnia and encouraging identification of Bosnian or Bosniak identity.[49] Habsburg rule also tried to provide for modernisation by codifying laws, introducing new political institutions, and establishing and expanding industries.[50]
+
+Austria–Hungary began to plan annexation of Bosnia, but due to international disputes the issue was not resolved until the annexation crisis of 1908.[51] Several external matters affected status of Bosnia and its relationship with Austria–Hungary. A bloody coup occurred in Serbia in 1903, which brought a radical anti-Austrian government into power in Belgrade.[52] Then in 1908, the revolt in the Ottoman Empire raised concerns the Istanbul government might seek the outright return of Bosnia-Herzegovina. These factors caused the Austro-Hungarian government to seek a permanent resolution of the Bosnian question sooner, rather than later.
+
+Taking advantage of turmoil in the Ottoman Empire, Austro-Hungarian diplomacy tried to obtain provisional Russian approval for changes over the status of Bosnia Herzegovina and published the annexation proclamation on 6 October 1908.[53] Despite international objections to the Austro-Hungarian annexation, Russians and their client state, Serbia, were compelled to accept the Austrian-Hungarian annexation of Bosnia Herzegovina in March 1909.
+
+In 1910, Habsburg Emperor Franz Joseph proclaimed the first constitution in Bosnia, which led to relaxation of earlier laws, elections and formation of the Bosnian parliament, and growth of new political life.[54]
+
+On 28 June 1914, a Yugoslav nationalist youth named Gavrilo Princip, a member of the secret Serbian-supported movement, Young Bosnia, assassinated the heir to the Austro-Hungarian throne, Archduke Franz Ferdinand, in Sarajevo—an event that was the spark that set off World War I. At the end of the war, the Bosniaks had lost more men per capita than any other ethnic group in the Habsburg Empire whilst serving in the Bosnian-Herzegovinian Infantry (known as Bosniaken) of the Austro-Hungarian Army.[55] Nonetheless, Bosnia and Herzegovina as a whole managed to escape the conflict relatively unscathed.[45]
+
+The Austro-Hungarian authorities established an auxiliary militia known as the Schutzkorps with a moot role in the empire's policy of anti-Serb repression.[56] Schutzkorps, predominantly recruited among the Muslim (Bosniak) population, were tasked with hunting down rebel Serbs (the Chetniks and Komiti)[57] and became known for their persecution of Serbs particularly in Serb populated areas of eastern Bosnia, where they partly retaliated against Serbian Chetniks who in fall 1914 had carried out attacks against the Muslim population in the area.[58][59] The proceedings of the Austro-Hungarian authorities led to around 5,500 citizens of Serb ethnicity in Bosnia and Herzegovina being arrested, and between 700 and 2,200 died in prison while 460 were executed.[57] Around 5,200 Serb families were forcibly expelled from Bosnia and Herzegovina.[57]
+
+Following World War I, Bosnia and Herzegovina joined the South Slav Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes (soon renamed Yugoslavia). Political life in Bosnia at this time was marked by two major trends: social and economic unrest over property redistribution, and formation of several political parties that frequently changed coalitions and alliances with parties in other Yugoslav regions.[45]
+
+The dominant ideological conflict of the Yugoslav state, between Croatian regionalism and Serbian centralization, was approached differently by Bosnia's major ethnic groups and was dependent on the overall political atmosphere.[20] The political reforms brought about in the newly established Yugoslavian kingdom saw few benefits for the Bosniaks; according to the 1910 final census of land ownership and population according to religious affiliation conducted in Austro-Hungary, Muslims (Bosniaks) owned 91.1%, Orthodox Serbians owned 6.0%, Croatian Catholics owned 2.6% and others, 0.3% of the property. Following the reforms Bosnian Muslims were dispossessed of a total of 1,175,305 hectares of agricultural and forest land.[60]
+
+Although the initial split of the country into 33 oblasts erased the presence of traditional geographic entities from the map, the efforts of Bosnian politicians such as Mehmed Spaho ensured the six oblasts carved up from Bosnia and Herzegovina corresponded to the six sanjaks from Ottoman times and, thus, matched the country's traditional boundary as a whole.[20]
+
+The establishment of the Kingdom of Yugoslavia in 1929, however, brought the redrawing of administrative regions into banates or banovinas that purposely avoided all historical and ethnic lines, removing any trace of a Bosnian entity.[20] Serbo-Croat tensions over the structuring of the Yugoslav state continued, with the concept of a separate Bosnian division receiving little or no consideration.
+
+The Cvetković-Maček Agreement that created the Croatian banate in 1939 encouraged what was essentially a partition of Bosnia between Croatia and Serbia.[46] However the rising threat of Adolf Hitler's Nazi Germany forced Yugoslav politicians to shift their attention. Following a period that saw attempts at appeasement, the signing of the Tripartite Treaty, and a coup d'état, Yugoslavia was finally invaded by Germany on 6 April 1941.[20]
+
+Once the kingdom of Yugoslavia was conquered by German forces in World War II, all of Bosnia was ceded to the Nazi puppet regime, the Independent State of Croatia (NDH). The NDH leaders embarked on a campaign of extermination of Serbs, Jews, Romani as well as dissident Croats, and, later, Josip Broz Tito's Partisans by setting up a number of death camps.[61]
+
+An estimated 209,000 Serbs and Montenegrins were killed on the territory of Bosnia–Herzegovina during the war.[62][dubious  – discuss] The Ustaše recognized both Roman Catholicism and Islam as the national religions, but held the position Eastern Orthodoxy, as a symbol of Serbian identity, was their greatest foe.[63] Although Croats were by far the largest ethnic group to constitute the Ustaše, the Vice President of the NDH and leader of the Yugoslav Muslim Organization Džafer Kulenović was a Muslim, and Muslims (Bosniaks) in total constituted nearly 12% of the Ustaše military and civil service authority.[64]
+
+Many Serbs themselves took up arms and joined the Chetniks, a Serb nationalist movement with the aim of establishing an ethnically homogeneous 'Greater Serbian' state[65] within the Kingdom of Yugoslavia. The Chetniks, in turn, persecuted and killed a large number of non-Serbs, communist Serbs and Communist sympathizers, with the Muslim population of Bosnia, Herzegovina and Sandžak being a primary target.[66] Once captured, Muslim villagers were systematically massacred by the Chetniks.[67] Of the 75,000 Muslims who lost their lives in Bosnia and Herzegovina during the war,[62] approximately 30,000 (mostly civilians) were killed by the Chetniks.[68]
+
+A percentage of Muslims served in Nazi Waffen-SS units.[69] Between 64,000 and 79,000 Bosnian Croats were killed between April 1941 to May 1945.[62] Of these, about 18,000 were killed by the Chetniks.[68]
+
+On 12 October 1941, a group of 108 prominent Sarajevan Muslims signed the Resolution of Sarajevo Muslims by which they condemned the persecution of Serbs organized by the Ustaše, made distinction between Muslims who participated in such persecutions and the Muslim population as a whole, presented information about the persecutions of Muslims by Serbs, and requested security for all citizens of the country, regardless of their identity.[70]
+
+Starting in 1941, Yugoslav communists under the leadership of Josip Broz Tito organized their own multi-ethnic resistance group, the partisans, who fought against both Axis and Chetnik forces. On 29 November 1943 the Anti-Fascist Council of National Liberation of Yugoslavia with Tito at its helm held a founding conference in Jajce where Bosnia and Herzegovina was reestablished as a republic within the Yugoslavian federation in its Habsburg borders.[71]
+
+Military success eventually prompted the Allies to support the Partisans, resulting in the successful Maclean Mission, but Tito declined their offer to help and relied on his own forces instead. All the major military offensives by the antifascist movement of Yugoslavia against Nazis and their local supporters were conducted in Bosnia–Herzegovina and its peoples bore the brunt of fighting. More than 300,000 people died in Bosnia and Herzegovina in World War II.[72] At the end of the war the establishment of the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, with the constitution of 1946, officially made Bosnia and Herzegovina one of six constituent republics in the new state.[20]
+
+Due to its central geographic position within the Yugoslavian federation, post-war Bosnia was selected as a base for the development of the military defense industry. This contributed to a large concentration of arms and military personnel in Bosnia; a significant factor in the war that followed the break-up of Yugoslavia in the 1990s.[20] However, Bosnia's existence within Yugoslavia, for the large part, was relatively peaceful and very prosperous, with high employment, a strong industrial and export oriented economy, a good education system and social and medical security for every citizen (of Bosnia and Herzegovina). Several international corporations operated in Bosnia — Volkswagen as part of TAS (car factory in Sarajevo, from 1972), Coca-Cola (from 1975), SKF Sweden (from 1967), Marlboro, (a tobacco factory in Sarajevo), and Holiday Inn hotels. Sarajevo was the site of the 1984 Winter Olympics.
+
+During the 1950s and 1960s Bosnia was a political backwater of the Republic of Yugoslavia. In the 1970s a strong Bosnian political elite arose, fueled in part by Tito's leadership in the Non-Aligned Movement and Bosnians serving in Yugoslavia's diplomatic corps. While working within the Socialist system, politicians such as Džemal Bijedić, Branko Mikulić and Hamdija Pozderac reinforced and protected the sovereignty of Bosnia and Herzegovina.[73] Their efforts proved key during the turbulent period following Tito's death in 1980, and are today considered some of the early steps towards Bosnian independence. However, the republic did not escape the increasingly nationalistic climate of the time. With the fall of communism and the start of the break-up of Yugoslavia, doctrine of tolerance began to lose its potency, creating an opportunity for nationalist elements in the society to spread their influence.[citation needed]
+
+On 18 November 1990, multi-party parliamentary elections were held throughout Bosnia and Herzegovina. A second round followed on 25 November, resulting in a national assembly where communist power was replaced by a coalition of three ethnically-based parties.[74] Following Slovenia and Croatia's declarations of independence from Yugoslavia, a significant split developed among the residents of Bosnia and Herzegovina on the issue of whether to remain within Yugoslavia (overwhelmingly favored by Serbs) or seek independence (overwhelmingly favored by Bosniaks and Croats).[citation needed]
+
+The Serb members of parliament, consisting mainly of the Serb Democratic Party members, abandoned the central parliament in Sarajevo, and formed the Assembly of the Serb People of Bosnia and Herzegovina on 24 October 1991, which marked the end of the tri-ethnic coalition that governed after the elections in 1990. This Assembly established the Serbian Republic of Bosnia and Herzegovina in part of the territory of Bosnia and Herzegovina on 9 January 1992. It was renamed Republika Srpska in August 1992. On 18 November 1991, the party branch in Bosnia and Herzegovina of the ruling party in the Republic of Croatia, the Croatian Democratic Union (HDZ), proclaimed the existence of the Croatian Community of Herzeg-Bosnia in a separate part of the territory of Bosnia and Herzegovina with the Croatian Defence Council (HVO) as its military branch.[75] It went unrecognized by the Government of Bosnia and Herzegovina, which declared it illegal.[76][77]
+
+A declaration of the sovereignty of Bosnia and Herzegovina on 15 October 1991 was followed by a referendum for independence on 29 February/1 March 1992, which was boycotted by the great majority of Serbs. The turnout in the independence referendum was 63.4 percent and 99.7 percent of voters voted for independence.[78] Bosnia and Herzegovina declared independence on 3 March 1992 and received international recognition the following month on 6 April 1992.[79] The Republic of Bosnia and Herzegovina was subsequently admitted as a member state of the United Nations on 22 May 1992.[80] Serbian leader Slobodan Milošević and Croatian leader Franjo Tuđman are believed to have agreed on a partition of Bosnia and Herzegovina in March 1991, with the aim of establishing Greater Serbia and Greater Croatia.[81]
+
+Following Bosnia and Herzegovina's declaration of independence, Bosnian Serb militias mobilized in different parts of the country. Government forces were poorly equipped and unprepared for the war.[82] International recognition of Bosnia and Herzegovina increased diplomatic pressure for the Yugoslav People's Army (JNA) to withdraw from the republic's territory, which they officially did in June 1992. The Bosnian Serb members of the JNA simply changed insignia, formed the Army of Republika Srpska (VRS), and continued fighting. Armed and equipped from JNA stockpiles in Bosnia, supported by volunteers and various paramilitary forces from Serbia, and receiving extensive humanitarian, logistical and financial support from the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, Republika Srpska's offensives in 1992 managed to place much of the country under its control.[20] The Bosnian Serb advance was accompanied by the ethnic cleansing of Bosniaks and Bosnian Croats from VRS-controlled areas. Dozens of concentration camps were established in which inmates were subjected to violence and abuse, including rape.[83] The ethnic cleansing culminated in the Srebrenica massacre of more than 8,000 Bosniak men and boys in July 1995, which was ruled to have been a genocide by the ICTY.[84] Bosniak and Bosnian Croat forces also committed war crimes against civilians from different ethnic groups, though on a smaller scale.[85][86][87][88] Most of the Bosniak and Croat atrocities were committed during the Bosniak-Croat war, a sub-conflict of the Bosnian War that pitted the Army of the Federation of Bosnia and Herzegovina (ARBiH) against the HVO. The Bosniak-Croat conflict ended in March 1994, with the signing of the Washington Agreement, leading to the creation of a joint Bosniak-Croat Federation of Bosnia and Herzegovina, which amalgamated HVO-held territory with that held by the ARBiH.[citation needed]
+
+Following the Srebrenica massacre, NATO launched a bombing campaign against Republika Srpska in August 1995. The bombing, together with a joint HV/HVO/ARBiH ground offensive in western Bosnia, convinced the Bosnian Serb leadership to consider a negotiated settlement, which manifested itself in the Dayton Agreement of December 1995. It brought an end to active combat and roughly established the basic political structure of the present-day state. A NATO-led peacekeeping force was immediately dispatched to the country to enforce the agreement. An estimated 100,000 people were killed in the war, about two-thirds of whom were Bosniak.[89] An additional 2.2 million citizens of Bosnia and Herzegovina of all ethnicities were displaced.[90] The International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) has ruled the conflict involved the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia (subsequently Serbia and Montenegro),[91] as well as Croatia.[92] Dozens of Bosnian Serb officials and soldiers have been convicted for their role in war crimes and crimes against humanity during the conflict, as well as for the genocide in Srebrenica. Several high-ranking Croat and Bosniak officials have also been convicted.[93] Victims' remains continue to be unearthed.[94] After the war, the Government of Bosnia and Herzegovina brought a lawsuit against Serbia before the International Court of Justice (ICJ), accusing the country of genocide. In 2007, the ICJ exonerated Serbia of direct responsibility for the genocide committed by Bosnian Serb forces in Srebrenica, but concluded the country had not done enough to prevent the massacre.[95]
+
+On 4 February 2014, the protests against the government of the Federation of Bosnia and Herzegovina, one of the country's two entities, dubbed the Bosnian Spring, the name being taken from the Arab Spring, began in the northern town of Tuzla. Workers from several factories that had been privatised and had gone bankrupt united to demand action over jobs, and unpaid salaries and pensions.[96] Soon protests spread to the rest of the Federation, with violent clashes reported in close to 20 towns, the biggest of which were Sarajevo, Zenica, Mostar, Bihać, Brčko and Tuzla.[97] The Bosnian news media reported hundreds of people had been injured during the protests, including dozens of police officers, with bursts of violence in Sarajevo, in the northern city of Tuzla, in Mostar in the south, and in Zenica in central Bosnia. The same level of unrest or activism did not occur in the Republika Srpska, but hundreds of people also gathered in support of protests in the town of Banja Luka against its separate government.[98][99][100]
+
+The protests marked the largest outbreak of public anger over high unemployment and two decades of political inertia in the country since the end of the Bosnian War in 1995.[101]
+
+Bosnia is in the western Balkans, bordering Croatia (932 km or 579 mi) to the north and west, Serbia (302 km or 188 mi) to the east, and Montenegro (225 km or 140 mi) to the southeast. It has a coastline about 20 kilometres (12 miles) long surrounding the city of Neum.[102][103] It lies between latitudes 42° and 46° N, and longitudes 15° and 20° E.
+
+The country's name comes from the two alleged regions Bosnia and Herzegovina whose border was never defined. Historically, Bosnia's official name never included any of its many regions until the Austria-Hungarian occupation.
+
+The country is mostly mountainous, encompassing the central Dinaric Alps. The northeastern parts reach into the Pannonian Plain, while in the south it borders the Adriatic. The Dinaric Alps generally run in a southeast–northwest direction, and get higher towards the south. The highest point of the country is the peak of Maglić at 2,386 metres (7,828.1 feet), on the Montenegrin border. Major mountains include Kozara, Grmeč, Vlašić, Čvrsnica, Prenj, Romanija, Jahorina, Bjelašnica and Treskavica. The geological composition of the Dinaric chain of mountains in Bosnia consists primarily of limestone (including Mesozoic limestone), with deposits of iron, coal, zinc, manganese, bauxite, lead, and salt present in some areas, especially in central and northern Bosnia.[104]
+
+Overall, nearly 50% of Bosnia and Herzegovina is forested. Most forest areas are in the centre, east and west parts of Bosnia. Herzegovina has drier Mediterranean climate, with dominant karst topography. Northern Bosnia (Posavina) contains very fertile agricultural land along the River Sava and the corresponding area is heavily farmed. This farmland is a part of the Pannonian Plain stretching into neighboring Croatia and Serbia. The country has only 20 kilometres (12 miles) of coastline,[102][105] around the town of Neum in the Herzegovina-Neretva Canton. Although the city is surrounded by Croatian peninsulas, by international law, Bosnia and Herzegovina has a right of passage to the outer sea.
+
+Sarajevo is the capital[1] and largest city.[106] Other major cities are Banja Luka and Bihać in the northwest region known as Bosanska Krajina, Bijeljina and Tuzla in the northeast, Zenica in the central part of Bosnia and Mostar, the largest city in Herzegovina.
+
+There are seven major rivers in Bosnia and Herzegovina:[107]
+
+Phytogeographically, Bosnia and Herzegovina belongs to the Boreal Kingdom and is shared between the Illyrian province of the Circumboreal Region and Adriatic province of the Mediterranean Region. According to the World Wide Fund for Nature, the territory of Bosnia and Herzegovina can be subdivided into three ecoregions: the Pannonian mixed forests, Dinaric Mountains mixed forests and Illyrian deciduous forests.
+
+As a result of the Dayton Accords, the civilian peace implementation is supervised by the High Representative for Bosnia and Herzegovina selected by the Peace Implementation Council. The High Representative is the highest political authority in the country. The High Representative has many governmental and legislative powers, including the dismissal of elected and non-elected officials. Due to the vast powers of the High Representative over Bosnian politics and essential veto powers, the position has also been compared to that of a viceroy.[108][109][110][111]
+
+Politics take place in a framework of a parliamentary representative democracy, whereby executive power is exercised by the Council of Ministers of Bosnia and Herzegovina. Legislative power is vested in both the Council of Ministers and the Parliamentary Assembly of Bosnia and Herzegovina. Members of the Parliamentary Assembly are chosen according to a proportional representation system.[112][113]
+
+Bosnia and Herzegovina is a liberal democracy. It has several levels of political structuring, according to the Dayton Accords. The most important of these levels is the division of the country into two entities: the Federation of Bosnia and Herzegovina and Republika Srpska. The Federation of Bosnia and Herzegovina covers 51% of Bosnia and Herzegovina's total area, while Republika Srpska covers 49%. The entities, based largely on the territories held by the two warring sides at the time, were formally established by the Dayton peace agreement in 1995 because of the tremendous changes in Bosnia and Herzegovina's ethnic structure. Since 1996, the power of the entities relative to the State government has decreased significantly. Nonetheless, entities still have numerous powers to themselves.
+
+The Brčko District in the north of the country was created in 2000, out of land from both entities. It officially belongs to both, but is governed by neither, and functions under a decentralized system of local government. For election purposes, Brčko District voters can choose to participate in either the Federation or Republika Srpska elections. The Brčko District has been praised for maintaining a multiethnic population and a level of prosperity significantly above the national average.[114]
+
+The third level of Bosnia and Herzegovina's political subdivision is manifested in cantons. They are unique to the Federation of Bosnia and Herzegovina entity, which consists of ten of them. Each has a cantonal government, which is under the law of the Federation as a whole. Some cantons are ethnically mixed and have special laws to ensure the equality of all constituent people.[citation needed]
+
+The fourth level of political division in Bosnia and Herzegovina is the municipality. The Federation of Bosnia and Herzegovina is divided into 74 municipalities, and Republika Srpska into 63. Municipalities also have their own local government, and are typically based on the most significant city or place in their territory. As such, many municipalities have a long tradition and history with their present boundaries. Some others, however, were only created following the recent war after traditional municipalities were split by the Inter-Entity Boundary Line. Each canton in the Federation of Bosnia and Herzegovina consists of several municipalities, which are divided into local communities.[citation needed]
+
+Besides entities, cantons, and municipalities, Bosnia and Herzegovina also has four "official" cities. These are: Banja Luka, Mostar, Sarajevo, and East Sarajevo. The territory and government of the cities of Banja Luka and Mostar corresponds to the municipalities of the same name, while the cities of Sarajevo and East Sarajevo officially consist of several municipalities. Cities have their own city government whose power is in between that of the municipalities and cantons (or the entity, in the case of Republika Srpska).
+
+More recently, several central institutions have been established (such as defense ministry, security ministry, state court, indirect taxation service and so on) in the process of transferring part of the jurisdiction from the entities to the state. The representation of the government of Bosnia and Herzegovina is by elites who represent the country's three major groups, with each having a guaranteed share of power.
+
+The Chair of the Presidency of Bosnia and Herzegovina rotates among three members (Bosniak, Serb, Croat), each elected as the Chair for an eight-month term within their four-year term as a member. The three members of the Presidency are elected directly by the people with Federation voters voting for the Bosniak and the Croat, and the Republika Srpska voters for the Serb.
+
+The Chair of the Council of Ministers is nominated by the Presidency and approved by the House of Representatives. He or she is then responsible for appointing a Foreign Minister, Minister of Foreign Trade, and others as appropriate.
+
+The Parliamentary Assembly is the lawmaking body in Bosnia and Herzegovina. It consists of two houses: the House of Peoples and the House of Representatives. The House of Peoples has 15 delegates chosen by parliaments of the entities, two-thirds of which come from the Federation (5 Croat and 5 Bosniaks) and one-third from the Republika Srpska (5 Serbs). The House of Representatives is composed of 42 Members elected by the people under a form of proportional representation (PR), two-thirds elected from the Federation and one-third elected from the Republika Srpska.[citation needed]
+
+The Constitutional Court of Bosnia and Herzegovina is the supreme, final arbiter of legal matters. It is composed of nine members: four members are selected by the House of Representatives of the Federation, two by the Assembly of the Republika Srpska, and three by the President of the European Court of Human Rights after consultation with the Presidency, but cannot be Bosnian citizens.[citation needed]
+
+However, the highest political authority in the country is the High Representative in Bosnia and Herzegovina, the chief executive officer for the international civilian presence in the country and is selected by the European Union. Since 1995, the High Representative has been able to bypass the elected parliamentary assembly, and since 1997 has been able to remove elected officials. The methods selected by the High Representative have been criticized as undemocratic.[115] International supervision is to end when the country is deemed politically and democratically stable and self-sustaining.
+
+The Armed Forces of Bosnia and Herzegovina (OSBiH) were unified into a single entity in 2005, with the merger of the Army of the Federation of Bosnia and Herzegovina and the Army of Republika Srpska, which had defended their respective regions. The Ministry of Defense was founded in 2004.
+
+The Bosnian military consists of the Bosnian Ground Forces and Air Force and Air Defense. The Ground Forces number 14,725 active and 7,000 reserve personnel. They are armed with a mix of American, Yugoslavian, Soviet, and European-made weaponry, vehicles, and military equipment. The Air Force and Air Defense Forces have 3,000 personnel and about 62 aircraft. The Air Defense Forces operate MANPADS hand-held missiles, surface-to-air missile (SAM) batteries, anti-aircraft cannons, and radar. The Army has recently adopted remodeled MARPAT uniforms, used by Bosnian soldiers serving with ISAF in Afghanistan. A domestic production program is now underway to ensure that army units are equipped with the correct ammunition.
+
+Beginning in 2007, the Ministry of Defence of Bosnia and Herzegovina undertook the army's first ever international assistance mission, enlisting the military to serve with ISAF peace missions to Afghanistan, Iraq and the Democratic Republic of Congo in 2007. Five officers, acting as officers/advisors, served in the Democratic Republic of Congo. 45 soldiers, mostly acting as base security and medical assistants, served in Afghanistan. 85 Bosnian soldiers served as base security in Iraq, occasionally conducting infantry patrols there as well. All three deployed groups have been commended by their respective international forces as well as the Ministry of Defence of Bosnia and Herzegovina. The international assistance operations are still ongoing.
+
+The Air Force and Anti-Aircraft Defence Brigade of Bosnia and Herzegovina was formed when elements of the Army of the Federation of Bosnia and Herzegovina and the Republika Srpska Air Force were merged in 2006. The Air Force has seen improvements in the last few years with added funds for aircraft repairs and improved cooperation with the Ground Forces as well as to the citizens of the country. The Ministry of Defense of Bosnia and Herzegovina is pursuing the acquisition of new aircraft including helicopters and perhaps even fighter jets.[116]
+
+EU integration is one of the main political objectives of Bosnia and Herzegovina; it initiated the Stabilisation and Association Process in 2007. Countries participating in the SAP have been offered the possibility to become, once they fulfill the necessary conditions, Member States of the EU. Bosnia and Herzegovina is therefore a potential candidate country for EU accession.[117]
+
+The implementation of the Dayton Accords of 1995 has focused the efforts of policymakers in Bosnia and Herzegovina, as well as the international community, on regional stabilization in the countries-successors of the former Yugoslavia.[citation needed]
+
+Within Bosnia and Herzegovina, relations with its neighbors of Croatia, Serbia and Montenegro have been fairly stable since the signing of the Dayton Agreement in 1995. On 23 April 2010, Bosnia and Herzegovina received the Membership Action Plan from NATO, which is the last step before full membership in the alliance. Full membership was expected in 2014 or 2015, depending on the progress of reforms.[118] In December 2018, NATO approved a Bosnian Membership Action Plan.[119]
+
+According to the 1991 census, Bosnia and Herzegovina had a population of 4,369,319, while the 1996 World Bank Group census showed a decrease to 3,764,425.[120] Large population migrations during the Yugoslav wars in the 1990s have caused demographic shifts in the country. Between 1991 and 2013, political disagreements made it impossible to organize a census. A census had been planned for 2011,[121] and then for 2012,[122] but was delayed until October 2013. The 2013 census found a total population of 3,791,622 people in 1.16 million households; 585,411 fewer people than the 1991 census.[123]
+
+Ethnic composition in Bosnia and Herzegovina as of 2013
+
+Bosnia and Herzegovina is home to three ethnic "constituent peoples", namely Bosniaks, Serbs, and Croats, plus a number of smaller groups including Jews and Roma.[124] According to data from 2013 census published by the Agency for Statistics of Bosnia and Herzegovina, Bosniaks constitute 50.11% of the population, Serbs 30.78%, Croats 15.43%, and others form 2.73%, with the remaining respondents not declaring their ethnicity or not answering.[11] The census results are contested by the Republika Srpska statistical office and by Bosnian Serb politicians.[125] The dispute over the census concerns the inclusion of non-permanent Bosnian residents in the figures, which Republika Srpska officials oppose.[126] The European Union's statistics office, Eurostat, concluded in May 2016 that the census methodology used by the Bosnian statistical agency is in line with international recommendations.[127]
+
+Bosnia's constitution does not specify any official languages.[128][129][130] However, academics Hilary Footitt and Michael Kelly note the Dayton Agreement states it is "done in Bosnian, Croatian, English and Serbian", and they describe this as the "de facto recognition of three official languages" at the state level. The equal status of Bosnian, Serbian and Croatian was verified by the Constitutional Court in 2000.[130] It ruled the provisions of the Federation and Republika Srpska constitutions on language were incompatible with the state constitution, since they only recognised "Bosniak" and Croatian (in the case of the Federation) and Serbian (in the case of Republika Srpska) as official languages at the entity level. As a result, the wording of the entity constitutions was changed and all three languages were made official in both entities.[130] The three standard languages are fully mutually intelligible and are known collectively under the appellation of Serbo-Croatian, despite this term not being formally recognized in the country. Use of one of the three languages has become a marker of ethnic identity.[131] Michael Kelly and Catherine Baker argue: "The three official languages of today's Bosnian state...represent the symbolic assertion of national identity over the pragmatism of mutual intelligibility".[132]
+
+According to the 1992 European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages, Bosnia and Herzegovina recognizes the following minority languages: Albanian, Montenegrin, Czech, Italian, Hungarian, Macedonian, German, Polish, Romani, Romanian, Rusyn, Slovak, Slovene, Turkish, Ukrainian and Jewish (Yiddish and Ladino).[133] The German minority in Bosnia and Herzegovina are mostly remnants of Donauschwaben (Danube Swabians), who settled in the area after the Habsburg monarchy claimed the Balkans from the Ottoman Empire. Due to expulsions and (forced) assimilation after the two World Wars, the number of ethnic Germans in Bosnia and Herzegovina was drastically diminished.[134]
+
+In a 2013 census, 52.86% of the population consider their mother tongue Bosnian, 30.76% Serbian, 14.6% Croatian and 1.57% another language, with 0.21% not giving an answer.[11]
+
+As per the census of 2013, Islam is the major religion with 51% Muslims, 46% Christians and remaining others 3%.[135][136]
+
+46% of the population identify as Christian; of these, the Serbian Orthodox Church makes up the largest group, accounting for 31% of the population (of whom most identify as Serbs), and the Roman Catholic Church 15% (of whom most identify as Croats). The smallest groups are Agnosticism 0.3%, Atheism 0.8% and other 1.15%, with the remainder not declaring their religion or not answering 1.1%.[11][137] A 2012 survey found 54% of Bosnia's Muslims are non-denominational Muslims, while 38% follow Sunnism.[136]
+
+Sarajevo is home to 395,133 inhabitants in its urban area which comprises the City of Sarajevo as well as municipalities of Ilidža, Vogošća, Istočna Ilidža, Istočno Novo Sarajevo and Istočni Stari Grad.[138] The metro area has a population of 555,210 and includes Sarajevo Canton, East Sarajevo and municipalities Breza, Kiseljak, Kreševo and Visoko.
+
+During the Bosnian War, the economy suffered €200 billion in material damages.[140] Bosnia and Herzegovina faces the dual-problem of rebuilding a war-torn country and introducing transitional liberal market reforms to its formerly mixed economy. One legacy of the previous era is a strong industry; under former republic president Džemal Bijedić and SFRY President Josip Broz Tito, metal industries were promoted in the republic, resulting in the development of a large share of Yugoslavia's plants; S.R. Bosnia and Herzegovina had a very strong industrial export oriented economy in the 1970s and 1980s, with large scale exports worth millions of US$.
+
+For most of Bosnia's history, agriculture has been conducted on privately owned farms; Fresh food has traditionally been exported from the republic.[141]
+
+The war in the 1990s, caused a dramatic change in the Bosnian economy.[142] GDP fell by 60% and the destruction of physical infrastructure devastated the economy.[143] With much of the production capacity unrestored, the Bosnian economy still faces considerable difficulties. Figures show GDP and per capita income increased 10% from 2003 to 2004; this and Bosnia's shrinking national debt being negative trends, and high unemployment 38.7% and a large trade deficit remain cause for concern.
+
+The national currency is the (Euro-pegged) Convertible Mark (KM), controlled by the currency board. Annual inflation is the lowest relative to other countries in the region at 1.9% in 2004.[144] The international debt was $5.1 billion (as on 31 December 2014). Real GDP growth rate was 5% for 2004 according to the Bosnian Central Bank of BiH and Statistical Office of Bosnia and Herzegovina.
+
+Bosnia and Herzegovina has displayed positive progress in the previous years, which decisively moved its place from the lowest income equality rank of income equality rankings fourteen out of 193 nations.[145]
+
+According to Eurostat data, Bosnia and Herzegovina's PPS GDP per capita stood at 29 per cent of the EU average in 2010.[146]
+
+The International Monetary Fund (IMF) announced a loan to Bosnia worth US$500 million to be delivered by Stand-By Arrangement. This was scheduled to be approved in September 2012.[147]
+
+The United States Embassy in Sarajevo, Bosnia and Herzegovina produces the Country Commercial Guide – an annual report that delivers a comprehensive look at Bosnia and Herzegovina's commercial and economic environment, using economic, political, and market analysis. It can be viewed on Embassy Sarajevo's website.
+
+By some estimates, grey economy is 25.5% of GDP.[148]
+
+In 2017, exports grew by 17% when compared to the previous year, totaling €5.65 billion.[149] The total volume of foreign trade in 2017 amounted to €14.97 billion and increased by 14% compared to the previous year. Imports of goods increased by 12% and amounted to €9.32 billion. The coverage of imports by exports has increased by 3% compared to the previous year and now it is 61 percent. In 2017, Bosnia and Herzegovina mostly exported car seats, electricity, processed wood, aluminum and furniture. In the same year, it mostly imported crude oil, automobiles, motor oil, coal and briquettes.[150]
+
+The unemployment rate in 2017 was 20.5%, but The Vienna Institute for International Economic Studies is predicting falling unemployment rate for the next few years. In 2018, the unemployment should be 19.4% and it should further fall to 18.8% in 2019. In 2020, the unemployment rate should go down to 18.3%.[151]
+
+On 31 December 2017, Council of Ministers of Bosnia and Herzegovina issued the report on public debt of Bosnia and Herzegovina, stating the public debt was reduced by €389.97 million, or by more than 6% when compared to 31 December 2016. By the end of 2017, public debt was €5.92 billion, which amounted to 35.6 percent of GDP.[152]
+
+As of 31 December 2017[update], there were 32,292 registered companies in the country, which together had revenues of €33.572 billion that same year.[153]
+
+In 2017, the country received €397.35 million in foreign direct investment, which equals to 2.5% of the GDP.[154]
+
+In 2017, Bosnia and Herzegovina ranked 3rd in the world in terms of the number of new jobs created by foreign investment, relative to the number of inhabitants.[155][156]
+
+In 2018, Bosnia and Herzegovina exported goods worth 11.9 billion KM (€6.07 billion), which is 7.43% higher than in the same period in 2017, while imports amounted to 19.27 billion KM (€9.83 billion), which is 5.47% higher.[157]
+
+The average price of new apartments sold in the country in the first 6 months of 2018 is 1,639 km (€886.31) per square meter. This represents a jump of 3.5% from the previous year.[158]
+
+On 30 June 2018, public debt of Bosnia and Herzegovina amounted to about €6.04 billion, of which external debt is 70.56 percent, while the internal debt is 29.4 percent of total public indebtedness. The share of public debt in gross domestic product is 34.92 percent.[159]
+
+In the first 7 months of 2018, 811,660 tourists visited the country, a 12.2% jump when compared to the first 7 months of 2017.[160]
+
+In the first 11 months of 2018, 1,378,542 tourists visited Bosnia-Herzegovina, an increase of 12.6%, and had 2,871,004 overnight hotel stays, a 13.8% increase from the previous year. Also, 71.8% of the tourists came from foreign countries.[161]
+
+In 2018, the total value of mergers and acquisitions in Bosnia and Herzegovina amounted to €404.6 million.[162]
+
+In 2018, 99.5 percent of enterprises in Bosnia and Herzegovina used computers in their business, while 99.3 percent had internet connections, according to a survey conducted by the Bosnia and Herzegovina Statistics Agency.[163]
+
+In 2018, Bosnia and Herzegovina received 783.4 million KM (€400.64 million) in direct foreign investment, which was equivalent to 2.3% of GDP.[164]
+
+In 2018, Central Bank of Bosnia and Herzegovina made a profit of 8,430,875 km (€4,306,347).[165]
+
+The World Bank predicts that the economy will grow 3.4% in 2019.[166]
+
+Bosnia and Herzegovina was placed 83rd on the Index of Economic Freedom for 2019. The total rating for Bosnia and Herzegovina is 61.9. This position represents some progress relative to the 91st place in 2018. This result is below the regional level, but still above the global average, making Bosnia and Herzegovina a "moderately free" country.[167]
+
+On 31 January 2019, total deposits in Bosnian banks were KM 21.9 billion (€11.20 billion), which represents 61.15% of nominal GDP.[168]
+
+In the second quarter of 2019, the average price of new apartments sold in Bosnia and Herzegovina was 1,606 km (€821.47) per square meter.[169]
+
+In the first six months of 2019, exports amounted to 5.829 billion KM (€2.98 billion), which is 0.1% less than in the same period of 2018, while imports amounted to 9.779 billion KM (€5.00 billion), which is by 4.5% more than in the same period of the previous year.[170]
+
+In the first seven months of 2019, 906,788 tourists visited the country, a 11.7% jump from the previous year.[171]
+
+In the first six months of 2019, foreign direct investment amounted to 650.1 million KM (€332.34 million).[172]
+
+Sarajevo International Airport (IATA: SJJ, ICAO: LQSA), also known as Butmir Airport, is the main international airport in Bosnia and Herzegovina, located 3.3 NM (6.1 km; 3.8 mi) southwest of the Sarajevo main railway station[173] in the city of Sarajevo in the suburb of Butmir.
+
+Railway operations in Bosnia and Herzegovina are successors of the Yugoslav Railways within the country boundaries following independence from the Former Yugoslavia in 1992.
+
+The Bosnian communications market was fully liberalised in January 2006. There are three landline telephone providers, although each one predominantly serves a partile services are provided by three operators, with nationwide services. Mobile data services are also available, including high-speed EDGE and 3G services.[174]
+
+Oslobođenje (Liberation), founded in 1943, is one of the country's longest running continuously circulating newspapers. There are many national publications, only some of which include the Dnevni Avaz (Daily Voice), founded in 1995, and Jutarnje Novine (Morning News) in circulation in Sarajevo.[175] Other local periodicals include the Croatian newspaper Hrvatska riječ and the Bosnian magazine Start, as well as the weekly newspapers Slobodna Bosna (Free Bosnia) and BH Dani (BH Days). Novi Plamen, a monthly magazine, is the most left-wing publication. The international news station Al Jazeera maintains a sister channel that caters to the Balkan region, Al Jazeera Balkans, broadcasting out of and based in Sarajevo.[176] Since 2014, the N1 platform began broadcasting as an affiliate of CNN International and has headquarters in Sarajevo, Zagreb, and Belgrade.[177]
+
+Additionally, the country is the most liberal in terms of freedom of the press in the region, ranking 43rd internationally.[178]
+
+As of December 2017[update], there are 3,064,072 internet users in the country or 86.77% of the entire population.[179]
+
+According to projections by the World Tourism Organization, Bosnia and Herzegovina will have the third highest tourism growth rate in the world between 1995 and 2020.[180]
+
+In 2018, 1.883.772 tourists visited Bosnia-Herzegovina, an increase of 44,1%, and had 3.843.484 overnight hotel stays, a 43.5% increase from the previous year. Also, 71.2% of the tourists came from foreign countries.[181]
+
+In 2017, 1,307,319 tourists visited Bosnia and Herzegovina, an increase of 13.7%, and had 2,677,125 overnight hotel stays, a 12.3% increase from the previous year. 71.5% of the tourists came from foreign countries.[182]
+
+In 2006, when ranking the best cities in the world, Lonely Planet placed Sarajevo, the national capital[1] and host of the 1984 Winter Olympic Games, as #43 on the list.[183] Tourism in Sarajevo is chiefly focused on historical, religious, and cultural aspects. In 2010, Lonely Planet's "Best in Travel" nominated it as one of the top ten cities to visit that year.[184] Sarajevo also won travel blog Foxnomad's "Best City to Visit" competition in 2012, beating more than one hundred other cities around the entire world.[185]
+
+Međugorje has become one of the most popular pilgrimage sites for Christians in the world and has turned into Europe's third most important religious place, where each year more than 1 million people visit.[186] It has been estimated that 30 million pilgrims have come to Međugorje since the reputed apparitions began in 1981.[187]
+
+Bosnia has also become an increasingly popular skiing and Ecotourism destination. Bosnia and Herzegovina remains one of the last undiscovered natural regions of the southern area of the Alps, with vast tracts of wild and untouched nature attracting adventurers and nature lovers. National Geographic magazine named Bosnia and Herzegovina as the best mountain biking adventure destination for 2012.[188] The central Bosnian Dinaric Alps are favored by hikers and mountaineers, containing both Mediterranean and Alpine climates. Whitewater rafting is somewhat of a national pastime, with three rivers, including the deepest river canyon in Europe, the Tara River Canyon.[180]
+
+Most recently, the Huffington Post named Bosnia and Herzegovina the "9th Greatest Adventure in the World for 2013", adding that the country boasts "the cleanest water and air in Europe; the greatest untouched forests; and the most wildlife. The best way to experience is the three rivers trip, which purls through the best the Balkans have to offer."[189]
+
+Some of the tourist attractions in Bosnia and Herzegovina include:
+
+Higher education has a long and rich tradition in Bosnia and Herzegovina. The first bespoke higher-education institution was a school of Sufi philosophy established by Gazi Husrev-beg in 1531. Numerous other religious schools then followed. In 1887, under the Austro-Hungarian Empire, a Sharia law school began a five-year program.[191] In the 1940s the University of Sarajevo became the city's first secular higher education institute. In the 1950s post-bachelaurate graduate degrees became available.[192] Severely damaged during the war, it was recently rebuilt in partnership with more than 40 other universities. There are various other institutions of higher education, including: University "Džemal Bijedić" of Mostar, University of Banja Luka, University of Mostar, University of East Sarajevo, University of Tuzla, American University in Bosnia and Herzegovina and the Academy of Sciences and Arts of Bosnia and Herzegovina, which is held in high regard as one of the most prestigious creative arts academies in the region.
+
+Also, Bosnia and Herzegovina is home to several private and international higher education institutions, some of which are:
+
+Primary schooling lasts for nine years. Secondary education is provided by general and technical secondary schools (typically Gymnasiums) where studies typically last for four years. All forms of secondary schooling include an element of vocational training. Pupils graduating from general secondary schools obtain the Matura and can enroll in any tertiary educational institution or academy by passing a qualification examination prescribed by the governing body or institution. Students graduating technical subjects obtain a Diploma.[193]
+
+The architecture of Bosnia and Herzegovina is largely influenced by four major periods where political and social changes influenced the creation of distinct cultural and architectural habits of the population. Each period made its influence felt and contributed to a greater diversity of cultures and architectural language in this region.
+
+Some television, magazines, and newspapers in Bosnia and Herzegovina are state-owned, and some are for-profit corporations funded by advertising, subscription, and other sales-related revenues. The Constitution of Bosnia and Herzegovina guarantees freedom of speech.
+
+As a country in transition with a post-war legacy and a complex domestic political structure Bosnia and Herzegovina's media system is under transformation. In the early post-war period (1995–2005), media development was guided mainly by international donors and cooperation agencies, who invested to help reconstruct, diversify, democratize and professionalize media outlets.[194][195]
+
+Post-war developments included the establishment of an independent Communication Regulatory Agency, the adoption of a Press Code, the establishment of the Press Council, the decriminalization of label and defamation, the introduction of a rather advanced Freedom of Access to Information Law, and the creation of a Public Service Broadcasting System from the formerly state-owned broadcaster.
+Yet, internationally backed positive developments have been often obstructed by domestic elites, and the professionalisation of media and journalists has proceeded only slowly. High levels of partisanship and linkages between the media and the political systems hinder the adherence to professional code of conducts.[195]
+
+Bosnia and Herzegovina has a rich literature, including the Nobel prize winner Ivo Andrić and poets such as Croat Antun Branko Šimić, Aleksa Šantić, Jovan Dučić and Mak Dizdar, writers such as Zlatko Topčić, Meša Selimović, Semezdin Mehmedinović, Miljenko Jergović, Isak Samokovlija, Safvet beg Bašagić, Abdulah Sidran, Petar Kočić, Aleksandar Hemon, and Nedžad Ibrišimović. The National Theater was founded 1919 in Sarajevo and its first director was the dramatist Branislav Nušić.
+Magazines such as Novi Plamen or Sarajevske sveske are some of the more prominent publications covering cultural and literary themes.
+
+The art of Bosnia and Herzegovina was always evolving and ranged from the original medieval tombstones called Stećci to paintings in Kotromanić court. However, only with the arrival of Austro-Hungarians did the painting renaissance in Bosnia really begin to flourish. The first educated artists from European academies appeared with the beginning of the 20th century. Among those are: Gabrijel Jurkić, Petar Šain, Roman Petrović and Lazar Drljača.
+
+After World War II artists like Mersad Berber and Safet Zec rose in popularity.
+
+In 2007, Ars Aevi, a museum of contemporary art that includes works by renowned world artists was founded in Sarajevo.
+
+Typical Bosnian and Herzegovinian songs are ganga, rera, and the traditional Slavic music for the folk dances such as kolo and from Ottoman era the most popular is sevdalinka. Pop and Rock music has a tradition here as well, with the more famous musicians including Dino Zonić, Goran Bregović, Davorin Popović, Kemal Monteno, Zdravko Čolić, Elvir Laković, Edo Maajka, Hari Mata Hari and Dino Merlin. Other composers such as Đorđe Novković, Al' Dino, Haris Džinović, Kornelije Kovač, and many pop and rock bands, for example, Bijelo Dugme, Crvena Jabuka, Divlje Jagode, Indexi, Plavi Orkestar, Zabranjeno Pušenje, Ambasadori, Dubioza kolektiv, who were among the leading ones in the former Yugoslavia. Bosnia is home to the composer Dušan Šestić, the creator of the national anthem of Bosnia and Herzegovina and father of singer Marija Šestić, to the world known jazz musician, educator and Bosnian jazz ambassador Sinan Alimanović, composer Saša Lošić and pianist Saša Toperić. In the villages, especially in Herzegovina, Bosniaks, Serbs, and Croats play the ancient Gusle. The gusle is used mainly to recite epic poems in a usually dramatic tone.
+
+Probably the most distinctive and identifiably "Bosnian" of music, Sevdalinka is a kind of emotional, melancholic folk song that often describes sad subjects such as love and loss, the death of a dear person or heartbreak. Sevdalinkas were traditionally performed with a saz, a Turkish string instrument, which was later replaced by the accordion. However the more modern arrangement, to the derision of some purists, is typically a vocalist accompanied by the accordion along with snare drums, upright bass, guitars, clarinets and violins.
+
+Rural folk traditions in Bosnia and Herzegovina include the shouted, polyphonic ganga and "ravne pjesme" (flat song) styles, as well as instruments like a droneless bagpipe, wooden flute and šargija. The gusle, an instrument found throughout the Balkans, is also used to accompany ancient Slavic epic poems. There are also Bosnian folk songs in the Ladino language, derived from the area's Jewish population.
+
+Bosnian roots music came from Middle Bosnia, Posavina, the Drina valley and Kalesija. It is usually performed by singers with two violinists and a šargija player. These bands first appeared around World War I and became popular in the 1960s. This is the third oldest music following after the sevdalinka and ilahija. Self-taught people, mostly in two or three members of the different choices of old instruments, mostly in the violin, sacking, saz, drums, flutes (zurle) or wooden flute, as others have already called, the original performers of Bosnian music that can not be written notes, transmitted by ear from generation to generation, family is usually hereditary. It is thought to be brought from Persia-Kalesi tribe that settled in the area of present Sprecanski valleys and hence probably the name Kalesija. In this part of Bosnia it is the most common. Again, it became the leader of First World War onwards, as well as 60 years in the field Sprecanski doline. This kind of music was enjoyed by all three peoples in Bosnia, Bosniaks, Croats and Serbs, and it contributed a lot to reconcile people socializing, entertainment and other organizations through festivala. In Kalesija it is maintained each year with the Bosnian Festival Original music.
+
+Studio Kemix firm Dzemal Dzihanovic from Živinice together with his artists brought this kind of music to perfection at the end 20th century. With its entirely new form of modernity, it is most common in the Tuzla Canton and the cradle of this music city Živinice was named Bosnian town of original music. Songs are performed preferably in a diphthong, the first and second voice which is a special secret performance of this music and some performers sing in troglasju as they do Kalesijski triple that was recorded in 1968, as the first written record of the tone on the album, along with Higurashi no naku.
+
+Sarajevo is internationally renowned for its eclectic and diverse selection of festivals. The Sarajevo Film Festival was established in 1995, during the Bosnian War and has become the premier and largest film festival in the Balkans and South-East Europe.
+
+Bosnia has a rich cinematic and film heritage, dating back to the Kingdom of Yugoslavia; many Bosnian filmmakers have achieved international prominence and some have won international awards ranging from the Academy Awards to multiple Palme d'Ors and Golden Bears. Some notable Bosnian screenwriters, directors and producers are Danis Tanović (known for the Academy Award– and Golden Globe Award–winning 2001 film No Man's Land and Silver Bear Grand Jury Prize–winning 2016 film Death in Sarajevo),[196] Emir Kusturica (won two Palme d'Or at Cannes), Jasmila Žbanić (won Golden Bear), Zlatko Topčić, Ademir Kenović, Dino Mustafić, Ahmed Imamović, Pjer Žalica, Aida Begić, Adis Bakrač, etc.
+
+Bosnian cuisine uses many spices, in moderate quantities. Most dishes are light, as they are boiled; the sauces are fully natural, consisting of little more than the natural juices of the vegetables in the dish. Typical ingredients include tomatoes, potatoes, onions, garlic, peppers, cucumbers, carrots, cabbage, mushrooms, spinach, zucchini, dried beans, fresh beans, plums, milk, paprika and cream called Pavlaka. Bosnian cuisine is balanced between Western and Eastern influences. As a result of the Ottoman administration for almost 500 years, Bosnian food is closely related to Turkish, Greek, and other former Ottoman and Mediterranean cuisines. However, because of years of Austrian rule, there are many influences from Central Europe. Typical meat dishes include primarily beef and lamb. Some local specialties are ćevapi, burek, dolma, sarma, pilav, goulash, ajvar and a whole range of Eastern sweets. Ćevapi is a grilled dish of minced meat, a type of kebab, popular in former Yugoslavia and considered a national dish in Bosnia and Herzegovina[197] and Serbia.[198][199][200] Local wines come from Herzegovina where the climate is suitable for growing grapes. Herzegovinian loza (similar to Italian Grappa but less sweet) is very popular. Plum (rakija) or apple (jabukovača) alcohol beverages are produced in the north. In the south, distilleries used to produce vast quantities of brandy and supply all of ex-Yugoslav alcohol factories (brandy is the base of most alcoholic drinks).
+
+Coffeehouses, where Bosnian coffee is served in džezva with rahat lokum and sugar cubes, proliferate Sarajevo and every city in the country. Coffee drinking is a favorite Bosnian pastime and part of the culture. Bosnia and Herzegovina is the ninth country in the entire world by per capita coffee consumption.[201]
+
+Bosnia and Herzegovina has produced many athletes, both as a state in Yugoslavia and independently after 1992. The most important international sporting event in the history of Bosnia and Herzegovina was the 14th Winter Olympics, held in Sarajevo from 7 to 19 February 1984.
+The Borac handball club has won seven Yugoslav Handball Championships, as well as the European Championship Cup in 1976 and the International Handball Federation Cup in 1991.
+
+Amel Mekić, Bosnian judoka, became European champion in 2011. Track and field athlete Amel Tuka won the bronze medal in 800 metres at the 2015 World Championships and Hamza Alić won the silver medal in shot put at the 2013 European Indoor Championships.
+
+The Bosna Royal basketball club from Sarajevo were European Champions in 1979. The Yugoslav national basketball team, which won medals in every world championship from 1963 through 1990, included Bosnian players such as FIBA Hall of Famers Dražen Dalipagić and Mirza Delibašić. Bosnia and Herzegovina regularly qualifies for the European Championship in Basketball, with players including Mirza Teletović, Nihad Đedović and Jusuf Nurkić. Bosnia and Herzegovina national u-16 team won two gold medals in 2015, winning both 2015 European Youth Summer Olympic Festival as well as 2015 FIBA Europe Under-16 Championship.
+
+Women's basketball club Jedinstvo Aida from Tuzla won Women's European Club Championship in 1989 and Ronchetti Cup final in 1990, led by Razija Mujanović, three times best female European basketball player, and Mara Lakić
+
+The Bosnian chess team was Champion of Yugoslavia seven times, in addition to club ŠK Bosna winning four European Chess Club Cups. Chess grandmaster Borki Predojević has also won two European Championships. The most impressive success of Bosnian Chess was runner-up position in Chess Olympiad of 1994 in Moscow, featuring Grandmasters Predrag Nikolić, Ivan Sokolov and Bojan Kurajica.
+
+Middle-weight boxer Marijan Beneš has won several Championships of Bosnia and Herzegovina, Yugoslav Championships and the European Championship.[202] In 1978, he won the World Title against Elisha Obed from the Bahamas.
+
+Association football is the most popular sport in Bosnia and Herzegovina. It dates from 1903, but its popularity grew significantly after World War I. Bosnian clubs FK Sarajevo and Željezničar, won the Yugoslav Championship, while the Yugoslav national football team included Bosnian players of all ethnic backgrounds and generations, such as Safet Sušić, Zlatko Vujović, Mehmed Baždarević, Davor Jozić, Faruk Hadžibegić, Predrag Pašić, Blaž Slišković, Vahid Halilhodžić, Dušan Bajević, Ivica Osim, Josip Katalinski, Tomislav Knez, Velimir Sombolac and numerous others. The Bosnia and Herzegovina national football team played at the 2014 FIFA World Cup, its first major tournament. Players on the team again includes notable players of all country's ethnic background, such as then and now captains Emir Spahić, Zvjezdan Misimović and Edin Džeko, defenders like Ognjen Vranješ, Sead Kolašinac and Toni Šunjić, midfielders like Miralem Pjanić and Senad Lulić, striker Vedad Ibišević, and so on.
+
+Former Bosnian footballers include Hasan Salihamidžić, who became only the second Bosnian to ever win a UEFA Champions League trophy, after Elvir Baljić. He made 234 appearances and scored 31 goals for German club FC Bayern Munich. Sergej Barbarez, who played for several clubs in the German Bundesliga including Borussia Dortmund, Hamburger SV and Bayer Leverkusen was joint-top scorer in the 2000–01 Bundesliga season with 22 goals. Meho Kodro spent most of his career playing in Spain most notably with Real Sociedad and FC Barcelona. Elvir Rahimić made 302 appearances for Russian club CSKA Moscow with whom he won the UEFA Cup in 2005. Milena Nikolić, member of women's national team, was 2013–14 UEFA Women's Champions League top scorer.
+
+Bosnia and Herzegovina was the world champion of volleyball at the 2004 Summer Paralympics and volleyball at the 2012 Summer Paralympics. Many among those on the team lost their legs in the Bosnian War.
+
+Tennis is also gaining a lot of popularity after the recent successes of Damir Džumhur and Mirza Bašić at Grand Slam level. Other notable tennis players who represented Bosnia are, Amer Delić and Mervana Jugić-Salkić.
+
+The Bosnian wartime militia (Schutzkorps), which became known for its persecution of Serbs, was overwhelmingly Muslim.
+
+
+
+Coordinates: 44°N 18°E / 44°N 18°E / 44; 18
+
+Una-Sana  Central Bosnia
+
+Posavina  Herzegovina-Neretva
+
+Tuzla  West Herzegovina
+
+Zenica-Doboj  Sarajevo
+
+Bosnian Podrinje
+ Canton 10

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+Bosnia and Herzegovina,[a] abbreviated BiH or B&H,[b] sometimes called Bosnia–Herzegovina and often known informally as Bosnia, is a country in South and Southeast Europe, located within the Balkans. Sarajevo is the capital and largest city.
+
+Bosnia and Herzegovina is bordered by Serbia to the east, Montenegro to the southeast, and Croatia to the north and southwest. It is not entirely landlocked; to the south it has a narrow coast on the Adriatic Sea, which is about 20 kilometres (12 miles) long and surrounds the town of Neum. The inland Bosnia region has a moderate continental climate, with hot summers and cold, snowy winters. In the central and eastern interior of the country the geography is mountainous, in the northwest moderately hilly, and in the northeast predominantly flatland. The smaller southern region, Herzegovina, has a Mediterranean climate and mostly mountainous topography.
+
+Bosnia and Herzegovina was settled at least from Upper Palaeolithic and has preserved prehistoric art found in Badanj cave. The permanent human settlement traces back to the Neolithic age, inhabited by cultures such as Butmir, Kakanj, and Vučedol. After arrival of the first Indo-Europeans it was populated by several Illyrian and Celtic civilizations. Culturally, politically, and socially, the country has a rich but complex history, having been first settled by the South Slavic peoples that populate the area today from the 6th through to the 9th centuries. In the 12th century the Banate of Bosnia was established, which evolved into the Kingdom of Bosnia in the 14th century, after which it was annexed into the Ottoman Empire, under whose rule it remained from the mid-15th to the late 19th centuries. The Ottomans brought Islam to the region, and altered much of the cultural and social outlook of the country. This was followed by annexation into the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy, which lasted up until World War I. In the interwar period, Bosnia and Herzegovina was part of the Kingdom of Yugoslavia and after World War II, it was granted full republic status in the newly formed Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia. Following the dissolution of Yugoslavia, the republic proclaimed independence in 1992, which was followed by the Bosnian War, lasting until late 1995 with the Dayton Agreement.
+
+The country is home to three main ethnic groups or, officially, constituent peoples, as specified in the constitution. Bosniaks are the largest group of the three, with Serbs second, and Croats third. A native of Bosnia and Herzegovina, regardless of ethnicity, is usually identified in English as a Bosnian. Minorities, defined under the constitutional nomenclature "Others", include Jews, Roma, Ukrainians, and Turks. Bosnia and Herzegovina has a bicameral legislature and a three-member Presidency composed of a member of each major ethnic group. However, the central government's power is highly limited, as the country is largely decentralized and comprises two autonomous entities: the Federation of Bosnia and Herzegovina and Republika Srpska, with a third unit, the Brčko District, governed under local government. The Federation of Bosnia and Herzegovina consists of 10 cantons.
+
+Bosnia and Herzegovina is a developing country and ranks 75th in terms of human development. Its economy is dominated by the industry and agriculture sectors, followed by the tourism and service sectors.[14] The country has a social security and universal healthcare system, and primary- and secondary-level education is tuition-free. It is a member of the UN, OSCE, Council of Europe, PfP, CEFTA, and a founding member of the Union for the Mediterranean upon its establishment in July 2008.[15] The country is an applicant for membership to the European Union and has been a candidate for NATO membership since April 2010, when it received a Membership Action Plan.[16] Bosnia and Herzegovina also experienced a significant rise in tourism in recent years.[17][18]
+
+The first preserved widely acknowledged mention of Bosnia is in De Administrando Imperio, a politico-geographical handbook written by the Byzantine emperor Constantine VII in the mid-10th century (between 948 and 952) describing the "small land" (χωρίον in Greek) of "Bosona" (Βοσώνα).[19]
+
+The name is believed to have derived from the hydronym of the river Bosna coursing through the Bosnian heartland. According to philologist Anton Mayer the name Bosna could derive from Illyrian *"Bass-an-as"), which would derive from the Proto-Indo-European root "bos" or "bogh"—meaning "the running water".[20] According to English medievalist William Miller the Slavic settlers in Bosnia "adapted the Latin designation [...] Basante, to their own idiom by calling the stream Bosna and themselves Bosniaks [...]".[21]
+
+The name Herzegovina ("herzog's [land]", from German word for "duke")[20] originates from Bosnian magnate Stjepan Vukčić Kosača's title, "Herceg (Herzog) of Hum and the Coast" (1448).[22] Hum, formerly Zahumlje, was an early medieval principality that was conquered by the Bosnian Banate in the first half of the 14th century. The region was administered by the Ottomans as the Sanjak of Herzegovina (Hersek) within the Eyalet of Bosnia up until the formation of the short-lived Herzegovina Eyalet in the 1830s, which remerged in the 1850s, after which the entity became commonly known as Bosnia and Herzegovina.[citation needed]
+
+On initial proclamation of independence in 1992, the country's official name was the Republic of Bosnia and Herzegovina but following the 1995 Dayton Agreement and the new constitution that accompanied it the official name was changed to Bosnia and Herzegovina.[23]
+
+Bosnia has been inhabited by humans since at least the Paleolithic, as one of the oldest cave paintings was found in Badanj cave. Major Neolithic cultures such as the Butmir and Kakanj were present along the river Bosna dated from c. 6230 BC – c. 4900 BC.
+
+The bronze culture of the Illyrians, an ethnic group with a distinct culture and art form, started to organize itself in today's Slovenia, Croatia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Serbia, Kosovo, Montenegro and Albania.
+
+From 8th century BC, Illyrian tribes evolved into kingdoms. The earliest recorded kingdom in Illyria (a region in the western part of the Balkan Peninsula inhabited by the Illyrians, as recorded in classical antiquity) was the Enchele in the 8th century BC. The era in which we observe other Illyrian kingdoms begins approximately at 400 BC and ends at 167 BC. The Autariatae under Pleurias (337 BC) were considered to have been a kingdom. The Kingdom of the Ardiaei (originally a tribe from the Neretva valley region) began at 230 BC and ended at 167 BC. The most notable Illyrian kingdoms and dynasties were those of Bardyllis of the Dardani and of Agron of the Ardiaei who created the last and best-known Illyrian kingdom. Agron ruled over the Ardiaei and had extended his rule to other tribes as well.
+
+From the 7th century BC, bronze was replaced by iron, after which only jewelry and art objects were still made out of bronze. Illyrian tribes, under the influence of Hallstatt cultures to the north, formed regional centers that were slightly different. Parts of Central Bosnia were inhabited by Daesitiates tribe most commonly associated with Central Bosnian cultural group. Iron Age Glasinac culture is associated with Autariatae tribe.
+
+A very important role in their life was the cult of the dead, which is seen in their careful burials and burial ceremonies, as well as the richness of their burial sites. In northern parts, there was a long tradition of cremation and burial in shallow graves, while in the south the dead were buried in large stone or earth tumuli (natively called gromile) that in Herzegovina were reaching monumental sizes, more than 50 m wide and 5 m high. Japodian tribes had an affinity to decoration (heavy, oversized necklaces out of yellow, blue or white glass paste, and large bronze fibulas, as well as spiral bracelets, diadems and helmets out of bronze foil).
+
+In the 4th century BC, the first invasion of Celts is recorded. They brought the technique of the pottery wheel, new types of fibulas and different bronze and iron belts. They only passed on their way to Greece, so their influence in Bosnia and Herzegovina is negligible. Celtic migrations displaced many Illyrian tribes from their former lands, but some Celtic and Illyrian tribes mixed. Concrete historical evidence for this period is scarce, but overall it appears the region was populated by a number of different peoples speaking distinct languages.
+
+In the Neretva Delta in the south, there were important Hellenistic influence of the Illyrian Daors tribe. Their capital was Daorson in Ošanići near Stolac. Daorson in the 4th century BC was surrounded by megalithic, 5 m high stonewalls (as large as those of Mycenae in Greece), composed of large trapezoid stone blocks. Daors made unique bronze coins and sculptures.
+
+Conflict between the Illyrians and Romans started in 229 BC, but Rome did not complete its annexation of the region until AD 9. It was precisely in modern-day Bosnia and Herzegovina that Rome fought one of the most difficult battles in its history since the Punic Wars, as described by the Roman historian Suetonius.[24] This was the Roman campaign against Illyricum, known as Bellum Batonianum.[25] The conflict arose after an attempt to recruit Illyrians, and a revolt spanned for four years (6–9 AD), after which they were subdued.[26] In the Roman period, Latin-speaking settlers from the entire Roman Empire settled among the Illyrians, and Roman soldiers were encouraged to retire in the region.[20]
+
+Following the split of the Empire between 337 and 395 AD, Dalmatia and Pannonia became parts of the Western Roman Empire. The region was conquered by the Ostrogoths in 455 AD. It subsequently changed hands between the Alans and the Huns. By the 6th century, Emperor Justinian had reconquered the area for the Byzantine Empire. Slavs overwhelmed the Balkans in the 6th and 7th centuries. Illyrian cultural traits were adopted by the South Slavs, as evidenced in certain customs and traditions, placenames, etc.[27]
+Timothy Gregory explains:
+
+Gregory, Timothy E. (2010). A History of Byzantium (2 ed.). Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell. p. 169.
+
+The Early Slavs raided the Western Balkans, including Bosnia, in the 6th and early 7th century (amid the Migration Period), and were composed of small tribal units drawn from a single Slavic confederation known to the Byzantines as the Sclaveni (whilst the related Antes, roughly speaking, colonized the eastern portions of the Balkans).[28][29]
+Tribes recorded by the ethnonyms of "Serb" and "Croat" are described as a second, latter, migration of different people during the second quarter of the 7th century who do not seem to have been particularly numerous;[28][30] these early "Serb" and "Croat" tribes, whose exact identity is subject to scholarly debate,[31] came to predominate over the Slavs in the neighbouring regions. The bulk of Bosnia proper, however, appears to have been a territory between Serb and Croat rule and is not enumerated as one of the regions settled by those tribes.[30]
+
+Bosnia is first mentioned as a land (horion Bosona) in Byzantine Emperor Constantine Porphyrogenitus' De Administrando Imperio in the mid 10th century, at the end of a chapter (Chap. 32) entitled Of the Serbs and the country in which they now dwell.[32] This has been scholarly interpreted in several ways and used especially by the Serb national ideologists to prove Bosnia as originally a "Serb" land. Other scholars have asserted the inclusion of Bosnia into Chapter 32 to merely be the result of Serbian Grand Duke Časlav's temporary rule over Bosnia at the time, while also pointing out Porphyrogenitus does not say anywhere explicitly that Bosnia is a "Serb land".[33] In fact, the very translation of the critical sentence where the word Bosona (Bosnia) appears is subject to varying interpretation.[32]
+
+In time, Bosnia formed a unit under its own ruler, who called himself Bosnian.[30] Bosnia, along with other territories, became part of Duklja in the 11th century, although it retained its own nobility and institutions.[34]
+
+In the High Middle Ages political circumstance led to the area being contested between the Kingdom of Hungary and the Byzantine Empire. Following another shift of power between the two in the early 12th century, Bosnia found itself outside the control of both and emerged as the Banate of Bosnia (under the rule of local bans).[20][35] The first Bosnian ban known by name was Ban Borić.[36] The second was Ban Kulin whose rule marked the start of a controversy involving the Bosnian Church – considered heretical by the Roman Catholic Church. In response to Hungarian attempts to use church politics regarding the issue as a way to reclaim sovereignty over Bosnia, Kulin held a council of local church leaders to renounce the heresy and embraced Catholicism in 1203. Despite this, Hungarian ambitions remained unchanged long after Kulin's death in 1204, waning only after an unsuccessful invasion in 1254. During this time the population was called Dobri Bošnjani ("Good Bosnians").[37][38] The names Serb and Croat, though occasionally appearing in peripheral areas, were not used in Bosnia proper.[39]
+
+Bosnian history from then until the early 14th century was marked by a power struggle between the Šubić and Kotromanić families. This conflict came to an end in 1322, when Stephen II Kotromanić became Ban. By the time of his death in 1353, he was successful in annexing territories to the north and west, as well as Zahumlje and parts of Dalmatia. He was succeeded by his ambitious nephew Tvrtko who, following a prolonged struggle with nobility and inter-family strife, gained full control of the country in 1367. By the year 1377, Bosnia was elevated into a kingdom with the coronation of Tvrtko as the first Bosnian King in Mile near Visoko in the Bosnian heartland.[40][41][42]
+
+Following his death in 1391 however, Bosnia fell into a long period of decline. The Ottoman Empire had started its conquest of Europe and posed a major threat to the Balkans throughout the first half of the 15th century. Finally, after decades of political and social instability, the Kingdom of Bosnia ceased to exist in 1463 after its conquest by the Ottoman Empire.[citation needed]
+
+The Ottoman conquest of Bosnia marked a new era in the country's history and introduced drastic changes in the political and cultural landscape. The Ottomans incorporating Bosnia as an integral province of the Ottoman Empire with its historical name and territorial integrity.[43]
+
+Within Bosnia the Ottomans introduced a number of key changes in the territory's socio-political administration; including a new landholding system, a reorganization of administrative units, and a complex system of social differentiation by class and religious affiliation.[20]
+
+The four centuries of Ottoman rule also had a drastic impact on Bosnia's population make-up, which changed several times as a result of the empire's conquests, frequent wars with European powers, forced and economic migrations, and epidemics. A native Slavic-speaking Muslim community emerged and eventually became the largest of the ethno-religious groups due to lack of strong Christian church organizations and continuous rivalry between the Orthodox and Catholic churches, while the indigenous Bosnian Church disappeared altogether (ostensibly by conversion of its members to Islam). The Ottomans referred to them as kristianlar while the Orthodox and Catholics were called gebir or kafir, meaning "unbeliever".[44] The Bosnian Franciscans (and the Catholic population as a whole) were protected by official imperial decrees and in accordance and full extent of Ottoman laws, however in effect, these often merely affected arbitrary rule and behavior of powerful local elite.[20]
+
+As the Ottoman Empire continued their rule in the Balkans (Rumelia), Bosnia was somewhat relieved of the pressures of being a frontier province, and experienced a period of general welfare. A number of cities, such as Sarajevo and Mostar, were established and grew into regional centers of trade and urban culture and were then visited by Ottoman traveler Evliya Çelebi in 1648. Within these cities, various Ottoman Sultans financed the construction of many works of Bosnian architecture such as the country's first library in Sarajevo, madrassas, a school of Sufi philosophy, and a clock tower (Sahat Kula), bridges such as the Stari Most, the Tsar's Mosque and the Gazi Husrev-beg's Mosque.[citation needed]
+
+Furthermore, several Bosnian Muslims played influential roles in the Ottoman Empire's cultural and political history during this time.[45] Bosnian recruits formed a large component of the Ottoman ranks in the battles of Mohács and Krbava field, while numerous other Bosnians rose through the ranks of the Ottoman military to occupy the highest positions of power in the Empire, including admirals such as Matrakçı Nasuh; generals such as Isa-Beg Isaković, Gazi Husrev-beg and Hasan Predojević and Sarı Süleyman Paşa; administrators such as Ferhat-paša Sokolović and Osman Gradaščević; and Grand Viziers such as the influential Mehmed Paša Sokolović and Damad Ibrahim Pasha. Some Bosnians emerged as Sufi mystics, scholars such as Muhamed Hevaji Uskufi Bosnevi, Ali Džabič; and poets in the Turkish, Albanian, Arabic, and Persian languages.[46]
+
+However, by the late 17th century the Empire's military misfortunes caught up with the country, and the end of the Great Turkish War with the treaty of Karlowitz in 1699 again made Bosnia the Empire's westernmost province. The 18th century was marked by further military failures, numerous revolts within Bosnia, and several outbursts of plague.[47]
+
+The Porte's efforts at modernizing the Ottoman state were met with distrust growing to hostility in Bosnia, where local aristocrats stood to lose much through the proposed Tanzimat reforms. This, combined with frustrations over territorial, political concessions in the north-east, and the plight of Slavic Muslim refugees arriving from the Sanjak of Smederevo into Bosnia Eyalet, culminated in a partially unsuccessful revolt by Husein Gradaščević, who endorsed a Bosnia Eyalet autonomous from the authoritarian rule of the Ottoman Sultan Mahmud II, who persecuted, executed and abolished the Janissaries and reduced the role of autonomous Pashas in Rumelia. Mahmud II sent his Grand Vizier to subdue Bosnia Eyalet and succeeded only with the reluctant assistance of Ali-paša Rizvanbegović.[46] Related rebellions were extinguished by 1850, but the situation continued to deteriorate.
+
+New nationalist movements appeared in Bosnia by the middle of the 19th century. Bolstered by Serbia's breakaway from the Ottoman Empire in the early 19th century, Serbian nationalists began making contacts and sending nationalist propaganda claiming Bosnia as a Serbian province. In the neighboring Habsburg Empire across the Ottoman border, Croatian nationalists made similar claims about Bosnia as a Croatian province. The rise of these competing movements marked the beginning of nationalist politics in Bosnia, which continued to grow in the rest of the 19th and 20th centuries.[48]
+
+Agrarian unrest eventually sparked the Herzegovinian rebellion, a widespread peasant uprising, in 1875. The conflict rapidly spread and came to involve several Balkan states and Great Powers, a situation that led to the Congress of Berlin and the Treaty of Berlin in 1878.[20]
+
+At the Congress of Berlin in 1878, the Austro-Hungarian Foreign Minister Gyula Andrássy obtained the occupation and administration of Bosnia and Herzegovina, and he also obtained the right to station garrisons in the Sanjak of Novi Pazar, which would remain under Ottoman administration until 1908, when the Austro-Hungarian troops withdrew from the Sanjak.
+
+Although Austro-Hungarian officials quickly came to an agreement with Bosnians, tensions remained and a mass emigration of Bosnians occurred.[20] However, a state of relative stability was reached soon enough and Austro-Hungarian authorities were able to embark on a number of social and administrative reforms they intended would make Bosnia and Herzegovina into a "model" colony.
+
+Habsburg rule had several key concerns in Bosnia. It tried to dissipate the South Slav nationalism by disputing the earlier Serb and Croat claims to Bosnia and encouraging identification of Bosnian or Bosniak identity.[49] Habsburg rule also tried to provide for modernisation by codifying laws, introducing new political institutions, and establishing and expanding industries.[50]
+
+Austria–Hungary began to plan annexation of Bosnia, but due to international disputes the issue was not resolved until the annexation crisis of 1908.[51] Several external matters affected status of Bosnia and its relationship with Austria–Hungary. A bloody coup occurred in Serbia in 1903, which brought a radical anti-Austrian government into power in Belgrade.[52] Then in 1908, the revolt in the Ottoman Empire raised concerns the Istanbul government might seek the outright return of Bosnia-Herzegovina. These factors caused the Austro-Hungarian government to seek a permanent resolution of the Bosnian question sooner, rather than later.
+
+Taking advantage of turmoil in the Ottoman Empire, Austro-Hungarian diplomacy tried to obtain provisional Russian approval for changes over the status of Bosnia Herzegovina and published the annexation proclamation on 6 October 1908.[53] Despite international objections to the Austro-Hungarian annexation, Russians and their client state, Serbia, were compelled to accept the Austrian-Hungarian annexation of Bosnia Herzegovina in March 1909.
+
+In 1910, Habsburg Emperor Franz Joseph proclaimed the first constitution in Bosnia, which led to relaxation of earlier laws, elections and formation of the Bosnian parliament, and growth of new political life.[54]
+
+On 28 June 1914, a Yugoslav nationalist youth named Gavrilo Princip, a member of the secret Serbian-supported movement, Young Bosnia, assassinated the heir to the Austro-Hungarian throne, Archduke Franz Ferdinand, in Sarajevo—an event that was the spark that set off World War I. At the end of the war, the Bosniaks had lost more men per capita than any other ethnic group in the Habsburg Empire whilst serving in the Bosnian-Herzegovinian Infantry (known as Bosniaken) of the Austro-Hungarian Army.[55] Nonetheless, Bosnia and Herzegovina as a whole managed to escape the conflict relatively unscathed.[45]
+
+The Austro-Hungarian authorities established an auxiliary militia known as the Schutzkorps with a moot role in the empire's policy of anti-Serb repression.[56] Schutzkorps, predominantly recruited among the Muslim (Bosniak) population, were tasked with hunting down rebel Serbs (the Chetniks and Komiti)[57] and became known for their persecution of Serbs particularly in Serb populated areas of eastern Bosnia, where they partly retaliated against Serbian Chetniks who in fall 1914 had carried out attacks against the Muslim population in the area.[58][59] The proceedings of the Austro-Hungarian authorities led to around 5,500 citizens of Serb ethnicity in Bosnia and Herzegovina being arrested, and between 700 and 2,200 died in prison while 460 were executed.[57] Around 5,200 Serb families were forcibly expelled from Bosnia and Herzegovina.[57]
+
+Following World War I, Bosnia and Herzegovina joined the South Slav Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes (soon renamed Yugoslavia). Political life in Bosnia at this time was marked by two major trends: social and economic unrest over property redistribution, and formation of several political parties that frequently changed coalitions and alliances with parties in other Yugoslav regions.[45]
+
+The dominant ideological conflict of the Yugoslav state, between Croatian regionalism and Serbian centralization, was approached differently by Bosnia's major ethnic groups and was dependent on the overall political atmosphere.[20] The political reforms brought about in the newly established Yugoslavian kingdom saw few benefits for the Bosniaks; according to the 1910 final census of land ownership and population according to religious affiliation conducted in Austro-Hungary, Muslims (Bosniaks) owned 91.1%, Orthodox Serbians owned 6.0%, Croatian Catholics owned 2.6% and others, 0.3% of the property. Following the reforms Bosnian Muslims were dispossessed of a total of 1,175,305 hectares of agricultural and forest land.[60]
+
+Although the initial split of the country into 33 oblasts erased the presence of traditional geographic entities from the map, the efforts of Bosnian politicians such as Mehmed Spaho ensured the six oblasts carved up from Bosnia and Herzegovina corresponded to the six sanjaks from Ottoman times and, thus, matched the country's traditional boundary as a whole.[20]
+
+The establishment of the Kingdom of Yugoslavia in 1929, however, brought the redrawing of administrative regions into banates or banovinas that purposely avoided all historical and ethnic lines, removing any trace of a Bosnian entity.[20] Serbo-Croat tensions over the structuring of the Yugoslav state continued, with the concept of a separate Bosnian division receiving little or no consideration.
+
+The Cvetković-Maček Agreement that created the Croatian banate in 1939 encouraged what was essentially a partition of Bosnia between Croatia and Serbia.[46] However the rising threat of Adolf Hitler's Nazi Germany forced Yugoslav politicians to shift their attention. Following a period that saw attempts at appeasement, the signing of the Tripartite Treaty, and a coup d'état, Yugoslavia was finally invaded by Germany on 6 April 1941.[20]
+
+Once the kingdom of Yugoslavia was conquered by German forces in World War II, all of Bosnia was ceded to the Nazi puppet regime, the Independent State of Croatia (NDH). The NDH leaders embarked on a campaign of extermination of Serbs, Jews, Romani as well as dissident Croats, and, later, Josip Broz Tito's Partisans by setting up a number of death camps.[61]
+
+An estimated 209,000 Serbs and Montenegrins were killed on the territory of Bosnia–Herzegovina during the war.[62][dubious  – discuss] The Ustaše recognized both Roman Catholicism and Islam as the national religions, but held the position Eastern Orthodoxy, as a symbol of Serbian identity, was their greatest foe.[63] Although Croats were by far the largest ethnic group to constitute the Ustaše, the Vice President of the NDH and leader of the Yugoslav Muslim Organization Džafer Kulenović was a Muslim, and Muslims (Bosniaks) in total constituted nearly 12% of the Ustaše military and civil service authority.[64]
+
+Many Serbs themselves took up arms and joined the Chetniks, a Serb nationalist movement with the aim of establishing an ethnically homogeneous 'Greater Serbian' state[65] within the Kingdom of Yugoslavia. The Chetniks, in turn, persecuted and killed a large number of non-Serbs, communist Serbs and Communist sympathizers, with the Muslim population of Bosnia, Herzegovina and Sandžak being a primary target.[66] Once captured, Muslim villagers were systematically massacred by the Chetniks.[67] Of the 75,000 Muslims who lost their lives in Bosnia and Herzegovina during the war,[62] approximately 30,000 (mostly civilians) were killed by the Chetniks.[68]
+
+A percentage of Muslims served in Nazi Waffen-SS units.[69] Between 64,000 and 79,000 Bosnian Croats were killed between April 1941 to May 1945.[62] Of these, about 18,000 were killed by the Chetniks.[68]
+
+On 12 October 1941, a group of 108 prominent Sarajevan Muslims signed the Resolution of Sarajevo Muslims by which they condemned the persecution of Serbs organized by the Ustaše, made distinction between Muslims who participated in such persecutions and the Muslim population as a whole, presented information about the persecutions of Muslims by Serbs, and requested security for all citizens of the country, regardless of their identity.[70]
+
+Starting in 1941, Yugoslav communists under the leadership of Josip Broz Tito organized their own multi-ethnic resistance group, the partisans, who fought against both Axis and Chetnik forces. On 29 November 1943 the Anti-Fascist Council of National Liberation of Yugoslavia with Tito at its helm held a founding conference in Jajce where Bosnia and Herzegovina was reestablished as a republic within the Yugoslavian federation in its Habsburg borders.[71]
+
+Military success eventually prompted the Allies to support the Partisans, resulting in the successful Maclean Mission, but Tito declined their offer to help and relied on his own forces instead. All the major military offensives by the antifascist movement of Yugoslavia against Nazis and their local supporters were conducted in Bosnia–Herzegovina and its peoples bore the brunt of fighting. More than 300,000 people died in Bosnia and Herzegovina in World War II.[72] At the end of the war the establishment of the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, with the constitution of 1946, officially made Bosnia and Herzegovina one of six constituent republics in the new state.[20]
+
+Due to its central geographic position within the Yugoslavian federation, post-war Bosnia was selected as a base for the development of the military defense industry. This contributed to a large concentration of arms and military personnel in Bosnia; a significant factor in the war that followed the break-up of Yugoslavia in the 1990s.[20] However, Bosnia's existence within Yugoslavia, for the large part, was relatively peaceful and very prosperous, with high employment, a strong industrial and export oriented economy, a good education system and social and medical security for every citizen (of Bosnia and Herzegovina). Several international corporations operated in Bosnia — Volkswagen as part of TAS (car factory in Sarajevo, from 1972), Coca-Cola (from 1975), SKF Sweden (from 1967), Marlboro, (a tobacco factory in Sarajevo), and Holiday Inn hotels. Sarajevo was the site of the 1984 Winter Olympics.
+
+During the 1950s and 1960s Bosnia was a political backwater of the Republic of Yugoslavia. In the 1970s a strong Bosnian political elite arose, fueled in part by Tito's leadership in the Non-Aligned Movement and Bosnians serving in Yugoslavia's diplomatic corps. While working within the Socialist system, politicians such as Džemal Bijedić, Branko Mikulić and Hamdija Pozderac reinforced and protected the sovereignty of Bosnia and Herzegovina.[73] Their efforts proved key during the turbulent period following Tito's death in 1980, and are today considered some of the early steps towards Bosnian independence. However, the republic did not escape the increasingly nationalistic climate of the time. With the fall of communism and the start of the break-up of Yugoslavia, doctrine of tolerance began to lose its potency, creating an opportunity for nationalist elements in the society to spread their influence.[citation needed]
+
+On 18 November 1990, multi-party parliamentary elections were held throughout Bosnia and Herzegovina. A second round followed on 25 November, resulting in a national assembly where communist power was replaced by a coalition of three ethnically-based parties.[74] Following Slovenia and Croatia's declarations of independence from Yugoslavia, a significant split developed among the residents of Bosnia and Herzegovina on the issue of whether to remain within Yugoslavia (overwhelmingly favored by Serbs) or seek independence (overwhelmingly favored by Bosniaks and Croats).[citation needed]
+
+The Serb members of parliament, consisting mainly of the Serb Democratic Party members, abandoned the central parliament in Sarajevo, and formed the Assembly of the Serb People of Bosnia and Herzegovina on 24 October 1991, which marked the end of the tri-ethnic coalition that governed after the elections in 1990. This Assembly established the Serbian Republic of Bosnia and Herzegovina in part of the territory of Bosnia and Herzegovina on 9 January 1992. It was renamed Republika Srpska in August 1992. On 18 November 1991, the party branch in Bosnia and Herzegovina of the ruling party in the Republic of Croatia, the Croatian Democratic Union (HDZ), proclaimed the existence of the Croatian Community of Herzeg-Bosnia in a separate part of the territory of Bosnia and Herzegovina with the Croatian Defence Council (HVO) as its military branch.[75] It went unrecognized by the Government of Bosnia and Herzegovina, which declared it illegal.[76][77]
+
+A declaration of the sovereignty of Bosnia and Herzegovina on 15 October 1991 was followed by a referendum for independence on 29 February/1 March 1992, which was boycotted by the great majority of Serbs. The turnout in the independence referendum was 63.4 percent and 99.7 percent of voters voted for independence.[78] Bosnia and Herzegovina declared independence on 3 March 1992 and received international recognition the following month on 6 April 1992.[79] The Republic of Bosnia and Herzegovina was subsequently admitted as a member state of the United Nations on 22 May 1992.[80] Serbian leader Slobodan Milošević and Croatian leader Franjo Tuđman are believed to have agreed on a partition of Bosnia and Herzegovina in March 1991, with the aim of establishing Greater Serbia and Greater Croatia.[81]
+
+Following Bosnia and Herzegovina's declaration of independence, Bosnian Serb militias mobilized in different parts of the country. Government forces were poorly equipped and unprepared for the war.[82] International recognition of Bosnia and Herzegovina increased diplomatic pressure for the Yugoslav People's Army (JNA) to withdraw from the republic's territory, which they officially did in June 1992. The Bosnian Serb members of the JNA simply changed insignia, formed the Army of Republika Srpska (VRS), and continued fighting. Armed and equipped from JNA stockpiles in Bosnia, supported by volunteers and various paramilitary forces from Serbia, and receiving extensive humanitarian, logistical and financial support from the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, Republika Srpska's offensives in 1992 managed to place much of the country under its control.[20] The Bosnian Serb advance was accompanied by the ethnic cleansing of Bosniaks and Bosnian Croats from VRS-controlled areas. Dozens of concentration camps were established in which inmates were subjected to violence and abuse, including rape.[83] The ethnic cleansing culminated in the Srebrenica massacre of more than 8,000 Bosniak men and boys in July 1995, which was ruled to have been a genocide by the ICTY.[84] Bosniak and Bosnian Croat forces also committed war crimes against civilians from different ethnic groups, though on a smaller scale.[85][86][87][88] Most of the Bosniak and Croat atrocities were committed during the Bosniak-Croat war, a sub-conflict of the Bosnian War that pitted the Army of the Federation of Bosnia and Herzegovina (ARBiH) against the HVO. The Bosniak-Croat conflict ended in March 1994, with the signing of the Washington Agreement, leading to the creation of a joint Bosniak-Croat Federation of Bosnia and Herzegovina, which amalgamated HVO-held territory with that held by the ARBiH.[citation needed]
+
+Following the Srebrenica massacre, NATO launched a bombing campaign against Republika Srpska in August 1995. The bombing, together with a joint HV/HVO/ARBiH ground offensive in western Bosnia, convinced the Bosnian Serb leadership to consider a negotiated settlement, which manifested itself in the Dayton Agreement of December 1995. It brought an end to active combat and roughly established the basic political structure of the present-day state. A NATO-led peacekeeping force was immediately dispatched to the country to enforce the agreement. An estimated 100,000 people were killed in the war, about two-thirds of whom were Bosniak.[89] An additional 2.2 million citizens of Bosnia and Herzegovina of all ethnicities were displaced.[90] The International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) has ruled the conflict involved the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia (subsequently Serbia and Montenegro),[91] as well as Croatia.[92] Dozens of Bosnian Serb officials and soldiers have been convicted for their role in war crimes and crimes against humanity during the conflict, as well as for the genocide in Srebrenica. Several high-ranking Croat and Bosniak officials have also been convicted.[93] Victims' remains continue to be unearthed.[94] After the war, the Government of Bosnia and Herzegovina brought a lawsuit against Serbia before the International Court of Justice (ICJ), accusing the country of genocide. In 2007, the ICJ exonerated Serbia of direct responsibility for the genocide committed by Bosnian Serb forces in Srebrenica, but concluded the country had not done enough to prevent the massacre.[95]
+
+On 4 February 2014, the protests against the government of the Federation of Bosnia and Herzegovina, one of the country's two entities, dubbed the Bosnian Spring, the name being taken from the Arab Spring, began in the northern town of Tuzla. Workers from several factories that had been privatised and had gone bankrupt united to demand action over jobs, and unpaid salaries and pensions.[96] Soon protests spread to the rest of the Federation, with violent clashes reported in close to 20 towns, the biggest of which were Sarajevo, Zenica, Mostar, Bihać, Brčko and Tuzla.[97] The Bosnian news media reported hundreds of people had been injured during the protests, including dozens of police officers, with bursts of violence in Sarajevo, in the northern city of Tuzla, in Mostar in the south, and in Zenica in central Bosnia. The same level of unrest or activism did not occur in the Republika Srpska, but hundreds of people also gathered in support of protests in the town of Banja Luka against its separate government.[98][99][100]
+
+The protests marked the largest outbreak of public anger over high unemployment and two decades of political inertia in the country since the end of the Bosnian War in 1995.[101]
+
+Bosnia is in the western Balkans, bordering Croatia (932 km or 579 mi) to the north and west, Serbia (302 km or 188 mi) to the east, and Montenegro (225 km or 140 mi) to the southeast. It has a coastline about 20 kilometres (12 miles) long surrounding the city of Neum.[102][103] It lies between latitudes 42° and 46° N, and longitudes 15° and 20° E.
+
+The country's name comes from the two alleged regions Bosnia and Herzegovina whose border was never defined. Historically, Bosnia's official name never included any of its many regions until the Austria-Hungarian occupation.
+
+The country is mostly mountainous, encompassing the central Dinaric Alps. The northeastern parts reach into the Pannonian Plain, while in the south it borders the Adriatic. The Dinaric Alps generally run in a southeast–northwest direction, and get higher towards the south. The highest point of the country is the peak of Maglić at 2,386 metres (7,828.1 feet), on the Montenegrin border. Major mountains include Kozara, Grmeč, Vlašić, Čvrsnica, Prenj, Romanija, Jahorina, Bjelašnica and Treskavica. The geological composition of the Dinaric chain of mountains in Bosnia consists primarily of limestone (including Mesozoic limestone), with deposits of iron, coal, zinc, manganese, bauxite, lead, and salt present in some areas, especially in central and northern Bosnia.[104]
+
+Overall, nearly 50% of Bosnia and Herzegovina is forested. Most forest areas are in the centre, east and west parts of Bosnia. Herzegovina has drier Mediterranean climate, with dominant karst topography. Northern Bosnia (Posavina) contains very fertile agricultural land along the River Sava and the corresponding area is heavily farmed. This farmland is a part of the Pannonian Plain stretching into neighboring Croatia and Serbia. The country has only 20 kilometres (12 miles) of coastline,[102][105] around the town of Neum in the Herzegovina-Neretva Canton. Although the city is surrounded by Croatian peninsulas, by international law, Bosnia and Herzegovina has a right of passage to the outer sea.
+
+Sarajevo is the capital[1] and largest city.[106] Other major cities are Banja Luka and Bihać in the northwest region known as Bosanska Krajina, Bijeljina and Tuzla in the northeast, Zenica in the central part of Bosnia and Mostar, the largest city in Herzegovina.
+
+There are seven major rivers in Bosnia and Herzegovina:[107]
+
+Phytogeographically, Bosnia and Herzegovina belongs to the Boreal Kingdom and is shared between the Illyrian province of the Circumboreal Region and Adriatic province of the Mediterranean Region. According to the World Wide Fund for Nature, the territory of Bosnia and Herzegovina can be subdivided into three ecoregions: the Pannonian mixed forests, Dinaric Mountains mixed forests and Illyrian deciduous forests.
+
+As a result of the Dayton Accords, the civilian peace implementation is supervised by the High Representative for Bosnia and Herzegovina selected by the Peace Implementation Council. The High Representative is the highest political authority in the country. The High Representative has many governmental and legislative powers, including the dismissal of elected and non-elected officials. Due to the vast powers of the High Representative over Bosnian politics and essential veto powers, the position has also been compared to that of a viceroy.[108][109][110][111]
+
+Politics take place in a framework of a parliamentary representative democracy, whereby executive power is exercised by the Council of Ministers of Bosnia and Herzegovina. Legislative power is vested in both the Council of Ministers and the Parliamentary Assembly of Bosnia and Herzegovina. Members of the Parliamentary Assembly are chosen according to a proportional representation system.[112][113]
+
+Bosnia and Herzegovina is a liberal democracy. It has several levels of political structuring, according to the Dayton Accords. The most important of these levels is the division of the country into two entities: the Federation of Bosnia and Herzegovina and Republika Srpska. The Federation of Bosnia and Herzegovina covers 51% of Bosnia and Herzegovina's total area, while Republika Srpska covers 49%. The entities, based largely on the territories held by the two warring sides at the time, were formally established by the Dayton peace agreement in 1995 because of the tremendous changes in Bosnia and Herzegovina's ethnic structure. Since 1996, the power of the entities relative to the State government has decreased significantly. Nonetheless, entities still have numerous powers to themselves.
+
+The Brčko District in the north of the country was created in 2000, out of land from both entities. It officially belongs to both, but is governed by neither, and functions under a decentralized system of local government. For election purposes, Brčko District voters can choose to participate in either the Federation or Republika Srpska elections. The Brčko District has been praised for maintaining a multiethnic population and a level of prosperity significantly above the national average.[114]
+
+The third level of Bosnia and Herzegovina's political subdivision is manifested in cantons. They are unique to the Federation of Bosnia and Herzegovina entity, which consists of ten of them. Each has a cantonal government, which is under the law of the Federation as a whole. Some cantons are ethnically mixed and have special laws to ensure the equality of all constituent people.[citation needed]
+
+The fourth level of political division in Bosnia and Herzegovina is the municipality. The Federation of Bosnia and Herzegovina is divided into 74 municipalities, and Republika Srpska into 63. Municipalities also have their own local government, and are typically based on the most significant city or place in their territory. As such, many municipalities have a long tradition and history with their present boundaries. Some others, however, were only created following the recent war after traditional municipalities were split by the Inter-Entity Boundary Line. Each canton in the Federation of Bosnia and Herzegovina consists of several municipalities, which are divided into local communities.[citation needed]
+
+Besides entities, cantons, and municipalities, Bosnia and Herzegovina also has four "official" cities. These are: Banja Luka, Mostar, Sarajevo, and East Sarajevo. The territory and government of the cities of Banja Luka and Mostar corresponds to the municipalities of the same name, while the cities of Sarajevo and East Sarajevo officially consist of several municipalities. Cities have their own city government whose power is in between that of the municipalities and cantons (or the entity, in the case of Republika Srpska).
+
+More recently, several central institutions have been established (such as defense ministry, security ministry, state court, indirect taxation service and so on) in the process of transferring part of the jurisdiction from the entities to the state. The representation of the government of Bosnia and Herzegovina is by elites who represent the country's three major groups, with each having a guaranteed share of power.
+
+The Chair of the Presidency of Bosnia and Herzegovina rotates among three members (Bosniak, Serb, Croat), each elected as the Chair for an eight-month term within their four-year term as a member. The three members of the Presidency are elected directly by the people with Federation voters voting for the Bosniak and the Croat, and the Republika Srpska voters for the Serb.
+
+The Chair of the Council of Ministers is nominated by the Presidency and approved by the House of Representatives. He or she is then responsible for appointing a Foreign Minister, Minister of Foreign Trade, and others as appropriate.
+
+The Parliamentary Assembly is the lawmaking body in Bosnia and Herzegovina. It consists of two houses: the House of Peoples and the House of Representatives. The House of Peoples has 15 delegates chosen by parliaments of the entities, two-thirds of which come from the Federation (5 Croat and 5 Bosniaks) and one-third from the Republika Srpska (5 Serbs). The House of Representatives is composed of 42 Members elected by the people under a form of proportional representation (PR), two-thirds elected from the Federation and one-third elected from the Republika Srpska.[citation needed]
+
+The Constitutional Court of Bosnia and Herzegovina is the supreme, final arbiter of legal matters. It is composed of nine members: four members are selected by the House of Representatives of the Federation, two by the Assembly of the Republika Srpska, and three by the President of the European Court of Human Rights after consultation with the Presidency, but cannot be Bosnian citizens.[citation needed]
+
+However, the highest political authority in the country is the High Representative in Bosnia and Herzegovina, the chief executive officer for the international civilian presence in the country and is selected by the European Union. Since 1995, the High Representative has been able to bypass the elected parliamentary assembly, and since 1997 has been able to remove elected officials. The methods selected by the High Representative have been criticized as undemocratic.[115] International supervision is to end when the country is deemed politically and democratically stable and self-sustaining.
+
+The Armed Forces of Bosnia and Herzegovina (OSBiH) were unified into a single entity in 2005, with the merger of the Army of the Federation of Bosnia and Herzegovina and the Army of Republika Srpska, which had defended their respective regions. The Ministry of Defense was founded in 2004.
+
+The Bosnian military consists of the Bosnian Ground Forces and Air Force and Air Defense. The Ground Forces number 14,725 active and 7,000 reserve personnel. They are armed with a mix of American, Yugoslavian, Soviet, and European-made weaponry, vehicles, and military equipment. The Air Force and Air Defense Forces have 3,000 personnel and about 62 aircraft. The Air Defense Forces operate MANPADS hand-held missiles, surface-to-air missile (SAM) batteries, anti-aircraft cannons, and radar. The Army has recently adopted remodeled MARPAT uniforms, used by Bosnian soldiers serving with ISAF in Afghanistan. A domestic production program is now underway to ensure that army units are equipped with the correct ammunition.
+
+Beginning in 2007, the Ministry of Defence of Bosnia and Herzegovina undertook the army's first ever international assistance mission, enlisting the military to serve with ISAF peace missions to Afghanistan, Iraq and the Democratic Republic of Congo in 2007. Five officers, acting as officers/advisors, served in the Democratic Republic of Congo. 45 soldiers, mostly acting as base security and medical assistants, served in Afghanistan. 85 Bosnian soldiers served as base security in Iraq, occasionally conducting infantry patrols there as well. All three deployed groups have been commended by their respective international forces as well as the Ministry of Defence of Bosnia and Herzegovina. The international assistance operations are still ongoing.
+
+The Air Force and Anti-Aircraft Defence Brigade of Bosnia and Herzegovina was formed when elements of the Army of the Federation of Bosnia and Herzegovina and the Republika Srpska Air Force were merged in 2006. The Air Force has seen improvements in the last few years with added funds for aircraft repairs and improved cooperation with the Ground Forces as well as to the citizens of the country. The Ministry of Defense of Bosnia and Herzegovina is pursuing the acquisition of new aircraft including helicopters and perhaps even fighter jets.[116]
+
+EU integration is one of the main political objectives of Bosnia and Herzegovina; it initiated the Stabilisation and Association Process in 2007. Countries participating in the SAP have been offered the possibility to become, once they fulfill the necessary conditions, Member States of the EU. Bosnia and Herzegovina is therefore a potential candidate country for EU accession.[117]
+
+The implementation of the Dayton Accords of 1995 has focused the efforts of policymakers in Bosnia and Herzegovina, as well as the international community, on regional stabilization in the countries-successors of the former Yugoslavia.[citation needed]
+
+Within Bosnia and Herzegovina, relations with its neighbors of Croatia, Serbia and Montenegro have been fairly stable since the signing of the Dayton Agreement in 1995. On 23 April 2010, Bosnia and Herzegovina received the Membership Action Plan from NATO, which is the last step before full membership in the alliance. Full membership was expected in 2014 or 2015, depending on the progress of reforms.[118] In December 2018, NATO approved a Bosnian Membership Action Plan.[119]
+
+According to the 1991 census, Bosnia and Herzegovina had a population of 4,369,319, while the 1996 World Bank Group census showed a decrease to 3,764,425.[120] Large population migrations during the Yugoslav wars in the 1990s have caused demographic shifts in the country. Between 1991 and 2013, political disagreements made it impossible to organize a census. A census had been planned for 2011,[121] and then for 2012,[122] but was delayed until October 2013. The 2013 census found a total population of 3,791,622 people in 1.16 million households; 585,411 fewer people than the 1991 census.[123]
+
+Ethnic composition in Bosnia and Herzegovina as of 2013
+
+Bosnia and Herzegovina is home to three ethnic "constituent peoples", namely Bosniaks, Serbs, and Croats, plus a number of smaller groups including Jews and Roma.[124] According to data from 2013 census published by the Agency for Statistics of Bosnia and Herzegovina, Bosniaks constitute 50.11% of the population, Serbs 30.78%, Croats 15.43%, and others form 2.73%, with the remaining respondents not declaring their ethnicity or not answering.[11] The census results are contested by the Republika Srpska statistical office and by Bosnian Serb politicians.[125] The dispute over the census concerns the inclusion of non-permanent Bosnian residents in the figures, which Republika Srpska officials oppose.[126] The European Union's statistics office, Eurostat, concluded in May 2016 that the census methodology used by the Bosnian statistical agency is in line with international recommendations.[127]
+
+Bosnia's constitution does not specify any official languages.[128][129][130] However, academics Hilary Footitt and Michael Kelly note the Dayton Agreement states it is "done in Bosnian, Croatian, English and Serbian", and they describe this as the "de facto recognition of three official languages" at the state level. The equal status of Bosnian, Serbian and Croatian was verified by the Constitutional Court in 2000.[130] It ruled the provisions of the Federation and Republika Srpska constitutions on language were incompatible with the state constitution, since they only recognised "Bosniak" and Croatian (in the case of the Federation) and Serbian (in the case of Republika Srpska) as official languages at the entity level. As a result, the wording of the entity constitutions was changed and all three languages were made official in both entities.[130] The three standard languages are fully mutually intelligible and are known collectively under the appellation of Serbo-Croatian, despite this term not being formally recognized in the country. Use of one of the three languages has become a marker of ethnic identity.[131] Michael Kelly and Catherine Baker argue: "The three official languages of today's Bosnian state...represent the symbolic assertion of national identity over the pragmatism of mutual intelligibility".[132]
+
+According to the 1992 European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages, Bosnia and Herzegovina recognizes the following minority languages: Albanian, Montenegrin, Czech, Italian, Hungarian, Macedonian, German, Polish, Romani, Romanian, Rusyn, Slovak, Slovene, Turkish, Ukrainian and Jewish (Yiddish and Ladino).[133] The German minority in Bosnia and Herzegovina are mostly remnants of Donauschwaben (Danube Swabians), who settled in the area after the Habsburg monarchy claimed the Balkans from the Ottoman Empire. Due to expulsions and (forced) assimilation after the two World Wars, the number of ethnic Germans in Bosnia and Herzegovina was drastically diminished.[134]
+
+In a 2013 census, 52.86% of the population consider their mother tongue Bosnian, 30.76% Serbian, 14.6% Croatian and 1.57% another language, with 0.21% not giving an answer.[11]
+
+As per the census of 2013, Islam is the major religion with 51% Muslims, 46% Christians and remaining others 3%.[135][136]
+
+46% of the population identify as Christian; of these, the Serbian Orthodox Church makes up the largest group, accounting for 31% of the population (of whom most identify as Serbs), and the Roman Catholic Church 15% (of whom most identify as Croats). The smallest groups are Agnosticism 0.3%, Atheism 0.8% and other 1.15%, with the remainder not declaring their religion or not answering 1.1%.[11][137] A 2012 survey found 54% of Bosnia's Muslims are non-denominational Muslims, while 38% follow Sunnism.[136]
+
+Sarajevo is home to 395,133 inhabitants in its urban area which comprises the City of Sarajevo as well as municipalities of Ilidža, Vogošća, Istočna Ilidža, Istočno Novo Sarajevo and Istočni Stari Grad.[138] The metro area has a population of 555,210 and includes Sarajevo Canton, East Sarajevo and municipalities Breza, Kiseljak, Kreševo and Visoko.
+
+During the Bosnian War, the economy suffered €200 billion in material damages.[140] Bosnia and Herzegovina faces the dual-problem of rebuilding a war-torn country and introducing transitional liberal market reforms to its formerly mixed economy. One legacy of the previous era is a strong industry; under former republic president Džemal Bijedić and SFRY President Josip Broz Tito, metal industries were promoted in the republic, resulting in the development of a large share of Yugoslavia's plants; S.R. Bosnia and Herzegovina had a very strong industrial export oriented economy in the 1970s and 1980s, with large scale exports worth millions of US$.
+
+For most of Bosnia's history, agriculture has been conducted on privately owned farms; Fresh food has traditionally been exported from the republic.[141]
+
+The war in the 1990s, caused a dramatic change in the Bosnian economy.[142] GDP fell by 60% and the destruction of physical infrastructure devastated the economy.[143] With much of the production capacity unrestored, the Bosnian economy still faces considerable difficulties. Figures show GDP and per capita income increased 10% from 2003 to 2004; this and Bosnia's shrinking national debt being negative trends, and high unemployment 38.7% and a large trade deficit remain cause for concern.
+
+The national currency is the (Euro-pegged) Convertible Mark (KM), controlled by the currency board. Annual inflation is the lowest relative to other countries in the region at 1.9% in 2004.[144] The international debt was $5.1 billion (as on 31 December 2014). Real GDP growth rate was 5% for 2004 according to the Bosnian Central Bank of BiH and Statistical Office of Bosnia and Herzegovina.
+
+Bosnia and Herzegovina has displayed positive progress in the previous years, which decisively moved its place from the lowest income equality rank of income equality rankings fourteen out of 193 nations.[145]
+
+According to Eurostat data, Bosnia and Herzegovina's PPS GDP per capita stood at 29 per cent of the EU average in 2010.[146]
+
+The International Monetary Fund (IMF) announced a loan to Bosnia worth US$500 million to be delivered by Stand-By Arrangement. This was scheduled to be approved in September 2012.[147]
+
+The United States Embassy in Sarajevo, Bosnia and Herzegovina produces the Country Commercial Guide – an annual report that delivers a comprehensive look at Bosnia and Herzegovina's commercial and economic environment, using economic, political, and market analysis. It can be viewed on Embassy Sarajevo's website.
+
+By some estimates, grey economy is 25.5% of GDP.[148]
+
+In 2017, exports grew by 17% when compared to the previous year, totaling €5.65 billion.[149] The total volume of foreign trade in 2017 amounted to €14.97 billion and increased by 14% compared to the previous year. Imports of goods increased by 12% and amounted to €9.32 billion. The coverage of imports by exports has increased by 3% compared to the previous year and now it is 61 percent. In 2017, Bosnia and Herzegovina mostly exported car seats, electricity, processed wood, aluminum and furniture. In the same year, it mostly imported crude oil, automobiles, motor oil, coal and briquettes.[150]
+
+The unemployment rate in 2017 was 20.5%, but The Vienna Institute for International Economic Studies is predicting falling unemployment rate for the next few years. In 2018, the unemployment should be 19.4% and it should further fall to 18.8% in 2019. In 2020, the unemployment rate should go down to 18.3%.[151]
+
+On 31 December 2017, Council of Ministers of Bosnia and Herzegovina issued the report on public debt of Bosnia and Herzegovina, stating the public debt was reduced by €389.97 million, or by more than 6% when compared to 31 December 2016. By the end of 2017, public debt was €5.92 billion, which amounted to 35.6 percent of GDP.[152]
+
+As of 31 December 2017[update], there were 32,292 registered companies in the country, which together had revenues of €33.572 billion that same year.[153]
+
+In 2017, the country received €397.35 million in foreign direct investment, which equals to 2.5% of the GDP.[154]
+
+In 2017, Bosnia and Herzegovina ranked 3rd in the world in terms of the number of new jobs created by foreign investment, relative to the number of inhabitants.[155][156]
+
+In 2018, Bosnia and Herzegovina exported goods worth 11.9 billion KM (€6.07 billion), which is 7.43% higher than in the same period in 2017, while imports amounted to 19.27 billion KM (€9.83 billion), which is 5.47% higher.[157]
+
+The average price of new apartments sold in the country in the first 6 months of 2018 is 1,639 km (€886.31) per square meter. This represents a jump of 3.5% from the previous year.[158]
+
+On 30 June 2018, public debt of Bosnia and Herzegovina amounted to about €6.04 billion, of which external debt is 70.56 percent, while the internal debt is 29.4 percent of total public indebtedness. The share of public debt in gross domestic product is 34.92 percent.[159]
+
+In the first 7 months of 2018, 811,660 tourists visited the country, a 12.2% jump when compared to the first 7 months of 2017.[160]
+
+In the first 11 months of 2018, 1,378,542 tourists visited Bosnia-Herzegovina, an increase of 12.6%, and had 2,871,004 overnight hotel stays, a 13.8% increase from the previous year. Also, 71.8% of the tourists came from foreign countries.[161]
+
+In 2018, the total value of mergers and acquisitions in Bosnia and Herzegovina amounted to €404.6 million.[162]
+
+In 2018, 99.5 percent of enterprises in Bosnia and Herzegovina used computers in their business, while 99.3 percent had internet connections, according to a survey conducted by the Bosnia and Herzegovina Statistics Agency.[163]
+
+In 2018, Bosnia and Herzegovina received 783.4 million KM (€400.64 million) in direct foreign investment, which was equivalent to 2.3% of GDP.[164]
+
+In 2018, Central Bank of Bosnia and Herzegovina made a profit of 8,430,875 km (€4,306,347).[165]
+
+The World Bank predicts that the economy will grow 3.4% in 2019.[166]
+
+Bosnia and Herzegovina was placed 83rd on the Index of Economic Freedom for 2019. The total rating for Bosnia and Herzegovina is 61.9. This position represents some progress relative to the 91st place in 2018. This result is below the regional level, but still above the global average, making Bosnia and Herzegovina a "moderately free" country.[167]
+
+On 31 January 2019, total deposits in Bosnian banks were KM 21.9 billion (€11.20 billion), which represents 61.15% of nominal GDP.[168]
+
+In the second quarter of 2019, the average price of new apartments sold in Bosnia and Herzegovina was 1,606 km (€821.47) per square meter.[169]
+
+In the first six months of 2019, exports amounted to 5.829 billion KM (€2.98 billion), which is 0.1% less than in the same period of 2018, while imports amounted to 9.779 billion KM (€5.00 billion), which is by 4.5% more than in the same period of the previous year.[170]
+
+In the first seven months of 2019, 906,788 tourists visited the country, a 11.7% jump from the previous year.[171]
+
+In the first six months of 2019, foreign direct investment amounted to 650.1 million KM (€332.34 million).[172]
+
+Sarajevo International Airport (IATA: SJJ, ICAO: LQSA), also known as Butmir Airport, is the main international airport in Bosnia and Herzegovina, located 3.3 NM (6.1 km; 3.8 mi) southwest of the Sarajevo main railway station[173] in the city of Sarajevo in the suburb of Butmir.
+
+Railway operations in Bosnia and Herzegovina are successors of the Yugoslav Railways within the country boundaries following independence from the Former Yugoslavia in 1992.
+
+The Bosnian communications market was fully liberalised in January 2006. There are three landline telephone providers, although each one predominantly serves a partile services are provided by three operators, with nationwide services. Mobile data services are also available, including high-speed EDGE and 3G services.[174]
+
+Oslobođenje (Liberation), founded in 1943, is one of the country's longest running continuously circulating newspapers. There are many national publications, only some of which include the Dnevni Avaz (Daily Voice), founded in 1995, and Jutarnje Novine (Morning News) in circulation in Sarajevo.[175] Other local periodicals include the Croatian newspaper Hrvatska riječ and the Bosnian magazine Start, as well as the weekly newspapers Slobodna Bosna (Free Bosnia) and BH Dani (BH Days). Novi Plamen, a monthly magazine, is the most left-wing publication. The international news station Al Jazeera maintains a sister channel that caters to the Balkan region, Al Jazeera Balkans, broadcasting out of and based in Sarajevo.[176] Since 2014, the N1 platform began broadcasting as an affiliate of CNN International and has headquarters in Sarajevo, Zagreb, and Belgrade.[177]
+
+Additionally, the country is the most liberal in terms of freedom of the press in the region, ranking 43rd internationally.[178]
+
+As of December 2017[update], there are 3,064,072 internet users in the country or 86.77% of the entire population.[179]
+
+According to projections by the World Tourism Organization, Bosnia and Herzegovina will have the third highest tourism growth rate in the world between 1995 and 2020.[180]
+
+In 2018, 1.883.772 tourists visited Bosnia-Herzegovina, an increase of 44,1%, and had 3.843.484 overnight hotel stays, a 43.5% increase from the previous year. Also, 71.2% of the tourists came from foreign countries.[181]
+
+In 2017, 1,307,319 tourists visited Bosnia and Herzegovina, an increase of 13.7%, and had 2,677,125 overnight hotel stays, a 12.3% increase from the previous year. 71.5% of the tourists came from foreign countries.[182]
+
+In 2006, when ranking the best cities in the world, Lonely Planet placed Sarajevo, the national capital[1] and host of the 1984 Winter Olympic Games, as #43 on the list.[183] Tourism in Sarajevo is chiefly focused on historical, religious, and cultural aspects. In 2010, Lonely Planet's "Best in Travel" nominated it as one of the top ten cities to visit that year.[184] Sarajevo also won travel blog Foxnomad's "Best City to Visit" competition in 2012, beating more than one hundred other cities around the entire world.[185]
+
+Međugorje has become one of the most popular pilgrimage sites for Christians in the world and has turned into Europe's third most important religious place, where each year more than 1 million people visit.[186] It has been estimated that 30 million pilgrims have come to Međugorje since the reputed apparitions began in 1981.[187]
+
+Bosnia has also become an increasingly popular skiing and Ecotourism destination. Bosnia and Herzegovina remains one of the last undiscovered natural regions of the southern area of the Alps, with vast tracts of wild and untouched nature attracting adventurers and nature lovers. National Geographic magazine named Bosnia and Herzegovina as the best mountain biking adventure destination for 2012.[188] The central Bosnian Dinaric Alps are favored by hikers and mountaineers, containing both Mediterranean and Alpine climates. Whitewater rafting is somewhat of a national pastime, with three rivers, including the deepest river canyon in Europe, the Tara River Canyon.[180]
+
+Most recently, the Huffington Post named Bosnia and Herzegovina the "9th Greatest Adventure in the World for 2013", adding that the country boasts "the cleanest water and air in Europe; the greatest untouched forests; and the most wildlife. The best way to experience is the three rivers trip, which purls through the best the Balkans have to offer."[189]
+
+Some of the tourist attractions in Bosnia and Herzegovina include:
+
+Higher education has a long and rich tradition in Bosnia and Herzegovina. The first bespoke higher-education institution was a school of Sufi philosophy established by Gazi Husrev-beg in 1531. Numerous other religious schools then followed. In 1887, under the Austro-Hungarian Empire, a Sharia law school began a five-year program.[191] In the 1940s the University of Sarajevo became the city's first secular higher education institute. In the 1950s post-bachelaurate graduate degrees became available.[192] Severely damaged during the war, it was recently rebuilt in partnership with more than 40 other universities. There are various other institutions of higher education, including: University "Džemal Bijedić" of Mostar, University of Banja Luka, University of Mostar, University of East Sarajevo, University of Tuzla, American University in Bosnia and Herzegovina and the Academy of Sciences and Arts of Bosnia and Herzegovina, which is held in high regard as one of the most prestigious creative arts academies in the region.
+
+Also, Bosnia and Herzegovina is home to several private and international higher education institutions, some of which are:
+
+Primary schooling lasts for nine years. Secondary education is provided by general and technical secondary schools (typically Gymnasiums) where studies typically last for four years. All forms of secondary schooling include an element of vocational training. Pupils graduating from general secondary schools obtain the Matura and can enroll in any tertiary educational institution or academy by passing a qualification examination prescribed by the governing body or institution. Students graduating technical subjects obtain a Diploma.[193]
+
+The architecture of Bosnia and Herzegovina is largely influenced by four major periods where political and social changes influenced the creation of distinct cultural and architectural habits of the population. Each period made its influence felt and contributed to a greater diversity of cultures and architectural language in this region.
+
+Some television, magazines, and newspapers in Bosnia and Herzegovina are state-owned, and some are for-profit corporations funded by advertising, subscription, and other sales-related revenues. The Constitution of Bosnia and Herzegovina guarantees freedom of speech.
+
+As a country in transition with a post-war legacy and a complex domestic political structure Bosnia and Herzegovina's media system is under transformation. In the early post-war period (1995–2005), media development was guided mainly by international donors and cooperation agencies, who invested to help reconstruct, diversify, democratize and professionalize media outlets.[194][195]
+
+Post-war developments included the establishment of an independent Communication Regulatory Agency, the adoption of a Press Code, the establishment of the Press Council, the decriminalization of label and defamation, the introduction of a rather advanced Freedom of Access to Information Law, and the creation of a Public Service Broadcasting System from the formerly state-owned broadcaster.
+Yet, internationally backed positive developments have been often obstructed by domestic elites, and the professionalisation of media and journalists has proceeded only slowly. High levels of partisanship and linkages between the media and the political systems hinder the adherence to professional code of conducts.[195]
+
+Bosnia and Herzegovina has a rich literature, including the Nobel prize winner Ivo Andrić and poets such as Croat Antun Branko Šimić, Aleksa Šantić, Jovan Dučić and Mak Dizdar, writers such as Zlatko Topčić, Meša Selimović, Semezdin Mehmedinović, Miljenko Jergović, Isak Samokovlija, Safvet beg Bašagić, Abdulah Sidran, Petar Kočić, Aleksandar Hemon, and Nedžad Ibrišimović. The National Theater was founded 1919 in Sarajevo and its first director was the dramatist Branislav Nušić.
+Magazines such as Novi Plamen or Sarajevske sveske are some of the more prominent publications covering cultural and literary themes.
+
+The art of Bosnia and Herzegovina was always evolving and ranged from the original medieval tombstones called Stećci to paintings in Kotromanić court. However, only with the arrival of Austro-Hungarians did the painting renaissance in Bosnia really begin to flourish. The first educated artists from European academies appeared with the beginning of the 20th century. Among those are: Gabrijel Jurkić, Petar Šain, Roman Petrović and Lazar Drljača.
+
+After World War II artists like Mersad Berber and Safet Zec rose in popularity.
+
+In 2007, Ars Aevi, a museum of contemporary art that includes works by renowned world artists was founded in Sarajevo.
+
+Typical Bosnian and Herzegovinian songs are ganga, rera, and the traditional Slavic music for the folk dances such as kolo and from Ottoman era the most popular is sevdalinka. Pop and Rock music has a tradition here as well, with the more famous musicians including Dino Zonić, Goran Bregović, Davorin Popović, Kemal Monteno, Zdravko Čolić, Elvir Laković, Edo Maajka, Hari Mata Hari and Dino Merlin. Other composers such as Đorđe Novković, Al' Dino, Haris Džinović, Kornelije Kovač, and many pop and rock bands, for example, Bijelo Dugme, Crvena Jabuka, Divlje Jagode, Indexi, Plavi Orkestar, Zabranjeno Pušenje, Ambasadori, Dubioza kolektiv, who were among the leading ones in the former Yugoslavia. Bosnia is home to the composer Dušan Šestić, the creator of the national anthem of Bosnia and Herzegovina and father of singer Marija Šestić, to the world known jazz musician, educator and Bosnian jazz ambassador Sinan Alimanović, composer Saša Lošić and pianist Saša Toperić. In the villages, especially in Herzegovina, Bosniaks, Serbs, and Croats play the ancient Gusle. The gusle is used mainly to recite epic poems in a usually dramatic tone.
+
+Probably the most distinctive and identifiably "Bosnian" of music, Sevdalinka is a kind of emotional, melancholic folk song that often describes sad subjects such as love and loss, the death of a dear person or heartbreak. Sevdalinkas were traditionally performed with a saz, a Turkish string instrument, which was later replaced by the accordion. However the more modern arrangement, to the derision of some purists, is typically a vocalist accompanied by the accordion along with snare drums, upright bass, guitars, clarinets and violins.
+
+Rural folk traditions in Bosnia and Herzegovina include the shouted, polyphonic ganga and "ravne pjesme" (flat song) styles, as well as instruments like a droneless bagpipe, wooden flute and šargija. The gusle, an instrument found throughout the Balkans, is also used to accompany ancient Slavic epic poems. There are also Bosnian folk songs in the Ladino language, derived from the area's Jewish population.
+
+Bosnian roots music came from Middle Bosnia, Posavina, the Drina valley and Kalesija. It is usually performed by singers with two violinists and a šargija player. These bands first appeared around World War I and became popular in the 1960s. This is the third oldest music following after the sevdalinka and ilahija. Self-taught people, mostly in two or three members of the different choices of old instruments, mostly in the violin, sacking, saz, drums, flutes (zurle) or wooden flute, as others have already called, the original performers of Bosnian music that can not be written notes, transmitted by ear from generation to generation, family is usually hereditary. It is thought to be brought from Persia-Kalesi tribe that settled in the area of present Sprecanski valleys and hence probably the name Kalesija. In this part of Bosnia it is the most common. Again, it became the leader of First World War onwards, as well as 60 years in the field Sprecanski doline. This kind of music was enjoyed by all three peoples in Bosnia, Bosniaks, Croats and Serbs, and it contributed a lot to reconcile people socializing, entertainment and other organizations through festivala. In Kalesija it is maintained each year with the Bosnian Festival Original music.
+
+Studio Kemix firm Dzemal Dzihanovic from Živinice together with his artists brought this kind of music to perfection at the end 20th century. With its entirely new form of modernity, it is most common in the Tuzla Canton and the cradle of this music city Živinice was named Bosnian town of original music. Songs are performed preferably in a diphthong, the first and second voice which is a special secret performance of this music and some performers sing in troglasju as they do Kalesijski triple that was recorded in 1968, as the first written record of the tone on the album, along with Higurashi no naku.
+
+Sarajevo is internationally renowned for its eclectic and diverse selection of festivals. The Sarajevo Film Festival was established in 1995, during the Bosnian War and has become the premier and largest film festival in the Balkans and South-East Europe.
+
+Bosnia has a rich cinematic and film heritage, dating back to the Kingdom of Yugoslavia; many Bosnian filmmakers have achieved international prominence and some have won international awards ranging from the Academy Awards to multiple Palme d'Ors and Golden Bears. Some notable Bosnian screenwriters, directors and producers are Danis Tanović (known for the Academy Award– and Golden Globe Award–winning 2001 film No Man's Land and Silver Bear Grand Jury Prize–winning 2016 film Death in Sarajevo),[196] Emir Kusturica (won two Palme d'Or at Cannes), Jasmila Žbanić (won Golden Bear), Zlatko Topčić, Ademir Kenović, Dino Mustafić, Ahmed Imamović, Pjer Žalica, Aida Begić, Adis Bakrač, etc.
+
+Bosnian cuisine uses many spices, in moderate quantities. Most dishes are light, as they are boiled; the sauces are fully natural, consisting of little more than the natural juices of the vegetables in the dish. Typical ingredients include tomatoes, potatoes, onions, garlic, peppers, cucumbers, carrots, cabbage, mushrooms, spinach, zucchini, dried beans, fresh beans, plums, milk, paprika and cream called Pavlaka. Bosnian cuisine is balanced between Western and Eastern influences. As a result of the Ottoman administration for almost 500 years, Bosnian food is closely related to Turkish, Greek, and other former Ottoman and Mediterranean cuisines. However, because of years of Austrian rule, there are many influences from Central Europe. Typical meat dishes include primarily beef and lamb. Some local specialties are ćevapi, burek, dolma, sarma, pilav, goulash, ajvar and a whole range of Eastern sweets. Ćevapi is a grilled dish of minced meat, a type of kebab, popular in former Yugoslavia and considered a national dish in Bosnia and Herzegovina[197] and Serbia.[198][199][200] Local wines come from Herzegovina where the climate is suitable for growing grapes. Herzegovinian loza (similar to Italian Grappa but less sweet) is very popular. Plum (rakija) or apple (jabukovača) alcohol beverages are produced in the north. In the south, distilleries used to produce vast quantities of brandy and supply all of ex-Yugoslav alcohol factories (brandy is the base of most alcoholic drinks).
+
+Coffeehouses, where Bosnian coffee is served in džezva with rahat lokum and sugar cubes, proliferate Sarajevo and every city in the country. Coffee drinking is a favorite Bosnian pastime and part of the culture. Bosnia and Herzegovina is the ninth country in the entire world by per capita coffee consumption.[201]
+
+Bosnia and Herzegovina has produced many athletes, both as a state in Yugoslavia and independently after 1992. The most important international sporting event in the history of Bosnia and Herzegovina was the 14th Winter Olympics, held in Sarajevo from 7 to 19 February 1984.
+The Borac handball club has won seven Yugoslav Handball Championships, as well as the European Championship Cup in 1976 and the International Handball Federation Cup in 1991.
+
+Amel Mekić, Bosnian judoka, became European champion in 2011. Track and field athlete Amel Tuka won the bronze medal in 800 metres at the 2015 World Championships and Hamza Alić won the silver medal in shot put at the 2013 European Indoor Championships.
+
+The Bosna Royal basketball club from Sarajevo were European Champions in 1979. The Yugoslav national basketball team, which won medals in every world championship from 1963 through 1990, included Bosnian players such as FIBA Hall of Famers Dražen Dalipagić and Mirza Delibašić. Bosnia and Herzegovina regularly qualifies for the European Championship in Basketball, with players including Mirza Teletović, Nihad Đedović and Jusuf Nurkić. Bosnia and Herzegovina national u-16 team won two gold medals in 2015, winning both 2015 European Youth Summer Olympic Festival as well as 2015 FIBA Europe Under-16 Championship.
+
+Women's basketball club Jedinstvo Aida from Tuzla won Women's European Club Championship in 1989 and Ronchetti Cup final in 1990, led by Razija Mujanović, three times best female European basketball player, and Mara Lakić
+
+The Bosnian chess team was Champion of Yugoslavia seven times, in addition to club ŠK Bosna winning four European Chess Club Cups. Chess grandmaster Borki Predojević has also won two European Championships. The most impressive success of Bosnian Chess was runner-up position in Chess Olympiad of 1994 in Moscow, featuring Grandmasters Predrag Nikolić, Ivan Sokolov and Bojan Kurajica.
+
+Middle-weight boxer Marijan Beneš has won several Championships of Bosnia and Herzegovina, Yugoslav Championships and the European Championship.[202] In 1978, he won the World Title against Elisha Obed from the Bahamas.
+
+Association football is the most popular sport in Bosnia and Herzegovina. It dates from 1903, but its popularity grew significantly after World War I. Bosnian clubs FK Sarajevo and Željezničar, won the Yugoslav Championship, while the Yugoslav national football team included Bosnian players of all ethnic backgrounds and generations, such as Safet Sušić, Zlatko Vujović, Mehmed Baždarević, Davor Jozić, Faruk Hadžibegić, Predrag Pašić, Blaž Slišković, Vahid Halilhodžić, Dušan Bajević, Ivica Osim, Josip Katalinski, Tomislav Knez, Velimir Sombolac and numerous others. The Bosnia and Herzegovina national football team played at the 2014 FIFA World Cup, its first major tournament. Players on the team again includes notable players of all country's ethnic background, such as then and now captains Emir Spahić, Zvjezdan Misimović and Edin Džeko, defenders like Ognjen Vranješ, Sead Kolašinac and Toni Šunjić, midfielders like Miralem Pjanić and Senad Lulić, striker Vedad Ibišević, and so on.
+
+Former Bosnian footballers include Hasan Salihamidžić, who became only the second Bosnian to ever win a UEFA Champions League trophy, after Elvir Baljić. He made 234 appearances and scored 31 goals for German club FC Bayern Munich. Sergej Barbarez, who played for several clubs in the German Bundesliga including Borussia Dortmund, Hamburger SV and Bayer Leverkusen was joint-top scorer in the 2000–01 Bundesliga season with 22 goals. Meho Kodro spent most of his career playing in Spain most notably with Real Sociedad and FC Barcelona. Elvir Rahimić made 302 appearances for Russian club CSKA Moscow with whom he won the UEFA Cup in 2005. Milena Nikolić, member of women's national team, was 2013–14 UEFA Women's Champions League top scorer.
+
+Bosnia and Herzegovina was the world champion of volleyball at the 2004 Summer Paralympics and volleyball at the 2012 Summer Paralympics. Many among those on the team lost their legs in the Bosnian War.
+
+Tennis is also gaining a lot of popularity after the recent successes of Damir Džumhur and Mirza Bašić at Grand Slam level. Other notable tennis players who represented Bosnia are, Amer Delić and Mervana Jugić-Salkić.
+
+The Bosnian wartime militia (Schutzkorps), which became known for its persecution of Serbs, was overwhelmingly Muslim.
+
+
+
+Coordinates: 44°N 18°E / 44°N 18°E / 44; 18
+
+Una-Sana  Central Bosnia
+
+Posavina  Herzegovina-Neretva
+
+Tuzla  West Herzegovina
+
+Zenica-Doboj  Sarajevo
+
+Bosnian Podrinje
+ Canton 10

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+Bosnia and Herzegovina,[a] abbreviated BiH or B&H,[b] sometimes called Bosnia–Herzegovina and often known informally as Bosnia, is a country in South and Southeast Europe, located within the Balkans. Sarajevo is the capital and largest city.
+
+Bosnia and Herzegovina is bordered by Serbia to the east, Montenegro to the southeast, and Croatia to the north and southwest. It is not entirely landlocked; to the south it has a narrow coast on the Adriatic Sea, which is about 20 kilometres (12 miles) long and surrounds the town of Neum. The inland Bosnia region has a moderate continental climate, with hot summers and cold, snowy winters. In the central and eastern interior of the country the geography is mountainous, in the northwest moderately hilly, and in the northeast predominantly flatland. The smaller southern region, Herzegovina, has a Mediterranean climate and mostly mountainous topography.
+
+Bosnia and Herzegovina was settled at least from Upper Palaeolithic and has preserved prehistoric art found in Badanj cave. The permanent human settlement traces back to the Neolithic age, inhabited by cultures such as Butmir, Kakanj, and Vučedol. After arrival of the first Indo-Europeans it was populated by several Illyrian and Celtic civilizations. Culturally, politically, and socially, the country has a rich but complex history, having been first settled by the South Slavic peoples that populate the area today from the 6th through to the 9th centuries. In the 12th century the Banate of Bosnia was established, which evolved into the Kingdom of Bosnia in the 14th century, after which it was annexed into the Ottoman Empire, under whose rule it remained from the mid-15th to the late 19th centuries. The Ottomans brought Islam to the region, and altered much of the cultural and social outlook of the country. This was followed by annexation into the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy, which lasted up until World War I. In the interwar period, Bosnia and Herzegovina was part of the Kingdom of Yugoslavia and after World War II, it was granted full republic status in the newly formed Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia. Following the dissolution of Yugoslavia, the republic proclaimed independence in 1992, which was followed by the Bosnian War, lasting until late 1995 with the Dayton Agreement.
+
+The country is home to three main ethnic groups or, officially, constituent peoples, as specified in the constitution. Bosniaks are the largest group of the three, with Serbs second, and Croats third. A native of Bosnia and Herzegovina, regardless of ethnicity, is usually identified in English as a Bosnian. Minorities, defined under the constitutional nomenclature "Others", include Jews, Roma, Ukrainians, and Turks. Bosnia and Herzegovina has a bicameral legislature and a three-member Presidency composed of a member of each major ethnic group. However, the central government's power is highly limited, as the country is largely decentralized and comprises two autonomous entities: the Federation of Bosnia and Herzegovina and Republika Srpska, with a third unit, the Brčko District, governed under local government. The Federation of Bosnia and Herzegovina consists of 10 cantons.
+
+Bosnia and Herzegovina is a developing country and ranks 75th in terms of human development. Its economy is dominated by the industry and agriculture sectors, followed by the tourism and service sectors.[14] The country has a social security and universal healthcare system, and primary- and secondary-level education is tuition-free. It is a member of the UN, OSCE, Council of Europe, PfP, CEFTA, and a founding member of the Union for the Mediterranean upon its establishment in July 2008.[15] The country is an applicant for membership to the European Union and has been a candidate for NATO membership since April 2010, when it received a Membership Action Plan.[16] Bosnia and Herzegovina also experienced a significant rise in tourism in recent years.[17][18]
+
+The first preserved widely acknowledged mention of Bosnia is in De Administrando Imperio, a politico-geographical handbook written by the Byzantine emperor Constantine VII in the mid-10th century (between 948 and 952) describing the "small land" (χωρίον in Greek) of "Bosona" (Βοσώνα).[19]
+
+The name is believed to have derived from the hydronym of the river Bosna coursing through the Bosnian heartland. According to philologist Anton Mayer the name Bosna could derive from Illyrian *"Bass-an-as"), which would derive from the Proto-Indo-European root "bos" or "bogh"—meaning "the running water".[20] According to English medievalist William Miller the Slavic settlers in Bosnia "adapted the Latin designation [...] Basante, to their own idiom by calling the stream Bosna and themselves Bosniaks [...]".[21]
+
+The name Herzegovina ("herzog's [land]", from German word for "duke")[20] originates from Bosnian magnate Stjepan Vukčić Kosača's title, "Herceg (Herzog) of Hum and the Coast" (1448).[22] Hum, formerly Zahumlje, was an early medieval principality that was conquered by the Bosnian Banate in the first half of the 14th century. The region was administered by the Ottomans as the Sanjak of Herzegovina (Hersek) within the Eyalet of Bosnia up until the formation of the short-lived Herzegovina Eyalet in the 1830s, which remerged in the 1850s, after which the entity became commonly known as Bosnia and Herzegovina.[citation needed]
+
+On initial proclamation of independence in 1992, the country's official name was the Republic of Bosnia and Herzegovina but following the 1995 Dayton Agreement and the new constitution that accompanied it the official name was changed to Bosnia and Herzegovina.[23]
+
+Bosnia has been inhabited by humans since at least the Paleolithic, as one of the oldest cave paintings was found in Badanj cave. Major Neolithic cultures such as the Butmir and Kakanj were present along the river Bosna dated from c. 6230 BC – c. 4900 BC.
+
+The bronze culture of the Illyrians, an ethnic group with a distinct culture and art form, started to organize itself in today's Slovenia, Croatia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Serbia, Kosovo, Montenegro and Albania.
+
+From 8th century BC, Illyrian tribes evolved into kingdoms. The earliest recorded kingdom in Illyria (a region in the western part of the Balkan Peninsula inhabited by the Illyrians, as recorded in classical antiquity) was the Enchele in the 8th century BC. The era in which we observe other Illyrian kingdoms begins approximately at 400 BC and ends at 167 BC. The Autariatae under Pleurias (337 BC) were considered to have been a kingdom. The Kingdom of the Ardiaei (originally a tribe from the Neretva valley region) began at 230 BC and ended at 167 BC. The most notable Illyrian kingdoms and dynasties were those of Bardyllis of the Dardani and of Agron of the Ardiaei who created the last and best-known Illyrian kingdom. Agron ruled over the Ardiaei and had extended his rule to other tribes as well.
+
+From the 7th century BC, bronze was replaced by iron, after which only jewelry and art objects were still made out of bronze. Illyrian tribes, under the influence of Hallstatt cultures to the north, formed regional centers that were slightly different. Parts of Central Bosnia were inhabited by Daesitiates tribe most commonly associated with Central Bosnian cultural group. Iron Age Glasinac culture is associated with Autariatae tribe.
+
+A very important role in their life was the cult of the dead, which is seen in their careful burials and burial ceremonies, as well as the richness of their burial sites. In northern parts, there was a long tradition of cremation and burial in shallow graves, while in the south the dead were buried in large stone or earth tumuli (natively called gromile) that in Herzegovina were reaching monumental sizes, more than 50 m wide and 5 m high. Japodian tribes had an affinity to decoration (heavy, oversized necklaces out of yellow, blue or white glass paste, and large bronze fibulas, as well as spiral bracelets, diadems and helmets out of bronze foil).
+
+In the 4th century BC, the first invasion of Celts is recorded. They brought the technique of the pottery wheel, new types of fibulas and different bronze and iron belts. They only passed on their way to Greece, so their influence in Bosnia and Herzegovina is negligible. Celtic migrations displaced many Illyrian tribes from their former lands, but some Celtic and Illyrian tribes mixed. Concrete historical evidence for this period is scarce, but overall it appears the region was populated by a number of different peoples speaking distinct languages.
+
+In the Neretva Delta in the south, there were important Hellenistic influence of the Illyrian Daors tribe. Their capital was Daorson in Ošanići near Stolac. Daorson in the 4th century BC was surrounded by megalithic, 5 m high stonewalls (as large as those of Mycenae in Greece), composed of large trapezoid stone blocks. Daors made unique bronze coins and sculptures.
+
+Conflict between the Illyrians and Romans started in 229 BC, but Rome did not complete its annexation of the region until AD 9. It was precisely in modern-day Bosnia and Herzegovina that Rome fought one of the most difficult battles in its history since the Punic Wars, as described by the Roman historian Suetonius.[24] This was the Roman campaign against Illyricum, known as Bellum Batonianum.[25] The conflict arose after an attempt to recruit Illyrians, and a revolt spanned for four years (6–9 AD), after which they were subdued.[26] In the Roman period, Latin-speaking settlers from the entire Roman Empire settled among the Illyrians, and Roman soldiers were encouraged to retire in the region.[20]
+
+Following the split of the Empire between 337 and 395 AD, Dalmatia and Pannonia became parts of the Western Roman Empire. The region was conquered by the Ostrogoths in 455 AD. It subsequently changed hands between the Alans and the Huns. By the 6th century, Emperor Justinian had reconquered the area for the Byzantine Empire. Slavs overwhelmed the Balkans in the 6th and 7th centuries. Illyrian cultural traits were adopted by the South Slavs, as evidenced in certain customs and traditions, placenames, etc.[27]
+Timothy Gregory explains:
+
+Gregory, Timothy E. (2010). A History of Byzantium (2 ed.). Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell. p. 169.
+
+The Early Slavs raided the Western Balkans, including Bosnia, in the 6th and early 7th century (amid the Migration Period), and were composed of small tribal units drawn from a single Slavic confederation known to the Byzantines as the Sclaveni (whilst the related Antes, roughly speaking, colonized the eastern portions of the Balkans).[28][29]
+Tribes recorded by the ethnonyms of "Serb" and "Croat" are described as a second, latter, migration of different people during the second quarter of the 7th century who do not seem to have been particularly numerous;[28][30] these early "Serb" and "Croat" tribes, whose exact identity is subject to scholarly debate,[31] came to predominate over the Slavs in the neighbouring regions. The bulk of Bosnia proper, however, appears to have been a territory between Serb and Croat rule and is not enumerated as one of the regions settled by those tribes.[30]
+
+Bosnia is first mentioned as a land (horion Bosona) in Byzantine Emperor Constantine Porphyrogenitus' De Administrando Imperio in the mid 10th century, at the end of a chapter (Chap. 32) entitled Of the Serbs and the country in which they now dwell.[32] This has been scholarly interpreted in several ways and used especially by the Serb national ideologists to prove Bosnia as originally a "Serb" land. Other scholars have asserted the inclusion of Bosnia into Chapter 32 to merely be the result of Serbian Grand Duke Časlav's temporary rule over Bosnia at the time, while also pointing out Porphyrogenitus does not say anywhere explicitly that Bosnia is a "Serb land".[33] In fact, the very translation of the critical sentence where the word Bosona (Bosnia) appears is subject to varying interpretation.[32]
+
+In time, Bosnia formed a unit under its own ruler, who called himself Bosnian.[30] Bosnia, along with other territories, became part of Duklja in the 11th century, although it retained its own nobility and institutions.[34]
+
+In the High Middle Ages political circumstance led to the area being contested between the Kingdom of Hungary and the Byzantine Empire. Following another shift of power between the two in the early 12th century, Bosnia found itself outside the control of both and emerged as the Banate of Bosnia (under the rule of local bans).[20][35] The first Bosnian ban known by name was Ban Borić.[36] The second was Ban Kulin whose rule marked the start of a controversy involving the Bosnian Church – considered heretical by the Roman Catholic Church. In response to Hungarian attempts to use church politics regarding the issue as a way to reclaim sovereignty over Bosnia, Kulin held a council of local church leaders to renounce the heresy and embraced Catholicism in 1203. Despite this, Hungarian ambitions remained unchanged long after Kulin's death in 1204, waning only after an unsuccessful invasion in 1254. During this time the population was called Dobri Bošnjani ("Good Bosnians").[37][38] The names Serb and Croat, though occasionally appearing in peripheral areas, were not used in Bosnia proper.[39]
+
+Bosnian history from then until the early 14th century was marked by a power struggle between the Šubić and Kotromanić families. This conflict came to an end in 1322, when Stephen II Kotromanić became Ban. By the time of his death in 1353, he was successful in annexing territories to the north and west, as well as Zahumlje and parts of Dalmatia. He was succeeded by his ambitious nephew Tvrtko who, following a prolonged struggle with nobility and inter-family strife, gained full control of the country in 1367. By the year 1377, Bosnia was elevated into a kingdom with the coronation of Tvrtko as the first Bosnian King in Mile near Visoko in the Bosnian heartland.[40][41][42]
+
+Following his death in 1391 however, Bosnia fell into a long period of decline. The Ottoman Empire had started its conquest of Europe and posed a major threat to the Balkans throughout the first half of the 15th century. Finally, after decades of political and social instability, the Kingdom of Bosnia ceased to exist in 1463 after its conquest by the Ottoman Empire.[citation needed]
+
+The Ottoman conquest of Bosnia marked a new era in the country's history and introduced drastic changes in the political and cultural landscape. The Ottomans incorporating Bosnia as an integral province of the Ottoman Empire with its historical name and territorial integrity.[43]
+
+Within Bosnia the Ottomans introduced a number of key changes in the territory's socio-political administration; including a new landholding system, a reorganization of administrative units, and a complex system of social differentiation by class and religious affiliation.[20]
+
+The four centuries of Ottoman rule also had a drastic impact on Bosnia's population make-up, which changed several times as a result of the empire's conquests, frequent wars with European powers, forced and economic migrations, and epidemics. A native Slavic-speaking Muslim community emerged and eventually became the largest of the ethno-religious groups due to lack of strong Christian church organizations and continuous rivalry between the Orthodox and Catholic churches, while the indigenous Bosnian Church disappeared altogether (ostensibly by conversion of its members to Islam). The Ottomans referred to them as kristianlar while the Orthodox and Catholics were called gebir or kafir, meaning "unbeliever".[44] The Bosnian Franciscans (and the Catholic population as a whole) were protected by official imperial decrees and in accordance and full extent of Ottoman laws, however in effect, these often merely affected arbitrary rule and behavior of powerful local elite.[20]
+
+As the Ottoman Empire continued their rule in the Balkans (Rumelia), Bosnia was somewhat relieved of the pressures of being a frontier province, and experienced a period of general welfare. A number of cities, such as Sarajevo and Mostar, were established and grew into regional centers of trade and urban culture and were then visited by Ottoman traveler Evliya Çelebi in 1648. Within these cities, various Ottoman Sultans financed the construction of many works of Bosnian architecture such as the country's first library in Sarajevo, madrassas, a school of Sufi philosophy, and a clock tower (Sahat Kula), bridges such as the Stari Most, the Tsar's Mosque and the Gazi Husrev-beg's Mosque.[citation needed]
+
+Furthermore, several Bosnian Muslims played influential roles in the Ottoman Empire's cultural and political history during this time.[45] Bosnian recruits formed a large component of the Ottoman ranks in the battles of Mohács and Krbava field, while numerous other Bosnians rose through the ranks of the Ottoman military to occupy the highest positions of power in the Empire, including admirals such as Matrakçı Nasuh; generals such as Isa-Beg Isaković, Gazi Husrev-beg and Hasan Predojević and Sarı Süleyman Paşa; administrators such as Ferhat-paša Sokolović and Osman Gradaščević; and Grand Viziers such as the influential Mehmed Paša Sokolović and Damad Ibrahim Pasha. Some Bosnians emerged as Sufi mystics, scholars such as Muhamed Hevaji Uskufi Bosnevi, Ali Džabič; and poets in the Turkish, Albanian, Arabic, and Persian languages.[46]
+
+However, by the late 17th century the Empire's military misfortunes caught up with the country, and the end of the Great Turkish War with the treaty of Karlowitz in 1699 again made Bosnia the Empire's westernmost province. The 18th century was marked by further military failures, numerous revolts within Bosnia, and several outbursts of plague.[47]
+
+The Porte's efforts at modernizing the Ottoman state were met with distrust growing to hostility in Bosnia, where local aristocrats stood to lose much through the proposed Tanzimat reforms. This, combined with frustrations over territorial, political concessions in the north-east, and the plight of Slavic Muslim refugees arriving from the Sanjak of Smederevo into Bosnia Eyalet, culminated in a partially unsuccessful revolt by Husein Gradaščević, who endorsed a Bosnia Eyalet autonomous from the authoritarian rule of the Ottoman Sultan Mahmud II, who persecuted, executed and abolished the Janissaries and reduced the role of autonomous Pashas in Rumelia. Mahmud II sent his Grand Vizier to subdue Bosnia Eyalet and succeeded only with the reluctant assistance of Ali-paša Rizvanbegović.[46] Related rebellions were extinguished by 1850, but the situation continued to deteriorate.
+
+New nationalist movements appeared in Bosnia by the middle of the 19th century. Bolstered by Serbia's breakaway from the Ottoman Empire in the early 19th century, Serbian nationalists began making contacts and sending nationalist propaganda claiming Bosnia as a Serbian province. In the neighboring Habsburg Empire across the Ottoman border, Croatian nationalists made similar claims about Bosnia as a Croatian province. The rise of these competing movements marked the beginning of nationalist politics in Bosnia, which continued to grow in the rest of the 19th and 20th centuries.[48]
+
+Agrarian unrest eventually sparked the Herzegovinian rebellion, a widespread peasant uprising, in 1875. The conflict rapidly spread and came to involve several Balkan states and Great Powers, a situation that led to the Congress of Berlin and the Treaty of Berlin in 1878.[20]
+
+At the Congress of Berlin in 1878, the Austro-Hungarian Foreign Minister Gyula Andrássy obtained the occupation and administration of Bosnia and Herzegovina, and he also obtained the right to station garrisons in the Sanjak of Novi Pazar, which would remain under Ottoman administration until 1908, when the Austro-Hungarian troops withdrew from the Sanjak.
+
+Although Austro-Hungarian officials quickly came to an agreement with Bosnians, tensions remained and a mass emigration of Bosnians occurred.[20] However, a state of relative stability was reached soon enough and Austro-Hungarian authorities were able to embark on a number of social and administrative reforms they intended would make Bosnia and Herzegovina into a "model" colony.
+
+Habsburg rule had several key concerns in Bosnia. It tried to dissipate the South Slav nationalism by disputing the earlier Serb and Croat claims to Bosnia and encouraging identification of Bosnian or Bosniak identity.[49] Habsburg rule also tried to provide for modernisation by codifying laws, introducing new political institutions, and establishing and expanding industries.[50]
+
+Austria–Hungary began to plan annexation of Bosnia, but due to international disputes the issue was not resolved until the annexation crisis of 1908.[51] Several external matters affected status of Bosnia and its relationship with Austria–Hungary. A bloody coup occurred in Serbia in 1903, which brought a radical anti-Austrian government into power in Belgrade.[52] Then in 1908, the revolt in the Ottoman Empire raised concerns the Istanbul government might seek the outright return of Bosnia-Herzegovina. These factors caused the Austro-Hungarian government to seek a permanent resolution of the Bosnian question sooner, rather than later.
+
+Taking advantage of turmoil in the Ottoman Empire, Austro-Hungarian diplomacy tried to obtain provisional Russian approval for changes over the status of Bosnia Herzegovina and published the annexation proclamation on 6 October 1908.[53] Despite international objections to the Austro-Hungarian annexation, Russians and their client state, Serbia, were compelled to accept the Austrian-Hungarian annexation of Bosnia Herzegovina in March 1909.
+
+In 1910, Habsburg Emperor Franz Joseph proclaimed the first constitution in Bosnia, which led to relaxation of earlier laws, elections and formation of the Bosnian parliament, and growth of new political life.[54]
+
+On 28 June 1914, a Yugoslav nationalist youth named Gavrilo Princip, a member of the secret Serbian-supported movement, Young Bosnia, assassinated the heir to the Austro-Hungarian throne, Archduke Franz Ferdinand, in Sarajevo—an event that was the spark that set off World War I. At the end of the war, the Bosniaks had lost more men per capita than any other ethnic group in the Habsburg Empire whilst serving in the Bosnian-Herzegovinian Infantry (known as Bosniaken) of the Austro-Hungarian Army.[55] Nonetheless, Bosnia and Herzegovina as a whole managed to escape the conflict relatively unscathed.[45]
+
+The Austro-Hungarian authorities established an auxiliary militia known as the Schutzkorps with a moot role in the empire's policy of anti-Serb repression.[56] Schutzkorps, predominantly recruited among the Muslim (Bosniak) population, were tasked with hunting down rebel Serbs (the Chetniks and Komiti)[57] and became known for their persecution of Serbs particularly in Serb populated areas of eastern Bosnia, where they partly retaliated against Serbian Chetniks who in fall 1914 had carried out attacks against the Muslim population in the area.[58][59] The proceedings of the Austro-Hungarian authorities led to around 5,500 citizens of Serb ethnicity in Bosnia and Herzegovina being arrested, and between 700 and 2,200 died in prison while 460 were executed.[57] Around 5,200 Serb families were forcibly expelled from Bosnia and Herzegovina.[57]
+
+Following World War I, Bosnia and Herzegovina joined the South Slav Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes (soon renamed Yugoslavia). Political life in Bosnia at this time was marked by two major trends: social and economic unrest over property redistribution, and formation of several political parties that frequently changed coalitions and alliances with parties in other Yugoslav regions.[45]
+
+The dominant ideological conflict of the Yugoslav state, between Croatian regionalism and Serbian centralization, was approached differently by Bosnia's major ethnic groups and was dependent on the overall political atmosphere.[20] The political reforms brought about in the newly established Yugoslavian kingdom saw few benefits for the Bosniaks; according to the 1910 final census of land ownership and population according to religious affiliation conducted in Austro-Hungary, Muslims (Bosniaks) owned 91.1%, Orthodox Serbians owned 6.0%, Croatian Catholics owned 2.6% and others, 0.3% of the property. Following the reforms Bosnian Muslims were dispossessed of a total of 1,175,305 hectares of agricultural and forest land.[60]
+
+Although the initial split of the country into 33 oblasts erased the presence of traditional geographic entities from the map, the efforts of Bosnian politicians such as Mehmed Spaho ensured the six oblasts carved up from Bosnia and Herzegovina corresponded to the six sanjaks from Ottoman times and, thus, matched the country's traditional boundary as a whole.[20]
+
+The establishment of the Kingdom of Yugoslavia in 1929, however, brought the redrawing of administrative regions into banates or banovinas that purposely avoided all historical and ethnic lines, removing any trace of a Bosnian entity.[20] Serbo-Croat tensions over the structuring of the Yugoslav state continued, with the concept of a separate Bosnian division receiving little or no consideration.
+
+The Cvetković-Maček Agreement that created the Croatian banate in 1939 encouraged what was essentially a partition of Bosnia between Croatia and Serbia.[46] However the rising threat of Adolf Hitler's Nazi Germany forced Yugoslav politicians to shift their attention. Following a period that saw attempts at appeasement, the signing of the Tripartite Treaty, and a coup d'état, Yugoslavia was finally invaded by Germany on 6 April 1941.[20]
+
+Once the kingdom of Yugoslavia was conquered by German forces in World War II, all of Bosnia was ceded to the Nazi puppet regime, the Independent State of Croatia (NDH). The NDH leaders embarked on a campaign of extermination of Serbs, Jews, Romani as well as dissident Croats, and, later, Josip Broz Tito's Partisans by setting up a number of death camps.[61]
+
+An estimated 209,000 Serbs and Montenegrins were killed on the territory of Bosnia–Herzegovina during the war.[62][dubious  – discuss] The Ustaše recognized both Roman Catholicism and Islam as the national religions, but held the position Eastern Orthodoxy, as a symbol of Serbian identity, was their greatest foe.[63] Although Croats were by far the largest ethnic group to constitute the Ustaše, the Vice President of the NDH and leader of the Yugoslav Muslim Organization Džafer Kulenović was a Muslim, and Muslims (Bosniaks) in total constituted nearly 12% of the Ustaše military and civil service authority.[64]
+
+Many Serbs themselves took up arms and joined the Chetniks, a Serb nationalist movement with the aim of establishing an ethnically homogeneous 'Greater Serbian' state[65] within the Kingdom of Yugoslavia. The Chetniks, in turn, persecuted and killed a large number of non-Serbs, communist Serbs and Communist sympathizers, with the Muslim population of Bosnia, Herzegovina and Sandžak being a primary target.[66] Once captured, Muslim villagers were systematically massacred by the Chetniks.[67] Of the 75,000 Muslims who lost their lives in Bosnia and Herzegovina during the war,[62] approximately 30,000 (mostly civilians) were killed by the Chetniks.[68]
+
+A percentage of Muslims served in Nazi Waffen-SS units.[69] Between 64,000 and 79,000 Bosnian Croats were killed between April 1941 to May 1945.[62] Of these, about 18,000 were killed by the Chetniks.[68]
+
+On 12 October 1941, a group of 108 prominent Sarajevan Muslims signed the Resolution of Sarajevo Muslims by which they condemned the persecution of Serbs organized by the Ustaše, made distinction between Muslims who participated in such persecutions and the Muslim population as a whole, presented information about the persecutions of Muslims by Serbs, and requested security for all citizens of the country, regardless of their identity.[70]
+
+Starting in 1941, Yugoslav communists under the leadership of Josip Broz Tito organized their own multi-ethnic resistance group, the partisans, who fought against both Axis and Chetnik forces. On 29 November 1943 the Anti-Fascist Council of National Liberation of Yugoslavia with Tito at its helm held a founding conference in Jajce where Bosnia and Herzegovina was reestablished as a republic within the Yugoslavian federation in its Habsburg borders.[71]
+
+Military success eventually prompted the Allies to support the Partisans, resulting in the successful Maclean Mission, but Tito declined their offer to help and relied on his own forces instead. All the major military offensives by the antifascist movement of Yugoslavia against Nazis and their local supporters were conducted in Bosnia–Herzegovina and its peoples bore the brunt of fighting. More than 300,000 people died in Bosnia and Herzegovina in World War II.[72] At the end of the war the establishment of the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, with the constitution of 1946, officially made Bosnia and Herzegovina one of six constituent republics in the new state.[20]
+
+Due to its central geographic position within the Yugoslavian federation, post-war Bosnia was selected as a base for the development of the military defense industry. This contributed to a large concentration of arms and military personnel in Bosnia; a significant factor in the war that followed the break-up of Yugoslavia in the 1990s.[20] However, Bosnia's existence within Yugoslavia, for the large part, was relatively peaceful and very prosperous, with high employment, a strong industrial and export oriented economy, a good education system and social and medical security for every citizen (of Bosnia and Herzegovina). Several international corporations operated in Bosnia — Volkswagen as part of TAS (car factory in Sarajevo, from 1972), Coca-Cola (from 1975), SKF Sweden (from 1967), Marlboro, (a tobacco factory in Sarajevo), and Holiday Inn hotels. Sarajevo was the site of the 1984 Winter Olympics.
+
+During the 1950s and 1960s Bosnia was a political backwater of the Republic of Yugoslavia. In the 1970s a strong Bosnian political elite arose, fueled in part by Tito's leadership in the Non-Aligned Movement and Bosnians serving in Yugoslavia's diplomatic corps. While working within the Socialist system, politicians such as Džemal Bijedić, Branko Mikulić and Hamdija Pozderac reinforced and protected the sovereignty of Bosnia and Herzegovina.[73] Their efforts proved key during the turbulent period following Tito's death in 1980, and are today considered some of the early steps towards Bosnian independence. However, the republic did not escape the increasingly nationalistic climate of the time. With the fall of communism and the start of the break-up of Yugoslavia, doctrine of tolerance began to lose its potency, creating an opportunity for nationalist elements in the society to spread their influence.[citation needed]
+
+On 18 November 1990, multi-party parliamentary elections were held throughout Bosnia and Herzegovina. A second round followed on 25 November, resulting in a national assembly where communist power was replaced by a coalition of three ethnically-based parties.[74] Following Slovenia and Croatia's declarations of independence from Yugoslavia, a significant split developed among the residents of Bosnia and Herzegovina on the issue of whether to remain within Yugoslavia (overwhelmingly favored by Serbs) or seek independence (overwhelmingly favored by Bosniaks and Croats).[citation needed]
+
+The Serb members of parliament, consisting mainly of the Serb Democratic Party members, abandoned the central parliament in Sarajevo, and formed the Assembly of the Serb People of Bosnia and Herzegovina on 24 October 1991, which marked the end of the tri-ethnic coalition that governed after the elections in 1990. This Assembly established the Serbian Republic of Bosnia and Herzegovina in part of the territory of Bosnia and Herzegovina on 9 January 1992. It was renamed Republika Srpska in August 1992. On 18 November 1991, the party branch in Bosnia and Herzegovina of the ruling party in the Republic of Croatia, the Croatian Democratic Union (HDZ), proclaimed the existence of the Croatian Community of Herzeg-Bosnia in a separate part of the territory of Bosnia and Herzegovina with the Croatian Defence Council (HVO) as its military branch.[75] It went unrecognized by the Government of Bosnia and Herzegovina, which declared it illegal.[76][77]
+
+A declaration of the sovereignty of Bosnia and Herzegovina on 15 October 1991 was followed by a referendum for independence on 29 February/1 March 1992, which was boycotted by the great majority of Serbs. The turnout in the independence referendum was 63.4 percent and 99.7 percent of voters voted for independence.[78] Bosnia and Herzegovina declared independence on 3 March 1992 and received international recognition the following month on 6 April 1992.[79] The Republic of Bosnia and Herzegovina was subsequently admitted as a member state of the United Nations on 22 May 1992.[80] Serbian leader Slobodan Milošević and Croatian leader Franjo Tuđman are believed to have agreed on a partition of Bosnia and Herzegovina in March 1991, with the aim of establishing Greater Serbia and Greater Croatia.[81]
+
+Following Bosnia and Herzegovina's declaration of independence, Bosnian Serb militias mobilized in different parts of the country. Government forces were poorly equipped and unprepared for the war.[82] International recognition of Bosnia and Herzegovina increased diplomatic pressure for the Yugoslav People's Army (JNA) to withdraw from the republic's territory, which they officially did in June 1992. The Bosnian Serb members of the JNA simply changed insignia, formed the Army of Republika Srpska (VRS), and continued fighting. Armed and equipped from JNA stockpiles in Bosnia, supported by volunteers and various paramilitary forces from Serbia, and receiving extensive humanitarian, logistical and financial support from the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, Republika Srpska's offensives in 1992 managed to place much of the country under its control.[20] The Bosnian Serb advance was accompanied by the ethnic cleansing of Bosniaks and Bosnian Croats from VRS-controlled areas. Dozens of concentration camps were established in which inmates were subjected to violence and abuse, including rape.[83] The ethnic cleansing culminated in the Srebrenica massacre of more than 8,000 Bosniak men and boys in July 1995, which was ruled to have been a genocide by the ICTY.[84] Bosniak and Bosnian Croat forces also committed war crimes against civilians from different ethnic groups, though on a smaller scale.[85][86][87][88] Most of the Bosniak and Croat atrocities were committed during the Bosniak-Croat war, a sub-conflict of the Bosnian War that pitted the Army of the Federation of Bosnia and Herzegovina (ARBiH) against the HVO. The Bosniak-Croat conflict ended in March 1994, with the signing of the Washington Agreement, leading to the creation of a joint Bosniak-Croat Federation of Bosnia and Herzegovina, which amalgamated HVO-held territory with that held by the ARBiH.[citation needed]
+
+Following the Srebrenica massacre, NATO launched a bombing campaign against Republika Srpska in August 1995. The bombing, together with a joint HV/HVO/ARBiH ground offensive in western Bosnia, convinced the Bosnian Serb leadership to consider a negotiated settlement, which manifested itself in the Dayton Agreement of December 1995. It brought an end to active combat and roughly established the basic political structure of the present-day state. A NATO-led peacekeeping force was immediately dispatched to the country to enforce the agreement. An estimated 100,000 people were killed in the war, about two-thirds of whom were Bosniak.[89] An additional 2.2 million citizens of Bosnia and Herzegovina of all ethnicities were displaced.[90] The International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) has ruled the conflict involved the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia (subsequently Serbia and Montenegro),[91] as well as Croatia.[92] Dozens of Bosnian Serb officials and soldiers have been convicted for their role in war crimes and crimes against humanity during the conflict, as well as for the genocide in Srebrenica. Several high-ranking Croat and Bosniak officials have also been convicted.[93] Victims' remains continue to be unearthed.[94] After the war, the Government of Bosnia and Herzegovina brought a lawsuit against Serbia before the International Court of Justice (ICJ), accusing the country of genocide. In 2007, the ICJ exonerated Serbia of direct responsibility for the genocide committed by Bosnian Serb forces in Srebrenica, but concluded the country had not done enough to prevent the massacre.[95]
+
+On 4 February 2014, the protests against the government of the Federation of Bosnia and Herzegovina, one of the country's two entities, dubbed the Bosnian Spring, the name being taken from the Arab Spring, began in the northern town of Tuzla. Workers from several factories that had been privatised and had gone bankrupt united to demand action over jobs, and unpaid salaries and pensions.[96] Soon protests spread to the rest of the Federation, with violent clashes reported in close to 20 towns, the biggest of which were Sarajevo, Zenica, Mostar, Bihać, Brčko and Tuzla.[97] The Bosnian news media reported hundreds of people had been injured during the protests, including dozens of police officers, with bursts of violence in Sarajevo, in the northern city of Tuzla, in Mostar in the south, and in Zenica in central Bosnia. The same level of unrest or activism did not occur in the Republika Srpska, but hundreds of people also gathered in support of protests in the town of Banja Luka against its separate government.[98][99][100]
+
+The protests marked the largest outbreak of public anger over high unemployment and two decades of political inertia in the country since the end of the Bosnian War in 1995.[101]
+
+Bosnia is in the western Balkans, bordering Croatia (932 km or 579 mi) to the north and west, Serbia (302 km or 188 mi) to the east, and Montenegro (225 km or 140 mi) to the southeast. It has a coastline about 20 kilometres (12 miles) long surrounding the city of Neum.[102][103] It lies between latitudes 42° and 46° N, and longitudes 15° and 20° E.
+
+The country's name comes from the two alleged regions Bosnia and Herzegovina whose border was never defined. Historically, Bosnia's official name never included any of its many regions until the Austria-Hungarian occupation.
+
+The country is mostly mountainous, encompassing the central Dinaric Alps. The northeastern parts reach into the Pannonian Plain, while in the south it borders the Adriatic. The Dinaric Alps generally run in a southeast–northwest direction, and get higher towards the south. The highest point of the country is the peak of Maglić at 2,386 metres (7,828.1 feet), on the Montenegrin border. Major mountains include Kozara, Grmeč, Vlašić, Čvrsnica, Prenj, Romanija, Jahorina, Bjelašnica and Treskavica. The geological composition of the Dinaric chain of mountains in Bosnia consists primarily of limestone (including Mesozoic limestone), with deposits of iron, coal, zinc, manganese, bauxite, lead, and salt present in some areas, especially in central and northern Bosnia.[104]
+
+Overall, nearly 50% of Bosnia and Herzegovina is forested. Most forest areas are in the centre, east and west parts of Bosnia. Herzegovina has drier Mediterranean climate, with dominant karst topography. Northern Bosnia (Posavina) contains very fertile agricultural land along the River Sava and the corresponding area is heavily farmed. This farmland is a part of the Pannonian Plain stretching into neighboring Croatia and Serbia. The country has only 20 kilometres (12 miles) of coastline,[102][105] around the town of Neum in the Herzegovina-Neretva Canton. Although the city is surrounded by Croatian peninsulas, by international law, Bosnia and Herzegovina has a right of passage to the outer sea.
+
+Sarajevo is the capital[1] and largest city.[106] Other major cities are Banja Luka and Bihać in the northwest region known as Bosanska Krajina, Bijeljina and Tuzla in the northeast, Zenica in the central part of Bosnia and Mostar, the largest city in Herzegovina.
+
+There are seven major rivers in Bosnia and Herzegovina:[107]
+
+Phytogeographically, Bosnia and Herzegovina belongs to the Boreal Kingdom and is shared between the Illyrian province of the Circumboreal Region and Adriatic province of the Mediterranean Region. According to the World Wide Fund for Nature, the territory of Bosnia and Herzegovina can be subdivided into three ecoregions: the Pannonian mixed forests, Dinaric Mountains mixed forests and Illyrian deciduous forests.
+
+As a result of the Dayton Accords, the civilian peace implementation is supervised by the High Representative for Bosnia and Herzegovina selected by the Peace Implementation Council. The High Representative is the highest political authority in the country. The High Representative has many governmental and legislative powers, including the dismissal of elected and non-elected officials. Due to the vast powers of the High Representative over Bosnian politics and essential veto powers, the position has also been compared to that of a viceroy.[108][109][110][111]
+
+Politics take place in a framework of a parliamentary representative democracy, whereby executive power is exercised by the Council of Ministers of Bosnia and Herzegovina. Legislative power is vested in both the Council of Ministers and the Parliamentary Assembly of Bosnia and Herzegovina. Members of the Parliamentary Assembly are chosen according to a proportional representation system.[112][113]
+
+Bosnia and Herzegovina is a liberal democracy. It has several levels of political structuring, according to the Dayton Accords. The most important of these levels is the division of the country into two entities: the Federation of Bosnia and Herzegovina and Republika Srpska. The Federation of Bosnia and Herzegovina covers 51% of Bosnia and Herzegovina's total area, while Republika Srpska covers 49%. The entities, based largely on the territories held by the two warring sides at the time, were formally established by the Dayton peace agreement in 1995 because of the tremendous changes in Bosnia and Herzegovina's ethnic structure. Since 1996, the power of the entities relative to the State government has decreased significantly. Nonetheless, entities still have numerous powers to themselves.
+
+The Brčko District in the north of the country was created in 2000, out of land from both entities. It officially belongs to both, but is governed by neither, and functions under a decentralized system of local government. For election purposes, Brčko District voters can choose to participate in either the Federation or Republika Srpska elections. The Brčko District has been praised for maintaining a multiethnic population and a level of prosperity significantly above the national average.[114]
+
+The third level of Bosnia and Herzegovina's political subdivision is manifested in cantons. They are unique to the Federation of Bosnia and Herzegovina entity, which consists of ten of them. Each has a cantonal government, which is under the law of the Federation as a whole. Some cantons are ethnically mixed and have special laws to ensure the equality of all constituent people.[citation needed]
+
+The fourth level of political division in Bosnia and Herzegovina is the municipality. The Federation of Bosnia and Herzegovina is divided into 74 municipalities, and Republika Srpska into 63. Municipalities also have their own local government, and are typically based on the most significant city or place in their territory. As such, many municipalities have a long tradition and history with their present boundaries. Some others, however, were only created following the recent war after traditional municipalities were split by the Inter-Entity Boundary Line. Each canton in the Federation of Bosnia and Herzegovina consists of several municipalities, which are divided into local communities.[citation needed]
+
+Besides entities, cantons, and municipalities, Bosnia and Herzegovina also has four "official" cities. These are: Banja Luka, Mostar, Sarajevo, and East Sarajevo. The territory and government of the cities of Banja Luka and Mostar corresponds to the municipalities of the same name, while the cities of Sarajevo and East Sarajevo officially consist of several municipalities. Cities have their own city government whose power is in between that of the municipalities and cantons (or the entity, in the case of Republika Srpska).
+
+More recently, several central institutions have been established (such as defense ministry, security ministry, state court, indirect taxation service and so on) in the process of transferring part of the jurisdiction from the entities to the state. The representation of the government of Bosnia and Herzegovina is by elites who represent the country's three major groups, with each having a guaranteed share of power.
+
+The Chair of the Presidency of Bosnia and Herzegovina rotates among three members (Bosniak, Serb, Croat), each elected as the Chair for an eight-month term within their four-year term as a member. The three members of the Presidency are elected directly by the people with Federation voters voting for the Bosniak and the Croat, and the Republika Srpska voters for the Serb.
+
+The Chair of the Council of Ministers is nominated by the Presidency and approved by the House of Representatives. He or she is then responsible for appointing a Foreign Minister, Minister of Foreign Trade, and others as appropriate.
+
+The Parliamentary Assembly is the lawmaking body in Bosnia and Herzegovina. It consists of two houses: the House of Peoples and the House of Representatives. The House of Peoples has 15 delegates chosen by parliaments of the entities, two-thirds of which come from the Federation (5 Croat and 5 Bosniaks) and one-third from the Republika Srpska (5 Serbs). The House of Representatives is composed of 42 Members elected by the people under a form of proportional representation (PR), two-thirds elected from the Federation and one-third elected from the Republika Srpska.[citation needed]
+
+The Constitutional Court of Bosnia and Herzegovina is the supreme, final arbiter of legal matters. It is composed of nine members: four members are selected by the House of Representatives of the Federation, two by the Assembly of the Republika Srpska, and three by the President of the European Court of Human Rights after consultation with the Presidency, but cannot be Bosnian citizens.[citation needed]
+
+However, the highest political authority in the country is the High Representative in Bosnia and Herzegovina, the chief executive officer for the international civilian presence in the country and is selected by the European Union. Since 1995, the High Representative has been able to bypass the elected parliamentary assembly, and since 1997 has been able to remove elected officials. The methods selected by the High Representative have been criticized as undemocratic.[115] International supervision is to end when the country is deemed politically and democratically stable and self-sustaining.
+
+The Armed Forces of Bosnia and Herzegovina (OSBiH) were unified into a single entity in 2005, with the merger of the Army of the Federation of Bosnia and Herzegovina and the Army of Republika Srpska, which had defended their respective regions. The Ministry of Defense was founded in 2004.
+
+The Bosnian military consists of the Bosnian Ground Forces and Air Force and Air Defense. The Ground Forces number 14,725 active and 7,000 reserve personnel. They are armed with a mix of American, Yugoslavian, Soviet, and European-made weaponry, vehicles, and military equipment. The Air Force and Air Defense Forces have 3,000 personnel and about 62 aircraft. The Air Defense Forces operate MANPADS hand-held missiles, surface-to-air missile (SAM) batteries, anti-aircraft cannons, and radar. The Army has recently adopted remodeled MARPAT uniforms, used by Bosnian soldiers serving with ISAF in Afghanistan. A domestic production program is now underway to ensure that army units are equipped with the correct ammunition.
+
+Beginning in 2007, the Ministry of Defence of Bosnia and Herzegovina undertook the army's first ever international assistance mission, enlisting the military to serve with ISAF peace missions to Afghanistan, Iraq and the Democratic Republic of Congo in 2007. Five officers, acting as officers/advisors, served in the Democratic Republic of Congo. 45 soldiers, mostly acting as base security and medical assistants, served in Afghanistan. 85 Bosnian soldiers served as base security in Iraq, occasionally conducting infantry patrols there as well. All three deployed groups have been commended by their respective international forces as well as the Ministry of Defence of Bosnia and Herzegovina. The international assistance operations are still ongoing.
+
+The Air Force and Anti-Aircraft Defence Brigade of Bosnia and Herzegovina was formed when elements of the Army of the Federation of Bosnia and Herzegovina and the Republika Srpska Air Force were merged in 2006. The Air Force has seen improvements in the last few years with added funds for aircraft repairs and improved cooperation with the Ground Forces as well as to the citizens of the country. The Ministry of Defense of Bosnia and Herzegovina is pursuing the acquisition of new aircraft including helicopters and perhaps even fighter jets.[116]
+
+EU integration is one of the main political objectives of Bosnia and Herzegovina; it initiated the Stabilisation and Association Process in 2007. Countries participating in the SAP have been offered the possibility to become, once they fulfill the necessary conditions, Member States of the EU. Bosnia and Herzegovina is therefore a potential candidate country for EU accession.[117]
+
+The implementation of the Dayton Accords of 1995 has focused the efforts of policymakers in Bosnia and Herzegovina, as well as the international community, on regional stabilization in the countries-successors of the former Yugoslavia.[citation needed]
+
+Within Bosnia and Herzegovina, relations with its neighbors of Croatia, Serbia and Montenegro have been fairly stable since the signing of the Dayton Agreement in 1995. On 23 April 2010, Bosnia and Herzegovina received the Membership Action Plan from NATO, which is the last step before full membership in the alliance. Full membership was expected in 2014 or 2015, depending on the progress of reforms.[118] In December 2018, NATO approved a Bosnian Membership Action Plan.[119]
+
+According to the 1991 census, Bosnia and Herzegovina had a population of 4,369,319, while the 1996 World Bank Group census showed a decrease to 3,764,425.[120] Large population migrations during the Yugoslav wars in the 1990s have caused demographic shifts in the country. Between 1991 and 2013, political disagreements made it impossible to organize a census. A census had been planned for 2011,[121] and then for 2012,[122] but was delayed until October 2013. The 2013 census found a total population of 3,791,622 people in 1.16 million households; 585,411 fewer people than the 1991 census.[123]
+
+Ethnic composition in Bosnia and Herzegovina as of 2013
+
+Bosnia and Herzegovina is home to three ethnic "constituent peoples", namely Bosniaks, Serbs, and Croats, plus a number of smaller groups including Jews and Roma.[124] According to data from 2013 census published by the Agency for Statistics of Bosnia and Herzegovina, Bosniaks constitute 50.11% of the population, Serbs 30.78%, Croats 15.43%, and others form 2.73%, with the remaining respondents not declaring their ethnicity or not answering.[11] The census results are contested by the Republika Srpska statistical office and by Bosnian Serb politicians.[125] The dispute over the census concerns the inclusion of non-permanent Bosnian residents in the figures, which Republika Srpska officials oppose.[126] The European Union's statistics office, Eurostat, concluded in May 2016 that the census methodology used by the Bosnian statistical agency is in line with international recommendations.[127]
+
+Bosnia's constitution does not specify any official languages.[128][129][130] However, academics Hilary Footitt and Michael Kelly note the Dayton Agreement states it is "done in Bosnian, Croatian, English and Serbian", and they describe this as the "de facto recognition of three official languages" at the state level. The equal status of Bosnian, Serbian and Croatian was verified by the Constitutional Court in 2000.[130] It ruled the provisions of the Federation and Republika Srpska constitutions on language were incompatible with the state constitution, since they only recognised "Bosniak" and Croatian (in the case of the Federation) and Serbian (in the case of Republika Srpska) as official languages at the entity level. As a result, the wording of the entity constitutions was changed and all three languages were made official in both entities.[130] The three standard languages are fully mutually intelligible and are known collectively under the appellation of Serbo-Croatian, despite this term not being formally recognized in the country. Use of one of the three languages has become a marker of ethnic identity.[131] Michael Kelly and Catherine Baker argue: "The three official languages of today's Bosnian state...represent the symbolic assertion of national identity over the pragmatism of mutual intelligibility".[132]
+
+According to the 1992 European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages, Bosnia and Herzegovina recognizes the following minority languages: Albanian, Montenegrin, Czech, Italian, Hungarian, Macedonian, German, Polish, Romani, Romanian, Rusyn, Slovak, Slovene, Turkish, Ukrainian and Jewish (Yiddish and Ladino).[133] The German minority in Bosnia and Herzegovina are mostly remnants of Donauschwaben (Danube Swabians), who settled in the area after the Habsburg monarchy claimed the Balkans from the Ottoman Empire. Due to expulsions and (forced) assimilation after the two World Wars, the number of ethnic Germans in Bosnia and Herzegovina was drastically diminished.[134]
+
+In a 2013 census, 52.86% of the population consider their mother tongue Bosnian, 30.76% Serbian, 14.6% Croatian and 1.57% another language, with 0.21% not giving an answer.[11]
+
+As per the census of 2013, Islam is the major religion with 51% Muslims, 46% Christians and remaining others 3%.[135][136]
+
+46% of the population identify as Christian; of these, the Serbian Orthodox Church makes up the largest group, accounting for 31% of the population (of whom most identify as Serbs), and the Roman Catholic Church 15% (of whom most identify as Croats). The smallest groups are Agnosticism 0.3%, Atheism 0.8% and other 1.15%, with the remainder not declaring their religion or not answering 1.1%.[11][137] A 2012 survey found 54% of Bosnia's Muslims are non-denominational Muslims, while 38% follow Sunnism.[136]
+
+Sarajevo is home to 395,133 inhabitants in its urban area which comprises the City of Sarajevo as well as municipalities of Ilidža, Vogošća, Istočna Ilidža, Istočno Novo Sarajevo and Istočni Stari Grad.[138] The metro area has a population of 555,210 and includes Sarajevo Canton, East Sarajevo and municipalities Breza, Kiseljak, Kreševo and Visoko.
+
+During the Bosnian War, the economy suffered €200 billion in material damages.[140] Bosnia and Herzegovina faces the dual-problem of rebuilding a war-torn country and introducing transitional liberal market reforms to its formerly mixed economy. One legacy of the previous era is a strong industry; under former republic president Džemal Bijedić and SFRY President Josip Broz Tito, metal industries were promoted in the republic, resulting in the development of a large share of Yugoslavia's plants; S.R. Bosnia and Herzegovina had a very strong industrial export oriented economy in the 1970s and 1980s, with large scale exports worth millions of US$.
+
+For most of Bosnia's history, agriculture has been conducted on privately owned farms; Fresh food has traditionally been exported from the republic.[141]
+
+The war in the 1990s, caused a dramatic change in the Bosnian economy.[142] GDP fell by 60% and the destruction of physical infrastructure devastated the economy.[143] With much of the production capacity unrestored, the Bosnian economy still faces considerable difficulties. Figures show GDP and per capita income increased 10% from 2003 to 2004; this and Bosnia's shrinking national debt being negative trends, and high unemployment 38.7% and a large trade deficit remain cause for concern.
+
+The national currency is the (Euro-pegged) Convertible Mark (KM), controlled by the currency board. Annual inflation is the lowest relative to other countries in the region at 1.9% in 2004.[144] The international debt was $5.1 billion (as on 31 December 2014). Real GDP growth rate was 5% for 2004 according to the Bosnian Central Bank of BiH and Statistical Office of Bosnia and Herzegovina.
+
+Bosnia and Herzegovina has displayed positive progress in the previous years, which decisively moved its place from the lowest income equality rank of income equality rankings fourteen out of 193 nations.[145]
+
+According to Eurostat data, Bosnia and Herzegovina's PPS GDP per capita stood at 29 per cent of the EU average in 2010.[146]
+
+The International Monetary Fund (IMF) announced a loan to Bosnia worth US$500 million to be delivered by Stand-By Arrangement. This was scheduled to be approved in September 2012.[147]
+
+The United States Embassy in Sarajevo, Bosnia and Herzegovina produces the Country Commercial Guide – an annual report that delivers a comprehensive look at Bosnia and Herzegovina's commercial and economic environment, using economic, political, and market analysis. It can be viewed on Embassy Sarajevo's website.
+
+By some estimates, grey economy is 25.5% of GDP.[148]
+
+In 2017, exports grew by 17% when compared to the previous year, totaling €5.65 billion.[149] The total volume of foreign trade in 2017 amounted to €14.97 billion and increased by 14% compared to the previous year. Imports of goods increased by 12% and amounted to €9.32 billion. The coverage of imports by exports has increased by 3% compared to the previous year and now it is 61 percent. In 2017, Bosnia and Herzegovina mostly exported car seats, electricity, processed wood, aluminum and furniture. In the same year, it mostly imported crude oil, automobiles, motor oil, coal and briquettes.[150]
+
+The unemployment rate in 2017 was 20.5%, but The Vienna Institute for International Economic Studies is predicting falling unemployment rate for the next few years. In 2018, the unemployment should be 19.4% and it should further fall to 18.8% in 2019. In 2020, the unemployment rate should go down to 18.3%.[151]
+
+On 31 December 2017, Council of Ministers of Bosnia and Herzegovina issued the report on public debt of Bosnia and Herzegovina, stating the public debt was reduced by €389.97 million, or by more than 6% when compared to 31 December 2016. By the end of 2017, public debt was €5.92 billion, which amounted to 35.6 percent of GDP.[152]
+
+As of 31 December 2017[update], there were 32,292 registered companies in the country, which together had revenues of €33.572 billion that same year.[153]
+
+In 2017, the country received €397.35 million in foreign direct investment, which equals to 2.5% of the GDP.[154]
+
+In 2017, Bosnia and Herzegovina ranked 3rd in the world in terms of the number of new jobs created by foreign investment, relative to the number of inhabitants.[155][156]
+
+In 2018, Bosnia and Herzegovina exported goods worth 11.9 billion KM (€6.07 billion), which is 7.43% higher than in the same period in 2017, while imports amounted to 19.27 billion KM (€9.83 billion), which is 5.47% higher.[157]
+
+The average price of new apartments sold in the country in the first 6 months of 2018 is 1,639 km (€886.31) per square meter. This represents a jump of 3.5% from the previous year.[158]
+
+On 30 June 2018, public debt of Bosnia and Herzegovina amounted to about €6.04 billion, of which external debt is 70.56 percent, while the internal debt is 29.4 percent of total public indebtedness. The share of public debt in gross domestic product is 34.92 percent.[159]
+
+In the first 7 months of 2018, 811,660 tourists visited the country, a 12.2% jump when compared to the first 7 months of 2017.[160]
+
+In the first 11 months of 2018, 1,378,542 tourists visited Bosnia-Herzegovina, an increase of 12.6%, and had 2,871,004 overnight hotel stays, a 13.8% increase from the previous year. Also, 71.8% of the tourists came from foreign countries.[161]
+
+In 2018, the total value of mergers and acquisitions in Bosnia and Herzegovina amounted to €404.6 million.[162]
+
+In 2018, 99.5 percent of enterprises in Bosnia and Herzegovina used computers in their business, while 99.3 percent had internet connections, according to a survey conducted by the Bosnia and Herzegovina Statistics Agency.[163]
+
+In 2018, Bosnia and Herzegovina received 783.4 million KM (€400.64 million) in direct foreign investment, which was equivalent to 2.3% of GDP.[164]
+
+In 2018, Central Bank of Bosnia and Herzegovina made a profit of 8,430,875 km (€4,306,347).[165]
+
+The World Bank predicts that the economy will grow 3.4% in 2019.[166]
+
+Bosnia and Herzegovina was placed 83rd on the Index of Economic Freedom for 2019. The total rating for Bosnia and Herzegovina is 61.9. This position represents some progress relative to the 91st place in 2018. This result is below the regional level, but still above the global average, making Bosnia and Herzegovina a "moderately free" country.[167]
+
+On 31 January 2019, total deposits in Bosnian banks were KM 21.9 billion (€11.20 billion), which represents 61.15% of nominal GDP.[168]
+
+In the second quarter of 2019, the average price of new apartments sold in Bosnia and Herzegovina was 1,606 km (€821.47) per square meter.[169]
+
+In the first six months of 2019, exports amounted to 5.829 billion KM (€2.98 billion), which is 0.1% less than in the same period of 2018, while imports amounted to 9.779 billion KM (€5.00 billion), which is by 4.5% more than in the same period of the previous year.[170]
+
+In the first seven months of 2019, 906,788 tourists visited the country, a 11.7% jump from the previous year.[171]
+
+In the first six months of 2019, foreign direct investment amounted to 650.1 million KM (€332.34 million).[172]
+
+Sarajevo International Airport (IATA: SJJ, ICAO: LQSA), also known as Butmir Airport, is the main international airport in Bosnia and Herzegovina, located 3.3 NM (6.1 km; 3.8 mi) southwest of the Sarajevo main railway station[173] in the city of Sarajevo in the suburb of Butmir.
+
+Railway operations in Bosnia and Herzegovina are successors of the Yugoslav Railways within the country boundaries following independence from the Former Yugoslavia in 1992.
+
+The Bosnian communications market was fully liberalised in January 2006. There are three landline telephone providers, although each one predominantly serves a partile services are provided by three operators, with nationwide services. Mobile data services are also available, including high-speed EDGE and 3G services.[174]
+
+Oslobođenje (Liberation), founded in 1943, is one of the country's longest running continuously circulating newspapers. There are many national publications, only some of which include the Dnevni Avaz (Daily Voice), founded in 1995, and Jutarnje Novine (Morning News) in circulation in Sarajevo.[175] Other local periodicals include the Croatian newspaper Hrvatska riječ and the Bosnian magazine Start, as well as the weekly newspapers Slobodna Bosna (Free Bosnia) and BH Dani (BH Days). Novi Plamen, a monthly magazine, is the most left-wing publication. The international news station Al Jazeera maintains a sister channel that caters to the Balkan region, Al Jazeera Balkans, broadcasting out of and based in Sarajevo.[176] Since 2014, the N1 platform began broadcasting as an affiliate of CNN International and has headquarters in Sarajevo, Zagreb, and Belgrade.[177]
+
+Additionally, the country is the most liberal in terms of freedom of the press in the region, ranking 43rd internationally.[178]
+
+As of December 2017[update], there are 3,064,072 internet users in the country or 86.77% of the entire population.[179]
+
+According to projections by the World Tourism Organization, Bosnia and Herzegovina will have the third highest tourism growth rate in the world between 1995 and 2020.[180]
+
+In 2018, 1.883.772 tourists visited Bosnia-Herzegovina, an increase of 44,1%, and had 3.843.484 overnight hotel stays, a 43.5% increase from the previous year. Also, 71.2% of the tourists came from foreign countries.[181]
+
+In 2017, 1,307,319 tourists visited Bosnia and Herzegovina, an increase of 13.7%, and had 2,677,125 overnight hotel stays, a 12.3% increase from the previous year. 71.5% of the tourists came from foreign countries.[182]
+
+In 2006, when ranking the best cities in the world, Lonely Planet placed Sarajevo, the national capital[1] and host of the 1984 Winter Olympic Games, as #43 on the list.[183] Tourism in Sarajevo is chiefly focused on historical, religious, and cultural aspects. In 2010, Lonely Planet's "Best in Travel" nominated it as one of the top ten cities to visit that year.[184] Sarajevo also won travel blog Foxnomad's "Best City to Visit" competition in 2012, beating more than one hundred other cities around the entire world.[185]
+
+Međugorje has become one of the most popular pilgrimage sites for Christians in the world and has turned into Europe's third most important religious place, where each year more than 1 million people visit.[186] It has been estimated that 30 million pilgrims have come to Međugorje since the reputed apparitions began in 1981.[187]
+
+Bosnia has also become an increasingly popular skiing and Ecotourism destination. Bosnia and Herzegovina remains one of the last undiscovered natural regions of the southern area of the Alps, with vast tracts of wild and untouched nature attracting adventurers and nature lovers. National Geographic magazine named Bosnia and Herzegovina as the best mountain biking adventure destination for 2012.[188] The central Bosnian Dinaric Alps are favored by hikers and mountaineers, containing both Mediterranean and Alpine climates. Whitewater rafting is somewhat of a national pastime, with three rivers, including the deepest river canyon in Europe, the Tara River Canyon.[180]
+
+Most recently, the Huffington Post named Bosnia and Herzegovina the "9th Greatest Adventure in the World for 2013", adding that the country boasts "the cleanest water and air in Europe; the greatest untouched forests; and the most wildlife. The best way to experience is the three rivers trip, which purls through the best the Balkans have to offer."[189]
+
+Some of the tourist attractions in Bosnia and Herzegovina include:
+
+Higher education has a long and rich tradition in Bosnia and Herzegovina. The first bespoke higher-education institution was a school of Sufi philosophy established by Gazi Husrev-beg in 1531. Numerous other religious schools then followed. In 1887, under the Austro-Hungarian Empire, a Sharia law school began a five-year program.[191] In the 1940s the University of Sarajevo became the city's first secular higher education institute. In the 1950s post-bachelaurate graduate degrees became available.[192] Severely damaged during the war, it was recently rebuilt in partnership with more than 40 other universities. There are various other institutions of higher education, including: University "Džemal Bijedić" of Mostar, University of Banja Luka, University of Mostar, University of East Sarajevo, University of Tuzla, American University in Bosnia and Herzegovina and the Academy of Sciences and Arts of Bosnia and Herzegovina, which is held in high regard as one of the most prestigious creative arts academies in the region.
+
+Also, Bosnia and Herzegovina is home to several private and international higher education institutions, some of which are:
+
+Primary schooling lasts for nine years. Secondary education is provided by general and technical secondary schools (typically Gymnasiums) where studies typically last for four years. All forms of secondary schooling include an element of vocational training. Pupils graduating from general secondary schools obtain the Matura and can enroll in any tertiary educational institution or academy by passing a qualification examination prescribed by the governing body or institution. Students graduating technical subjects obtain a Diploma.[193]
+
+The architecture of Bosnia and Herzegovina is largely influenced by four major periods where political and social changes influenced the creation of distinct cultural and architectural habits of the population. Each period made its influence felt and contributed to a greater diversity of cultures and architectural language in this region.
+
+Some television, magazines, and newspapers in Bosnia and Herzegovina are state-owned, and some are for-profit corporations funded by advertising, subscription, and other sales-related revenues. The Constitution of Bosnia and Herzegovina guarantees freedom of speech.
+
+As a country in transition with a post-war legacy and a complex domestic political structure Bosnia and Herzegovina's media system is under transformation. In the early post-war period (1995–2005), media development was guided mainly by international donors and cooperation agencies, who invested to help reconstruct, diversify, democratize and professionalize media outlets.[194][195]
+
+Post-war developments included the establishment of an independent Communication Regulatory Agency, the adoption of a Press Code, the establishment of the Press Council, the decriminalization of label and defamation, the introduction of a rather advanced Freedom of Access to Information Law, and the creation of a Public Service Broadcasting System from the formerly state-owned broadcaster.
+Yet, internationally backed positive developments have been often obstructed by domestic elites, and the professionalisation of media and journalists has proceeded only slowly. High levels of partisanship and linkages between the media and the political systems hinder the adherence to professional code of conducts.[195]
+
+Bosnia and Herzegovina has a rich literature, including the Nobel prize winner Ivo Andrić and poets such as Croat Antun Branko Šimić, Aleksa Šantić, Jovan Dučić and Mak Dizdar, writers such as Zlatko Topčić, Meša Selimović, Semezdin Mehmedinović, Miljenko Jergović, Isak Samokovlija, Safvet beg Bašagić, Abdulah Sidran, Petar Kočić, Aleksandar Hemon, and Nedžad Ibrišimović. The National Theater was founded 1919 in Sarajevo and its first director was the dramatist Branislav Nušić.
+Magazines such as Novi Plamen or Sarajevske sveske are some of the more prominent publications covering cultural and literary themes.
+
+The art of Bosnia and Herzegovina was always evolving and ranged from the original medieval tombstones called Stećci to paintings in Kotromanić court. However, only with the arrival of Austro-Hungarians did the painting renaissance in Bosnia really begin to flourish. The first educated artists from European academies appeared with the beginning of the 20th century. Among those are: Gabrijel Jurkić, Petar Šain, Roman Petrović and Lazar Drljača.
+
+After World War II artists like Mersad Berber and Safet Zec rose in popularity.
+
+In 2007, Ars Aevi, a museum of contemporary art that includes works by renowned world artists was founded in Sarajevo.
+
+Typical Bosnian and Herzegovinian songs are ganga, rera, and the traditional Slavic music for the folk dances such as kolo and from Ottoman era the most popular is sevdalinka. Pop and Rock music has a tradition here as well, with the more famous musicians including Dino Zonić, Goran Bregović, Davorin Popović, Kemal Monteno, Zdravko Čolić, Elvir Laković, Edo Maajka, Hari Mata Hari and Dino Merlin. Other composers such as Đorđe Novković, Al' Dino, Haris Džinović, Kornelije Kovač, and many pop and rock bands, for example, Bijelo Dugme, Crvena Jabuka, Divlje Jagode, Indexi, Plavi Orkestar, Zabranjeno Pušenje, Ambasadori, Dubioza kolektiv, who were among the leading ones in the former Yugoslavia. Bosnia is home to the composer Dušan Šestić, the creator of the national anthem of Bosnia and Herzegovina and father of singer Marija Šestić, to the world known jazz musician, educator and Bosnian jazz ambassador Sinan Alimanović, composer Saša Lošić and pianist Saša Toperić. In the villages, especially in Herzegovina, Bosniaks, Serbs, and Croats play the ancient Gusle. The gusle is used mainly to recite epic poems in a usually dramatic tone.
+
+Probably the most distinctive and identifiably "Bosnian" of music, Sevdalinka is a kind of emotional, melancholic folk song that often describes sad subjects such as love and loss, the death of a dear person or heartbreak. Sevdalinkas were traditionally performed with a saz, a Turkish string instrument, which was later replaced by the accordion. However the more modern arrangement, to the derision of some purists, is typically a vocalist accompanied by the accordion along with snare drums, upright bass, guitars, clarinets and violins.
+
+Rural folk traditions in Bosnia and Herzegovina include the shouted, polyphonic ganga and "ravne pjesme" (flat song) styles, as well as instruments like a droneless bagpipe, wooden flute and šargija. The gusle, an instrument found throughout the Balkans, is also used to accompany ancient Slavic epic poems. There are also Bosnian folk songs in the Ladino language, derived from the area's Jewish population.
+
+Bosnian roots music came from Middle Bosnia, Posavina, the Drina valley and Kalesija. It is usually performed by singers with two violinists and a šargija player. These bands first appeared around World War I and became popular in the 1960s. This is the third oldest music following after the sevdalinka and ilahija. Self-taught people, mostly in two or three members of the different choices of old instruments, mostly in the violin, sacking, saz, drums, flutes (zurle) or wooden flute, as others have already called, the original performers of Bosnian music that can not be written notes, transmitted by ear from generation to generation, family is usually hereditary. It is thought to be brought from Persia-Kalesi tribe that settled in the area of present Sprecanski valleys and hence probably the name Kalesija. In this part of Bosnia it is the most common. Again, it became the leader of First World War onwards, as well as 60 years in the field Sprecanski doline. This kind of music was enjoyed by all three peoples in Bosnia, Bosniaks, Croats and Serbs, and it contributed a lot to reconcile people socializing, entertainment and other organizations through festivala. In Kalesija it is maintained each year with the Bosnian Festival Original music.
+
+Studio Kemix firm Dzemal Dzihanovic from Živinice together with his artists brought this kind of music to perfection at the end 20th century. With its entirely new form of modernity, it is most common in the Tuzla Canton and the cradle of this music city Živinice was named Bosnian town of original music. Songs are performed preferably in a diphthong, the first and second voice which is a special secret performance of this music and some performers sing in troglasju as they do Kalesijski triple that was recorded in 1968, as the first written record of the tone on the album, along with Higurashi no naku.
+
+Sarajevo is internationally renowned for its eclectic and diverse selection of festivals. The Sarajevo Film Festival was established in 1995, during the Bosnian War and has become the premier and largest film festival in the Balkans and South-East Europe.
+
+Bosnia has a rich cinematic and film heritage, dating back to the Kingdom of Yugoslavia; many Bosnian filmmakers have achieved international prominence and some have won international awards ranging from the Academy Awards to multiple Palme d'Ors and Golden Bears. Some notable Bosnian screenwriters, directors and producers are Danis Tanović (known for the Academy Award– and Golden Globe Award–winning 2001 film No Man's Land and Silver Bear Grand Jury Prize–winning 2016 film Death in Sarajevo),[196] Emir Kusturica (won two Palme d'Or at Cannes), Jasmila Žbanić (won Golden Bear), Zlatko Topčić, Ademir Kenović, Dino Mustafić, Ahmed Imamović, Pjer Žalica, Aida Begić, Adis Bakrač, etc.
+
+Bosnian cuisine uses many spices, in moderate quantities. Most dishes are light, as they are boiled; the sauces are fully natural, consisting of little more than the natural juices of the vegetables in the dish. Typical ingredients include tomatoes, potatoes, onions, garlic, peppers, cucumbers, carrots, cabbage, mushrooms, spinach, zucchini, dried beans, fresh beans, plums, milk, paprika and cream called Pavlaka. Bosnian cuisine is balanced between Western and Eastern influences. As a result of the Ottoman administration for almost 500 years, Bosnian food is closely related to Turkish, Greek, and other former Ottoman and Mediterranean cuisines. However, because of years of Austrian rule, there are many influences from Central Europe. Typical meat dishes include primarily beef and lamb. Some local specialties are ćevapi, burek, dolma, sarma, pilav, goulash, ajvar and a whole range of Eastern sweets. Ćevapi is a grilled dish of minced meat, a type of kebab, popular in former Yugoslavia and considered a national dish in Bosnia and Herzegovina[197] and Serbia.[198][199][200] Local wines come from Herzegovina where the climate is suitable for growing grapes. Herzegovinian loza (similar to Italian Grappa but less sweet) is very popular. Plum (rakija) or apple (jabukovača) alcohol beverages are produced in the north. In the south, distilleries used to produce vast quantities of brandy and supply all of ex-Yugoslav alcohol factories (brandy is the base of most alcoholic drinks).
+
+Coffeehouses, where Bosnian coffee is served in džezva with rahat lokum and sugar cubes, proliferate Sarajevo and every city in the country. Coffee drinking is a favorite Bosnian pastime and part of the culture. Bosnia and Herzegovina is the ninth country in the entire world by per capita coffee consumption.[201]
+
+Bosnia and Herzegovina has produced many athletes, both as a state in Yugoslavia and independently after 1992. The most important international sporting event in the history of Bosnia and Herzegovina was the 14th Winter Olympics, held in Sarajevo from 7 to 19 February 1984.
+The Borac handball club has won seven Yugoslav Handball Championships, as well as the European Championship Cup in 1976 and the International Handball Federation Cup in 1991.
+
+Amel Mekić, Bosnian judoka, became European champion in 2011. Track and field athlete Amel Tuka won the bronze medal in 800 metres at the 2015 World Championships and Hamza Alić won the silver medal in shot put at the 2013 European Indoor Championships.
+
+The Bosna Royal basketball club from Sarajevo were European Champions in 1979. The Yugoslav national basketball team, which won medals in every world championship from 1963 through 1990, included Bosnian players such as FIBA Hall of Famers Dražen Dalipagić and Mirza Delibašić. Bosnia and Herzegovina regularly qualifies for the European Championship in Basketball, with players including Mirza Teletović, Nihad Đedović and Jusuf Nurkić. Bosnia and Herzegovina national u-16 team won two gold medals in 2015, winning both 2015 European Youth Summer Olympic Festival as well as 2015 FIBA Europe Under-16 Championship.
+
+Women's basketball club Jedinstvo Aida from Tuzla won Women's European Club Championship in 1989 and Ronchetti Cup final in 1990, led by Razija Mujanović, three times best female European basketball player, and Mara Lakić
+
+The Bosnian chess team was Champion of Yugoslavia seven times, in addition to club ŠK Bosna winning four European Chess Club Cups. Chess grandmaster Borki Predojević has also won two European Championships. The most impressive success of Bosnian Chess was runner-up position in Chess Olympiad of 1994 in Moscow, featuring Grandmasters Predrag Nikolić, Ivan Sokolov and Bojan Kurajica.
+
+Middle-weight boxer Marijan Beneš has won several Championships of Bosnia and Herzegovina, Yugoslav Championships and the European Championship.[202] In 1978, he won the World Title against Elisha Obed from the Bahamas.
+
+Association football is the most popular sport in Bosnia and Herzegovina. It dates from 1903, but its popularity grew significantly after World War I. Bosnian clubs FK Sarajevo and Željezničar, won the Yugoslav Championship, while the Yugoslav national football team included Bosnian players of all ethnic backgrounds and generations, such as Safet Sušić, Zlatko Vujović, Mehmed Baždarević, Davor Jozić, Faruk Hadžibegić, Predrag Pašić, Blaž Slišković, Vahid Halilhodžić, Dušan Bajević, Ivica Osim, Josip Katalinski, Tomislav Knez, Velimir Sombolac and numerous others. The Bosnia and Herzegovina national football team played at the 2014 FIFA World Cup, its first major tournament. Players on the team again includes notable players of all country's ethnic background, such as then and now captains Emir Spahić, Zvjezdan Misimović and Edin Džeko, defenders like Ognjen Vranješ, Sead Kolašinac and Toni Šunjić, midfielders like Miralem Pjanić and Senad Lulić, striker Vedad Ibišević, and so on.
+
+Former Bosnian footballers include Hasan Salihamidžić, who became only the second Bosnian to ever win a UEFA Champions League trophy, after Elvir Baljić. He made 234 appearances and scored 31 goals for German club FC Bayern Munich. Sergej Barbarez, who played for several clubs in the German Bundesliga including Borussia Dortmund, Hamburger SV and Bayer Leverkusen was joint-top scorer in the 2000–01 Bundesliga season with 22 goals. Meho Kodro spent most of his career playing in Spain most notably with Real Sociedad and FC Barcelona. Elvir Rahimić made 302 appearances for Russian club CSKA Moscow with whom he won the UEFA Cup in 2005. Milena Nikolić, member of women's national team, was 2013–14 UEFA Women's Champions League top scorer.
+
+Bosnia and Herzegovina was the world champion of volleyball at the 2004 Summer Paralympics and volleyball at the 2012 Summer Paralympics. Many among those on the team lost their legs in the Bosnian War.
+
+Tennis is also gaining a lot of popularity after the recent successes of Damir Džumhur and Mirza Bašić at Grand Slam level. Other notable tennis players who represented Bosnia are, Amer Delić and Mervana Jugić-Salkić.
+
+The Bosnian wartime militia (Schutzkorps), which became known for its persecution of Serbs, was overwhelmingly Muslim.
+
+
+
+Coordinates: 44°N 18°E / 44°N 18°E / 44; 18
+
+Una-Sana  Central Bosnia
+
+Posavina  Herzegovina-Neretva
+
+Tuzla  West Herzegovina
+
+Zenica-Doboj  Sarajevo
+
+Bosnian Podrinje
+ Canton 10

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+
+
+Cattle, or cows (female) and bulls (male), are the most common type of large domesticated ungulates. They are a prominent modern member of the subfamily Bovinae, are the most widespread species of the genus Bos, and are most commonly classified collectively as Bos taurus.
+
+Cattle are commonly raised as livestock for meat (beef or veal, see beef cattle), for milk (see dairy cattle), and for hides, which are used to make leather. They are used as riding animals and draft animals (oxen or bullocks, which pull carts, plows and other implements). Another product of cattle is their dung, which can be used to create manure or fuel. In some regions, such as parts of India, cattle have significant religious meaning. Cattle, mostly small breeds such as the Miniature Zebu, are also kept as pets.
+
+Around 10,500 years ago, cattle were domesticated from as few as 80 progenitors in central Anatolia, the Levant and Western Iran.[1] According to an estimate from 2011, there are 1.4 billion cattle in the world.[2] In 2009, cattle became one of the first livestock animals to have a fully mapped genome.[3]
+
+Cattle were originally identified as three separate species: Bos taurus, the European or "taurine" cattle (including similar types from Africa and Asia); Bos indicus, the zebu; and the extinct Bos primigenius, the aurochs. The aurochs is ancestral to both zebu and taurine cattle.[4] These have been reclassified as one species, Bos taurus, with three subspecies: Bos taurus primigenius, Bos taurus indicus, and Bos taurus taurus.[5][6]
+
+Complicating the matter is the ability of cattle to interbreed with other closely related species. Hybrid individuals and even breeds exist, not only between taurine cattle and zebu (such as the sanga cattle, Bos taurus africanus), but also between one or both of these and some other members of the genus Bos – yaks (the dzo or yattle[7]), banteng, and gaur. Hybrids such as the beefalo breed can even occur between taurine cattle and either species of bison, leading some authors to consider them part of the genus Bos, as well.[8] The hybrid origin of some types may not be obvious – for example, genetic testing of the Dwarf Lulu breed, the only taurine-type cattle in Nepal, found them to be a mix of taurine cattle, zebu, and yak.[9] However, cattle cannot be successfully hybridized with more distantly related bovines such as water buffalo or African buffalo.
+
+The aurochs originally ranged throughout Europe, North Africa, and much of Asia. In historical times, its range became restricted to Europe, and the last known individual died in Mazovia, Poland, in about 1627.[10] Breeders have attempted to recreate cattle of similar appearance to aurochs by crossing traditional types of domesticated cattle, creating the Heck cattle breed.
+
+Cattle did not originate as the term for bovine animals. It was borrowed from Anglo-Norman catel, itself from medieval Latin capitale 'principal sum of money, capital', itself derived in turn from Latin caput 'head'. Cattle originally meant movable personal property, especially livestock of any kind, as opposed to real property (the land, which also included wild or small free-roaming animals such as chickens—they were sold as part of the land).[11] The word is a variant of chattel (a unit of personal property) and closely related to capital in the economic sense.[12] The term replaced earlier Old English feoh 'cattle, property', which survives today as fee (cf. German: Vieh, Dutch: vee, Gothic: faihu).
+
+The word "cow" came via Anglo-Saxon cū (plural cȳ), from Common Indo-European gʷōus (genitive gʷowés) = "a bovine animal", compare Persian: gâv, Sanskrit: go-, Welsh: buwch.[13] The plural cȳ became ki or kie in Middle English, and an additional plural ending was often added, giving kine, kien, but also kies, kuin and others. This is the origin of the now archaic English plural, "kine". The Scots language singular is coo or cou, and the plural is "kye".
+
+In older English sources such as the King James Version of the Bible, "cattle" refers to livestock, as opposed to "deer" which refers to wildlife.  "Wild cattle" may refer to feral cattle or to undomesticated species of the genus Bos.  Today, when used without any other qualifier, the modern meaning of "cattle" is usually restricted to domesticated bovines.[14]
+
+In general, the same words are used in different parts of the world, but with minor differences in the definitions.  The terminology described here contrasts the differences in definition between the United Kingdom and other British-influenced parts of the world such as Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Ireland and the United States.[15]
+
+"Cattle" can only be used in the plural and not in the singular: it is a plurale tantum.[26] Thus one may refer to "three cattle" or "some cattle", but not "one cattle". "One head of cattle" is a valid though periphrastic way to refer to one animal of indeterminate or unknown age and sex; otherwise no universally used single-word singular form of cattle exists in modern English, other than the sex- and age-specific terms such as cow, bull, steer and heifer.  Historically, "ox" was not a sex-specific term for adult cattle, but generally this is now used only for working cattle, especially adult castrated males. The term is also incorporated into the names of other species, such as the musk ox and "grunting ox" (yak), and is used in some areas to describe certain cattle products such as ox-hide and oxtail.[27]
+
+Cow is in general use as a singular for the collective cattle. The word cow is easy to use when a singular is needed and the sex is unknown or irrelevant—when "there is a cow in the road", for example. Further, any herd of fully mature cattle in or near a pasture is statistically likely to consist mostly of cows, so the term is probably accurate even in the restrictive sense.  Other than the few bulls needed for breeding, the vast majority of male cattle are castrated as calves and are used as oxen or slaughtered for meat before the age of three years.  Thus, in a pastured herd, any calves or herd bulls usually are clearly distinguishable from the cows due to distinctively different sizes and clear anatomical differences. Merriam-Webster and Oxford Living Dictionaries recognize the sex-nonspecific use of cow as an alternate definition,[28][29] whereas Collins and the OED do not.
+
+Colloquially, more general nonspecific terms may denote cattle when a singular form is needed. Head of cattle is usually used only after a numeral. Australian, New Zealand and British farmers use the term beast or cattle beast. Bovine is also used in Britain. The term critter is common in the western United States and Canada, particularly when referring to young cattle.[30] In some areas of the American South (particularly the Appalachian region), where both dairy and beef cattle are present, an individual animal was once called a "beef critter", though that term is becoming archaic.
+
+Cattle raised for human consumption are called beef cattle. Within the beef cattle industry in parts of the United States, the term beef (plural beeves) is still used in its archaic sense to refer to an animal of either sex. Cows of certain breeds that are kept for the milk they give are called dairy cows or milking cows (formerly milch cows).  Most young male offspring of dairy cows are sold for veal, and may be referred to as veal calves.
+
+The term dogies is used to describe orphaned calves in the context of ranch work in the American West, as in "Keep them dogies moving".[31] In some places, a cow kept to provide milk for one family is called a "house cow".  Other obsolete terms for cattle include "neat" (this use survives in "neatsfoot oil", extracted from the feet and legs of cattle), and "beefing" (young animal fit for slaughter).
+
+An onomatopoeic term for one of the most common sounds made by cattle is moo (also called lowing). There are a number of other sounds made by cattle, including calves bawling, and bulls bellowing. Bawling is most common for cows after weaning of a calf. The bullroarer makes a sound similar to a bull's territorial call.[32]
+
+Cattle are large quadrupedal ungulate mammals with cloven hooves. Most breeds have horns, which can be as large as the Texas Longhorn or small like a scur. Careful genetic selection has allowed polled (hornless) cattle to become widespread.
+
+Cattle are ruminants, meaning their digestive system is highly specialized to allow the use of poorly digestible plants as food. Cattle have one stomach with four compartments, the rumen, reticulum, omasum, and abomasum, with the rumen being the largest compartment.
+The reticulum, the smallest compartment, is known as the "honeycomb". The omasum's main function is to absorb water and nutrients from the digestible feed. The omasum is known as the "many plies". The abomasum is like the human stomach; this is why it is known as the "true stomach".
+
+Cattle are known for regurgitating and re-chewing their food, known as cud chewing, like most ruminants.  While the animal is feeding, the food is swallowed without being chewed and goes into the rumen for storage until the animal can find a quiet place to continue the digestion process.  The food is regurgitated, a mouthful at a time, back up to the mouth, where the food, now called the cud, is chewed by the molars, grinding down the coarse vegetation to small particles.  The cud is then swallowed again and further digested by specialized microorganisms in the rumen. These microbes are primarily responsible for decomposing cellulose and other carbohydrates into volatile fatty acids cattle use as their primary metabolic fuel. The microbes inside the rumen also synthesize amino acids from non-protein nitrogenous sources, such as urea and ammonia. As these microbes reproduce in the rumen, older generations die and their cells continue on through the digestive tract. These cells are then partially digested in the small intestines, allowing cattle to gain a high-quality protein source. These features allow cattle to thrive on grasses and other tough vegetation.
+
+The gestation period for a cow is about nine months long. A newborn calf's size can vary among breeds, but a typical calf weighs 25 to 45 kg (55 to 99 lb). Adult size and weight vary significantly among breeds and sex. Steers are generally killed before reaching 750 kg (1,650 lb). Breeding stock may be allowed a longer lifespan, occasionally living as long as 25 years. The oldest recorded cow, Big Bertha, died at the age of 48 in 1993.
+
+On farms it is very common to use artificial insemination (AI),  a medically assisted reproduction technique consisting of the artificial deposition of semen in the female's genital tract.[33]  It is used in cases where the spermatozoa can not reach the fallopian tubes or simply by choice of the owner of the animal. It consists of transferring, to the uterine cavity, spermatozoa previously collected and processed, with the selection of morphologically more normal and mobile spermatozoa.
+
+A cow's udder contains two pairs of mammary glands, (commonly referred to as teats) creating four "quarters".[34] The front ones are referred to as fore quarters and the rear ones rear quarters.[35]
+
+Bulls become fertile at about seven months of age. Their fertility is closely related to the size of their testicles, and one simple test of fertility is to measure the circumference of the scrotum: a young bull is likely to be fertile once this reaches 28 centimetres (11 in); that of a fully adult bull may be over 40 centimetres (16 in).[36][37]
+
+A bull has a fibro-elastic penis. Given the small amount of erectile tissue, there is little enlargement after erection. The penis is quite rigid when non-erect, and becomes even more rigid during erection. Protrusion is not affected much by erection, but more by relaxation of the retractor penis muscle and straightening of the sigmoid flexure.[38][39][40] Induced ovulation can be manipulated to produce farming benefits. For example, to synchronise ovulation of the cattle to benefit dairy farming.
+
+The weight of adult cattle varies, depending on the breed. Smaller kinds, such as Dexter and Jersey adults, range between 272 to 454 kg (600 to 1,000 lb). Large Continental breeds, such as Charolais, Marchigiana, Belgian Blue and Chianina, adults range from 635 to 1,134 kg (1,400 to 2,500 lb). British breeds, such as Hereford, Angus, and Shorthorn, mature between 454 to 907 kg (1,000 to 2,000 lb), occasionally higher, particularly with Angus and Hereford.[41] Bulls are larger than cows of the same breed by up to a few hundred kilograms. Chianina bulls can weigh up to  1,500 kg (3,300 lb); British bulls, such as Angus and Hereford, can weigh as little as 907 kg (2,000 lb) to as much as 1,361 kg (3,000 lb).[citation needed]
+
+The world record for the heaviest bull was 1,740 kg (3,840 lb), a Chianina named Donetto, when he was exhibited at the Arezzo show in 1955.[42] The heaviest steer was eight-year-old 'Old Ben', a Shorthorn/Hereford cross weighing in at 2,140 kg (4,720 lb) in 1910.[43]
+
+In the United States, the average weight of beef cattle has steadily increased, especially since the 1970s, requiring the building of new slaughterhouses able to handle larger carcasses. New packing plants in the 1980s stimulated a large increase in cattle weights.[44] Before 1790 beef cattle averaged only 160 kg (350 lb) net; and thereafter weights climbed steadily.[45][46]
+
+In laboratory studies, young cattle are able to memorize the locations of several food sources and retain this memory for at least 8 hours, although this declined after 12 hours.[47]  Fifteen-month-old heifers learn more quickly than adult cows which have had either one or two calvings, but their longer-term memory is less stable.[48]  Mature cattle perform well in spatial learning tasks and have a good long-term memory in these tests.  Cattle tested in a radial arm maze are able to remember the locations of high-quality food for at least 30 days.  Although they initially learn to avoid low-quality food, this memory diminishes over the same duration.[49]  Under less artificial testing conditions, young cattle showed they were able to remember the location of feed for at least 48 days.[50]  Cattle can make an association between a visual stimulus and food within 1 day—memory of this association can be retained for 1 year, despite a slight decay.[51]
+
+Calves are capable of discrimination learning[52] and adult cattle compare favourably with small mammals in their learning ability in the Closed-field Test.[53]
+
+They are also able to discriminate between familiar individuals, and among humans.  Cattle can tell the difference between familiar and unfamiliar animals of the same species (conspecifics).  Studies show they behave less aggressively toward familiar individuals when they are forming a new group.[54]  Calves can also discriminate between humans based on previous experience, as shown by approaching those who handled them positively and avoiding those who handled them aversively.[55] Although cattle can discriminate between humans by their faces alone, they also use other cues such as the color of clothes when these are available.[56]
+
+In audio play-back studies, calves prefer their own mother's vocalizations compared to the vocalizations of an unfamiliar mother.[57]
+
+In laboratory studies using images, cattle can discriminate between images of the heads of cattle and other animal species.[58] They are also able to distinguish between familiar and unfamiliar conspecifics.  Furthermore, they are able to categorize images as familiar and unfamiliar individuals.[54]
+
+When mixed with other individuals, cloned calves from the same donor form subgroups, indicating that kin discrimination occurs and may be a basis of grouping behaviour.  It has also been shown using images of cattle that both artificially inseminated and cloned calves have similar cognitive capacities of kin and non-kin discrimination.[59]
+
+Cattle can recognize familiar individuals. Visual individual recognition is a more complex mental process than visual discrimination.  It requires the recollection of the learned idiosyncratic identity of an individual that has been previously encountered and the formation of a mental representation.[60] By using 2-dimensional images of the heads of one cow (face, profiles, ​3⁄4 views), all the tested heifers showed individual recognition of familiar and unfamiliar individuals from their own breed.   Furthermore, almost all the heifers recognized unknown individuals from different breeds, although this was achieved with greater difficulty.  Individual recognition was most difficult when the visual features of the breed being tested were quite different from the breed in the image, for example, the breed being tested had no spots whereas the image was of a spotted breed.[61]
+
+Cattle use visual/brain lateralisation in their visual scanning of novel and familiar stimuli.[62]  Domestic cattle prefer to view novel stimuli with the left eye, i.e. using the right brain hemisphere (similar to horses, Australian  magpies, chicks, toads and fish) but use the right eye, i.e. using the left hemisphere, for viewing familiar stimuli.[63]
+
+In cattle, temperament can affect production traits such as carcass and meat quality or milk yield as well as affecting the animal's overall health and reproduction. Cattle temperament is defined as "the consistent behavioral and physiological difference observed between individuals in response to a stressor or environmental challenge and is used to describe the relatively stable difference in the behavioral predisposition of an animal, which can be related to psychobiological mechanisms".[65] Generally, cattle temperament is assumed to be multidimensional. Five underlying categories of temperament traits have been proposed:[66]
+
+In a study on Holstein–Friesian heifers learning to press a panel to open a gate for access to a food reward, the researchers also recorded the heart rate and behavior of the heifers when moving along the race towards the food. When the heifers made clear improvements in learning, they had higher heart rates and tended to move more vigorously along the race. The researchers concluded this was an indication that cattle may react emotionally to their own learning improvement.[67]
+
+Negative emotional states are associated with a bias toward negative responses towards ambiguous cues in judgement tasks.  After separation from their mothers, Holstein calves showed such a cognitive bias indicative of low mood.[68]  A similar study showed that after hot-iron disbudding (dehorning), calves had a similar negative bias indicating that post-operative pain following this routine procedure results in a negative change in emotional state.[69]
+
+In studies of visual discrimination, the position of the ears has been used as an indicator of emotional state.[54] When cattle are stressed other cattle can tell by the chemicals released in their urine.[70]
+
+Cattle are very gregarious and even short-term isolation is considered to cause severe psychological stress.  When Aubrac and Friesian heifers are isolated, they increase their vocalizations and experience increased heart rate and plasma cortisol concentrations.  These physiological changes are greater in Aubracs.  When visual contact is re-instated, vocalizations rapidly decline, regardless of the familiarity of the returning cattle, however, heart rate decreases are greater if the returning cattle are familiar to the previously-isolated individual.[71]  Mirrors have been used to reduce stress in isolated cattle.[72]
+
+Cattle use all of the five widely recognized sensory modalities.  These can assist in some complex behavioural patterns, for example, in grazing behaviour.  Cattle eat mixed diets, but when given the opportunity, show a partial preference of approximately 70% clover and 30% grass. This preference has a diurnal pattern, with a stronger preference for clover in the morning, and the proportion of grass increasing towards the evening.[73]
+
+Vision is the dominant sense in cattle and they obtain almost 50% of their information visually.
+[74]
+
+Cattle are a prey animal and to assist predator detection, their eyes are located on the sides of their head rather than the front.  This gives them a wide field of view of 330° but limits binocular vision (and therefore stereopsis) to 30° to 50° compared to 140° in humans.[54][75]  This means they have a blind spot directly behind them.  Cattle have good visual acuity,[54] but compared to humans, their visual accommodation is poor.[clarification needed][74]
+
+Cattle have two kinds of color receptors in the cone cells of their retinas.   This means that cattle are dichromatic, as are most other non-primate land mammals.[76][77] There are two to three rods per cone in the fovea centralis but five to six near the optic papilla.[75] Cattle can distinguish long wavelength colors (yellow, orange and red) much better than the shorter wavelengths (blue, grey and green). Calves are able to discriminate between long (red) and short (blue) or medium (green) wavelengths, but have limited ability to discriminate between the short and medium.  They also approach handlers more quickly under red light.[78] Whilst having good color sensitivity, it is not as good as humans or sheep.[54]
+
+A common misconception about cattle (particularly bulls) is that they are enraged by the color red (something provocative is often said to be "like a red flag to a bull"). This is a myth. In bullfighting, it is the movement of the red flag or cape that irritates the bull and incites it to charge.[79]
+
+Cattle have a well-developed sense of taste and can distinguish the four primary tastes (sweet, salty, bitter and sour). They possess around 20,000 taste buds. The strength of taste perception depends on the individual's current food requirements. They avoid bitter-tasting foods (potentially toxic) and have a marked preference for sweet (high calorific value) and salty foods (electrolyte balance).  Their sensitivity to sour-tasting foods helps them to maintain optimal ruminal pH.[74]
+
+Plants have low levels of sodium and cattle have developed the capacity of seeking salt by taste and smell.  If cattle become depleted of sodium salts, they show increased locomotion directed to searching for these.  To assist in their search, the olfactory and gustatory receptors able to detect minute amounts of sodium salts increase their sensitivity as biochemical disruption develops with sodium salt depletion.[80][81]
+
+Cattle hearing ranges from 23 Hz to 35 kHz.  Their frequency of best sensitivity is 8 kHz and they have a lowest threshold of −21 db (re 20 μN/m−2), which means their hearing is more acute than horses (lowest threshold of 7 db).[82] Sound localization acuity thresholds are an average of 30°.  This means that cattle are less able to localise sounds compared to goats (18°), dogs (8°) and humans (0.8°).[83]  Because cattle have a broad foveal fields of view covering almost the entire horizon, they may not need very accurate locus information from their auditory systems to direct their gaze to a sound source.
+
+Vocalizations are an important mode of communication amongst cattle and can provide information on the age, sex, dominance status and reproductive status of the caller. Calves can recognize their mothers using vocalizations; vocal behaviour may play a role by indicating estrus and competitive display by bulls.[84]
+
+Cattle have a range of odiferous glands over their body including interdigital, infraorbital, inguinal and sebaceous glands, indicating that olfaction probably plays a large role in their social life.  Both the primary olfactory system using the olfactory bulbs, and the secondary olfactory system using the vomeronasal organ are used.[85]  This latter olfactory system is used in the flehmen response.  There is evidence that when cattle are stressed, this can be recognised by other cattle and this is communicated by alarm substances in the urine.[70]  The odour of dog faeces induces behavioural changes prior to cattle feeding, whereas the odours of urine from either stressed or non-stressed conspecifics and blood have no effect.[86]
+
+In the laboratory, cattle can be trained to recognise conspecific individuals using olfaction only.[85]
+
+In general, cattle use their sense of smell to "expand" on information detected by other sensory modalities.  However, in the case of social and reproductive behaviours, olfaction is a key source of information.[74]
+
+Cattle have tactile sensations detected mainly by mechanoreceptors, thermoreceptors and nociceptors in the skin and muzzle.  These are used most frequently when cattle explore their environment.[74]
+
+There is conflicting evidence for magnetoreception in cattle. One study reported that resting and grazing cattle tend to align their body axes in the geomagnetic north–south (N-S) direction.[87]  In a follow-up study, cattle exposed to various magnetic fields directly beneath or in the vicinity of power lines trending in various magnetic directions exhibited distinct patterns of alignment.[88] However, in 2011, a group of Czech researchers reported their failed attempt to replicate the finding using Google Earth images.[89]
+
+Under natural conditions, calves stay with their mother until weaning at 8 to 11 months.  Heifer and bull calves are equally attached to their mothers in the first few months of life.[90]  Cattle are considered to be "hider" type animals,[clarification needed] but in the artificial environment of small calving pens, close proximity between cow and calf is maintained by the mother at the first three calvings but this changes to being mediated by the calf after these.  Primiparous dams show a higher incidence of abnormal maternal behavior.[91]
+
+Beef-calves reared on the range suckle an average of 5.0 times every 24 hours with an average total time of 46 min spent suckling. There is a diurnal rhythm in suckling activity with peaks between 05:00–07:00, 10:00–13:00 and 17:00–21:00.[92]
+
+Studies on the natural weaning of zebu cattle (Bos indicus) have shown that the cow weans her calves over a 2-week period, but after that, she continues to show strong affiliatory behavior with her offspring and preferentially chooses them for grooming and as grazing partners for at least 4–5 years.[93]
+
+Semi-wild Highland cattle heifers first give birth at 2 or 3 years of age, and the timing of birth is synchronized with increases in natural food quality. Average calving interval is 391 days, and calving mortality within the first year of life is 5%.[94]
+
+One study showed that over a 4-year period, dominance relationships within a herd of semi-wild highland cattle were very firm. There were few overt aggressive conflicts and the majority of disputes were settled by agonistic (non-aggressive, competitive) behaviors that involved no physical contact between opponents (e.g. threatening and spontaneous withdrawing).  Such agonistic behavior reduces the risk of injury. Dominance status depended on age and sex, with older animals generally being dominant to young ones and males dominant to females. Young bulls gained superior dominance status over adult cows when they reached about 2 years of age.[94]
+
+As with many animal dominance hierarchies, dominance-associated aggressiveness does not correlate with rank position, but is closely related to rank distance between individuals.[94]
+
+Dominance is maintained in several ways.  Cattle often engage in mock fights where they test each other's strength in a non-aggressive way.  Licking is primarily performed by subordinates and received by dominant animals.  Mounting is a playful behavior shown by calves of both sexes and by bulls and sometimes by cows in estrus,[95] however, this is not a dominance related behavior as has been found in other species.[94]
+
+The horns of cattle are "honest signals" used in mate selection.  Furthermore, horned cattle attempt to keep greater distances between themselves and have fewer physical interactions than hornless cattle.  This leads to more stable social relationships.[96]
+
+In calves, the frequency of agonistic behavior decreases as space allowance increases, but this does not occur for changes in group size. However, in adult cattle, the number of agonistic encounters increases as the group size increases.[97]
+
+When grazing, cattle vary several aspects of their bite, i.e. tongue and jaw movements, depending on characteristics of the plant they are eating.  Bite area decreases with the density of the plants but increases with their height.  Bite area is determined by the sweep of the tongue; in one study observing 750-kilogram (1,650 lb) steers, bite area reached a maximum of approximately 170 cm2 (30 sq in).  Bite depth increases with the height of the plants.  By adjusting their behavior, cattle obtain heavier bites in swards that are tall and sparse compared with short, dense swards of equal mass/area.[98]  Cattle adjust other aspects of their grazing behavior in relation to the available food; foraging velocity decreases and intake rate increases in areas of abundant palatable forage.[99]
+
+Cattle avoid grazing areas contaminated by the faeces of other cattle more strongly than they avoid areas contaminated by sheep,[100] but they do not avoid pasture contaminated by rabbit faeces.[101]
+
+In 24 April 2009, edition of the journal Science, a team of researchers led by the National Institutes of Health and the US Department of Agriculture reported having mapped the bovine genome.[102]  The scientists found cattle have about 22,000 genes, and 80% of their genes are shared with humans, and they share about 1000 genes with dogs and rodents, but are not found in humans. Using this bovine "HapMap", researchers can track the differences between the breeds that affect the quality of meat and milk yields.[103]
+
+Behavioral traits of cattle can be as heritable as some production traits, and often, the two can be related.[104] The heritability of fear varies markedly in cattle from low (0.1) to high (0.53); such high variation is also found in pigs and sheep,  probably due to differences in the methods used.[105]  The heritability of temperament (response to isolation during handling) has been calculated as 0.36 and 0.46 for habituation to handling.[106]  Rangeland assessments show that the heritability of aggressiveness in cattle is around 0.36.[107]
+
+Quantitative trait loci (QTLs) have been found for a range of production and behavioral characteristics for both dairy and beef cattle.[108]
+
+Cattle occupy a unique role in human history, having been domesticated since at least the early neolithic age.
+
+Archeozoological and genetic data indicate that cattle were first domesticated from wild aurochs (Bos primigenius) approximately 10,500 years ago. There were two major areas of domestication: one in the Near East (specifically central Anatolia, the Levant and Western Iran), giving rise to the taurine line, and a second in the area that is now Pakistan, resulting in the indicine line.[109]  Modern mitochondrial DNA variation indicates the taurine line may have arisen from as few as 80 aurochs tamed in the upper reaches of Mesopotamia near the villages of Çayönü Tepesi in what is now southeastern Turkey and Dja'de el-Mughara in what is now northern Iraq.[1]
+
+Although European cattle are largely descended from the taurine lineage, gene flow from African cattle (partially of indicine origin) contributed substantial genomic components to both southern European cattle breeds and their New World descendants.[109]  A study on 134 breeds showed that modern taurine cattle originated from Africa, Asia, North and South America, Australia, and Europe.[110]  Some researchers have suggested that African taurine cattle are derived from a third independent domestication from North African aurochsen.[109]
+
+As early as 9000 BC both grain and cattle were used as money or as barter (the first grain remains found, considered to be evidence of pre-agricultural practice date to 17,000 BC).[111][112][113] Some evidence also exists to suggest that other animals, such as camels and goats, may have been used as currency in some parts of the world.[114] One of the advantages of using cattle as currency is that it allows the seller to set a fixed price. It even created the standard pricing. For example, two chickens were traded for one cow as cows were deemed to be more valuable than chickens.[112]
+
+Cattle are often raised by allowing herds to graze on the grasses of large tracts of rangeland. Raising cattle in this manner allows the use of land that might be unsuitable for growing crops. The most common interactions with cattle involve daily feeding, cleaning and milking. Many routine husbandry practices involve ear tagging, dehorning, loading, medical operations, vaccinations and hoof care, as well as training for agricultural shows and preparations. Also, some cultural differences occur in working with cattle; the cattle husbandry of Fulani men rests on behavioural techniques, whereas in Europe, cattle are controlled primarily by physical means, such as fences.[115]  Breeders use cattle husbandry to reduce M. bovis infection susceptibility by selective breeding and maintaining herd health to avoid concurrent disease.[116]
+
+Cattle are farmed for beef, veal, dairy, and leather. They are less commonly used for conservation grazing, or simply to maintain grassland for wildlife, such as in Epping Forest, England. They are often used in some of the most wild places for livestock. Depending on the breed, cattle can survive on hill grazing, heaths, marshes, moors and semidesert. Modern cattle are more commercial than older breeds and, having become more specialized, are less versatile. For this reason, many smaller farmers still favor old breeds, such as the Jersey dairy breed.
+In Portugal, Spain, southern France and some Latin American countries, bulls are used in the activity of bullfighting;  Jallikattu in India is a bull taming sport radically different from European bullfighting, humans are unarmed and bulls are not killed. In many other countries bullfighting is illegal. Other activities such as bull riding are seen as part of a rodeo, especially in North America. Bull-leaping, a central ritual in Bronze Age Minoan culture (see Sacred Bull), still exists in southwestern France.  In modern times, cattle are also entered into agricultural competitions. These competitions can involve live cattle or cattle carcases in hoof and hook events.
+
+In terms of food intake by humans, consumption of cattle is less efficient than of grain or vegetables with regard to land use, and hence cattle grazing consumes more area than such other agricultural production when raised on grains.[117] Nonetheless, cattle and other forms of domesticated animals can sometimes help to use plant resources in areas not easily amenable to other forms of agriculture. Bulls are sometimes used as guard animals.[118][119]
+
+The average sleep time of a domestic cow is about 4 hours a day.[120]  Cattle do have a stay apparatus,[121] but do not sleep standing up,[122] they lie down to sleep deeply.[123]  In spite of the urban legend, cows cannot be tipped over by people pushing on them.[124]
+
+The meat of adult cattle is known as beef, and that of calves is veal.  Other animal parts are also used as food products, including blood, liver, kidney, heart and oxtail.  Cattle also produce milk, and dairy cattle are specifically bred to produce the large quantities of milk processed and sold for human consumption. Cattle today are the basis of a multibillion-dollar industry worldwide. The international trade in beef for 2000 was over $30 billion and represented only 23% of world beef production.[125] Approximately 300 million cattle, including dairy cattle, are slaughtered each year for food.[126] The production of milk, which is also made into cheese, butter, yogurt, and other dairy products, is comparable in economic size to beef production, and provides an important part of the food supply for many of the world's people. Cattle hides, used for leather to make shoes, couches and clothing, are another widespread product.  Cattle remain broadly used as draft animals in many developing countries, such as India. Cattle are also used in some sporting games, including rodeo and bullfighting.
+
+Source: Helgi Library,[127] World Bank, FAOSTAT
+
+About half the world's meat comes from cattle.[128]
+
+Certain breeds of cattle, such as the Holstein-Friesian, are used to produce milk,[129][130] which can be processed into dairy products such as milk, cheese or yogurt. Dairy cattle are usually kept on specialized dairy farms designed for milk production. Most cows are milked twice per day, with milk processed at a dairy, which may be onsite at the farm or the milk may be shipped to a dairy plant for eventual sale of a dairy product.[131] For dairy cattle to continue producing milk, they must give birth to one calf per year. If the calf is male, it generally is slaughtered at a young age to produce veal.[132] They will continue to produce milk until three weeks before birth.[130] Over the last fifty years, dairy farming has become more intensive to increase the yield of milk produced by each cow. The Holstein-Friesian is the breed of dairy cow most common in the UK, Europe and the United States. It has been bred selectively to produce the highest yields of milk of any cow. Around 22 litres per day is average in the UK.[129][130]
+
+Most cattle are not kept solely for hides, which are usually a by-product of beef production. Hides are most commonly used for leather, which can be made into a variety of product, including shoes. In 2012 India was the world's largest producer of cattle hides.[133]
+
+Feral cattle are defined as being 'cattle that are not domesticated or cultivated'.[134] Populations of feral cattle are known to come from and exist in: Australia, United States of America,[135] Colombia, Argentina, Spain, France and many islands, including New Guinea, Hawaii, Galapagos, Juan Fernández Islands, Hispaniola (Dominican Republic and Haiti), Tristan da Cunha and Île Amsterdam,[136]  two islands of Kuchinoshima[137] and Kazura Island next to Naru Island in Japan.[138][139] Chillingham cattle is sometimes regarded as a feral breed.[140] Aleutian wild cattles can be found on Aleutian Islands.[141] The "Kinmen cattle" which is dominantly found on Kinmen Island, Taiwan is mostly domesticated while smaller portion of the population is believed to live in the wild due to accidental releases.[142]
+
+Other notable examples include cattle in the vicinity of Hong Kong (in the Shing Mun Country Park,[143] among Sai Kung District[144] and Lantau Island[145] and on Grass Island[146]), and semi-feral animals in Yangmingshan, Taiwan.[147]
+
+(2003)
+
+& Hoekstra
+
+(2003)
+
+(2003)
+
+Gut flora in cattle include methanogens that produce methane as a byproduct of enteric fermentation, which cattle belch out. The same volume of atmospheric methane has a higher global warming potential than atmospheric carbon dioxide.[151][152] Methane belching from cattle can be reduced with genetic selection, immunization, rumen defaunation, diet modification, decreased antibiotic use, and grazing management, among others.[153][154][155][156]
+
+A report from the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) states that the livestock sector is "responsible for 18% of greenhouse gas emissions".[157] The IPCC estimates that cattle and other livestock emit about 80 to 93 Megatonnes of methane per year,[158] accounting for an estimated 37% of anthropogenic methane emissions,[157] and additional methane is produced by anaerobic fermentation of manure in manure lagoons and other manure storage structures.[159] The net change in atmospheric methane content was recently about 1 Megatonne per year,[160]  and in some recent years there has been no increase in atmospheric methane content.[161]  While cattle fed forage actually produce more methane than grain-fed cattle, the increase may be offset by the increased carbon recapture of pastures, which recapture three times the CO2 of cropland used for grain.[162]
+
+One of the cited changes suggested to reduce greenhouse gas emissions is intensification of the livestock industry, since intensification leads to less land for a given level of production. This assertion is supported by studies of the US beef production system, suggesting practices prevailing in 2007 involved 8.6% less fossil fuel use, 16.3% less greenhouse gas emissions, 12.1% less water use, and 33.0% less land use, per unit mass of beef produced, than those used in 1977.[163]  The analysis took into account not only practices in feedlots, but also feed production (with less feed needed in more intensive production systems), forage-based cow-calf operations and back-grounding before cattle enter a feedlot (with more beef produced per head of cattle from those sources, in more intensive systems), and beef from animals derived from the dairy industry.
+
+The number of American cattle kept in confined feedlot conditions fluctuates. From 1 January 2002 through 1 January 2012, there was no significant overall upward or downward trend in the number of US cattle on feed for slaughter, which averaged about 14.046 million head over that period.[164][165]  Previously, the number had increased; it was 12.453 million in 1985.[166] Cattle on feed (for slaughter) numbered about 14.121 million on 1 January 2012, i.e. about 15.5% of the estimated inventory of 90.8 million US cattle (including calves) on that date.  Of the 14.121 million, US cattle on feed (for slaughter) in operations with 1000 head or more were estimated to number 11.9 million.[165] Cattle feedlots in this size category correspond to the regulatory definition of "large" concentrated animal feeding operations (CAFOs) for cattle other than mature dairy cows or veal calves.[167]  Significant numbers of dairy, as well as beef cattle, are confined in CAFOs, defined as "new and existing operations which stable or confine and feed or maintain for a total of 45 days or more in any 12-month period more than the number of animals specified"[168] where "[c]rops, vegetation, forage growth, or post-harvest residues are not sustained in the normal growing season over any portion of the lot or facility."[169]  They may be designated as small, medium and large. Such designation of cattle CAFOs is according to cattle type (mature dairy cows, veal calves or other) and cattle numbers, but medium CAFOs are so designated only if they meet certain discharge criteria, and small CAFOs are designated only on a case-by-case basis.[170]
+
+A CAFO that discharges pollutants is required to obtain a permit, which requires a plan to manage nutrient runoff, manure, chemicals, contaminants, and other wastewater pursuant to the US Clean Water Act.[171] The regulations involving CAFO permitting have been extensively litigated.[172]
+Commonly, CAFO wastewater and manure nutrients are applied to land at agronomic rates for use by forages or crops, and it is often assumed that various constituents of wastewater and manure, e.g. organic contaminants and pathogens, will be retained, inactivated or degraded on the land with application at such rates; however, additional evidence is needed to test reliability of such assumptions
+.[173]  Concerns raised by opponents of CAFOs have included risks of contaminated water due to feedlot runoff,[174] soil erosion, human and animal exposure to toxic chemicals, development of antibiotic resistant bacteria and an increase in E. coli contamination.[175]  While research suggests some of these impacts can be mitigated by developing wastewater treatment systems[174] and planting cover crops in larger setback zones,[176] the Union of Concerned Scientists released a report in 2008 concluding that CAFOs are generally unsustainable and externalize costs.[162]
+
+An estimated 935,000 cattle operations were operating in the US in 2010.[177] In 2001, the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) tallied 5,990 cattle CAFOs then regulated, consisting of beef (2,200), dairy (3,150), heifer (620) and veal operations (20).[178] Since that time, the EPA has established CAFOs as an enforcement priority.  EPA enforcement highlights for fiscal year 2010 indicated enforcement actions against 12 cattle CAFOs for violations that included failures to obtain a permit, failures to meet the terms of a permit, and discharges of contaminated water.[179]
+
+Another concern is manure, which if not well-managed, can lead to adverse environmental consequences. However, manure also is a valuable source of nutrients and organic matter when used as a fertilizer.[180]  Manure was used as a fertilizer on about 6,400,000 hectares (15.8 million acres) of US cropland in 2006, with manure from cattle accounting for nearly 70% of manure applications to soybeans and about 80% or more of manure applications to corn, wheat, barley, oats and sorghum.[181]  Substitution of manure for synthetic fertilizers in crop production can be environmentally significant, as between 43 and 88 megajoules of fossil fuel energy would be used per kg of nitrogen in manufacture of synthetic nitrogenous fertilizers.[182]
+
+Grazing by cattle at low intensities can create a favourable environment for native herbs and forbs by mimicking the native grazers who they displaced; in many world regions, though, cattle are reducing biodiversity due to overgrazing.[183]  A survey of refuge managers on 123 National Wildlife Refuges in the US tallied 86 species of wildlife considered positively affected and 82 considered negatively affected by refuge cattle grazing or haying.[184] Proper management of pastures, notably managed intensive rotational grazing and grazing at low intensities can lead to less use of fossil fuel energy, increased recapture of carbon dioxide, fewer ammonia emissions into the atmosphere, reduced soil erosion, better air quality, and less water pollution.[162]
+
+The veterinary discipline dealing with cattle and cattle diseases (bovine veterinary) is called buiatrics.[185] Veterinarians and professionals working on cattle health issues are pooled in the World Association for Buiatrics, founded in 1960.[186] National associations and affiliates also exist.[187]
+
+Cattle diseases were in the center of attention in the 1980s and 1990s when the Bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE), also known as mad cow disease, was of concern.  Cattle might catch and develop various other diseases, like blackleg, bluetongue, foot rot too.[188][189][190]
+
+In most states, as cattle health is not only a veterinarian issue, but also a public health issue, public health and food safety standards and farming regulations directly affect the daily work of farmers who keep cattle.[191] However, said rules change frequently and are often debated. For instance, in the U.K., it was proposed in 2011 that milk from tuberculosis-infected cattle should be allowed to enter the food chain.[192] Internal food safety regulations might affect a country's trade policy as well. For example, the United States has just reviewed its beef import rules according to the "mad cow standards"; while Mexico forbids the entry of cattle who are older than 30 months.[193]
+
+Cow urine is commonly used in India for internal medical purposes.[194][195]  It is distilled and then consumed by patients seeking treatment for a wide variety of illnesses.[196] At present, no conclusive medical evidence shows this has any effect.[197] However, an Indian medicine containing cow urine has already obtained U.S. patents.[198]
+
+Digital dermatitis is caused by the bacteria from the genus Treponema. It differs from foot rot and can appear under unsanitary conditions such as poor hygiene or inadequate hoof trimming, among other causes. It primarily affects dairy cattle and has been known to lower the quantity of milk produced, however the milk quality remains unaffected. Cattle are also susceptible to ringworm caused by the fungus, Trichophyton verrucosum, a contagious skin disease which may be transferred to humans exposed to infected cows.[199]
+
+Stocking density refers to the number of animals within a specified area. When stocking density reaches high levels, the behavioural needs of the animals may not be met.  This can negatively influence health, welfare and production performance.[200]
+
+The effect of overstocking in cows can have a negative effect on milk production and reproduction rates which are two very important traits for dairy farmers. Overcrowding of cows in barns has been found to reduced feeding, resting and rumination.[200] Although they consume the same amount of dry matter within the span of a day, they consume the food at a much more rapid rate, and this behaviour in cows can lead to further complications.[201] The feeding behaviour of cows during their post-milking period is very important as it has been proven that the longer animals can eat after milking, the longer they will be standing up and therefore causing less contamination to the teat ends.[202] This is necessary to reduce the risk of mastitis as infection has been shown to increase the chances of embryonic loss.[203] Sufficient rest is important for dairy cows because it is during this period that their resting blood flow increases up to 50%, this is directly proportionate to milk production.[202] Each additional hour of rest can be seen to translate to 2 to 3.5 more pounds of milk per cow daily. Stocking densities of anything over 120% have been shown to decrease the amount of time cows spend lying down.[204]
+
+Cortisol is an important stress hormone; its plasma concentrations increase greatly when subjected to high levels of stress.[205]  Increased concentration levels of cortisol have been associated with significant increases in gonadotrophin levels and lowered progestin levels. Reduction of stress is important in the reproductive state of cows as an increase in gonadotrophin and lowered progesterone levels may impinge on the ovulatory and lutenization process and to reduce the chances of successful implantation.[206] A high cortisol level will also stimulate the degradation of fats and proteins which may make it difficult for the animal to sustain its pregnancy if implanted successfully.[205]
+
+Animal rights activists have criticized the treatment of cattle, claiming that common practices in cattle husbandry, slaughter, and entertainment unnecessarily cause cattle fear, stress, and pain. They advocate for abstaining from the consumption of cattle-related animal products (such as beef, cow's milk, veal, and leather) and cattle-based entertainment (such as rodeos and bullfighting) in order to end one's participation in the cruelty, claiming that the animals are only treated this way due to market forces and popular demand.
+
+The following practices have been criticized by animal welfare and animal rights groups:[207] branding,[208] castration,[209] dehorning,[210] ear tagging,[211] nose ringing,[212] restraint,[213] tail docking,[214] the use of veal crates,[215] and cattle prods.[216] Further, the stress induced by high stocking density (such as in feedlots, auctions, and during transport) is known to negatively affect the health of cattle,[217][218] and has also been criticized.[219][220]
+
+While the treatment of dairy cows is similar to that of beef cattle, especially towards the end of their life, it has faced additional criticism.[221] To produce milk from dairy cattle, most calves are separated from their mothers soon after birth and fed milk replacement in order to retain the cows' milk for human consumption.[222] Animal welfare advocates point out that this breaks the natural bond between the mother and her calf.[222] Unwanted male calves are either slaughtered at birth or sent for veal production.[222] To prolong lactation, dairy cows are almost permanently kept pregnant through artificial insemination.[222] Because of this, some feminists state that dairy production is based on the sexual exploitation of cows.[223][224] Although cows' natural life expectancy is about twenty years,[225] after about five years the cows' milk production has dropped; they are then considered "spent" and are sent to slaughter, which is considered cruel by some.[226][227]
+
+While leather is often a by-product of slaughter, in some countries, such as India and Bangladesh, cows are raised primarily for their leather. These leather industries often make their cows walk long distances across borders to be killed in neighboring provinces and countries where cattle slaughter is legal. Some cows die along the long journey, and exhausted animals are often beaten and have chili and tobacco rubbed into their eyes to make them keep walking.[228] These practices have faced backlash from various animal rights groups.[229][230]
+
+There has been a long history of protests against rodeos,[231]  with the opposition saying that rodeos are unnecessary and cause stress, injury, and death to the animals.[232][233]
+
+The running of the bulls faces opposition due to the stress and injuries incurred by the bulls during the event.[234]
+
+Bullfighting is considered by many people, including animal rights and animal welfare advocates, to be a cruel, barbaric blood sport in which bulls are forced to suffer severe stress and a slow, torturous death.[235] A number of animal rights and animal welfare groups are involved in anti-bullfighting activities.[236]
+
+Oxen (singular ox) are cattle trained as draft animals. Often they are adult, castrated males of larger breeds, although females and bulls are also used in some areas. Usually, an ox is over four years old due to the need for training and to allow it to grow to full size. Oxen are used for plowing, transport, hauling cargo, grain-grinding by trampling or by powering machines, irrigation by powering pumps, and wagon drawing. Oxen were commonly used to skid logs in forests, and sometimes still are, in low-impact, select-cut logging. Oxen are most often used in teams of two, paired, for light work such as carting, with additional pairs added when more power is required, sometimes up to a total of 20 or more.
+
+Oxen can be trained to respond to a teamster's signals. These signals are given by verbal commands or by noise (whip cracks). Verbal commands vary according to dialect and local tradition. Oxen can pull harder and longer than horses. Though not as fast as horses, they are less prone to injury because they are more sure-footed.
+
+Many oxen are used worldwide, especially in developing countries.  About 11.3 million draft oxen are used in sub-Saharan Africa.[237]  In India, the number of draft cattle in 1998 was estimated at 65.7 million head.[238] About half the world's crop production is thought to depend on land preparation (such as plowing) made possible by animal traction.[239]
+
+The cow is mentioned often in the Quran.  The second and longest surah of the Quran is named Al-Baqara ("The Cow"). Out of the 286 verses of the surah, seven mention cows (Al Baqarah 67–73).[240][241] The name of the surah derives from this passage in which Moses orders his people to sacrifice a cow in order to resurrect a man murdered by an unknown person.[242]
+
+Cattle are venerated within the Hindu religion of India. In the Vedic period they were a symbol of plenty [243]:130 and were frequently slaughtered. In later times they gradually acquired their present status. According to the Mahabharata, they are to be treated with the same respect 'as one's mother'.[244] In the middle of the first millennium, the consumption of beef began to be disfavoured by lawgivers.[243]:144 Although there has never been any cow-goddesses or temples dedicated to them,[243]:146 cows appear in numerous stories from the Vedas and Puranas. The deity Krishna was brought up in a family of cowherders, and given the name Govinda (protector of the cows). Also, Shiva is traditionally said to ride on the back of a bull named Nandi.
+
+Milk and milk products were used in Vedic rituals.[243]:130 In the postvedic period products of the cow—milk, curd, ghee, but also cow dung and urine (gomutra), or the combination of these five (panchagavya)—began to assume an increasingly important role in ritual purification and expiation.[243]:130–131
+
+Veneration of the cow has become a symbol of the identity of Hindus as a community,[243]:20 especially since the end of the 19th century. Slaughter of cows (including oxen, bulls and calves) is forbidden by law in several states of the Indian Union. McDonald's outlets in India do not serve any beef burgers. In Maharaja Ranjit Singh's empire of the early 19th century, the killing of a cow was punishable by death.[245]
+
+Cattle are typically represented in heraldry by the bull.
+
+Arms of the Azores
+
+Arms of Mecklenburg region, Germany
+
+Arms of Turin, Italy
+
+Arms of Kaunas, Lithuania
+
+Arms of Bielsk Podlaski, Poland
+
+Arms of Ciołek, Poland
+
+Arms of Turek, Poland
+
+For 2013, the FAO estimated global cattle numbers at 1.47 billion.[249] Regionally, the FAO estimate for 2013 includes: Asia 497 million; South America 350 million; Africa 307 million; Europe 122 million; North America 102 million; Central America 47 million; Oceania 40 million; and Caribbean 9 million.
+
+Didactic model of Bovine
+
+Bovine anatomical model
+
+Didactic model of a bovine muscular system
+

en/71.html.txt

@@ -0,0 +1,205 @@
+
+
+Paleolithic
+
+Epipalaeolithic
+Mesolithic
+
+Neolithic
+
+The Stone Age was a broad prehistoric period during which stone was widely used to make tools with an edge, a point, or a percussion surface. The period lasted for roughly 3.4 million years,[1] and ended between 8700 BCE and 2000 BCE ,[citation needed] with the advent of metalworking.[2] Though some simple metalworking of malleable metals, particularly the use of gold and copper for purposes of ornamentation, was known in the Stone Age, it is the melting and smelting of copper that marks the end of the Stone Age.[3] In western Asia this occurred by about 3000 BCE, when bronze became widespread.  The term Bronze Age is used to describe the period that followed the Stone Age, as well as to describe cultures that had developed techniques and technologies for working copper into tools, supplanting stone in many uses.
+
+Stone Age artifacts that have been discovered include tools used by modern humans, by their predecessor species in the genus Homo, and possibly by the earlier partly contemporaneous genera Australopithecus and Paranthropus. Bone tools have been discovered that were used during this period as well but these are rarely preserved in the archaeological record. The Stone Age is further subdivided by the types of stone tools in use.
+
+The Stone Age is the first period in the three-age system frequently used in archaeology to divide the timeline of human technological prehistory into functional periods:
+
+The Stone Age is contemporaneous with the evolution of the genus Homo, with the possible exception of the early Stone Age, when species prior to Homo may have manufactured tools.[4] According to the age and location of the current evidence, the cradle of the genus is the East African Rift System, especially toward the north in Ethiopia, where it is bordered by grasslands. The closest relative among the other living primates, the genus Pan, represents a branch that continued on in the deep forest, where the primates evolved. The rift served as a conduit for movement into southern Africa and also north down the Nile into North Africa and through the continuation of the rift in the Levant to the vast grasslands of Asia.
+
+Starting from about 4 million years ago (mya) a single biome established itself from South Africa through the rift, North Africa, and across Asia to modern China.  This has been called "transcontinental 'savannahstan'" recently.[5] Starting in the grasslands of the rift, Homo erectus, the predecessor of modern humans, found an ecological niche as a tool-maker and developed a dependence on it, becoming a "tool equipped savanna dweller".[6]
+
+The oldest indirect evidence found of stone tool use is fossilised animal bones with tool marks; these are 3.4 million years old and were found in the Lower Awash Valley in Ethiopia.[1] Archaeological discoveries in Kenya in 2015, identifying what may be the oldest evidence of hominin use of tools known to date, have indicated that Kenyanthropus platyops (a 3.2 to 3.5-million-year-old Pliocene hominin fossil discovered in Lake Turkana, Kenya in 1999) may have been the earliest tool-users known.[7]
+
+The oldest stone tools were excavated from the site of Lomekwi 3 in West Turkana, northwestern Kenya, and date to 3.3 million years old.[8] Prior to the discovery of these "Lomekwian" tools, the oldest known stone tools had been found at several sites at Gona, Ethiopia, on sediments of the paleo-Awash River, which serve to date them. All the tools come from the Busidama Formation, which lies above a disconformity, or missing layer, which would have been from 2.9 to 2.7 mya. The oldest sites discovered to contain tools are dated to 2.6–2.55 mya.[9] One of the most striking circumstances about these sites is that they are from the Late Pliocene, where prior to their discovery tools were thought to have evolved only in the Pleistocene. Excavators at the locality point out that:[10]
+
+... the earliest stone tool makers were skilled flintknappers .... The possible reasons behind this seeming abrupt transition from the absence of stone tools to the presence thereof include ... gaps in the geological record.
+
+The species who made the Pliocene tools remains unknown. Fragments of Australopithecus garhi, Australopithecus aethiopicus,[11] and Homo, possibly Homo habilis, have been found in sites near the age of the Gona tools.[12]
+
+In July 2018, scientists reported the discovery in China of the known oldest stone tools outside Africa, estimated at 2.12 million years old.[13]
+
+Innovation of the technique of smelting ore is regarded as ending the Stone Age and beginning the Bronze Age. The first highly significant metal manufactured was bronze, an alloy of copper and tin or arsenic, each of which was smelted separately. The transition from the Stone Age to the Bronze Age was a period during which modern people could smelt copper, but did not yet manufacture bronze, a time known as the Copper Age (or more technically the Chalcolithic or Eneolithic, both meaning 'copper–stone'). The Chalcolithic by convention is the initial period of the Bronze Age. The Bronze Age was followed by the Iron Age.
+
+The transition out of the Stone Age occurred between 6000 and 2500 BCE for much of humanity living in North Africa and Eurasia. The first evidence of human metallurgy dates to between the 6th and 5th millennia BCE in the archaeological sites of Majdanpek, Yarmovac, and Pločnik in modern-day Serbia (including a copper axe from 5500 BCE belonging to the Vinca culture); though not conventionally considered part of the Chalcolithic, this provides the earliest known example of copper metallurgy.[14] Note the Rudna Glava mine in Serbia. Ötzi the Iceman, a mummy from about 3300 BCE, carried with him a copper axe and a flint knife.
+
+In some regions, such as Sub-Saharan Africa, the Stone Age was followed directly by the Iron Age.[15] The Middle East and Southeast Asian regions progressed past Stone Age technology around 6000 BCE.[citation needed] Europe, and the rest of Asia became post-Stone Age societies by about 4000 BCE.[citation needed] The proto-Inca cultures of South America continued at a Stone Age level until around 2000 BCE, when gold, copper, and silver made their entrance. The peoples of the Americas notably did not develop a widespread behavior of smelting bronze or iron after the Stone Age period, although the technology existed.[16] Stone-tool manufacture continued even after the Stone Age ended in a given area. In Europe and North America, millstones were in use until well into the 20th century, and still are in many parts of the world.
+
+The terms "Stone Age", "Bronze Age", and "Iron Age" are not intended to suggest that advancements and time periods in prehistory are only measured by the type of tool material, rather than, for example, social organization, food sources exploited, adaptation to climate, adoption of agriculture, cooking, settlement, and religion. Like pottery, the typology of the stone tools combined with the relative sequence of the types in various regions provide a chronological framework for the evolution of humanity and society. They serve as diagnostics of date, rather than characterizing the people or the society.
+
+Lithic analysis is a major and specialised form of archaeological investigation. It involves measurement of stone tools to determine their typology, function and technologies involved. It includes scientific study of the lithic reduction of the raw materials and methods used to make the prehistoric artifacts that are discovered. Much of this study takes place in the laboratory in the presence of various specialists. In experimental archaeology, researchers attempt to create replica tools, to understand how they were made. Flintknappers are craftsmen who use sharp tools to reduce flintstone to flint tool.
+
+In addition to lithic analysis, field prehistorians utilize a wide range of techniques derived from multiple fields. The work of archaeologists in determining the paleocontext and relative sequence of the layers is supplemented by the efforts of geologic specialists in identifying layers of rock developed or deposited over geologic time; of paleontological specialists in identifying bones and animals; of palynologists in discovering and identifying pollen, spores and plant species; of physicists and chemists in laboratories determining ages of materials by carbon-14, potassium-argon and other methods. Study of the Stone Age has never been limited to stone tools and archaeology, even though they are important forms of evidence. The chief focus of study has always been on the society and the living people who belonged to it.
+
+Useful as it has been, the concept of the Stone Age has its limitations. The date range of this period is ambiguous, disputed, and variable, depending upon the region in question. While it is possible to speak of a general 'stone age' period for the whole of humanity, some groups never developed metal-smelting technology, and so remained in the so-called 'stone age' until they encountered technologically developed cultures. The term was innovated to describe the archaeological cultures of Europe. It may not always be the best in relation to regions such as some parts of the Indies and Oceania, where farmers or hunter-gatherers used stone for tools until European colonisation began.
+
+Archaeologists of the late 19th and early 20th centuries CE, who adapted the three-age system to their ideas, hoped to combine cultural anthropology and archaeology in such a way that a specific contemporaneous tribe can be used to illustrate the way of life and beliefs of the people exercising a particular Stone-Age technology. As a description of people living today, the term stone age is controversial. The Association of Social Anthropologists discourages this use, asserting:[17]
+
+To describe any living group as 'primitive' or 'Stone Age' inevitably implies that they are living representatives of some earlier stage of human development that the majority of humankind has left behind.
+
+In the 1920s, South African archaeologists organizing the stone tool collections of that country observed that they did not fit the newly detailed Three-Age System. In the words of J. Desmond Clark,[18]
+
+It was early realized that the threefold division of culture into Stone, Bronze and Iron Ages adopted in the nineteenth century for Europe had no validity in Africa outside the Nile valley.
+
+Consequently, they proposed a new system for Africa, the Three-stage System. Clark regarded the Three-age System as valid for North Africa; in sub-Saharan Africa, the Three-stage System was best.[19] In practice, the failure of African archaeologists either to keep this distinction in mind, or to explain which one they mean, contributes to the considerable equivocation already present in the literature. There are in effect two Stone Ages, one part of the Three-age and the other constituting the Three-stage. They refer to one and the same artifacts and the same technologies, but vary by locality and time.
+
+The three-stage system was proposed in 1929 by Astley John Hilary Goodwin, a professional archaeologist, and Clarence van Riet Lowe, a civil engineer and amateur archaeologist, in an article titled "Stone Age Cultures of South Africa" in the journal Annals of the South African Museum. By then, the dates of the Early Stone Age, or Paleolithic, and Late Stone Age, or Neolithic (neo = new), were fairly solid and were regarded by Goodwin as absolute. He therefore proposed a relative chronology of periods with floating dates, to be called the Earlier and Later Stone Age. The Middle Stone Age would not change its name, but it would not mean Mesolithic.[20]
+
+The duo thus reinvented the Stone Age. In Sub-Saharan Africa, however, iron-working technologies were either invented independently or came across the Sahara from the north (see iron metallurgy in Africa). The Neolithic was characterized primarily by herding societies rather than large agricultural societies, and although there was copper metallurgy in Africa as well as bronze smelting, archaeologists do not currently recognize a separate Copper Age or Bronze Age. Moreover, the technologies included in those 'stages', as Goodwin called them, were not exactly the same. Since then, the original relative terms have become identified with the technologies of the Paleolithic and Mesolithic, so that they are no longer relative. Moreover, there has been a tendency to drop the comparative degree in favor of the positive: resulting in two sets of Early, Middle and Late Stone Ages of quite different content and chronologies.
+
+By voluntary agreement,[citation needed] archaeologists respect the decisions of the Pan-African Congress on Prehistory, which meets every four years to resolve archaeological business brought before it. Delegates are actually international; the organization takes its name from the topic.[21] Louis Leakey hosted the first one in Nairobi in 1947. It adopted Goodwin and Lowe's 3-stage system at that time, the stages to be called Early, Middle and Later.
+
+The problem of the transitions in archaeology is a branch of the general philosophic continuity problem, which examines how discrete objects of any sort that are contiguous in any way can be presumed to have a relationship of any sort. In archaeology, the relationship is one of causality. If Period B can be presumed to descend from Period A, there must be a boundary between A and B, the A–B boundary. The problem is in the nature of this boundary. If there is no distinct boundary, then the population of A suddenly stopped using the customs characteristic of A and suddenly started using those of B, an unlikely scenario in the process of evolution. More realistically, a distinct border period, the A/B transition, existed, in which the customs of A were gradually dropped and those of B acquired. If transitions do not exist, then there is no proof of any continuity between A and B.
+
+The Stone Age of Europe is characteristically in deficit of known transitions. The 19th and early 20th-century innovators of the modern three-age system recognized the problem of the initial transition, the "gap" between the Paleolithic and the Neolithic. Louis Leakey provided something of an answer by proving that man evolved in Africa. The Stone Age must have begun there to be carried repeatedly to Europe by migrant populations. The different phases of the Stone Age thus could appear there without transitions. The burden on African archaeologists became all the greater, because now they must find the missing transitions in Africa. The problem is difficult and ongoing.
+
+After its adoption by the First Pan African Congress in 1947, the Three-Stage Chronology was amended by the Third Congress in 1955 to include a First Intermediate Period between Early and Middle, to encompass the Fauresmith and Sangoan technologies, and the Second Intermediate Period between Middle and Later, to encompass the Magosian technology and others. The chronologic basis for definition was entirely relative. With the arrival of scientific means of finding an absolute chronology, the two intermediates turned out to be will-of-the-wisps. They were in fact Middle and Lower Paleolithic. Fauresmith is now considered to be a facies of Acheulean, while Sangoan is a facies of Lupemban.[22] Magosian is "an artificial mix of two different periods".[23]
+
+Once seriously questioned, the intermediates did not wait for the next Pan African Congress two years hence, but were officially rejected in 1965 (again on an advisory basis) by Burg Wartenstein Conference #29, Systematic Investigation of the African Later Tertiary and Quaternary,[24] a conference in anthropology held by the Wenner-Gren Foundation, at Burg Wartenstein Castle, which it then owned in Austria, attended by the same scholars that attended the Pan African Congress, including Louis Leakey and Mary Leakey, who was delivering a pilot presentation of her typological analysis of Early Stone Age tools, to be included in her 1971 contribution to Olduvai Gorge, "Excavations in Beds I and II, 1960–1963."[25]
+
+However, although the intermediate periods were gone, the search for the transitions continued.
+
+In 1859 Jens Jacob Worsaae first proposed a division of the Stone Age into older and younger parts based on his work with Danish kitchen middens that began in 1851.[26] In the subsequent decades this simple distinction developed into the archaeological periods of today. The major subdivisions of the Three-age Stone Age cross two epoch boundaries on the geologic time scale:
+
+The succession of these phases varies enormously from one region (and culture) to another.
+
+The Paleolithic or Palaeolithic (from Greek: παλαιός, palaios, "old"; and λίθος, lithos, "stone" lit. "old stone", coined by archaeologist John Lubbock and published in 1865) is the earliest division of the Stone Age. It covers the greatest portion of humanity's time (roughly 99% of "human technological history",[27] where "human" and "humanity" are interpreted to mean the genus Homo), extending from 2.5 or 2.6 million years ago, with the first documented use of stone tools by hominans such as Homo habilis, to the end of the Pleistocene around 10,000 BCE.[27] The Paleolithic era ended with the Mesolithic, or in areas with an early neolithisation, the Epipaleolithic.
+
+At sites dating from the Lower Paleolithic Period (about 2,500,000 to 200,000 years ago), simple pebble tools have been found in association with the remains of what may have been the earliest human ancestors. A somewhat more sophisticated Lower Paleolithic tradition, known as the Chopper chopping-tool industry, is widely distributed in the Eastern Hemisphere. This tradition is thought to have been the work of the hominin species named Homo erectus. Although no such fossil tools have yet been found, it is believed that H. erectus probably made tools of wood and bone as well as stone.
+About 700,000 years ago, a new Lower Paleolithic tool, the hand ax, appeared. The earliest European hand axes are assigned to the Abbevillian industry, which developed in northern France in the valley of the Somme River; a later, more refined hand-axe tradition is seen in the Acheulian industry, evidence of which has been found in Europe, Africa, the Middle East, and Asia. Some of the earliest known hand axes were found at Olduvai Gorge (Tanzania) in association with remains of H. erectus. Alongside the hand-axe tradition there developed a distinct and very different stone-tool industry, based on flakes of stone: special tools were made from worked (carefully shaped) flakes of flint. In Europe, the Clactonian industry is one example of a flake tradition. The early flake industries probably contributed to the development of the Middle Paleolithic flake tools of the Mousterian industry, which is associated with the remains of Neanderthal man.[28]
+
+The earliest documented stone tools have been found in eastern Africa, manufacturers unknown, at the 3.3 million year old site of Lomekwi 3 in Kenya.[8] Better known are the later tools belonging to an industry known as Oldowan, after the type site of Olduvai Gorge in Tanzania.
+
+The tools were formed by knocking pieces off a river pebble, or stones like it, with a hammerstone to obtain large and small pieces with one or more sharp edges. The original stone is called a core; the resultant pieces, flakes. Typically, but not necessarily, small pieces are detached from a larger piece, in which case the larger piece may be called the core and the smaller pieces the flakes. The prevalent usage, however, is to call all the results flakes, which can be confusing. A split in half is called bipolar flaking.
+
+Consequently, the method is often called "core-and-flake". More recently, the tradition has been called "small flake" since the flakes were small compared to subsequent Acheulean tools.[29]
+
+The essence of the Oldowan is the making and often immediate use of small flakes.
+
+Another naming scheme is "Pebble Core Technology (PBC)":[30]
+
+Pebble cores are ... artifacts that have been shaped by varying amounts of hard-hammer percussion.
+
+Various refinements in the shape have been called choppers, discoids, polyhedrons, subspheroid, etc. To date no reasons for the variants have been ascertained:[31]
+
+From a functional standpoint, pebble cores seem designed for no specific purpose.
+
+However, they would not have been manufactured for no purpose:[31]
+
+Pebble cores can be useful in many cutting, scraping or chopping tasks, but ... they are not particularly more efficient in such tasks than a sharp-edged rock.
+
+The whole point of their utility is that each is a "sharp-edged rock" in locations where nature has not provided any. There is additional evidence that Oldowan, or Mode 1, tools were utilized in "percussion technology"; that is, they were designed to be gripped at the blunt end and strike something with the edge, from which use they were given the name of choppers. Modern science has been able to detect mammalian blood cells on Mode 1 tools at Sterkfontein, Member 5 East, in South Africa. As the blood must have come from a fresh kill, the tool users are likely to have done the killing and used the tools for butchering. Plant residues bonded to the silicon of some tools confirm the use to chop plants.[32]
+
+Although the exact species authoring the tools remains unknown, Mode 1 tools in Africa were manufactured and used predominantly by Homo habilis. They cannot be said to have developed these tools or to have contributed the tradition to technology. They continued a tradition of yet unknown origin. As chimpanzees sometimes naturally use percussion to extract or prepare food in the wild, and may use either unmodified stones or stones that they have split, creating an Oldowan tool, the tradition may well be far older than its current record.[citation needed]
+
+Towards the end of Oldowan in Africa a new species appeared over the range of Homo habilis: Homo erectus. The earliest "unambiguous" evidence is a whole cranium, KNM-ER 3733 (a find identifier) from Koobi Fora in Kenya, dated to 1.78 mya.[33] An early skull fragment, KNM-ER 2598, dated to 1.9 mya, is considered a good candidate also.[34] Transitions in paleoanthropology are always hard to find, if not impossible, but based on the "long-legged" limb morphology shared by H. habilis and H. rudolfensis in East Africa, an evolution from one of those two has been suggested.[35]
+
+The most immediate cause of the new adjustments appears to have been an increasing aridity in the region and consequent contraction of parkland savanna, interspersed with trees and groves, in favor of open grassland, dated 1.8–1.7 mya. During that transitional period the percentage of grazers among the fossil species increased from 15–25% to 45%, dispersing the food supply and requiring a facility among the hunters to travel longer distances comfortably, which H. erectus obviously had.[36] The ultimate proof is the "dispersal" of H. erectus "across much of Africa and Asia, substantially before the development of the Mode 2 technology and use of fire ...."[35] H. erectus carried Mode 1 tools over Eurasia.
+
+According to the current evidence (which may change at any time) Mode 1 tools are documented from about 2.6 mya to about 1.5 mya in Africa,[37] and to 0.5 mya outside of it.[38] The genus Homo is known from H. habilis and H. rudolfensis from 2.3 to 2.0 mya, with the latest habilis being an upper jaw from Koobi Fora, Kenya, from 1.4 mya. H. erectus is dated 1.8–0.6 mya.[39]
+
+According to this chronology Mode 1 was inherited by Homo from unknown Hominans, probably Australopithecus and Paranthropus, who must have continued on with Mode 1 and then with Mode 2 until their extinction no later than 1.1 mya. Meanwhile, living contemporaneously in the same regions H. habilis inherited the tools around 2.3 mya. At about 1.9 mya H. erectus came on stage and lived contemporaneously with the others. Mode 1 was now being shared by a number of Hominans over the same ranges, presumably subsisting in different niches, but the archaeology is not precise enough to say which.
+
+Tools of the Oldowan tradition first came to archaeological attention in Europe, where, being intrusive and not well defined, compared to the Acheulean, they were puzzling to archaeologists. The mystery would be elucidated by African archaeology at Olduvai, but meanwhile, in the early 20th century, the term "Pre-Acheulean" came into use in climatology. C.E.P, Brooks, a British climatologist working in the United States, used the term to describe a "chalky boulder clay" underlying a layer of gravel at Hoxne, central England, where Acheulean tools had been found.[40] Whether any tools would be found in it and what type was not known. Hugo Obermaier, a contemporary German archaeologist working in Spain, quipped:
+
+Unfortunately, the stage of human industry which corresponds to these deposits cannot be positively identified. All we can say is that it is pre-Acheulean.
+
+This uncertainty was clarified by the subsequent excavations at Olduvai; nevertheless, the term is still in use for pre-Acheulean contexts, mainly across Eurasia, that are yet unspecified or uncertain but with the understanding that they are or will turn out to be pebble-tool.[41]
+
+There are ample associations of Mode 2 with H. erectus in Eurasia. H. erectus – Mode 1 associations are scantier but they do exist, especially in the Far East. One strong piece of evidence prevents the conclusion that only H. erectus reached Eurasia: at Yiron, Israel, Mode 1 tools have been found dating to 2.4 mya,[42] about 0.5 my earlier than the known H. erectus finds. If the date is correct, either another Hominan preceded H. erectus out of Africa or the earliest H. erectus has yet to be found.
+
+After the initial appearance at Gona in Ethiopia at 2.7 mya, pebble tools date from 2.0 mya at Sterkfontein, Member 5, South Africa, and from 1.8 mya at El Kherba, Algeria, North Africa. The manufacturers had already left pebble tools at Yiron, Israel, at 2.4 mya, Riwat, Pakistan, at 2.0 mya, and Renzidong, South China, at over 2 mya.[43] The identification of a fossil skull at Mojokerta, Pernung Peninsula on Java, dated to 1.8 mya, as H. erectus, suggests that the African finds are not the earliest to be found in Africa, or that, in fact, erectus did not originate in Africa after all but on the plains of Asia.[35] The outcome of the issue waits for more substantial evidence. Erectus was found also at Dmanisi, Georgia, from 1.75 mya in association with pebble tools.
+
+Pebble tools are found the latest first in southern Europe and then in northern. They begin in the open areas of Italy and Spain, the earliest dated to 1.6 mya at Pirro Nord, Italy. The mountains of Italy are rising at a rapid rate in the framework of geologic time; at 1.6 mya they were lower and covered with grassland (as much of the highlands still are). Europe was otherwise mountainous and covered over with dense forest, a formidable terrain for warm-weather savanna dwellers. Similarly there is no evidence that the Mediterranean was passable at Gibraltar or anywhere else to H. erectus or earlier hominans. They might have reached Italy and Spain along the coasts.
+
+In northern Europe pebble tools are found earliest at Happisburgh, United Kingdom, from 0.8 mya. The last traces are from Kent's Cavern, dated 0.5 mya. By that time H. erectus is regarded as having been extinct; however, a more modern version apparently had evolved, Homo heidelbergensis, who must have inherited the tools.[44] He also explains the last of the Acheulean in Germany at 0.4 mya.
+
+In the late 19th and early 20th centuries archaeologists worked on the assumptions that a succession of Hominans and cultures prevailed, that one replaced another. Today the presence of multiple hominans living contemporaneously near each other for long periods is accepted as proved true; moreover, by the time the previously assumed "earliest" culture arrived in northern Europe, the rest of Africa and Eurasia had progressed to the Middle and Upper Palaeolithic, so that across the earth all three were for a time contemporaneous. In any given region there was a progression from Oldowan to Acheulean, Lower to Upper, no doubt.
+
+The end of Oldowan in Africa was brought on by the appearance of Acheulean, or Mode 2, stone tools. The earliest known instances are in the 1.7–1.6 mya layer at Kokiselei, West Turkana, Kenya.[34] At Sterkfontein, South Africa, they are in Member 5 West, 1.7–1.4 mya.[32] The 1.7 is a fairly certain, fairly standard date. Mode 2 is often found in association with H. erectus. It makes sense that the most advanced tools should have been innovated by the most advanced Hominan; consequently, they are typically given credit for the innovation.
+
+A Mode 2 tool is a biface consisting of two concave surfaces intersecting to form a cutting edge all the way around, except in the case of tools intended to feature a point. More work and planning go into the manufacture of a Mode 2 tool. The manufacturer hits a slab off a larger rock to use as a blank. Then large flakes are struck off the blank and worked into bifaces by hard-hammer percussion on an anvil stone. Finally the edge is retouched: small flakes are hit off with a bone or wood soft hammer to sharpen or resharpen it. The core can be either the blank or another flake. Blanks are ported for manufacturing supply in places where nature has provided no suitable stone.
+
+Although most Mode 2 tools are easily distinguished from Mode 1, there is a close similarity of some Oldowan and some Acheulean, which can lead to confusion. Some Oldowan tools are more carefully prepared to form a more regular edge. One distinguishing criterion is the size of the flakes. In contrast to the Oldowan "small flake" tradition, Acheulean is "large flake:" "The primary technological distinction remaining between Oldowan and the Acheulean is the preference for large flakes (>10 cm) as blanks for making large cutting tools (handaxes and cleavers) in the Acheulean."[45] "Large Cutting Tool (LCT)" has become part of the standard terminology as well.[31]
+
+In North Africa, the presence of Mode 2 remains a mystery, as the oldest finds are from Thomas Quarry in Morocco at 0.9 mya.[43] Archaeological attention, however, shifts to the Jordan Rift Valley, an extension of the East African Rift Valley (the east bank of the Jordan is slowly sliding northward as East Africa is thrust away from Africa). Evidence of use of the Nile Valley is in deficit, but Hominans could easily have reached the palaeo-Jordan river from Ethiopia along the shores of the Red Sea, one side or the other. A crossing would not have been necessary, but it is more likely there than over a theoretical but unproven land bridge through either Gibraltar or Sicily.
+
+Meanwhile, Acheulean went on in Africa past the 1.0 mya mark and also past the extinction of H. erectus there. The last Acheulean in East Africa is at Olorgesailie, Kenya, dated to about 0.9 mya. Its owner was still H. erectus,[43] but in South Africa, Acheulean at Elandsfontein, 1.0–0.6 mya, is associated with Saldanha man, classified as H. heidelbergensis, a more advanced, but not yet modern, descendant most likely of H. erectus. The Thoman Quarry Hominans in Morocco similarly are most likely Homo rhodesiensis,[46] in the same evolutionary status as H. heidelbergensis.
+
+Mode 2 is first known out of Africa at 'Ubeidiya, Israel, a site now on the Jordan River, then frequented over the long term (hundreds of thousands of years) by Homo on the shore of a variable-level palaeo-lake, long since vanished. The geology was created by successive "transgression and regression" of the lake[47] resulting in four cycles of layers. The tools are located in the first two, Cycles Li (Limnic Inferior) and Fi (Fluviatile Inferior), but mostly in Fi. The cycles represent different ecologies and therefore different cross-sections of fauna, which makes it possible to date them. They appear to be the same faunal assemblages as the Ferenta Faunal Unit in Italy, known from excavations at Selvella and Pieterfitta, dated to 1.6–1.2 mya.[48]
+
+At 'Ubeidiya the marks on the bones of the animal species found there indicate that the manufacturers of the tools butchered the kills of large predators, an activity that has been termed "scavenging".[49] There are no living floors, nor did they process bones to obtain the marrow. These activities cannot be understood therefore as the only or even the typical economic activity of Hominans. Their interests were selective: they were primarily harvesting the meat of Cervids,[50] which is estimated to have been available without spoiling for up to four days after the kill.
+
+The majority of the animals at the site were of "Palaearctic biogeographic origin".[51] However, these overlapped in range on 30–60% of "African biogeographic origin".[52] The biome was Mediterranean, not savanna. The animals were not passing through; there was simply an overlap of normal ranges. Of the Hominans, H. erectus left several cranial fragments. Teeth of undetermined species may have been H. ergaster.[53] The tools are classified as "Lower Acheulean" and "Developed Oldowan". The latter is a disputed classification created by Mary Leakey to describe an Acheulean-like tradition in Bed II at Olduvai. It is dated 1.53–1.27 mya. The date of the tools therefore probably does not exceed 1.5 mya; 1.4 is often given as a date. This chronology, which is definitely later than in Kenya, supports the "out of Africa" hypothesis for Acheulean, if not for the Hominans.
+
+From Southwest Asia, as the Levant is now called, the Acheulean extended itself more slowly eastward, arriving at Isampur, India, about 1.2 mya. It does not appear in China and Korea until after 1mya and not at all in Indonesia. There is a discernible boundary marking the furthest extent of the Acheulean eastward before 1 mya, called the Movius Line, after its proposer, Hallam L. Movius. On the east side of the line the small flake tradition continues, but the tools are additionally worked Mode 1, with flaking down the sides. In Athirampakkam at Chennai in Tamil Nadu the Acheulean age started at 1.51 mya and it is also prior than North India and Europe.[54]
+
+The cause of the Movius Line remains speculative, whether it represents a real change in technology or a limitation of archeology, but after 1 mya evidence not available to Movius indicates the prevalence of Acheulean. For example, the Acheulean site at Bose, China, is dated 0.803±3K mya.[55] The authors of this chronologically later East Asian Acheulean remain unknown, as does whether it evolved in the region or was brought in.
+
+There is no named boundary line between Mode 1 and Mode 2 on the west; nevertheless, Mode 2 is equally late in Europe as it is in the Far East. The earliest comes from a rock shelter at Estrecho de Quípar in Spain, dated to greater than 0.9 mya. Teeth from an undetermined Hominan were found there also.[56] The last Mode 2 in Southern Europe is from a deposit at Fontana Ranuccio near Anagni in Italy dated to 0.45 mya, which is generally linked to Homo cepranensis, a "late variant of H. erectus", a fragment of whose skull was found at Ceprano nearby, dated 0.46 mya.[57]
+
+This period is best known as the era during which the Neanderthals lived in Europe and the Near East (c. 300,000–28,000 years ago). Their technology is mainly the Mousterian, but Neanderthal physical characteristics have been found also in ambiguous association with the more recent Châtelperronian archeological culture in Western Europe and several local industries like the Szeletian in Eastern Europe/Eurasia. There is no evidence for Neanderthals in Africa, Australia or the Americas.
+
+Neanderthals nursed their elderly and practised ritual burial indicating an organised society. The earliest evidence (Mungo Man) of settlement in Australia dates to around 40,000 years ago when modern humans likely crossed from Asia by island-hopping. Evidence for symbolic behavior such as body ornamentation and burial is ambiguous for the Middle Paleolithic and still subject to debate. The Bhimbetka rock shelters exhibit the earliest traces of human life in India, some of which are approximately 30,000 years old.
+
+From 50,000 to 10,000 years ago in Europe, the Upper Paleolithic ends with the end of the Pleistocene and onset of the Holocene era (the end of the last ice age). Modern humans spread out further across the Earth during the period known as the Upper Paleolithic.
+
+The Upper Paleolithic is marked by a relatively rapid succession of often complex stone artifact technologies and a large increase in the creation of art and personal ornaments. During period between 35 and 10 kya evolved: from 38 to 30 kya Châtelperronian, 40–28 Aurignacian, 28–22 Gravettian, 22–17 Solutrean, and 18–10 Magdalenian. All of these industries except the Châtelperronian are associated with anatomically modern humans. Authorship of the Châtelperronian is still the subject of much debate.
+
+Most scholars date the arrival of humans in Australia at 40,000 to 50,000 years ago, with a possible range of up to 125,000 years ago. The earliest anatomically modern human remains found in Australia (and outside of Africa) are those of Mungo Man; they have been dated at 42,000 years old.[58][59]
+
+The Americas were colonised via the Bering land bridge which was exposed during this period by lower sea levels. These people are called the Paleo-Indians, and the earliest accepted dates are those of the Clovis culture sites, some 13,500 years ago. Globally, societies were hunter-gatherers but evidence of regional identities begins to appear in the wide variety of stone tool types being developed to suit very different environments.
+
+The period starting from the end of the last ice age, 10,000 years ago, to around 6,000 years ago was characterized by rising sea levels and a need to adapt to a changing environment and find new food sources. The development of Mode 5 (microlith) tools began in response to these changes. They were derived from the previous Paleolithic tools, hence the term Epipaleolithic, or were intermediate between the Paleolithic and the Neolithic, hence the term Mesolithic (Middle Stone Age), used for parts of Eurasia, but not outside it. The choice of a word depends on exact circumstances and the inclination of the archaeologists excavating the site. Microliths were used in the manufacture of more efficient composite tools, resulting in an intensification of hunting and fishing and with increasing social activity the development of more complex settlements, such as Lepenski Vir. Domestication of the dog as a hunting companion probably dates to this period.
+
+The earliest known battle occurred during the Mesolithic period at a site in Egypt known as Cemetery 117.
+
+The Neolithic, or New Stone Age, was approximately characterized by the adoption of agriculture. The shift from food gathering to food producing, in itself one of the most revolutionary changes in human history, was accompanied by the so-called Neolithic Revolution: the development of pottery, polished stone tools, and construction of more complex, larger settlements such as Göbekli Tepe and Çatal Hüyük. Some of these features began in certain localities even earlier, in the transitional Mesolithic. The first Neolithic cultures started around 7000 BCE in the fertile crescent and spread concentrically to other areas of the world; however, the Near East was probably not the only nucleus of agriculture, the cultivation of maize in Meso-America and of rice in the Far East being others.
+
+Due to the increased need to harvest and process plants, ground stone and polished stone artifacts became much more widespread, including tools for grinding, cutting, and chopping. Skara Brae located in Orkney off Scotland is one of Europe's best examples of a Neolithic village. The community contains stone beds, shelves and even an indoor toilet linked to a stream. The first large-scale constructions were built, including settlement towers and walls, e.g., Jericho (Tell es-Sultan) and ceremonial sites, e.g.: Stonehenge. The Ġgantija temples of Gozo in the Maltese archipelago are the oldest surviving free standing structures in the world, erected c. 3600–2500 BCE. The earliest evidence for established trade exists in the Neolithic with newly settled people importing exotic goods over distances of many hundreds of miles.
+
+These facts show that there were sufficient resources and co-operation to enable large groups to work on these projects. To what extent this was a basis for the development of elites and social hierarchies is a matter of ongoing debate.[60] Although some late Neolithic societies formed complex stratified chiefdoms similar to Polynesian societies such as the Ancient Hawaiians, based on the societies of modern tribesmen at an equivalent technological level, most Neolithic societies were relatively simple and egalitarian.[61] A comparison of art in the two ages leads some theorists to conclude that Neolithic cultures were noticeably more hierarchical than the Paleolithic cultures that preceded them.[62]
+
+The Early Stone Age in Africa is not to be identified with "Old Stone Age", a translation of Paleolithic, or with Paleolithic, or with the "Earlier Stone Age" that originally meant what became the Paleolithic and Mesolithic. In the initial decades of its definition by the Pan-African Congress of Prehistory, it was parallel in Africa to the Upper and Middle Paleolithic. However, since then Radiocarbon dating has shown that the Middle Stone Age is in fact contemporaneous with the Middle Paleolithic.[63] The Early Stone Age therefore is contemporaneous with the Lower Paleolithic and happens to include the same main technologies, Oldowan and Acheulean, which produced Mode 1 and Mode 2 stone tools respectively. A distinct regional term is warranted, however, by the location and chronology of the sites and the exact typology.
+
+The Middle Stone Age was a period of African prehistory between Early Stone Age and Late Stone Age. It began around 300,000 years ago and ended around 50,000 years ago.[64] It is considered as an equivalent of European Middle Paleolithic.[65] It is associated with anatomically modern or almost modern Homo sapiens. Early physical evidence comes from Omo [66] and Herto,[67] both in Ethiopia and dated respectively at c. 195 ka and at c. 160 ka.
+
+The Later Stone Age (LSA, sometimes also called the Late Stone Age) refers to a period in African prehistory. Its beginnings are roughly contemporaneous with the European Upper Paleolithic. It lasts until historical times and this includes cultures corresponding to Mesolithic and Neolithic in other regions.
+
+Stone tools were made from a variety of stones. For example, flint and chert were shaped (or chipped) for use as cutting tools and weapons, while basalt and sandstone were used for ground stone tools, such as quern-stones. Wood, bone, shell, antler (deer) and other materials were widely used, as well. During the most recent part of the period, sediments (such as clay) were used to make pottery. Agriculture was developed and certain animals were domesticated as well.
+
+Some species of non-primates are able to use stone tools, such as the sea otter, which breaks abalone shells with them. Primates can both use and manufacture stone tools. This combination of abilities is more marked in apes and men, but only men, or more generally Hominans, depend on tool use for survival.[68] The key anatomical and behavioral features required for tool manufacture, which are possessed only by Hominans, are the larger thumb and the ability to hold by means of an assortment of grips.[69]
+
+Food sources of the Palaeolithic hunter-gatherers were wild plants and animals harvested from the environment. They liked animal organ meats, including the livers, kidneys and brains. Large seeded legumes were part of the human diet long before the agricultural revolution, as is evident from archaeobotanical finds from the Mousterian layers of Kebara Cave, in Israel.[70] Moreover, recent evidence indicates that humans processed and consumed wild cereal grains as far back as 23,000 years ago in the Upper Paleolithic.[71]
+
+Near the end of the Wisconsin glaciation, 15,000 to 9,000 years ago, mass extinction of Megafauna such as the woolly mammoth occurred in Asia, Europe, North America and Australia. This was the first Holocene extinction event. It possibly forced modification in the dietary habits of the humans of that age and with the emergence of agricultural practices, plant-based foods also became a regular part of the diet. A number of factors have been suggested for the extinction: certainly over-hunting, but also deforestation and climate change.[72] The net effect was to fragment the vast ranges required by the large animals and extinguish them piecemeal in each fragment.
+
+Around 2 million years ago, Homo habilis is believed to have constructed the first man-made structure in East Africa, consisting of simple arrangements of stones to hold branches of trees in position. A similar stone circular arrangement believed to be around 380,000 years old was discovered at Terra Amata, near Nice, France. (Concerns about the dating have been raised, see Terra Amata). Several human habitats dating back to the Stone Age have been discovered around the globe, including:
+
+Prehistoric art is visible in the artifacts. Prehistoric music is inferred from found instruments, while parietal art can be found on rocks of any kind. The latter are petroglyphs and rock paintings. The art may or may not have had a religious function.[73]
+
+Petroglyphs appeared in the Neolithic. A Petroglyph is an intaglio abstract or symbolic image engraved on natural stone by various methods, usually by prehistoric peoples. They were a dominant form of pre-writing symbols. Petroglyphs have been discovered in different parts of the world, including Australia (Sydney rock engravings), Asia (Bhimbetka, India), North America (Death Valley National Park), South America (Cumbe Mayo, Peru), and Europe (Finnmark, Norway).
+
+In paleolithic times, mostly animals were painted, in theory ones that were used as food or represented strength, such as the rhinoceros or large cats (as in the Chauvet Cave). Signs such as dots were sometimes drawn. Rare human representations include handprints and half-human/half-animal figures. The Cave of Chauvet in the Ardèche département, France, contains the most important cave paintings of the paleolithic era,[74] dating from about 36,000 BCE.[75][76] The Altamira cave paintings in Spain were done 14,000 to 12,000 BCE and show, among others, bisons. The hall of bulls in Lascaux, Dordogne, France, dates from about 15,000 to 10,000 BCE.
+
+The meaning of many of these paintings remains unknown. They may have been used for seasonal rituals. The animals are accompanied by signs that suggest a possible magic use. Arrow-like symbols in Lascaux are sometimes interpreted as calendar or almanac use, but the evidence remains interpretative.[77]
+
+Some scenes of the Mesolithic, however, can be typed and therefore, judging from their various modifications, are fairly clear. One of these is the battle scene between organized bands of archers. For example, "the marching Warriors", a rock painting at Cingle de la Mola, Castellón in Spain, dated to about 7,000–4,000 BCE, depicts about 50 bowmen in two groups marching or running in step toward each other, each man carrying a bow in one hand and a fistful of arrows in the other. A file of five men leads one band, one of whom is a figure with a "high crowned hat".
+
+In other scenes elsewhere, the men wear head-dresses and knee ornaments but otherwise fight nude. Some scenes depict the dead and wounded, bristling with arrows.[78] One is reminded of Ötzi the Iceman, a Copper Age mummy revealed by an Alpine melting glacier, who collapsed from loss of blood due to an arrow wound in the back.
+
+Modern studies and the in-depth analysis of finds dating from the Stone Age indicate certain rituals and beliefs of the people in those prehistoric times. It is now believed that activities of the Stone Age humans went beyond the immediate requirements of procuring food, body coverings, and shelters. Specific rites relating to death and burial were practiced, though certainly differing in style and execution between cultures.[citation needed]
+
+The image of the caveman is commonly associated with the Stone Age. For example, a 2003 documentary series showing the evolution of humans through the Stone Age was called Walking with Cavemen, but only the last programme showed humans living in caves. While the idea that human beings and dinosaurs coexisted is sometimes portrayed in popular culture in cartoons, films and computer games, such as The Flintstones, One Million Years B.C. and Chuck Rock, the notion of hominids and non-avian dinosaurs co-existing is not supported by any scientific evidence.
+
+Other depictions of the Stone Age include the best-selling Earth's Children series of books by Jean M. Auel, which are set in the Paleolithic and are loosely based on archaeological and anthropological findings.
+
+The 1981 film Quest for Fire by Jean-Jacques Annaud tells the story of a group of early homo sapiens searching for their lost fire. A 21st-century series, Chronicles of Ancient Darkness by Michelle Paver tells of two New Stone Age children fighting to fulfil a prophecy and save their clan.

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+Boston (US: /ˈbɔːstən/, UK: /ˈbɒstən/)[10] is the capital and most populous city[3] of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts in the United States, and the 21st most populous city in the United States. The city proper covers 49 square miles (127 km2) with an estimated population of 692,600 in 2019,[4] also making it the most populous city in New England,[3] and is the seat of Suffolk County (although the county government was disbanded on July 1, 1999).[11] The city is the economic and cultural anchor of a substantially larger metropolitan area known as Greater Boston, a metropolitan statistical area (MSA) home to a census-estimated 4.8 million people in 2016 and ranking as the tenth-largest such area in the country.[12] As a combined statistical area (CSA), this wider commuting region is home to some 8.2 million people, making it the sixth most populous in the United States.[13]
+
+Boston is one of the oldest municipalities in the United States, founded on the Shawmut Peninsula in 1630 by Puritan settlers from the English town of the same name.[14][15] It was the scene of several key events of the American Revolution, such as the Boston Massacre, the Boston Tea Party, the Battle of Bunker Hill, and the Siege of Boston. Upon gaining U.S. independence from Great Britain, it continued to be an important port and manufacturing hub as well as a center for education and culture.[16][17] The city has expanded beyond the original peninsula through land reclamation and municipal annexation. Its rich history attracts many tourists, with Faneuil Hall alone drawing more than 20 million visitors per year.[18] Boston's many firsts include the United States' first public park (Boston Common, 1634), first public or state school (Boston Latin School, 1635)[19] and first subway system (Tremont Street subway, 1897).[20]
+
+Today, Boston is a thriving center of scientific research. The Boston area's many colleges and universities make it a world leader in higher education,[21] including law, medicine, engineering, and business, and the city is considered to be a global pioneer in innovation and entrepreneurship, with nearly 5,000 startups.[22][23][24] Boston's economic base also includes finance,[25] professional and business services, biotechnology, information technology, and government activities.[26] Households in the city claim the highest average rate of philanthropy in the United States;[27] businesses and institutions rank among the top in the country for environmental sustainability and investment.[28] The city has one of the highest costs of living in the United States[29][30] as it has undergone gentrification,[31] though it remains high on world livability rankings.[32]
+
+Boston's early European settlers had first called the area Trimountaine (after its "three mountains," only traces of which remain today) but later renamed it Boston after Boston, Lincolnshire, England, the origin of several prominent colonists. The renaming on October 7, 1630, (Old Style)[33][b] was by Puritan colonists from England[15][34] who had moved over from Charlestown earlier that year in quest for fresh water. Their settlement was initially limited to the Shawmut Peninsula, at that time surrounded by the Massachusetts Bay and Charles River and connected to the mainland by a narrow isthmus. The peninsula is thought to have been inhabited as early as 4000 BC.[35]
+
+In 1629, the Massachusetts Bay Colony's first governor John Winthrop led the signing of the Cambridge Agreement, a key founding document of the city. Puritan ethics and their focus on education influenced its early history;[36] America's first public school, Boston Latin School, was founded in Boston in 1635.[19] Over the next 130 years, the city participated in four French and Indian Wars, until the British defeated the French and their Indian allies in North America.
+
+Boston was the largest town in British America until Philadelphia grew larger in the mid-18th century.[37] Boston's oceanfront location made it a lively port, and the city primarily engaged in shipping and fishing during its colonial days. However, Boston stagnated in the decades prior to the Revolution. By the mid-18th century, New York City and Philadelphia surpassed Boston in wealth. During this period, Boston encountered financial difficulties even as other cities in New England grew rapidly.[38][39]
+
+William Howe, 5th Viscount Howe, in a letter to William Legge, 2nd Earl of Dartmouth about the British army's decision to leave Boston, dated March 21, 1776.[40]
+
+Many of the crucial events of the American Revolution[41] occurred in or near Boston. Boston's penchant for mob action along with the colonists' growing distrust in Britain fostered a revolutionary spirit in the city.[38] When the British government passed the Stamp Act in 1765, a Boston mob ravaged the homes of Andrew Oliver, the official tasked with enforcing the Act, and Thomas Hutchinson, then the Lieutenant Governor of Massachusetts.[38][42] The British sent two regiments to Boston in 1768 in an attempt to quell the angry colonists. This did not sit well with the colonists. In 1770, during the Boston Massacre, the army killed several people in response to a mob in Boston. The colonists compelled the British to withdraw their troops. The event was widely publicized and fueled a revolutionary movement in America.[39]
+
+In 1773, Britain passed the Tea Act. Many of the colonists saw the act as an attempt to force them to accept the taxes established by the Townshend Acts. The act prompted the Boston Tea Party, where a group of rebels threw an entire shipment of tea sent by the British East India Company into Boston Harbor. The Boston Tea Party was a key event leading up to the revolution, as the British government responded furiously with the Intolerable Acts, demanding compensation for the lost tea from the rebels.[38] This angered the colonists further and led to the American Revolutionary War. The war began in the area surrounding Boston with the Battles of Lexington and Concord.[38][43]
+
+Boston itself was besieged for almost a year during the Siege of Boston, which began on April 19, 1775. The New England militia impeded the movement of the British Army. William Howe, 5th Viscount Howe, then the commander-in-chief of the British forces in North America, led the British army in the siege. On June 17, the British captured the Charlestown peninsula in Boston, during the Battle of Bunker Hill. The British army outnumbered the militia stationed there, but it was a Pyrrhic victory for the British because their army suffered devastating casualties. It was also a testament to the power and courage of the militia, as their stubborn defending made it difficult for the British to capture Charlestown without losing many troops.[44][45]
+
+Several weeks later, George Washington took over the militia after the Continental Congress established the Continental Army to unify the revolutionary effort. Both sides faced difficulties and supply shortages in the siege, and the fighting was limited to small-scale raids and skirmishes. On March 4, 1776, Washington commanded his army to fortify Dorchester Heights, an area of Boston. The army placed cannons there to repel a British invasion against their stake in Boston. Washington was confident the army could resist a small-scale invasion with their fortifications. Howe planned an invasion into Boston, but bad weather delayed their advance. Howe decided to withdraw, because the storm gave Washington's army more time to improve their fortifications. British troops left Boston on March 17, which solidified the revolutionaries' control of the city.[43][44]
+
+After the Revolution, Boston's long seafaring tradition helped make it one of the world's wealthiest international ports, with the slave trade,[46] rum, fish, salt, and tobacco being particularly important.[47] Boston's harbor activity was significantly curtailed by the Embargo Act of 1807 (adopted during the Napoleonic Wars) and the War of 1812. Foreign trade returned after these hostilities, but Boston's merchants had found alternatives for their capital investments in the interim. Manufacturing became an important component of the city's economy, and the city's industrial manufacturing overtook international trade in economic importance by the mid-19th century. A network of small rivers bordering the city and connecting it to the surrounding region facilitated shipment of goods and led to a proliferation of mills and factories. Later, a dense network of railroads furthered the region's industry and commerce.[48]
+
+During this period, Boston flourished culturally, as well, admired for its rarefied literary life and generous artistic patronage,[50][51] with members of old Boston families—eventually dubbed Boston Brahmins—coming to be regarded as the nation's social and cultural elites.[52]
+
+Boston was an early port of the Atlantic triangular slave trade in the New England colonies, but was soon overtaken by Salem, Massachusetts and Newport, Rhode Island.[53] Boston eventually became a center of the abolitionist movement.[54] The city reacted strongly to the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850,[55] contributing to President Franklin Pierce's attempt to make an example of Boston after the Anthony Burns Fugitive Slave Case.[56][57]
+
+In 1822,[16] the citizens of Boston voted to change the official name from the "Town of Boston" to the "City of Boston", and on March 19, 1822, the people of Boston accepted the charter incorporating the City.[58] At the time Boston was chartered as a city, the population was about 46,226, while the area of the city was only 4.8 square miles (12 km2).[58]
+
+In the 1820s, Boston's population grew rapidly, and the city's ethnic composition changed dramatically with the first wave of European immigrants. Irish immigrants dominated the first wave of newcomers during this period, especially following the Irish Potato Famine; by 1850, about 35,000 Irish lived in Boston.[59] In the latter half of the 19th century, the city saw increasing numbers of Irish, Germans, Lebanese, Syrians,[60] French Canadians, and Russian and Polish Jews settling in the city. By the end of the 19th century, Boston's core neighborhoods had become enclaves of ethnically distinct immigrants with their residence yielding lasting cultural change. Italians became the largest inhabitants of the North End,[61] Irish dominated South Boston and Charlestown, and Russian Jews lived in the West End. Irish and Italian immigrants brought with them Roman Catholicism. Currently, Catholics make up Boston's largest religious community,[62] and the Irish have played a major role in Boston politics since the early 20th century; prominent figures include the Kennedys, Tip O'Neill, and John F. Fitzgerald.[63]
+
+Between 1631 and 1890, the city tripled its area through land reclamation by filling in marshes, mud flats, and gaps between wharves along the waterfront.[64] The largest reclamation efforts took place during the 19th century; beginning in 1807, the crown of Beacon Hill was used to fill in a 50-acre (20 ha) mill pond that later became the Haymarket Square area. The present-day State House sits atop this lowered Beacon Hill. Reclamation projects in the middle of the century created significant parts of the South End, the West End, the Financial District, and Chinatown.
+
+After the Great Boston fire of 1872, workers used building rubble as landfill along the downtown waterfront. During the mid-to-late 19th century, workers filled almost 600 acres (2.4 km2) of brackish Charles River marshlands west of Boston Common with gravel brought by rail from the hills of Needham Heights. The city annexed the adjacent towns of South Boston (1804), East Boston (1836), Roxbury (1868), Dorchester (including present-day Mattapan and a portion of South Boston) (1870), Brighton (including present-day Allston) (1874), West Roxbury (including present-day Jamaica Plain and Roslindale) (1874), Charlestown (1874), and Hyde Park (1912).[65][66] Other proposals were unsuccessful for the annexation of Brookline, Cambridge,[67] and Chelsea.[68][69]
+
+Boston went into decline by the early to mid-20th century, as factories became old and obsolete and businesses moved out of the region for cheaper labor elsewhere.[70] Boston responded by initiating various urban renewal projects, under the direction of the Boston Redevelopment Authority (BRA) established in 1957. In 1958, BRA initiated a project to "improve" the historic West End neighborhood. Extensive demolition was met with strong public opposition, and thousands of families were displaced.[71]
+
+The BRA continued implementing eminent domain projects, including the clearance of the vibrant Scollay Square area for construction of the bleak, modernist style Government Center. In 1965, the Columbia Point Health Center opened in the Dorchester neighborhood, the first Community Health Center in the United States. It mostly served the massive Columbia Point public housing complex adjoining it, which was built in 1953. The health center is still in operation and was rededicated in 1990 as the Geiger-Gibson Community Health Center.[72] The Columbia Point complex itself was redeveloped and revitalized from 1984 to 1990 into a mixed-income residential development called Harbor Point Apartments.[73]
+
+By the 1970s, the city's economy had begun to recover after 30 years of economic downturn. A large number of high-rises were constructed in the Financial District and in Boston's Back Bay during this period.[74] This boom continued into the mid-1980s and resumed after a few pauses. Hospitals such as Massachusetts General Hospital, Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, and Brigham and Women's Hospital lead the nation in medical innovation and patient care. Schools such as the Boston Architectural College, Boston College, Boston University, the Harvard Medical School, Tufts University School of Medicine, Northeastern University, Massachusetts College of Art and Design, Wentworth Institute of Technology, Berklee College of Music, the Boston Conservatory, and many others attract students to the area. Nevertheless, the city experienced conflict starting in 1974 over desegregation busing, which resulted in unrest and violence around public schools throughout the mid-1970s.[75]
+
+Boston is an intellectual, technological, and political center but has lost some important regional institutions,[76] including the loss to mergers and acquisitions of local financial institutions such as FleetBoston Financial, which was acquired by Charlotte-based Bank of America in 2004.[77] Boston-based department stores Jordan Marsh and Filene's have both merged into the New York City–based Macy's.[78]
+The 1993 acquisition of The Boston Globe by The New York Times[79] was reversed in 2013 when it was re-sold to Boston businessman John W. Henry. In 2016, it was announced General Electric would be moving its corporate headquarters from Connecticut to the Seaport District in Boston, joining many other companies in this rapidly developing neighborhood.
+
+Boston has experienced gentrification in the latter half of the 20th century,[80] with housing prices increasing sharply since the 1990s.[30] Living expenses have risen; Boston has one of the highest costs of living in the United States[81] and was ranked the 129th-most expensive major city in the world in a 2011 survey of 214 cities.[82] Despite cost-of-living issues, Boston ranks high on livability ratings, ranking 36th worldwide in quality of living in 2011 in a survey of 221 major cities.[83]
+
+On April 15, 2013, two Chechen Islamist brothers detonated a pair of bombs near the finish line of the Boston Marathon, killing three people and injuring roughly 264.[84]
+
+In 2016, Boston briefly shouldered a bid as the US applicant for the 2024 Summer Olympics. The bid was supported by the mayor and a coalition of business leaders and local philanthropists, but was eventually dropped due to public opposition.[85] The USOC then selected Los Angeles to be the American candidate with Los Angeles ultimately securing the right to host the 2028 Summer Olympics.
+
+Boston has an area of 89.63 square miles (232.1 km2)—48.4 square miles (125.4 km2) (54%) of land and 41.2 square miles (106.7 km2) (46%) of water. The city's official elevation, as measured at Logan International Airport, is 19 ft (5.8 m) above sea level.[86] The highest point in Boston is Bellevue Hill at 330 feet (100 m) above sea level, and the lowest point is at sea level.[87] Situated onshore of the Atlantic Ocean, Boston is the only state capital in the contiguous United States with an oceanic shoreline.[88]
+
+The geographical center of Boston is in Roxbury. Due north of the center we find the South End. This is not to be confused with South Boston which lies directly east from the South End. North of South Boston is East Boston and southwest of East Boston is the North End.
+
+Boston is surrounded by the "Greater Boston" region and is contiguously bordered by the cities and towns of Winthrop, Revere, Chelsea, Everett, Somerville, Cambridge, Watertown, Newton, Brookline, Needham, Dedham, Canton, Milton, and Quincy. The Charles River separates Boston's Allston-Brighton, Fenway-Kenmore and Back Bay neighborhoods from Watertown and the majority of Cambridge, and the mass of Boston from its own Charlestown neighborhood. To the east lie Boston Harbor and the Boston Harbor Islands National Recreation Area (which includes part of the city's territory, specifically Calf Island, Gallops Island, Great Brewster Island, Green Island, Little Brewster Island, Little Calf Island, Long Island, Lovells Island, Middle Brewster Island, Nixes Mate, Outer Brewster Island, Rainsford Island, Shag Rocks, Spectacle Island, The Graves, and Thompson Island). The Neponset River forms the boundary between Boston's southern neighborhoods and the city of Quincy and the town of Milton. The Mystic River separates Charlestown from Chelsea and Everett, and Chelsea Creek and Boston Harbor separate East Boston from Downtown, the North End, and the Seaport.[89]
+
+
+
+Boston is sometimes called a "city of neighborhoods" because of the profusion of diverse subsections; the city government's Office of Neighborhood Services has officially designated 23 neighborhoods.[90] More than two-thirds of inner Boston's modern land area did not exist when the city was founded. Instead, it was created via the gradual filling in of the surrounding tidal areas over the centuries,[64] with earth from leveling or lowering Boston's three original hills (the "Trimountain", after which Tremont Street is named) and with gravel brought by train from Needham to fill the Back Bay.[17]
+
+Downtown and its immediate surroundings consist largely of low-rise masonry buildings (often Federal style and Greek Revival) interspersed with modern highrises, in the Financial District, Government Center, and South Boston.[91] Back Bay includes many prominent landmarks, such as the Boston Public Library, Christian Science Center, Copley Square, Newbury Street, and New England's two tallest buildings: the John Hancock Tower and the Prudential Center.[92]
+Near the John Hancock Tower is the old John Hancock Building with its prominent illuminated beacon, the color of which forecasts the weather.[93] Smaller commercial areas are interspersed among areas of single-family homes and wooden/brick multi-family row houses. The South End Historic District is the largest surviving contiguous Victorian-era neighborhood in the US.[94] The geography of downtown and South Boston was particularly affected by the Central Artery/Tunnel Project (known unofficially as the "Big Dig") which removed the unsightly elevated Central Artery and incorporated new green spaces and open areas.[95]
+
+Under the Köppen climate classification, depending on the isotherm used, Boston has either a humid subtropical climate (Köppen Cfa) under the −3 °C (26.6 °F) isotherm or a humid continental climate under the 0 °C isotherm (Köppen Dfa).[96] The city is best described as being in a transitional zone between the two climates. Summers are typically hot and humid, while winters are cold and stormy, with occasional periods of heavy snow. Spring and fall are usually cool to mild, with varying conditions dependent on wind direction and jet stream positioning. Prevailing wind patterns that blow offshore minimize the influence of the Atlantic Ocean. However, in winter areas near the immediate coast will often see more rain than snow as warm air is drawn off the Atlantic at times.[97] The city lies at the transition between USDA plant hardiness zones 6b (most of the city) and 7a (Downtown, South Boston, and East Boston neighborhoods).[98]
+
+The hottest month is July, with a mean temperature of 73.4 °F (23.0 °C). The coldest month is January, with a mean of 29.0 °F (−1.7 °C). Periods exceeding 90 °F (32 °C) in summer and below freezing in winter are not uncommon but rarely extended, with about 13 and 25 days per year seeing each, respectively.[99] The most recent sub-0 °F (−18 °C) reading occurred on January 7, 2018, when the temperature dipped down to −2 °F (−19 °C).[99] In addition, several decades may pass between 100 °F (38 °C) readings, with the most recent such occurrence on July 22, 2011, when the temperature reached 103 °F (39 °C).[99] The city's average window for freezing temperatures is November 9 through April 5.[99][c] Official temperature records have ranged from −18 °F (−28 °C) on February 9, 1934, up to 104 °F (40 °C) on July 4, 1911. The record cold daily maximum is 2 °F (−17 °C) on December 30, 1917 while, conversely, the record warm daily minimum is 83 °F (28 °C) on August 2, 1975 and July 21, 2019.[100][99]
+
+Boston's coastal location on the North Atlantic moderates its temperature but makes the city very prone to Nor'easter weather systems that can produce much snow and rain.[97] The city averages 43.8 inches (1,110 mm) of precipitation a year, with 43.8 inches (111 cm) of snowfall per season.[99] Most snowfall occurs from mid-November through early April, and snow is rare in May and October.[101][102] There is also high year-to-year variability in snowfall; for instance, the winter of 2011–12 saw only 9.3 in (23.6 cm) of accumulating snow, but the previous winter, the corresponding figure was 81.0 in (2.06 m).[99][d]
+
+Fog is fairly common, particularly in spring and early summer. Due to its location along the North Atlantic, the city often receives sea breezes, especially in the late spring, when water temperatures are still quite cold and temperatures at the coast can be more than 20 °F (11 °C) colder than a few miles inland, sometimes dropping by that amount near midday.[103][104]
+Thunderstorms occur from May to September, that are occasionally severe with large hail, damaging winds and heavy downpours.[97] Although downtown Boston has never been struck by a violent tornado, the city itself has experienced many tornado warnings. Damaging storms are more common to areas north, west, and northwest of the city.[105] Boston has a relatively sunny climate for a coastal city at its latitude, averaging over 2,600 hours of sunshine per annum.
+
+
+
+In 2016, Boston was estimated to have 673,184 residents (a density of 13,841 persons/sq mi, or 5,344/km2) living in 272,481 housing units[3]—a 9% population increase over 2010. The city is the third-most densely populated large U.S. city of over half a million residents. Some 1.2 million persons may be within Boston's boundaries during work hours, and as many as 2 million during special events. This fluctuation of people is caused by hundreds of thousands of suburban residents who travel to the city for work, education, health care, and special events.[122]
+
+In the city, the population was spread out, with 21.9% at age 19 and under, 14.3% from 20 to 24, 33.2% from 25 to 44, 20.4% from 45 to 64, and 10.1% who were 65 years of age or older. The median age was 30.8 years. For every 100 females, there were 92.0 males. For every 100 females age 18 and over, there were 89.9 males.[123] There were 252,699 households, of which 20.4% had children under the age of 18 living in them, 25.5% were married couples living together, 16.3% had a female householder with no husband present, and 54.0% were non-families. 37.1% of all households were made up of individuals, and 9.0% had someone living alone who was 65 years of age or older. The average household size was 2.26 and the average family size was 3.08.[123] Boston has one of the largest LGBT populations in the United States.
+
+The median household income in Boston was $51,739, while the median income for a family was $61,035. Full-time year-round male workers had a median income of $52,544 versus $46,540 for full-time year-round female workers. The per capita income for the city was $33,158. 21.4% of the population and 16.0% of families were below the poverty line. Of the total population, 28.8% of those under the age of 18 and 20.4% of those 65 and older were living below the poverty line.[124]
+
+In 1950, Whites represented 94.7% of Boston's population.[125] From the 1950s to the end of the 20th century, the proportion of non-Hispanic whites in the city declined. In 2000, non-Hispanic whites made up 49.5% of the city's population, making the city majority minority for the first time. However, in the 21st century, the city has experienced significant gentrification, during which affluent whites have moved into formerly non-white areas. In 2006, the US Census Bureau estimated non-Hispanic whites again formed a slight majority but as of 2010[update], in part due to the housing crash, as well as increased efforts to make more affordable housing more available, the non-white population has rebounded. This may also have to do with increased Latin American and Asian populations and more clarity surrounding US Census statistics, which indicate a non-Hispanic white population of 47 percent (some reports give slightly lower figures).[126][127][128]
+
+People of Irish descent form the largest single ethnic group in the city, making up 15.8% of the population, followed by Italians, accounting for 8.3% of the population. People of West Indian and Caribbean ancestry are another sizable group, at 6.0%,[132] about half of whom are of Haitian ancestry. Over 27,000 Chinese Americans made their home in Boston city proper in 2013,[133] and the city hosts a growing Chinatown accommodating heavily traveled Chinese-owned bus lines to and from Chinatown, Manhattan in New York City. Some neighborhoods, such as Dorchester, have received an influx of people of Vietnamese ancestry in recent decades. Neighborhoods such as Jamaica Plain and Roslindale have experienced a growing number of Dominican Americans.[134] The city and greater area also has a growing immigrant population of South Asians, including the tenth-largest Indian population in the country.
+
+The city, especially the East Boston neighborhood, has a significant Hispanic population. In 2010, Hispanics in Boston were mostly of Puerto Rican (30,506 or 4.9% of total city population), Dominican (25,648 or 4.2% of total city population), Salvadoran (10,850 or 1.8% of city population), Colombian (6,649 or 1.1% of total city population), Mexican (5,961 or 1.0% of total city population), and Guatemalan (4,451 or 0.7% of total city population) ethnic origin. Hispanics of all national origins totaled 107,917 in 2010. In Greater Boston, these numbers grew significantly, with Puerto Ricans numbering 175,000+, Dominicans 95,000+, Salvadorans 40,000+, Guatemalans 31,000+, Mexicans 25,000+, and Colombians numbering 22,000+.[135]
+
+According to the 2012–2016 American Community Survey 5-Year Estimates, the largest ancestry groups in Boston, Massachusetts are:[136][137]
+
+Data is from the 2008–2012 American Community Survey 5-Year Estimates.[138][139][140]
+
+According to a 2014 study by the Pew Research Center, 57% of the population of the city identified themselves as Christians, with 25% attending a variety of Protestant churches and 29% professing Roman Catholic beliefs;[141][142] 33% claim no religious affiliation, while the remaining 10% are composed of adherents of Judaism, Buddhism, Islam, Hinduism, Baháʼí and other faiths.
+
+As of 2010[update], the Catholic Church had the highest number of adherents as a single denomination in the Greater Boston area, with more than two million members and 339 churches, followed by the Episcopal Church with 58,000 adherents in 160 churches. The United Church of Christ had 55,000 members and 213 churches.[143] The UCC is the successor of the city's Puritan religious traditions. Old South Church in Boston is one of the oldest congregations in the United States. It was organized in 1669 by dissenters from the First Church in Boston (1630). Past members include Samuel Adams, William Dawes, Benjamin Franklin, Samuel Sewall, and Phillis Wheatley. In 1773, Adams gave the signals from the Old South Meeting House that started the Boston Tea Party.
+
+The city has a Jewish population of an estimated 248,000 Jews within the Boston metro area.[144] More than half of Jewish households in the Greater Boston area reside in the city itself, Brookline, Newton, Cambridge, Somerville, or adjacent towns.[144]
+
+Distribution of Greater Boston NECTA Labor Force (2016)[147]
+
+A global city, Boston is placed among the top 30 most economically powerful cities in the world.[148] Encompassing $363 billion, the Greater Boston metropolitan area has the sixth-largest economy in the country and 12th-largest in the world.[149]
+
+Boston's colleges and universities exert a significant impact on the regional economy. Boston attracts more than 350,000 college students from around the world, who contribute more than US$4.8 billion annually to the city's economy.[150][151] The area's schools are major employers and attract industries to the city and surrounding region. The city is home to a number of technology companies and is a hub for biotechnology, with the Milken Institute rating Boston as the top life sciences cluster in the country.[152] Boston receives the highest absolute amount of annual funding from the National Institutes of Health of all cities in the United States.[153]
+
+The city is considered highly innovative for a variety of reasons, including the presence of academia, access to venture capital, and the presence of many high-tech companies.[23][154] The Route 128 corridor and Greater Boston continue to be a major center for venture capital investment,[155] and high technology remains an important sector.
+
+Tourism also composes a large part of Boston's economy, with 21.2 million domestic and international visitors spending $8.3 billion in 2011.[156] Excluding visitors from Canada and Mexico, over 1.4 million international tourists visited Boston in 2014, with those from China and the United Kingdom leading the list.[157] Boston's status as a state capital as well as the regional home of federal agencies has rendered law and government to be another major component of the city's economy.[158] The city is a major seaport along the East Coast of the United States and the oldest continuously operated industrial and fishing port in the Western Hemisphere.[159]
+
+In the 2018 Global Financial Centres Index, Boston was ranked as having the thirteenth most competitive financial services center in the world and the second most competitive in the United States.[160] Boston-based Fidelity Investments helped popularize the mutual fund in the 1980s and has made Boston one of the top financial centers in the United States.[161][162] The city is home to the headquarters of Santander Bank, and Boston is a center for venture capital firms. State Street Corporation, which specializes in asset management and custody services, is based in the city. Boston is a printing and publishing center[163]—Houghton Mifflin Harcourt is headquartered within the city, along with Bedford-St. Martin's Press and Beacon Press. Pearson PLC publishing units also employ several hundred people in Boston. The city is home to three major convention centers—the Hynes Convention Center in the Back Bay, and the Seaport World Trade Center and Boston Convention and Exhibition Center on the South Boston waterfront.[164] The General Electric Corporation announced in January 2016 its decision to move the company's global headquarters to the Seaport District in Boston, from Fairfield, Connecticut, citing factors including Boston's preeminence in the realm of higher education.[165] Boston is home to the headquarters of several major athletic and footwear companies including Converse, New Balance, and Reebok. Rockport, Puma and Wolverine World Wide, Inc. headquarters or regional offices[166] are just outside the city.[167]
+
+In 2019, a yearly ranking of time wasted in traffic listed Boston area drivers lost approximately 164 hours a year in lost productivity due to the area's traffic congestion. This amounted to $2,300 a year per driver in costs.[168]
+
+The Boston Public Schools enroll 57,000 students attending 145 schools, including the renowned Boston Latin Academy, John D. O'Bryant School of Math & Science, and Boston Latin School. The Boston Latin School was established in 1635 and is the oldest public high school in the US. Boston also operates the United States' second-oldest public high school and its oldest public elementary school.[19] The system's students are 40% Hispanic or Latino, 35% Black or African American, 13% White, and 9% Asian.[169] There are private, parochial, and charter schools as well, and approximately 3,300 minority students attend participating suburban schools through the Metropolitan Educational Opportunity Council.[170] In September 2019, the city formally inaugurated Boston Saves, a program that provides every child enrolled in the city's kindergarten system a savings account containing $50 to be used toward college or career training.[171]
+
+Some of the most renowned and highly ranked universities in the world are near Boston.[172][173] Three universities with a major presence in the city, Harvard, MIT, and Tufts, are just outside of Boston in the cities of Cambridge and Somerville, known as the Brainpower Triangle.[174] Harvard is the nation's oldest institute of higher education and is centered across the Charles River in Cambridge, though the majority of its land holdings and a substantial amount of its educational activities are in Boston. Its business school and athletics facilities are in Boston's Allston neighborhood, and its medical, dental, and public health schools are located in the Longwood area.[175]
+
+The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) originated in Boston and was long known as "Boston Tech"; it moved across the river to Cambridge in 1916.[176] Tufts University's main campus is north of the city in Somerville and Medford, though it locates its medical and dental schools in Boston's Chinatown at Tufts Medical Center, a 451-bed academic medical institution that is home to a full-service hospital for adults and the Floating Hospital for Children.[177]
+
+Four members of the Association of American Universities are in Greater Boston (more than any other metropolitan area): Harvard University, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Boston University, and Brandeis University.[178] Furthermore, Greater Boston contains seven Highest Research Activity (R1) Universities as per the Carnegie Classification. This includes, in addition to the aforementioned four, Boston College, Northeastern University, and Tufts University. This is, by a large margin, the highest concentration of such institutions in a single metropolitan area.
+Hospitals, universities, and research institutions in Greater Boston received more than $1.77 billion in National Institutes of Health grants in 2013, more money than any other American metropolitan area.[179]
+
+Greater Boston has more than 100 colleges and universities, with 250,000 students enrolled in Boston and Cambridge alone.[180] The city's largest private universities include Boston University (also the city's fourth-largest employer),[181] with its main campus along Commonwealth Avenue and a medical campus in the South End, Northeastern University in the Fenway area,[182] Suffolk University near Beacon Hill, which includes law school and business school,[183] and Boston College, which straddles the Boston (Brighton)–Newton border.[184] Boston's only public university is the University of Massachusetts Boston on Columbia Point in Dorchester. Roxbury Community College and Bunker Hill Community College are the city's two public community colleges. Altogether, Boston's colleges and universities employ more than 42,600 people, accounting for nearly seven percent of the city's workforce.[185]
+
+Smaller private colleges include Babson College, Bentley University, Boston Architectural College, Emmanuel College, Fisher College, MGH Institute of Health Professions, Massachusetts College of Pharmacy and Health Sciences, Simmons College, Wellesley College, Wheelock College, Wentworth Institute of Technology, New England School of Law (originally established as America's first all female law school),[186] and Emerson College.[187]
+
+Metropolitan Boston is home to several conservatories and art schools, including Lesley University College of Art and Design, Massachusetts College of Art, the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, New England Institute of Art, New England School of Art and Design (Suffolk University), Longy School of Music of Bard College, and the New England Conservatory (the oldest independent conservatory in the United States).[188] Other conservatories include the Boston Conservatory and Berklee College of Music, which has made Boston an important city for jazz music.[189]
+
+Like many major American cities, Boston has seen a great reduction in violent crime since the early 1990s. Boston's low crime rate since the 1990s has been credited to the Boston Police Department's collaboration with neighborhood groups and church parishes to prevent youths from joining gangs, as well as involvement from the United States Attorney and District Attorney's offices. This helped lead in part to what has been touted as the "Boston Miracle". Murders in the city dropped from 152 in 1990 (for a murder rate of 26.5 per 100,000 people) to just 31—not one of them a juvenile—in 1999 (for a murder rate of 5.26 per 100,000).[190]
+
+In 2008, there were 62 reported homicides.[191] Through December 30, 2016, major crime was down seven percent and there were 46 homicides compared to 40 in 2015.[192]
+
+Boston shares many cultural roots with greater New England, including a dialect of the non-rhotic Eastern New England accent known as the Boston accent[193] and a regional cuisine with a large emphasis on seafood, salt, and dairy products.[194] Boston also has its own collection of neologisms known as Boston slang and sardonic humor.[195]
+
+In the early 1800s, William Tudor wrote that Boston was "'perhaps the most perfect and certainly the best-regulated democracy that ever existed. There is something so impossible in the immortal fame of Athens, that the very name makes everything modern shrink from comparison; but since the days of that glorious city I know of none that has approached so near in some points, distant as it may still be from that illustrious model.'[196] From this, Boston has been called the "Athens of America" (also a nickname of Philadelphia[197]) for its literary culture, earning a reputation as "the intellectual capital of the United States."[198]
+
+In the nineteenth century, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Margaret Fuller, James Russell Lowell, and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow wrote in Boston. Some consider the Old Corner Bookstore to be the "cradle of American literature," the place where these writers met and where The Atlantic Monthly was first published.[199] In 1852, the Boston Public Library was founded as the first free library in the United States.[198] Boston's literary culture continues today thanks to the city's many universities and the Boston Book Festival.
+
+Music is afforded a high degree of civic support in Boston. The Boston Symphony Orchestra is one of the "Big Five," a group of the greatest American orchestras, and the classical music magazine Gramophone called it one of the "world's best" orchestras.[200] Symphony Hall (west of Back Bay) is home to the Boston Symphony Orchestra and the related Boston Youth Symphony Orchestra, which is the largest youth orchestra in the nation, and to the Boston Pops Orchestra. The British newspaper The Guardian called Boston Symphony Hall "one of the top venues for classical music in the world," adding "Symphony Hall in Boston was where science became an essential part of concert hall design."[201] Other concerts are held at the New England Conservatory's Jordan Hall. The Boston Ballet performs at the Boston Opera House. Other performing-arts organizations in the city include the Boston Lyric Opera Company, Opera Boston, Boston Baroque (the first permanent Baroque orchestra in the US),[202] and the Handel and Haydn Society (one of the oldest choral companies in the United States).[203] The city is a center for contemporary classical music with a number of performing groups, several of which are associated with the city's conservatories and universities. These include the Boston Modern Orchestra Project and Boston Musica Viva.[202] Several theaters are in or near the Theater District south of Boston Common, including the Cutler Majestic Theatre, Citi Performing Arts Center, the Colonial Theater, and the Orpheum Theatre.[204]
+
+There are several major annual events, such as First Night which occurs on New Year's Eve, the Boston Early Music Festival, the annual Boston Arts Festival at Christopher Columbus Waterfront Park, the annual Boston gay pride parade and festival held in June, and Italian summer feasts in the North End honoring Catholic saints.[205] The city is the site of several events during the Fourth of July period. They include the week-long Harborfest festivities[206] and a Boston Pops concert accompanied by fireworks on the banks of the Charles River.[207]
+
+Several historic sites relating to the American Revolution period are preserved as part of the Boston National Historical Park because of the city's prominent role. Many are found along the Freedom Trail,[208] which is marked by a red line of bricks embedded in the ground.
+
+The city is also home to several art museums and galleries, including the Museum of Fine Arts and the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum.[209] The Institute of Contemporary Art is housed in a contemporary building designed by Diller Scofidio + Renfro in the Seaport District.[210] Boston's South End Art and Design District (SoWa) and Newbury St. are both art gallery destinations.[211][212] Columbia Point is the location of the University of Massachusetts Boston, the Edward M. Kennedy Institute for the United States Senate, the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum, and the Massachusetts Archives and Commonwealth Museum. The Boston Athenæum (one of the oldest independent libraries in the United States),[213] Boston Children's Museum, Bull & Finch Pub (whose building is known from the television show Cheers),[214] Museum of Science, and the New England Aquarium are within the city.
+
+Boston has been a noted religious center from its earliest days. The Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Boston serves nearly 300 parishes and is based in the Cathedral of the Holy Cross (1875) in the South End, while the Episcopal Diocese of Massachusetts serves just under 200 congregations, with the Cathedral Church of St. Paul (1819) as its episcopal seat. Unitarian Universalism has its headquarters in the Fort Point neighborhood. The Christian Scientists are headquartered in Back Bay at the Mother Church (1894). The oldest church in Boston is First Church in Boston, founded in 1630.[215] King's Chapel was the city's first Anglican church, founded in 1686 and converted to Unitarianism in 1785. Other churches include Christ Church (better known as Old North Church, 1723), the oldest church building in the city, Trinity Church (1733), Park Street Church (1809), Old South Church (1874), Jubilee Christian Church, and Basilica and Shrine of Our Lady of Perpetual Help on Mission Hill (1878).[216]
+
+Air quality in Boston is generally very good. Between 2004–2013, there were only four days in which the air was unhealthy for the general public, according to the EPA.[217]
+
+Some of the cleaner energy facilities in Boston include the Allston green district, with three ecologically compatible housing facilities.[218] Boston is also breaking ground on multiple green affordable housing facilities to help reduce the carbon impact of the city while simultaneously making these initiatives financially available to a greater population. Boston's climate plan is updated every three years and was most recently modified in 2013. This legislature includes the Building Energy Reporting and Disclosure Ordinance, which requires the city's larger buildings to disclose their yearly energy and water use statistics and to partake in an energy assessment every five years. These statistics are made public by the city, thereby increasing incentives for buildings to be more environmentally conscious.[219]
+
+Mayor Thomas Menino introduced the Renew Boston Whole Building Incentive which reduces the cost of living in buildings that are deemed energy efficient. This gives people an opportunity to find housing in neighborhoods that support the environment. The ultimate goal of this initiative is to enlist 500 Bostonians to participate in a free, in-home energy assessment.[219]
+
+Many older buildings in certain areas of Boston are supported by wooden piles driven into the area's fill; these piles remain sound if submerged in water, but are subject to dry rot if exposed to air for long periods.[220]
+Ground water levels have been dropping in many areas of the city, due in part to an increase in the amount of rainwater discharged directly into sewers rather than absorbed by the ground. The Boston Groundwater Trust coordinates monitoring ground water levels throughout the city via a network of public and private monitoring wells.[221] However, Boston's drinking water supply from the Quabbin and Wachusett Reservoirs[222] is one of the very few in the country so pure as to satisfy the Federal Clean Water Act without filtration.[223]
+
+The City of Boston has developed a climate action plan covering carbon reduction in buildings, transportation, and energy use.[224] Mayor Thomas Menino commissioned the city's first Climate Action Plan in 2007, with an update released in 2011.[225] Since then, Mayor Marty Walsh has built upon these plans with further updates released in 2014 and 2019. As a coastal city built largely on fill, sea-level rise is of major concern to the city government. The latest version of the climate action plan anticipates between two and seven feet of sea-level rise in Boston by the end of the century. A separate initiative, Resilient Boston Harbor, lays out neighborhood-specific recommendations for coastal resilience.[226]
+
+Boston has teams in the four major North American professional sports leagues plus Major League Soccer, and, as of 2019, has won 39 championships in these leagues. It is one of eight cities (along with Chicago, Detroit, Los Angeles, New York, Philadelphia, St. Louis and Washington) to have won championships in all four major American sports leagues. It has been suggested[227][228][229] that Boston is the new "TitleTown, USA", as the city's professional sports teams have won twelve championships since 2001: Patriots (2001, 2003, 2004, 2014, 2016 and 2018), Red Sox (2004, 2007, 2013, and 2018), Celtics (2008), and Bruins (2011). This love of sports made Boston the United States Olympic Committee's choice to bid to hold the 2024 Summer Olympic Games, but the city cited financial concerns when it withdrew its bid on July 27, 2015.[230]
+
+The Boston Red Sox, a founding member of the American League of Major League Baseball in 1901, play their home games at Fenway Park, near Kenmore Square, in the city's Fenway section. Built in 1912, it is the oldest sports arena or stadium in active use in the United States among the four major professional American sports leagues, Major League Baseball, the National Football League, National Basketball Association, and the National Hockey League.[231] Boston was the site of the first game of the first modern World Series, in 1903. The series was played between the AL Champion Boston Americans and the NL champion Pittsburgh Pirates.[232][233] Persistent reports that the team was known in 1903 as the "Boston Pilgrims" appear to be unfounded.[234] Boston's first professional baseball team was the Red Stockings, one of the charter members of the National Association in 1871, and of the National League in 1876. The team played under that name until 1883, under the name Beaneaters until 1911, and under the name Braves from 1912 until they moved to Milwaukee after the 1952 season. Since 1966 they have played in Atlanta as the Atlanta Braves.[235]
+
+The TD Garden, formerly called the FleetCenter and built to replace the old, since-demolished Boston Garden, is adjoined to North Station and is the home of two major league teams: the Boston Bruins of the National Hockey League and the Boston Celtics of the National Basketball Association. The arena seats 18,624 for basketball games and 17,565 for ice hockey games. The Bruins were the first American member of the National Hockey League and an Original Six franchise.[236] The Boston Celtics were founding members of the Basketball Association of America, one of the two leagues that merged to form the NBA.[237] The Celtics have the distinction of having won more championships than any other NBA team, with seventeen.[238] The venue is also set to host the 2020 Laver Cup, an international men's tennis tournament consisting of two teams: Team Europe and Team World, the latter of which consisting of non-European players. This will be the 4th edition of the tournament, and the first time Boston has hosted an ATP tournament since 1999, where Marat Safin defeated Greg Rusedski.[239]
+
+While they have played in suburban Foxborough since 1971, the New England Patriots of the National Football League were founded in 1960 as the Boston Patriots, changing their name after relocating. The team won the Super Bowl after the 2001, 2003, 2004, 2014, 2016 and 2018 seasons.[240] They share Gillette Stadium with the New England Revolution of Major League Soccer. The Boston Breakers of Women's Professional Soccer, which formed in 2009, played their home games at Dilboy Stadium in Somerville.[241] The Boston Storm of the United Women's Lacrosse League was formed in 2015.[242]
+
+The area's many colleges and universities are active in college athletics. Four NCAA Division I members play in the area—Boston College, Boston University, Harvard University, and Northeastern University. Of the four, only Boston College participates in college football at the highest level, the Football Bowl Subdivision. Harvard participates in the second-highest level, the Football Championship Subdivision. The Boston Cannons of the MLL play at Harvard Stadium.
+
+One of the best known sporting events in the city is the Boston Marathon, the 26.2-mile (42.2 km) race which is the world's oldest annual marathon,[243] run on Patriots' Day in April. On April 15, 2013, two explosions killed three people and injured hundreds at the marathon.[84]
+Another major annual event is the Head of the Charles Regatta, held in October.[244]
+
+Boston Common, near the Financial District and Beacon Hill, is the oldest public park in the United States.[245] Along with the adjacent Boston Public Garden, it is part of the Emerald Necklace, a string of parks designed by Frederick Law Olmsted to encircle the city. The Emerald Necklace includes Jamaica Pond, Boston's largest body of freshwater, and Franklin Park, the city's largest park and home of the Franklin Park Zoo.[246] Another major park is the Esplanade, along the banks of the Charles River. The Hatch Shell, an outdoor concert venue, is adjacent to the Charles River Esplanade. Other parks are scattered throughout the city, with major parks and beaches near Castle Island, in Charlestown and along the Dorchester, South Boston, and East Boston shorelines.[247]
+
+Boston's park system is well-reputed nationally. In its 2013 ParkScore ranking, The Trust for Public Land reported Boston was tied with Sacramento and San Francisco for having the third-best park system among the 50 most populous US cities.[248] ParkScore ranks city park systems by a formula that analyzes the city's median park size, park acres as percent of city area, the percent of residents within a half-mile of a park, spending of park services per resident, and the number of playgrounds per 10,000 residents.
+
+Boston has a strong mayor – council government system in which the mayor (elected every fourth year) has extensive executive power. Marty Walsh became Mayor in January 2014, his predecessor Thomas Menino's twenty-year tenure having been the longest in the city's history.[249]
+The Boston City Council is elected every two years; there are nine district seats, and four citywide "at-large" seats.[250] The School Committee, which oversees the Boston Public Schools, is appointed by the mayor.[251]
+
+In addition to city government, numerous commissions and state authorities—including the Massachusetts Department of Conservation and Recreation, the Boston Public Health Commission, the Massachusetts Water Resources Authority (MWRA), and the Massachusetts Port Authority (Massport)—play a role in the life of Bostonians. As the capital of Massachusetts, Boston plays a major role in state politics.
+
+The city has several federal facilities, including the John F. Kennedy Federal Office Building, the Thomas P. O'Neill Jr. Federal Building,[252] the John W. McCormack Post Office and Courthouse, the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston, the United States Court of Appeals for the First Circuit, and the United States District Court for the District of Massachusetts. Both courts are housed in the John Joseph Moakley United States Courthouse.
+
+Federally, Boston is split between two congressional districts. Three-fourths of the city is in the 7th district and is represented by Ayanna Pressley while the remaining southern fourth is in the 8th district and is represented by Stephen Lynch,[253] both of whom are Democrats; a Republican has not represented a significant portion of Boston in over a century. The state's senior member of the United States Senate is Democrat Elizabeth Warren, first elected in 2012. The state's junior member of the United States Senate is Democrat Ed Markey, who was elected in 2013 to succeed John Kerry after Kerry's appointment and confirmation as the United States Secretary of State.
+
+The city uses an algorithm created by the Walsh administration, called CityScore, to measure the effectiveness of various city services. This score is available on a public online dashboard and allows city managers in police, fire, schools, emergency management services, and 3-1-1 to take action and make adjustments in areas of concern.[254]
+
+Boston has an ordinance, enacted in 2014, that bars the Boston Police Department "from detaining anyone based on their immigration status unless they have a criminal warrant."[255]
+
+The Boston Globe and the Boston Herald are two of the city's major daily newspapers. The city is also served by other publications such as Boston magazine, DigBoston, and the Boston edition of Metro. The Christian Science Monitor, headquartered in Boston, was formerly a worldwide daily newspaper but ended publication of daily print editions in 2009, switching to continuous online and weekly magazine format publications.[258] The Boston Globe also releases a teen publication to the city's public high schools, called Teens in Print or T.i.P., which is written by the city's teens and delivered quarterly within the school year.[259] The Improper Bostonian, a glossy lifestyle magazine, was published from 1991 through April 2019.
+
+The Bay State Banner is an independent newspaper primarily geared toward the readership interests of the African-American community in Boston, Massachusetts. The Bay State Banner was founded in 1965 by Melvin B. Miller who remains the chief editor and publisher. In 2015, the publication celebrated its 50th anniversary serving the region's minority-oriented neighborhoods.
+
+The city's growing Latino population has given rise to a number of local and regional Spanish-language newspapers. These include El Planeta (owned by the former publisher of The Boston Phoenix), El Mundo, and La Semana. Siglo21, with its main offices in nearby Lawrence, is also widely distributed.[260]
+
+There are a number of weekly newspapers dedicated to Boston neighborhoods. Among them is South Boston Online, founded in 1999, which appears in print and online, and covers events in South Boston and the Seaport District.
+
+Various LGBT publications serve the city's large LGBT (lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender) population such as The Rainbow Times, the only minority and lesbian-owned LGBT news magazine. Founded in 2006, The Rainbow Times is now based out of Boston, but serves all of New England.[261]
+
+Boston is the largest broadcasting market in New England, with the radio market being the ninth largest in the United States.[262] Several major AM stations include talk radio WRKO, sports/talk station WEEI, and CBS Radio WBZ.[263] WBZ (AM) broadcasts a news radio format and is a 50,000 watt "clear channel" station, whose nighttime broadcasts are heard hundreds of miles from Boston.  A variety of commercial FM radio formats serve the area, as do NPR stations WBUR and WGBH. College and university radio stations include WERS (Emerson), WHRB (Harvard), WUMB (UMass Boston), WMBR (MIT), WZBC (Boston College), WMFO (Tufts University), WBRS (Brandeis University), WTBU (Boston University, campus and web only), WRBB (Northeastern University) and WMLN-FM (Curry College).
+
+The Boston television DMA, which also includes Manchester, New Hampshire, is the 8th largest in the United States.[264] The city is served by stations representing every major American network, including WBZ-TV 4 and its sister station WSBK-TV 38 (the former a CBS O&O, the latter a MyNetwork TV affiliate), WCVB-TV 5 and its sister station WMUR-TV 9 (both ABC), WHDH 7 and its sister station WLVI 56 (the former an independent station, the latter a CW affiliate), WBTS-CD 15 (a NBC O&O), and WFXT 25 (Fox). The city is also home to PBS member station WGBH-TV 2, a major producer of PBS programs,[265] which also operates WGBX 44. Spanish-language television networks, including UniMás (WUTF-TV 27), Telemundo (WNEU 60, a sister station to WBTS-CD), and Univisión (WUNI 66), have a presence in the region, with WNEU and WUNI serving as network owned-and-operated stations. Most of the area's television stations have their transmitters in nearby Needham and Newton along the Route 128 corridor.[266] Six Boston television stations are carried by Canadian satellite television provider Bell TV and by cable television providers in Canada.
+
+Films have been made in Boston since as early as 1903, and it continues to be both a popular setting and a popular filming location.[267][268]
+
+The Longwood Medical and Academic Area, adjacent to the Fenway district, is home to a large number of medical and research facilities, including Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, Brigham and Women's Hospital, Boston Children's Hospital, Dana–Farber Cancer Institute, Harvard Medical School, Harvard School of Dental Medicine, Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, Joslin Diabetes Center, and the Massachusetts College of Pharmacy and Health Sciences.[269]
+Prominent medical facilities, including Massachusetts General Hospital, Massachusetts Eye and Ear Infirmary and Spaulding Rehabilitation Hospital are in the Beacon Hill area. St. Elizabeth's Medical Center is in Brighton Center of the city's Brighton neighborhood. New England Baptist Hospital is in Mission Hill. The city has Veterans Affairs medical centers in the Jamaica Plain and West Roxbury neighborhoods.[270] The Boston Public Health Commission, an agency of the Massachusetts government, oversees health concerns for city residents.[271] Boston EMS provides pre-hospital emergency medical services to residents and visitors.
+
+Many of Boston's medical facilities are associated with universities. The facilities in the Longwood Medical and Academic Area and in Massachusetts General Hospital are affiliated with Harvard Medical School.[272] Tufts Medical Center (formerly Tufts-New England Medical Center), in the southern portion of the Chinatown neighborhood, is affiliated with Tufts University School of Medicine. Boston Medical Center, in the South End neighborhood, is the primary teaching facility for the Boston University School of Medicine as well as the largest trauma center in the Boston area;[273] it was formed by the merger of Boston University Hospital and Boston City Hospital, which was the first municipal hospital in the United States.[274]
+
+Logan International Airport, in East Boston and operated by the Massachusetts Port Authority (Massport), is Boston's principal airport.[276] Nearby general aviation airports are Beverly Municipal Airport to the north, Hanscom Field to the west, and Norwood Memorial Airport to the south. Massport also operates several major facilities within the Port of Boston, including a cruise ship terminal and facilities to handle bulk and container cargo in South Boston, and other facilities in Charlestown and East Boston.[277]
+
+Downtown Boston's streets grew organically, so they do not form a planned grid,[278] unlike those in later-developed Back Bay, East Boston, the South End, and South Boston. Boston is the eastern terminus of I-90, which in Massachusetts runs along the Massachusetts Turnpike. The elevated portion of the Central Artery, which carried most of the through traffic in downtown Boston, was replaced with the O'Neill Tunnel during the Big Dig, substantially completed in early 2006.  The former and current Central Artery follow I-93 as the primary north–south artery from the city.  Other major highways include US 1, which carries traffic to the North Shore and areas south of Boston, US 3, which connects to the northwestern suburbs, Massachusetts Route 3, which connects to the South Shore and Cape Cod, and Massachusetts Route 2 which connects to the western suburbs.  Surrounding the city is Massachusetts Route 128, a partial beltway which has been largely subsumed by other routes (mostly I-95 and I-93).
+
+With nearly a third of Bostonians using public transit for their commute to work, Boston has the fifth-highest rate of public transit usage in the country.[279] The city of Boston has a higher than average percentage of households without a car. In 2015, 35.4 percent of Boston households lacked a car, which decreased slightly to 33.8 percent in 2016. The national average was 8.7 percent in 2016. Boston averaged 0.94 cars per household in 2016, compared to a national average of 1.8.[280] Boston's public transportation agency, the Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority (MBTA) operates the oldest underground rapid transit system in the Americas, and is the fourth-busiest rapid transit system in the country,[20] with 65.5 miles (105 km) of track on four lines.[281] The MBTA also operates busy bus and commuter rail networks, and water shuttles.[281]
+
+Amtrak intercity rail to Boston is provided through four stations: South Station, North Station, Back Bay, and Route 128. South Station is a major intermodal transportation hub and is the terminus of Amtrak's Northeast Regional, Acela Express, and Lake Shore Limited routes, in addition to multiple MBTA services. Back Bay is also served by MBTA and those three Amtrak routes, while Route 128, in the southwestern suburbs of Boston, is only served by the Acela Express and Northeast Regional.[282] Meanwhile, Amtrak's Downeaster to Brunswick, Maine terminates in North Station, and is the only Amtrak route to do so.[283]
+
+Nicknamed "The Walking City", Boston hosts more pedestrian commuters than do other comparably populated cities. Owing to factors such as necessity, the compactness of the city and large student population, 13 percent of the population commutes by foot, making it the highest percentage of pedestrian commuters in the country out of the major American cities.[284] In 2011, Walk Score ranked Boston the third most walkable city in the United States.[285][286] As of 2015[update], Walk Score still ranks Boston as the third most walkable US city, with a Walk Score of 80, a Transit Score of 75, and a Bike Score of 70.[287]
+
+Between 1999 and 2006, Bicycling magazine named Boston three times as one of the worst cities in the US for cycling;[288] regardless, it has one of the highest rates of bicycle commuting.[289] In 2008, as a consequence of improvements made to bicycling conditions within the city, the same magazine put Boston on its "Five for the Future" list as a "Future Best City" for biking,[290][291] and Boston's bicycle commuting percentage increased from 1% in 2000 to 2.1% in 2009.[292] The bikeshare program Bluebikes, originally called Hubway, launched in late July 2011,[293] logging more than 140,000 rides before the close of its first season.[294] The neighboring municipalities of Cambridge, Somerville, and Brookline joined the Hubway program in the summer of 2012.[295] In 2016, there are 1,461 bikes and 158 docking stations across the city.[296] PBSC Urban Solutions provides bicycles and technology for this bike-sharing system.[297]
+
+In 2013, the Boston-Cambridge-Newton metropolitan statistical area (Boston MSA) had the seventh-lowest percentage of workers who commuted by private automobile (75.6 percent), with 6.2 percent of area workers traveling via rail transit. During the period starting in 2006 and ending in 2013, the Boston MSA had the greatest percentage decline of workers commuting by automobile (3.3 percent) among MSAs with more than a half-million residents.[298]
+
+The City of Boston has eleven official sister cities:[299]
+
+Boston has formal partnership relationships through a Memorandum Of Understanding (MOU) with four additional cities or regions:
+
+Nation:
+
+States:
+
+Territories:

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+
+
+
+
+in the African Union (light blue)
+
+Botswana (/bɒtˈswɑːnə/ (listen), also UK: /bʊt-, bʊˈtʃw-/[14]), officially the Republic of Botswana (Setswana: Lefatshe la Botswana; Kalanga: Hango yeBotswana), is a landlocked country in Southern Africa. Formerly the British protectorate of Bechuanaland, Botswana adopted its name after becoming independent within the Commonwealth on 30 September 1966.[15] Since then, it has been a representative republic, with a consistent record of uninterrupted democratic elections and the lowest perceived corruption ranking in Africa since at least 1998.[16] It is currently Africa's oldest continuous democracy.[17] Botswana is topographically flat, with up to 70 percent of its territory being the Kalahari Desert. It is bordered by South Africa to the south and southeast, Namibia to the west and north, and Zimbabwe to the northeast. Its border with Zambia to the north near Kazungula is poorly defined but is, at most, a few hundred metres long.[18]
+
+A mid-sized country of just over 2.3 million people, Botswana is one of the most sparsely populated countries in the world. Around 10 percent of the population lives in the capital and largest city, Gaborone. Formerly one of the poorest countries in the world—with a GDP per capita of about US$70 per year in the late 1960s—Botswana has since transformed itself into an upper middle income country, with one of the world's fastest-growing economies.[19] The economy is dominated by mining, cattle, and tourism. Botswana boasts a GDP (purchasing power parity) per capita of about $18,825 per year as of 2015[update], which is one of the highest in Africa.[1] Its high gross national income (by some estimates the fourth-largest in Africa) gives the country a relatively high standard of living and the highest Human Development Index of continental Sub-Saharan Africa.[20]
+
+Botswana is a member of the African Union, the Southern African Development Community, the Commonwealth of Nations, and the United Nations. The country has been among the hardest hit by the HIV/AIDS epidemic. Despite the success in programmes to make treatments available to those infected, and to educate the populace in general about how to stop the spread of HIV/AIDS, the number of people with AIDS rose from 290,000 in 2005 to 320,000 in 2013.[21]:A20 As of 2014[update], Botswana has the third-highest prevalence rate for HIV/AIDS, with roughly 20% of the population infected.[22]
+
+The country's name means "Land of the Tswana", referring to the dominant ethnic group in Botswana.[23] The term Batswana was originally applied to the Tswana, which is still the case.[24] However, it has also come to be used generally as a demonym for all citizens of Botswana.[25] Many English dictionaries also recommend the term Botswanan to refer to people of Botswana even though that term is rarely used in the country.[26]
+
+Archaeological digs have shown that hominids have lived in Botswana for around two million years. Stone tools and fauna remains have shown that all areas of the country were inhabited at least 400,000 years ago.[27] In October 2019, researchers reported that Botswana was the birthplace of all modern humans about 200,000 years ago.[28][29] Evidence left by modern humans such as cave paintings are about 73,000 years old.[30] The original inhabitants of southern Africa were the Bushmen (San) and Khoi peoples. Both speak Khoisan languages and hunted, gathered, and traded over long distances. When cattle were first introduced about 2000 years ago into southern Africa, pastoralism became a major feature of the economy, since the region had large grasslands free of tsetse fly.[31]
+
+It is unclear when Bantu-speaking peoples first moved into the country from the north, although AD 600 seems to be a consensus estimate. In that era, the ancestors of the modern-day Kalanga moved into what is now the north-eastern areas of the country. These proto-Kalanga were closely connected to states in Zimbabwe as well as to the Mapungubwe state and the notable of these was Domboshaba ruins which is a cultural and heritage site in Botswana originally occupied towards the end of the Great Zimbabwe period (1250–1450 AD) with stone walls that have an average height of 1.8 metres.. The site is a respected place for the people living in the region and it is believed that the chief lived on the top of the hill together with his helpers or assistants. These states, located outside of current Botswana's borders, appear to have kept massive cattle herds in what is now the Central District—apparently at numbers approaching modern cattle density.[32] This massive cattle-raising complex prospered until 1300 AD or so, and seems to have regressed following the collapse of Mapungubwe. During this era, the first Tswana-speaking groups, the Bakgalagadi, moved into the southern areas of the Kalahari. All these various peoples were connected to trade routes that ran via the Limpopo River to the Indian Ocean, and trade goods from Asia such as beads made their way to Botswana most likely in exchange for ivory, gold, and rhinoceros horn.[33]
+Toutswemogala Hill Iron Age Settlement's radio-carbon dates for this settlement range from 7th to late 19th century AD indicating occupation of more than one thousand years. The hill was part of the formation of early states in Southern Africa with cattle keeping as major source of economy. Toutswe settlement include house-floors, large heaps of vitrified cow-dog and burials while the outstanding structure is the stone wall. There are large traits of centaurs ciliaris, a type of grass which has come to be associated with cattle-keeping settlements in South, Central Africa.Around 700 A.D., the Toutswe people moved westward into Botswana and began an agricultural and pastoral land tenure system based on sorghum and millet, and domesticated stock, respectively.[34] The site was situated in the center of a broader cultural area in Eastern Botswana and shares many commonalities with other archaeological sites of this region, in both ceramic production styles and also timeframes inhabited.[34] Large structures were observed that contained vitrified remains of animal dung, leading to the theory that these were animal enclosures and that Toutswemogala Hill was thus a major center of animal husbandry in the region.[34] However, agriculture also played a vital role in the longevity of Toutswemogala Hill's extended occupation, as many grain storage structures have also been found on the site.  Many different stratified layers of housing floors further signal continuous occupation over hundreds of years.
+
+The arrival of the ancestors of the Tswana-speakers who came to control the region has yet to be dated precisely. Members of the Bakwena, a chieftaincy under a legendary leader named Kgabo II, made their way into the southern Kalahari by AD 1500, at the latest, and his people drove the Bakgalagadi inhabitants west into the desert. Over the years, several offshoots of the Bakwena moved into adjoining territories. The Bangwaketse occupied areas to the west, while the Bangwato moved northeast into formerly Kalanga areas.[35] Not long afterwards, a Bangwato offshoot known as the Batawana migrated into the Okavango Delta, probably in the 1790s.[36]
+
+The first written records relating to modern-day Botswana appear in 1824. What these records show is that the Bangwaketse had become the predominant power in the region. Under the rule of Makaba II, the Bangwaketse kept vast herds of cattle in well-protected desert areas, and used their military prowess to raid their neighbours.[37] Other chiefdoms in the area, by this time, had capitals of 10,000 or so and were fairly prosperous.[38] This equilibrium came to end during the Mfecane period, 1823–1843, when a succession of invading peoples from South Africa entered the country. Although the Bangwaketse were able to defeat the invading Bakololo in 1826, over time all the major chiefdoms in Botswana were attacked, weakened, and impoverished. The Bakololo and Amandebele raided repeatedly and took large numbers of cattle, women, and children from the Batswana—most of whom were driven into the desert or sanctuary areas such as hilltops and caves. Only after 1843, when the Amandebele moved into western Zimbabwe, did this threat subside.[39]
+
+During the 1840s and 1850s trade with Cape Colony-based merchants opened up and enabled the Batswana chiefdoms to rebuild. The Bakwena, Bangwaketse, Bangwato and Batawana cooperated to control the lucrative ivory trade and then used the proceeds to import horses and guns, which in turn enabled them to establish control over what is now Botswana. This process was largely complete by 1880, and thus the Bushmen, the Kalanga, the Bakgalagadi, and other current minorities were subjugated by the Batswana.[40]
+
+Following the Great Trek, Afrikaners from the Cape Colony established themselves on the borders of Botswana in the Transvaal. In 1852 a coalition of Tswana chiefdoms led by Sechele I resisted Afrikaner incursions during Battle of Dimawe, and after about eight years of intermittent tensions and hostilities, eventually came to a peace agreement in Potchefstroom in 1860. From that point on, the modern-day border between South Africa and Botswana was agreed on, and the Afrikaners and Batswana traded and worked together comparatively peacefully.[41][42]
+
+In 1884 Batawana a northern based Tswana clan's Cavalry under the command of Kgosi Moremi fought & defeated the Ndebele's invasion of northern Botswana at the Battle of Khutiyabasadi, this blow to the larger invading Ndebele force signaled the start of the collapse of the Ndebele Kingdom in Zimbabwe & this helped galvanize Tswana speaking authority of the area now making part of northern Botswana. .[43]
+
+Due to newly peaceful conditions, trade thrived between 1860 and 1880. Taking advantage of this were Christian missionaries. The Lutherans and the London Missionary Society both became established in the country by 1856. By 1880 every major village had a resident missionary, and their influence slowly became felt. Khama III (reigned 1875–1923) was the first of the Tswana chiefs to make Christianity a state religion and changed a great deal of Tswana customary law as a result. Christianity became the de facto official religion in all the chiefdoms by World War I.[44]
+
+During the Scramble for Africa the territory of Botswana was coveted by both Germany and Great Britain. During the Berlin Conference, Britain decided to annex Botswana in order to safeguard the Road to the North and thus connect the Cape Colony to its territories further north. It unilaterally annexed Tswana territories in January 1885 and then sent the Warren Expedition north to consolidate control over the area and convince the chiefs to accept British overrule. Despite their misgivings, they eventually acquiesced to this fait accompli.[45]
+
+In 1890 areas north of 22 degrees were added to the new Bechuanaland Protectorate. During the 1890s the new territory was divided into eight different reserves, with fairly small amounts of land being left as freehold for white settlers. During the early 1890s, the British government decided to hand over the Bechuanaland Protectorate to the British South Africa Company. This plan, which was well on its way to fruition despite the entreaties of Tswana leaders who toured England in protest, was eventually foiled by the failure of the Jameson Raid in January 1896.[46][47]
+
+When the Union of South Africa was formed in 1910 from the main British colonies in the region, the High Commission Territories – the Bechuanaland Protectorate, Basutoland (now Lesotho), and Swaziland (now Eswatini) — were not included, but provision was made for their later incorporation. However, the UK began to consult with their inhabitants as to their wishes. Although successive South African governments sought to have the territories transferred to their jurisdiction, the UK kept delaying; consequently, it never occurred. The election of the Nationalist government in 1948, which instituted apartheid, and South Africa's withdrawal from the Commonwealth in 1961, ended any prospect of the UK or these territories agreeing to incorporation into South Africa.[48]
+
+An expansion of British central authority and the evolution of tribal government resulted in the 1920 establishment of two advisory councils to represent both Africans and Europeans.[49] The African Council consisted of the eight heads of the Tswana tribes and some elected members.[49] Proclamations in 1934 regulated tribal rule and powers. A European-African advisory council was formed in 1951, and the 1961 constitution established a consultative legislative council.
+
+In June 1964, the United Kingdom accepted proposals for a democratic self-government in Botswana. The seat of government was moved in 1965 from Mahikeng in South Africa, to the newly established Gaborone, which is located near Botswana's border with South Africa. Based on the 1965 constitution, the country held its first general elections under universal suffrage and gained independence on 30 September 1966.[50] Seretse Khama, a leader in the independence movement and the legitimate claimant to the Ngwato chiefship, was elected as the first President, and subsequently re-elected twice.
+
+The presidency passed to the sitting vice-president, Quett Masire, who was elected in his own right in 1984 and re-elected in 1989 and 1994. Masire retired from office in 1998. He was succeeded by Festus Mogae, who was elected in his own right in 1999 and re-elected in 2004. The presidency passed in 2008 to Ian Khama (son of the first President), who had been serving as Mogae's vice-president since resigning his position in 1998 as Commander of the Botswana Defence Force to take up this civilian role.
+
+A long-running dispute over the northern border with Namibia's Caprivi Strip was the subject of a ruling by the International Court of Justice in December 1999. It ruled that Kasikili Island belongs to Botswana.[51]
+
+At 581,730 km2 (224,607 sq mi) Botswana is the world's 48th-largest country. It is similar in size to Madagascar or France. It lies between latitudes 17° and 27°S, and longitudes 20° and 30°E.
+
+The country is predominantly flat, tending toward gently rolling tableland. Botswana is dominated by the Kalahari Desert, which covers up to 70% of its land surface. The Okavango Delta, one of the world's largest inland deltas, is in the northwest. The Makgadikgadi Pan, a large salt pan, lies in the north.
+
+The Limpopo River Basin, the major landform of all of southern Africa, lies partly in Botswana, with the basins of its tributaries, the Notwane, Bonwapitse, Mahalapye, Lotsane, Motloutse and the Shashe, located in the eastern part of the country. The Notwane provides water to the capital through the Gaborone Dam. The Chobe River lies to the north, providing a boundary between Botswana and Namibia's Zambezi Region. The Chobe River meets with the Zambezi River at a place called Kazungula (meaning a small sausage tree, a point where Sebitwane and his Makololo tribe crossed the Zambezi into Zambia).
+
+Botswana has diverse areas of wildlife habitat. In addition to the delta and desert areas, there are grasslands and savannas, where blue wildebeest, antelopes, and other mammals and birds are found. Northern Botswana has one of the few remaining large populations of the endangered African wild dog. Chobe National Park, found in the Chobe District, has the world's largest concentration of African elephants. The park covers about 11,000 km2 (4,247 sq mi) and supports about 350 species of birds.
+
+The Chobe National Park and Moremi Game Reserve (in the Okavango Delta) are major tourist destinations. Other reserves include the Central Kalahari Game Reserve located in the Kalahari desert in Ghanzi District; Makgadikgadi Pans National Park and Nxai Pan National Park are in Central District in the Makgadikgadi Pan. Mashatu Game Reserve is privately owned: located where the Shashe River and Limpopo River meet in eastern Botswana. The other privately owned reserve is Mokolodi Nature Reserve near Gaborone. There are also specialised sanctuaries like Khama Rhino Sanctuary (for rhinoceros) and Makgadikgadi Sanctuary (for flamingos). They are both located in Central District.
+
+Botswana faces two major environmental problems, drought and desertification, which are heavily linked. Three-quarters of the country's human and animal populations depend on groundwater due to drought. Groundwater use through deep borehole drilling has somewhat eased the effects of drought. Surface water is scarce in Botswana and less than 5% of the agriculture in the country is sustainable by rainfall. In the remaining 95% of the country, raising livestock is the primary source of rural income. Approximately 71% of the country's land is used for communal grazing, which has been a major cause of the desertification and the accelerating soil erosion of the country.[52]
+
+Since raising livestock has proven to be profitable for the people of Botswana, they continue to exploit the land. The animal populations have continued to dramatically increase. From 1966 to 1991, the livestock population has increased from 1.7 million to 5.5 million.[52]:64 Similarly, the human population has increased from 574,000 in 1971 to 1.5 million in 1995, a 161% increase in 24 years. "Over 50% of all households in Botswana own cattle, which is currently the largest single source of rural income." "Rangeland degradation or desertification is regarded as the reduction in land productivity as a result of overstocking and overgrazing, or as a result of veld product gathering for commercial use. Degradation is exacerbated by the effects of drought and climate change."[52]
+
+Environmentalists report that the Okavango Delta is drying up due to the increased grazing of livestock.[53] The Okavango Delta is one of the major semi-forested wetlands in Botswana and one of the largest inland deltas in the world; it is a crucial ecosystem to the survival of many animals.[53]
+
+The Department of Forestry and Range Resources has already begun to implement a project to reintroduce indigenous vegetation into communities in Kgalagadi South, Kweneng North and Boteti.[54] Reintroduction of indigenous vegetation will help with the degradation of the land. The United States Government has also entered into an agreement with Botswana, giving them US$7 million to reduce Botswana's debt by US$8.3 million. The stipulation of the US reducing Botswana's debt is that Botswana will focus on more extensive conservation of the land.[53]
+
+The United Nations Development Programme claims that poverty is a major problem behind the overexploitation of resources, including land, in Botswana. To help change this the UNDP joined in with a project started in the southern community of Struizendam in Botswana. The purpose of the project is to draw from "indigenous knowledge and traditional land management systems". The leaders of this movement are supposed to be the people in the community, to draw them in, in turn increasing their possibilities to earn an income and thus decreasing poverty. The UNDP also stated that the government has to effectively implement policies to allow people to manage their own local resources and are giving the government information to help with policy development.[55]
+
+Botswana is the continent's oldest democracy. The Constitution of Botswana is the rule of law, which protects the citizens of Botswana and represents their rights. The politics of Botswana take place in a framework of a multi-party representative democratic republic, whereby the President of Botswana is both head of state and head of government, and is elected by and accountable to the Parliament of Botswana. Executive power is exercised by the government. Legislative power is vested in both the government and the Parliament of Botswana. The most recent election, its eleventh, was held on 23 October 2019. Since independence was declared, the party system has been dominated by the Botswana Democratic Party.[56]
+
+The judiciary is independent of the executive and the legislature.[57] Botswana ranked 30th out of 167 states in the 2012 Democracy Index.[58] According to Transparency International, Botswana is the least corrupt country in Africa and ranks close to Portugal and South Korea.[59]
+
+It consists of a typical court system of local Magistrates Courts, a High Court and a Court of Appeal. The High Court is a superior court of record with unlimited original jurisdiction to hear and determine any criminal, civil or constitutional cases under any law. Appeals can be heard by the Court of Appeal. The Head of the High Court is the Chief Justice.[60]
+
+The Court of Appeal is the highest and final court in the country and deals with appeals from the High Court and the Industrial Court. The Head of the Court of Appeal is the Judge President.
+
+Judges are appointed by the President of Botswana on the recommendation of the Judicial Services Commission.
+
+Chief Justices:[61]
+
+With regard to the legal profession, although the Law Society of Botswana has been in existence since 1997,[62] there is still no clear indication in their registry of attorneys as to how certain demographics, such as women, have fared in the legal field.
+
+At the time of independence, Botswana had no armed forces. It was only after the Rhodesian and South African militaries struck respectively against the Zimbabwe People's Revolutionary Army and Umkhonto we Sizwe[63] bases that the Botswana Defence Force (BDF) was formed in 1977.[64] The President is commander-in-chief of the armed forces and appoints a defence council and the BDF currently consists of roughly 60,000 servicemen. In 2019, Botswana signed the UN treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons.[65]
+
+Following political changes in South Africa and the region, the BDF's missions have increasingly focused on prevention of poaching, preparing for disasters, and foreign peacekeeping. The United States has been the largest single foreign contributor to the development of the BDF, and a large segment of its officer corps have received U.S. training. The Botswana government gave the United States permission to explore the possibility of establishing an Africa Command (AFRICOM) base in the country.[66]
+
+Many of the indigenous San people have been forcibly relocated from their land to reservations. To make them relocate, they were denied access to water on their land and faced arrest if they hunted, which was their primary source of food.[67] Their lands lie in the middle of the world's richest diamond field. Officially, the government denies that there is any link to mining and claims the relocation is to preserve the wildlife and ecosystem, even though the San people have lived sustainably on the land for millennia.[67] On the reservations, they struggle to find employment and alcoholism is rampant.[67]
+On 24 August 2018 the UN Special Rapporteur on Minorities, Fernand de Varennes, issued a statement calling on Botswana "to step up efforts to recognize and protect the rights of minorities in relation to public services, land and resource use and the use of minority languages in education and other critical areas."
+
+Until June 2019, homosexuality was illegal in Botswana. A Botswana High Court decision of 11 June of that year, however, struck down provisions in the Criminal Code that punished "carnal knowledge of any person against the order of nature" and "acts of gross indecency", making Botswana one of only twenty-two African countries that have either decriminalised or legalised homosexuality.[68]
+
+Capital punishment in Botswana includes the death penalty by hanging.
+
+The Botswana Centre for Human Rights, Ditshwanelo, was established in 1993.[69]
+
+Botswana's ten districts are:
+
+Botswana's councils created from urban or town councils are: Gaborone City, Francistown, Lobatse Town, Selebi-Phikwe Town, Jwaneng Town, Orapa Town and Sowa Township.
+
+Since independence, Botswana has had one of the fastest growth rates in per capita income in the world.[70] Botswana has transformed itself from one of the poorest countries in the world to an upper middle-income country. GDP per capita grew from $1,344 in 1950 to $15,015 in 2016.[71] Although Botswana was resource-abundant, a good institutional framework allowed the country to reinvest resource-income in order to generate stable future income.[72] By one estimate, it has the fourth highest gross national income at purchasing power parity in Africa, giving it a standard of living around that of Mexico.[73]
+
+The Ministry of Trade and Industry of Botswana is responsible for promoting business development throughout the country. According to the International Monetary Fund, economic growth averaged over 9% per year from 1966 to 1999. Botswana has a high level of economic freedom compared to other African countries.[74] The government has maintained a sound fiscal policy, despite consecutive budget deficits in 2002 and 2003, and a negligible level of foreign debt. It earned the highest sovereign credit rating in Africa and has stockpiled foreign exchange reserves (over $7 billion in 2005/2006) amounting to almost two and a half years of current imports.
+
+An array of financial institutions populates the country's financial system, with pension funds and commercial banks being the two most important segments by asset size. Banks remain profitable, well-capitalised, and liquid, as a result of growing national resources and high interest rates.[75] The Bank of Botswana serves as a central bank. The country's currency is the Botswana pula.
+
+Botswana's competitive banking system is one of Africa's most advanced.[clarification needed] Generally adhering to global standards in the transparency of financial policies and banking supervision, the financial sector provides ample access to credit for entrepreneurs.[citation needed] The Capital Bank opened in 2008.[76] As of August 2015[update], there are a dozen licensed banks in the country.[77] The government is involved in banking through state-owned financial institutions and a special financial incentives program that is aimed at increasing Botswana's status as a financial centre.[citation needed] Credit is allocated on market terms, although the government provides subsidised loans.[citation needed] Reform of non-bank financial institutions has continued in recent years, notably through the establishment of a single financial regulatory agency that provides more effective supervision.[78] The government has abolished exchange controls, and with the resulting creation of new portfolio investment options, the Botswana Stock Exchange is growing.[79]
+
+Botswana's trading partners in 2004 (Imports: $3.37 billion)
+
+Botswana's trading partners in 2004 (Exports: $3.67 billion)
+
+The constitution provides for an independent judiciary, and the government respects this in practice. The legal system is sufficient to conduct secure commercial dealings, although a serious and growing backlog of cases prevents timely trials. The protection of intellectual property rights has improved significantly. Botswana is ranked second only to South Africa among sub-Saharan Africa countries in the 2014 International Property Rights Index.[80]
+
+While generally open to foreign participation in its economy, Botswana reserves some sectors for citizens. Increased foreign investment plays a significant role in the privatisation of state-owned enterprises. Investment regulations are transparent, and bureaucratic procedures are streamlined and open, although somewhat slow. Investment returns such as profits and dividends, debt service, capital gains, returns on intellectual property, royalties, franchise's fees, and service fees can be repatriated without limits.
+
+Botswana imports refined petroleum products and electricity from South Africa. There is some domestic production of electricity from coal.
+
+In Botswana, the Department of Mines[81] and Mineral Resources, Green Technology and Energy Security[82] led by Hon Sadique Kebonang in Gaborone, maintains data regarding mining throughout the country.
+Debswana, the largest diamond mining company operating in Botswana, is 50% owned by the government.[83] The mineral industry provides about 40% of all government revenues.[84] In 2007, significant quantities of uranium were discovered, and mining was projected to begin by 2010. Several international mining corporations have established regional headquarters in Botswana, and prospected for diamonds, gold, uranium, copper, and even oil, many coming back with positive results. Government announced in early 2009 that they would try to shift their economic dependence on diamonds, over serious concern that diamonds are predicted to dry out in Botswana over the next twenty years.
+
+Botswana's Orapa mine is the largest diamond mine in the world in terms of value and quantity of carats produced annually.[85] Estimated to have produced over 11 million carats in 2013, with an average price of $145/carat, the Orapa mine was estimated to produce over $1.6 billion worth of diamonds in 2013.[86]
+
+As of 2012, the Tswana are the majority ethnic group in Botswana, making up approximately 79% of the population, followed by Kalanga at 11% and the San (Basarwa) at 3%. Another 7% is made up of a number of other smaller Southern African ethnic groups, as well as Indians and people of European descent.[1] The native groups include the Shona, Bayei, Bambukushu, Basubia, Baherero and Bakgalagadi. The Indian minority is made up of both recent migrants and descendants of Indian migrants who arrived from Mozambique, Kenya, Tanzania, Mauritius and South Africa.
+Since 2000, because of deteriorating economic conditions in Zimbabwe, the number of Zimbabweans in Botswana has risen into the tens of thousands.[87]
+
+Fewer than 10,000 San people are still living their traditional hunter-gatherer way of life. Since the mid-1990s the central government of Botswana has been trying to move San out of their historic lands.[88] James Anaya, as the Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights and fundamental freedoms of indigenous people for the United Nations in 2010, described loss of land as a major contributor to many of the problems facing Botswana's indigenous people, citing the San's eviction from the Central Kalahari Game Reserve (CKGR) as a special example.[89]:2 Among Anaya's recommendations in a report to the United Nations Human Rights Council was that development programs should promote, in consultation with indigenous communities such as the San and Bakgalagadi people, activities in harmony with the culture of those communities such as traditional hunting and gathering activities.[89]:19
+
+The official language of Botswana is English although Setswana is widely spoken across the country. In Setswana, prefixes are more important than they are in many other languages, since Setswana is a Bantu language and has noun classes denoted by these prefixes. They include Bo, which refers to the country, Ba, which refers to the people, Mo, which is one person, and Se which is the language. For example, the main ethnic group of Botswana is the Tswana people, hence the name Botswana for its country. The people as a whole are Batswana, one person is a Motswana, and the language they speak is Setswana.
+
+Other languages spoken in Botswana include Kalanga (sekalanga), Sarwa (sesarwa), Ndebele, Kgalagadi, Tswapong, !Xóõ, Yeyi, and, in some parts, Afrikaans.
+
+An estimated 77% of the country's citizens identify as Christians. Anglicans, Methodists, and the United Congregational Church of Southern Africa make up the majority of Christians. There are also congregations of Lutherans, Baptists, Roman Catholics, The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (Mormons), the Dutch Reformed Church, Mennonites, Seventh-day Adventists and Jehovah's Witnesses in the country. According to the 2001 census, the country has around 5,000 Muslims, mainly from South Asia, 3,000 Hindus and 700 Baha'is. Approximately 20% of citizens identify with no religion.
+
+Besides referring to the language of the dominant people groups in Botswana, Setswana is the adjective used to describe the rich cultural traditions of the Batswana—whether construed as members of the Tswana ethnic groups or of all citizens of Botswana. In Botswana, most of the tribes have different ways to greet one another, but for easy communication and connection, batswana use a three-way hand shake or just greet one another by saying "Dumelang" as a way of saying "hello" without physical contact. In community celebrations like Dikgafela or during marriage ceremonies, batswana women show excitement and happiness by the use of ululations as part of their culture.
+
+Botswana literature belongs somewhere in the strong African literary writing circles. African literature is known for its consciousness and didactic writing styles. Writing as an art form has existed in Botswana for a long while from the rock painting era especially in the Tsodilo Hills known to be 20,000 years old, to the present day with the movie production of the No.1 Ladies Detective Agency story.
+
+In recent times and to date Botswana has seen a remarkable appearance of distinguished writers whose genres range from historical, political and witty story writing. Prominent amongst these are the South African born Bessie Head who settled in Serowe village, Andrew Sesinyi, Barolong Seboni (His works include Images of the Sun, Screams and Pleas, Lovesongs, Windsongs of the Kgalagadi and Lighting the Fire, and several other publications that include a play; Sechele I, and Setswana Riddles Translated into English), Unity Dow, Galesiti Baruti, Caitlin Davies, Lauri Kubuetsile, Albert Malikongwa, Toro Mositi and Moteane Melamu.[91]
+
+Most of Bessie Head's important works are set in Serowe. The three novels When Rain Clouds Gather (1968), Maru (1971), and A Question of Power (1973) all have this setting. The three are also autobiographical; When Rain Clouds Gather is based on her experience living on a development farm, Maru incorporates her experience of being considered racially inferior, and A Question of Power draws on her understanding of what it was like to experience acute psychological distress. Head also published a number of short stories, including the collection The Collector of Treasures (1977). She published a book on the history of Serowe, the village she settled in, called Serowe: Village of the Rainwind. Her last novel, A Bewitched Crossroad (1984), is historical, set in 19th-century Botswana. She had also written a story of two prophets, one wealthy and one who lived poorly called "Jacob: The Faith-Healing Priest".[92][93]
+
+The 1981 comedy, "The Gods Must Be Crazy" was set in Botswana and became a major international hit, 2000's Disney production "Whispers: An Elephant's Tale" was filmed in Botswana, starring Hollywood legend Angela Bassett. Later on, during 2009, parts of M. Saravanan's Tamil language Indian action film, "Ayan" were recorded in Botswana.
+
+The critically acclaimed "A United Kingdom", about the real-life love story of Seretse Khama and Ruth Williams, was filmed partly between Botswana and London, England and was released internationally in 2016.[94]
+
+There are five television stations in Botswana, one of which is state-owned (Botswana TV), along with Now TV, Khuduga HD, Maru TV and EBotswana. There are five local radio stations (RB1, RB2, Duma FM, Gabz FM, and Yarona FM) and thirteen newspapers (Mmegi, Sunday Standard, The Telegraph, Business Weekly, The Botswana Gazette, The Voice, The Guardian, Echo, Botswana People's Daily, DailyNews, Tswana Times, Weekend Post, and The Monitor) that publish regularly.
+
+[95][96]
+
+Botswana's music is mostly vocal and performed, sometimes without drums depending on the occasion; it also makes heavy use of string instruments. Botswana folk music has instruments such as setinkane (a sort of miniature piano), segankure/segaba (a Botswana version of the Chinese instrument erhu), moropa (meropa -plural) (many varieties of drums), phala (a whistle used mostly during celebrations, which comes in a variety of forms). Botswana cultural musical instruments are not confined only to the strings or drums. The hands are used as musical instruments too, by either clapping them together or against phathisi (goat skin turned inside out wrapped around the calf area, only used by men) to create music and rhythm. For the last few decades, the guitar has been celebrated as a versatile music instrument for Tswana music as it offers a variety in string which the segaba instrument does not have. The national anthem is "Fatshe leno la rona". Written and composed by Kgalemang Tumediso Motsete, it was adopted upon independence in 1966.[97]
+
+In the northern part of Botswana, women in the villages of Etsha and Gumare are noted for their skill at crafting baskets from Mokola Palm and local dyes. The baskets are generally woven into three types: large, lidded baskets used for storage, large, open baskets for carrying objects on the head or for winnowing threshed grain, and smaller plates for winnowing pounded grain. The artistry of these baskets is being steadily enhanced through colour use and improved designs as they are increasingly produced for international markets.[98]
+
+The oldest paintings from both Botswana and South Africa depict hunting, animal and human figures, and were made by the Khoisan (!Kung San/Bushmen) over twenty thousand years ago within the Kalahari desert.
+
+The cuisine of Botswana is unique and mostly includes meat as Botswana is a cattle country, the national dish is seswaa, pounded meat made from goat meat or beef, Segwapa dried, cured meat ranging from beef to game meats & the cut may also vary, either fillets of meat cut into strips following the grain of the muscle, or flat pieces sliced across the grain. Madila is a popular fermented milk product of Botswana in a yogurt form. Botswana's cuisine shares some characteristics with other cuisine of Southern Africa. Examples of Botswana food are Bogobe, pap (maize porridge), boerewors, samp, Magwinya (fried dough bread) and mopane worms. Porridge (bogobe) is made by putting sorghum, maize or millet flour into boiling water, stirring into a soft paste, and then cooking it slowly. Sometimes the sorghum or maize is fermented, and milk and sugar added. This dish is called ting. Without the milk and sugar, ting is sometimes eaten with meat or vegetables as lunch or dinner. Another way of making bogobe is to add sour milk and a cooking melon (lerotse). This dish is called tophi by the Kalanga tribe. Many different kinds of beans are grown, including cowpeas, ditloo, and letlhodi. There are some vegetables that grow in the wild that are available seasonally including thepe and Delele (okra). Many fruits are locally available, including marula. Watermelons, believed to have come originally from Botswana, are plentiful in season. Another kind of melon, called lerotse or lekatane, is also grown. There are some kinds of wild melon found in sandy desert areas which are an important food and water source for the people who live in those areas. Kgalagadi Breweries Limited produces the national beer St. Louis Larger Botswana's first and only proud local beer brand that has also been a part of Batswana's rich history since 1989 & non-alcoholic beverage Keone Mooka Mageu a traditional fermented porridge.
+
+Football is the most popular sport in Botswana, with qualification for the 2012 Africa Cup of Nations being the national team's highest achievement to date. Other popular sports are softball, cricket, tennis, rugby, badminton, handball, golf, and track and field.[99][100] Botswana is an associate member of the International Cricket Council. Botswana became a member of The International Badminton Federation and Africa Badminton Federation in 1991. The Botswana Golf Union offers an amateur golf league in which golfers compete in tournaments and championships.
+Botswana won the country's first Olympic medal in 2012 when runner Nijel Amos won silver in the 800 metres. In 2011, Amantle Montsho became world champion in the 400 metres and won Botswana's first athletics medal on the world level. High jumper Kabelo Kgosiemang is a three-time African champion, Isaac Makwala is a sprinter who specializes in the 400 metres, he was the gold medallist at the Commonwealth Games in 2018, Baboloki Thebe was a silver medallist in the 200 metres at the 2014 Summer Youth Olympics and reached the semi-finals at the 2014 World Junior Championships in Athletics & Ross Branch Ross a motorbiker holds the number one plate in the South African Cross Country Championship and has competed at the Dakar Rally.
+
+The card game bridge has a strong following; it was first played in Botswana over 30 years ago, and it grew in popularity during the 1980s. Many British expatriate school teachers informally taught the game in Botswana's secondary schools. The Botswana Bridge Federation (BBF) was founded in 1988 and continues to organise tournaments. Bridge has remained popular and the BBF has over 800 members.[101] In 2007, the BBF invited the English Bridge Union to host a week-long teaching program in May 2008.[102]
+
+Botswana has made great strides in educational development since independence in 1966. At that time there were very few graduates in the country and only a very small percentage of the population attended secondary school. Botswana increased its adult literacy rate from 69% in 1991 to 83% in 2008.[103]
+
+With the discovery of diamonds and the increase in government revenue that this brought, there was a huge increase in educational provision in the country. All students were guaranteed ten years of basic education, leading to a Junior Certificate qualification. Approximately half of the school population attends a further two years of secondary schooling leading to the award of the Botswana General Certificate of Secondary Education (BGCSE). Secondary education in Botswana is neither free nor compulsory.
+
+After leaving school, students can attend one of the seven technical colleges in the country, or take vocational training courses in teaching or nursing. Students enter the University of Botswana, Botswana College of Agriculture, Botswana International University of Science and Technology and the Botswana Accountancy College in Gaborone. Many other students end up in the numerous private tertiary education colleges around the country. Notable amongst these is Botho University, the country's first private university which offers undergraduate programmes in Accounting, Business and Computing. Another international university is the Limkokwing University of Creative Technology which offers various associate degrees in Creative Arts.[104] Other tertiary institutions include Ba Isago, ABM University College the largest school of business and management, New Era, Gaborone Institute of Professional Studies, Gaborone University College of Law And Professional Studies etc. Tremendous strides in providing quality education have been made by private education providers such that a large number of the best students in the country are now applying to them as well. A vast majority of these students are government sponsored. The nation's second international university, the Botswana International University of Science and Technology, was completed in Palapye in 2011.
+The quantitative gains have not always been matched by qualitative ones. Primary schools in particular still lack resources, and the teachers are less well paid than their secondary school colleagues. The Botswana Ministry of Education[105] is working to establish libraries in primary schools in partnership with the African Library Project.[106] The Government of Botswana hopes that by investing a large part of national income in education, the country will become less dependent on diamonds for its economic survival, and less dependent on expatriates for its skilled workers.[107] Those objectives are in part pursued through policies in favour of vocational education, gathered within the NPVET (National Policy on Vocational Education and Training), aiming to "integrate the different types of vocational education and training into one comprehensive system".[107] Botswana invests 21% of its government spending in education.[103]
+
+In January 2006, Botswana announced the reintroduction of school fees after two decades of free state education[108] though the government still provides full scholarships with living expenses to any Botswana citizen in university, either at the University of Botswana or if the student wishes to pursue an education in any field not offered locally, such as medicine, they are provided with a full scholarship to study abroad.
+
+Botswana is planning to use science and technology to diversify its economy and thereby reduce its dependence on diamond mining. To this end, the government has set up six hubs since 2008, in the agriculture, diamonds, innovation, transport, health and education sectors.[109]
+
+Botswana published its updated National Policy on Research, Science and Technology in 2011, within a UNESCO project sponsored by the Spanish Agency for International Cooperation and Development (AECID). This policy aims to take up the challenges of rapid technological evolution, globalisation and the achievement of the national development goals formulated in high-level strategic documents that include Botswana's Tenth National Development Plan to 2016 and Vision 2016.[109]
+The National Policy on Research, Science, Technology and Innovation (2011) fixes the target of raising gross domestic expenditure on research and development (R&D) from 0.26% of GDP in 2012 to over 2% of GDP by 2016. This target can only be reached within the specified time frame by raising public spending on R&D.[109]
+
+Despite the modest level of financial investment in research, Botswana counts one of the highest researcher densities in sub-Saharan Africa: 344 per million inhabitants (in head counts), compared to an average of 91 per million inhabitants for the subcontinent in 2013.[109]
+
+In 2009, Botswana-based company Deaftronics launched a solar-powered hearing aid after six years of prototype development. Since then, Deaftronics has sold over 10,000 of the hearing aids. Priced at $200 per unit, each hearing aid includes four rechargeable batteries (lasting up to three years) and a solar charger for them. The product is inexpensive compared to many similar devices, that can start from around $600.
+[110][111]
+
+In 2011, Botswana's Department of Agricultural Research (DAR) unveiled Musi cattle, designed to ultimately optimise the overall efficiency for beef production under Botswana conditions. A hybrid of Tswana, Bonsmara, Brahman, Tuli and Simmental breeds,[112] it is hoped that the composite with lead to increased beef production. The objective of the research was to find a genetic material that could perform like crossbreeds already found in Botswana and well above the indigenous Tswana breed while retaining the hardiness and adaptability of the native stock in one package.[113]
+
+In 2016, the Botswana Institute of Technology Research and Innovation (BITRI) developed a rapid testing kit for foot and-mouth in collaboration with the Botswana Vaccine Institute and Canadian Food Inspection Agency.  The existing diagnostic methods required highly trained laboratory personnel and special equipment, which caused delays in the implementation of control procedures; whereas the kit developed in Botswana allows for on-site diagnosis to be made.[114]
+
+The Square Kilometre Array (SKA) (MeerKAT) will consist of thousands of dishes and antennas spread over large distances linked together to form one giant telescope. Additional dishes will be located in eight other African countries Botswana among them. Botswana was selected to participate because of its ideal location in the southern hemisphere and environment, which could enable easier data collection from the universe. Botswana government has built SKA precursor telescope at Kgale View, called the African Very Long Base Line Interferometry Network (AVN) & sent student on Astronomy scholarships.[115]
+
+In the IT sector in 2016 a firm, Almaz, opened a first-of-its-kind computer assembly company.[116][117] Ditec, a Botswana company, also customizes, designs and manufactures mobile phones. Ditec is one of the leading experts in design, development and customisation of Microsoft powered devices.[118]
+
+Botswana has 971 kilometres (603 mi) of railway lines, 18,482 kilometres (11,484 mi) of roads, and 92 airports, of which 12 have paved runways. The paved road network has almost entirely been constructed since independence in 1966. The national airline is Air Botswana, which flies domestically and to other countries in Africa. Botswana Railways is the national railways company that forms a crucial link in the Southern African regional railway systems. Botswana Railways offers rail-based transport logistics solutions to move a range of commodities for the mining sector and primary industries, passenger trains services and dry ports.[119][120]
+
+In terms of power infrastructure in Botswana, the country produces coal for electricity and oil is imported into the country. Recently, the country has taken a large interest in renewable energy sources and has completed a comprehensive strategy that will attract investors in the wind, solar and biomass renewable energy industries. Botswana's power stations include Morupule B Power Station (600 MW), Morupule A Power Station (132 MW), Orapa Power Station (90 MW), Phakalane Power Station (1.3 MW) and Mmamabula Power Station (300 MW) which is expected to be online in the near future.
+A 200 MW solar power plant is at planning and designing stage by Ministry of Mineral Resources, Green Technology and Energy Security.[121][122][122]
+
+The Ministry of Health in Botswana is responsible for overseeing the quality and distribution of healthcare throughout the country. Life expectancy at birth was 55 in 2009 according to the World Bank, having previously fallen from a peak of 64.1 in 1990 to a low of 49 in 2002.[123] After Botswana's 2011 census, current life expectancy is estimated at 54.06 years.[1]
+
+The Cancer Association of Botswana is a voluntary non-governmental organisation. The association is a member of the Union for International Cancer Control. The Association supplements existing services through provision of cancer prevention and health awareness programmes, facilitating access to health services for cancer patients and offering support and counseling to those affected.[124]
+
+Like elsewhere in Sub-Saharan Africa, the economic impact of AIDS is considerable. Economic development spending was cut by 10% in 2002–3 as a result of recurring budget deficits and rising expenditure on healthcare services. Botswana has been hit very hard by the AIDS pandemic; in 2006 it was estimated that life expectancy at birth had dropped from 65 to 35 years.[125] However, after Botswana's 2011 census current life expectancy is estimated at 54.06 years.[1]
+
+The prevalence of HIV/AIDS in Botswana was estimated at 25.4% for adults aged 15–49 in 2009 and 21.9% in 2013,[21]:A8 exceeded by Lesotho and Swaziland in sub-Saharan African nations. This places Botswana at the third highest prevalence in the world, in 2013, while "leading the way in prevention and treatment programmes".[22] In 2003, the government began a comprehensive program involving free or cheap generic antiretroviral drugs as well as an information campaign designed to stop the spread of the virus; in 2013, over 40% of adults in Botswana had access to antiretroviral therapy.[21]:28 In the age group of 15–19 years old, prevalence was estimated at about 6% for females and 3.5% for males in 2013,[21]:33 and for the 20–24 age group, 15% for females and 5% for males.[21]:33 Botswana is one of 21 priority countries identified by the UN AIDS group in 2011 in the Global Plan to eliminate new HIV infections among children and to keep their mothers alive.[21]:37 From 2009 to 2013, the country saw a decrease over 50% in new HIV infections in children.[21]:38 A further measure of the success, or reason for hope, in dealing with HIV in Botswana, is that less than 10% of pregnant HIV-infected women were not receiving antiretroviral medications in 2013, with a corresponding large decrease (over 50%) in the number of new HIV infections in children under 5.[21]:39, 40 Among the UN Global Plan countries, people living with HIV in Botswana have the highest percentage receiving antiretroviral treatment: about 75% for adults (age 15+) and about 98% for children.[21]:237
+
+With a nationwide Prevention of Mother-to-Child Transmission program, Botswana has reduced HIV transmission from infected mothers to their children from about 40% to just 4%. Under the leadership of Festus Mogae, the Government of Botswana solicited outside help in fighting HIV/AIDS and received early support from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, the Merck Foundation, and together formed the African Comprehensive HIV/AIDS Partnership (ACHAP). Other early partners include the Botswana-Harvard AIDS Institute, of the Harvard School of Public Health and the Botswana-UPenn Partnership of the University of Pennsylvania. According to the 2011 UNAIDS Report, universal access to treatment – defined as 80% coverage or greater – has been achieved in Botswana.[126]
+
+Potential reasons for Botswana's high HIV prevalence include concurrent sexual partnerships, transactional sex, cross-generational sex, and a significant number of people who travel outside of their local communities in pursuit of work. The polyamorous nature of many sexual relationships further impacts the health situation, to the extent that it has given rise to a love vocabulary[127] that is unique to the region.
+
+The Botswana Tourism Organisation[128] is the country's official tourism group. Primarily, tourists visit Gaborone due to the city having numerous activities for visitors. The Lion Park Resort[129] is Botswana's first permanent amusement park and hosts events such as birthday parties for families. Other destinations in Botswana include the Gaborone Yacht Club and the Kalahari Fishing Club and natural attractions such as the Gaborone Dam and Mokolodi Nature Reserve. There are golf courses which are maintained by the Botswana Golf Union (BGU).[130] The Phakalane Golf Estate is a multimillion-dollar clubhouse that offers both hotel accommodations and access to golf courses.
+Museums in Botswana include:
+
+This article incorporates text from a free content work.  Licensed under CC-BY-SA IGO 3.0 UNESCO Science Report: towards 2030, 546–547, UNESCO, UNESCO Publishing. To learn how to add open license text to Wikipedia articles, please see this how-to page. For information on reusing text from Wikipedia, please see the terms of use.
+
+Coordinates: 24°39.5′S 25°54.5′E / 24.6583°S 25.9083°E / -24.6583; 25.9083
+
+Click on a coloured area to see an article about English in that country or region

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+Botany, also called plant science(s), plant biology or phytology, is the science of plant life and a branch of biology. A botanist, plant scientist or phytologist is a scientist who specialises in this field. The term "botany" comes from the Ancient Greek word βοτάνη (botanē) meaning "pasture", "grass", or "fodder"; βοτάνη is in turn derived from βόσκειν (boskein), "to feed" or "to graze".[1][2][3]  Traditionally, botany has also included the study of fungi and algae by mycologists and phycologists respectively, with the study of these three groups of organisms remaining within the sphere of interest of the International Botanical Congress. Nowadays, botanists (in the strict sense) study approximately 410,000 species of land plants of which some 391,000 species are vascular plants (including approximately 369,000 species of flowering plants),[4] and approximately 20,000 are bryophytes.[5]
+
+Botany originated in prehistory as herbalism with the efforts of early humans to identify – and later cultivate – edible, medicinal and poisonous plants, making it one of the oldest branches of science. Medieval physic gardens, often attached to monasteries, contained plants of medical importance. They were forerunners of the first botanical gardens attached to universities, founded from the 1540s onwards. One of the earliest was the Padua botanical garden. These gardens facilitated the academic study of plants. Efforts to catalogue and describe their collections were the beginnings of plant taxonomy, and led in 1753 to the binomial system of Carl Linnaeus that remains in use to this day.
+
+In the 19th and 20th centuries, new techniques were developed for the study of plants, including methods of optical microscopy and live cell imaging, electron microscopy, analysis of chromosome number, plant chemistry and the structure and function of enzymes and other proteins. In the last two decades of the 20th century, botanists exploited the techniques of molecular genetic analysis, including genomics and proteomics and DNA sequences to classify plants more accurately.
+
+Modern botany is a broad, multidisciplinary subject with inputs from most other areas of science and technology. Research topics include the study of plant structure, growth and differentiation, reproduction, biochemistry and primary metabolism, chemical products, development, diseases, evolutionary relationships, systematics, and plant taxonomy. Dominant themes in 21st century plant science are molecular genetics and epigenetics, which are the mechanisms and control of gene expression during differentiation of plant cells and tissues. Botanical research has diverse applications in providing staple foods, materials such as timber, oil, rubber, fibre and drugs, in modern horticulture, agriculture and forestry, plant propagation, breeding and genetic modification, in the synthesis of chemicals and raw materials for construction and energy production, in environmental management, and the maintenance of biodiversity.
+
+Botany originated as herbalism, the study and use of plants for their medicinal properties.[6] Many records of the Holocene period date early botanical knowledge as far back as 10,000 years ago.[7] This early unrecorded knowledge of plants was discovered in ancient sites of human occupation within Tennessee, which make up much of the Cherokee land today.[7] The early recorded history of botany includes many ancient writings and plant classifications. Examples of early botanical works have been found in ancient texts from India dating back to before 1100 BC,[8][9] in archaic Avestan writings, and in works from China before it was unified in 221 BC.[8][10]
+
+Modern botany traces its roots back to Ancient Greece specifically to Theophrastus (c. 371–287 BC), a student of Aristotle who invented and described many of its principles and is widely regarded in the scientific community as the "Father of Botany".[11] His major works, Enquiry into Plants and On the Causes of Plants, constitute the most important contributions to botanical science until the Middle Ages, almost seventeen centuries later.[11][12]
+
+Another work from Ancient Greece that made an early impact on botany is De Materia Medica, a five-volume encyclopedia about herbal medicine written in the middle of the first century by Greek physician and pharmacologist Pedanius Dioscorides. De Materia Medica was widely read for more than 1,500 years.[13] Important contributions from the medieval Muslim world include Ibn Wahshiyya's Nabatean Agriculture, Abū Ḥanīfa Dīnawarī's (828–896) the Book of Plants, and Ibn Bassal's The Classification of Soils. In the early 13th century, Abu al-Abbas al-Nabati, and Ibn al-Baitar (d. 1248) wrote on botany in a systematic and scientific manner.[14][15][16]
+
+In the mid-16th century, "botanical gardens" were founded in a number of Italian universities – the Padua botanical garden in 1545 is usually considered to be the first which is still in its original location. These gardens continued the practical value of earlier "physic gardens", often associated with monasteries, in which plants were cultivated for medical use. They supported the growth of botany as an academic subject. Lectures were given about the plants grown in the gardens and their medical uses demonstrated. Botanical gardens came much later to northern Europe; the first in England was the University of Oxford Botanic Garden in 1621. Throughout this period, botany remained firmly subordinate to medicine.[17]
+
+German physician Leonhart Fuchs (1501–1566) was one of "the three German fathers of botany", along with theologian Otto Brunfels (1489–1534) and physician Hieronymus Bock (1498–1554) (also called Hieronymus Tragus).[18][19] Fuchs and Brunfels broke away from the tradition of copying earlier works to make original observations of their own. Bock created his own system of plant classification.
+
+Physician Valerius Cordus (1515–1544) authored a botanically and pharmacologically important herbal Historia Plantarum in 1544 and a pharmacopoeia of lasting importance, the Dispensatorium in 1546.[20] Naturalist Conrad von Gesner (1516–1565) and herbalist John Gerard (1545–c. 1611) published herbals covering the medicinal uses of plants. Naturalist Ulisse Aldrovandi (1522–1605) was considered the father of natural history, which included the study of plants. In 1665, using an early microscope, Polymath Robert Hooke discovered cells, a term he coined, in cork, and a short time later in living plant tissue.[21]
+
+During the 18th century, systems of plant identification were developed comparable to dichotomous keys, where unidentified plants are placed into taxonomic groups (e.g. family, genus and species) by making a series of choices between pairs of characters. The choice and sequence of the characters may be artificial in keys designed purely for identification (diagnostic keys) or more closely related to the natural or phyletic order of the taxa in synoptic keys.[22] By the 18th century, new plants for study were arriving in Europe in increasing numbers from newly discovered countries and the European colonies worldwide. In 1753, Carl von Linné (Carl Linnaeus) published his Species Plantarum, a hierarchical classification of plant species that remains the reference point for modern botanical nomenclature. This established a standardised binomial or two-part naming scheme where the first name represented the genus and the second identified the species within the genus.[23] For the purposes of identification, Linnaeus's Systema Sexuale classified plants into 24 groups according to the number of their male sexual organs. The 24th group, Cryptogamia, included all plants with concealed reproductive parts, mosses, liverworts, ferns, algae and fungi.[24]
+
+Increasing knowledge of plant anatomy, morphology and life cycles led to the realisation that there were more natural affinities between plants than the artificial sexual system of Linnaeus. Adanson (1763), de Jussieu (1789), and Candolle (1819) all proposed various alternative natural systems of classification that grouped plants using a wider range of shared characters and were widely followed. The Candollean system reflected his ideas of the progression of morphological complexity and the later classification by Bentham and Hooker, which was influential until the mid-19th century, was influenced by Candolle's approach. Darwin's publication of the Origin of Species in 1859 and his concept of common descent required modifications to the Candollean system to reflect evolutionary relationships as distinct from mere morphological similarity.[25]
+
+Botany was greatly stimulated by the appearance of the first "modern" textbook, Matthias Schleiden's Grundzüge der Wissenschaftlichen Botanik, published in English in 1849 as Principles of Scientific Botany.[26]  Schleiden was a microscopist and an early plant anatomist who co-founded the cell theory with Theodor Schwann and Rudolf Virchow and was among the first to grasp the significance of the cell nucleus that had been described by Robert Brown in 1831.[27]
+In 1855, Adolf Fick formulated Fick's laws that enabled the calculation of the rates of molecular diffusion in biological systems.[28]
+
+Building upon the gene-chromosome theory of heredity that originated with Gregor Mendel (1822–1884), August Weismann (1834–1914) proved that inheritance only takes place through gametes. No other cells can pass on inherited characters.[29] The work of Katherine Esau (1898–1997) on plant anatomy is still a major foundation of modern botany. Her books Plant Anatomy and Anatomy of Seed Plants have been key plant structural biology texts for more than half a century.[30][31]
+
+The discipline of plant ecology was pioneered in the late 19th century by botanists such as Eugenius Warming, who produced the hypothesis that plants form communities, and his mentor and successor Christen C. Raunkiær whose system for describing plant life forms is still in use today. The concept that the composition of plant communities such as temperate broadleaf forest changes by a process of ecological succession was developed by Henry Chandler Cowles, Arthur Tansley and Frederic Clements. Clements is credited with the idea of climax vegetation as the most complex vegetation that an environment can support and Tansley introduced the concept of ecosystems to biology.[32][33][34] Building on the extensive earlier work of Alphonse de Candolle, Nikolai Vavilov (1887–1943) produced accounts of the biogeography, centres of origin, and evolutionary history of economic plants.[35]
+
+Particularly since the mid-1960s there have been advances in understanding of the physics of plant physiological processes such as transpiration (the transport of water within plant tissues),  the temperature dependence of rates of water evaporation from the leaf surface and the molecular diffusion of water vapour and carbon dioxide through stomatal apertures. These developments, coupled with new methods for measuring the size of stomatal apertures, and the rate of photosynthesis have enabled precise description of the rates of gas exchange between plants and the atmosphere.[36][37] Innovations in statistical analysis by Ronald Fisher,[38] Frank Yates and others at Rothamsted Experimental Station facilitated rational experimental design and data analysis in botanical research.[39] The discovery and identification of the auxin plant hormones by Kenneth V. Thimann in 1948 enabled regulation of plant growth by externally applied chemicals. Frederick Campion Steward pioneered techniques of micropropagation and plant tissue culture controlled by plant hormones.[40] The synthetic auxin 2,4-Dichlorophenoxyacetic acid or 2,4-D was one of the first commercial synthetic herbicides.[41]
+
+20th century developments in plant biochemistry have been driven by modern techniques of organic chemical analysis, such as spectroscopy, chromatography and electrophoresis. With the rise of the related molecular-scale biological approaches of molecular biology, genomics, proteomics and metabolomics, the relationship between the plant genome and most aspects of the biochemistry, physiology, morphology and behaviour of plants can be subjected to detailed experimental analysis.[42] The concept originally stated by Gottlieb Haberlandt in 1902[43] that all plant cells are totipotent and can be grown in vitro ultimately enabled the use of genetic engineering experimentally to knock out a gene or genes responsible for a specific trait, or to add genes such as GFP that report when a gene of interest is being expressed. These technologies enable the biotechnological use of whole plants or plant cell cultures grown in bioreactors to synthesise pesticides, antibiotics or other pharmaceuticals, as well as the practical application of genetically modified crops designed for traits such as improved yield.[44]
+
+Modern morphology recognises a continuum between the major morphological categories of root, stem (caulome), leaf (phyllome) and trichome.[45] Furthermore, it emphasises structural dynamics.[46] Modern systematics aims to reflect and discover phylogenetic relationships between plants.[47][48][49][50] Modern Molecular phylogenetics largely ignores morphological characters, relying on DNA sequences as data. Molecular analysis of DNA sequences from most families of flowering plants enabled the Angiosperm Phylogeny Group to publish in 1998 a phylogeny of flowering plants, answering many of the questions about relationships among angiosperm families and species.[51] The theoretical possibility of a practical method for identification of plant species and commercial varieties by DNA barcoding is the subject of active current research.[52][53]
+
+The study of plants is vital because they underpin almost all animal life on Earth by generating a large proportion of the oxygen and food that provide humans and other organisms with aerobic respiration with the chemical energy they need to exist. Plants, algae and cyanobacteria are the major groups of organisms that carry out photosynthesis, a process that uses the energy of sunlight to convert water and carbon dioxide[54] into sugars that can be used both as a source of chemical energy and of organic molecules that are used in the structural components of cells.[55] As a by-product of photosynthesis, plants release oxygen into the atmosphere, a gas that is required by nearly all living things to carry out cellular respiration. In addition, they are influential in the global carbon and water cycles and plant roots bind and stabilise soils, preventing soil erosion.[56] Plants are crucial to the future of human society as they provide food, oxygen, medicine, and products for people, as well as creating and preserving soil.[57]
+
+Historically, all living things were classified as either animals or plants[58] and botany covered the study of all organisms not considered animals.[59] Botanists examine both the internal functions and processes within plant organelles, cells, tissues, whole plants, plant populations and plant communities. At each of these levels, a botanist may be concerned with the classification (taxonomy), phylogeny and evolution, structure (anatomy and morphology), or function (physiology) of plant life.[60]
+
+The strictest definition of "plant" includes only the "land plants" or embryophytes, which include seed plants (gymnosperms, including the pines, and flowering plants) and the free-sporing cryptogams including ferns, clubmosses, liverworts, hornworts and mosses. Embryophytes are multicellular eukaryotes descended from an ancestor that obtained its energy from sunlight by photosynthesis. They have life cycles with alternating haploid and diploid phases. The sexual haploid phase of embryophytes, known as the gametophyte, nurtures the developing diploid embryo sporophyte within its tissues for at least part of its life,[61] even in the seed plants, where the gametophyte itself is nurtured by its parent sporophyte.[62] Other groups of organisms that were previously studied by botanists include bacteria (now studied in bacteriology), fungi (mycology) – including lichen-forming fungi (lichenology), non-chlorophyte algae (phycology), and viruses (virology). However, attention is still given to these groups by botanists, and fungi (including lichens) and photosynthetic protists are usually covered in introductory botany courses.[63][64]
+
+Palaeobotanists study ancient plants in the fossil record to provide information about the evolutionary history of plants. Cyanobacteria, the first oxygen-releasing photosynthetic organisms on Earth, are thought to have given rise to the ancestor of plants by entering into an endosymbiotic relationship with an early eukaryote, ultimately becoming the chloroplasts in plant cells. The new photosynthetic plants (along with their algal relatives) accelerated the rise in atmospheric oxygen started by the cyanobacteria, changing the ancient oxygen-free, reducing, atmosphere to one in which free oxygen has been abundant for more than 2 billion years.[65][66]
+
+Among the important botanical questions of the 21st century are the role of plants as primary producers in the global cycling of life's basic ingredients: energy, carbon, oxygen, nitrogen and water, and ways that our plant stewardship can help address the global environmental issues of resource management, conservation, human food security, biologically invasive organisms, carbon sequestration, climate change, and sustainability.[67]
+
+Virtually all staple foods come either directly from primary production by plants, or indirectly from animals that eat them.[68]  Plants and other photosynthetic organisms are at the base of most food chains because they use the energy from the sun and nutrients from the soil and atmosphere, converting them into a form that can be used by animals. This is what ecologists call the first trophic level.[69]  The modern forms of the major staple foods, such as hemp, teff, maize, rice, wheat and other cereal grasses, pulses, bananas and plantains,[70] as well as hemp, flax and cotton grown for their fibres, are the outcome of prehistoric selection over thousands of years from among wild ancestral plants with the most desirable characteristics.[71]
+
+Botanists study how plants produce food and how to increase yields, for example through plant breeding, making their work important to humanity's ability to feed the world and provide food security for future generations.[72] Botanists also study weeds, which are a considerable problem in agriculture, and the biology and control of plant pathogens in agriculture and natural ecosystems.[73] Ethnobotany is the study of the relationships between plants and people. When applied to the investigation of historical plant–people relationships ethnobotany may be referred to as archaeobotany or palaeoethnobotany.[74] Some of the earliest plant-people relationships arose between the indigenous people of Canada in identifying edible plants from inedible plants.[75] This relationship the indigenous people had with plants was recorded by ethnobotanists.[75]
+
+Plant biochemistry is the study of the chemical processes used by plants. Some of these processes are used in their primary metabolism like the photosynthetic Calvin cycle and crassulacean acid metabolism.[76] Others make specialised materials like the cellulose and lignin used to build their bodies, and secondary products like resins and aroma compounds.
+
+Plants and various other groups of photosynthetic eukaryotes collectively known as "algae" have unique organelles known as chloroplasts. Chloroplasts are thought to be descended from cyanobacteria that formed endosymbiotic relationships with ancient plant and algal ancestors. Chloroplasts and cyanobacteria contain the blue-green pigment chlorophyll a.[77] Chlorophyll a (as well as its plant and green algal-specific cousin chlorophyll b)[a] absorbs light in the blue-violet and orange/red parts of the spectrum while reflecting and transmitting the green light that we see as the characteristic colour of these organisms. The energy in the red and blue light that these pigments absorb is used by chloroplasts to make energy-rich carbon compounds from carbon dioxide and water by oxygenic photosynthesis, a process that generates molecular oxygen (O2) as a by-product.
+
+The light energy captured by chlorophyll a is initially in the form of electrons (and later a proton gradient) that's used to make molecules of ATP and NADPH which temporarily store and transport energy. Their energy is used in the light-independent reactions of the Calvin cycle by the enzyme rubisco to produce molecules of the 3-carbon sugar glyceraldehyde 3-phosphate (G3P). Glyceraldehyde 3-phosphate is the first product of photosynthesis and the raw material from which glucose and almost all other organic molecules of biological origin are synthesised. Some of the glucose is converted to starch which is stored in the chloroplast.[81] Starch is the characteristic energy store of most land plants and algae, while inulin, a polymer of fructose is used for the same purpose in the sunflower family Asteraceae. Some of the glucose is converted to sucrose (common table sugar) for export to the rest of the plant.
+
+Unlike in animals (which lack chloroplasts), plants and their eukaryote relatives have delegated many biochemical roles to their chloroplasts, including synthesising all their fatty acids,[82][83] and most amino acids.[84] The fatty acids that chloroplasts make are used for many things, such as providing material to build cell membranes out of and making the polymer cutin which is found in the plant cuticle that protects land plants from drying out. [85]
+
+Plants synthesise a number of unique polymers like the polysaccharide molecules cellulose, pectin and xyloglucan[86] from which the land plant cell wall is constructed.[87]
+Vascular land plants make lignin, a polymer used to strengthen the secondary cell walls of xylem tracheids and vessels to keep them from collapsing when a plant sucks water through them under water stress. Lignin is also used in other cell types like sclerenchyma fibres that provide structural support for a plant and is a major constituent of wood. Sporopollenin is a chemically resistant polymer found in the outer cell walls of spores and pollen of land plants responsible for the survival of early land plant spores and the pollen of seed plants in the fossil record. It is widely regarded as a marker for the start of land plant evolution during the Ordovician period.[88]
+The concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere today is much lower than it was when plants emerged onto land during the Ordovician and Silurian periods. Many monocots like maize and the pineapple and some dicots like the Asteraceae have since independently evolved[89] pathways like Crassulacean acid metabolism and the C4 carbon fixation pathway for photosynthesis which avoid the losses resulting from photorespiration in the more common C3 carbon fixation pathway. These biochemical strategies are unique to land plants.
+
+Phytochemistry is a branch of plant biochemistry primarily concerned with the chemical substances produced by plants during secondary metabolism.[90] Some of these compounds are toxins such as the alkaloid coniine from hemlock. Others, such as the essential oils peppermint oil and lemon oil are useful for their aroma, as flavourings and spices (e.g., capsaicin), and in medicine as pharmaceuticals as in opium from opium poppies. Many medicinal and recreational drugs, such as tetrahydrocannabinol (active ingredient in cannabis), caffeine, morphine and nicotine come directly from plants. Others are simple derivatives of botanical natural products. For example, the pain killer aspirin is the acetyl ester of salicylic acid, originally isolated from the bark of willow trees,[91] and a wide range of opiate painkillers like heroin are obtained by chemical modification of morphine obtained from the opium poppy.[92] Popular stimulants come from plants, such as caffeine from coffee, tea and chocolate, and nicotine from tobacco. Most alcoholic beverages come from fermentation of carbohydrate-rich plant products such as barley (beer), rice (sake) and grapes (wine).[93] Native Americans have used various plants as ways of treating illness or disease for thousands of years.[94] This knowledge Native Americans have on plants has been recorded by enthnobotanists and then in turn has been used by pharmaceutical companies as a way of drug discovery.[95]
+
+Plants can synthesise useful coloured dyes and pigments such as the anthocyanins responsible for the red colour of red wine, yellow weld and blue woad used together to produce Lincoln green, indoxyl, source of the blue dye indigo traditionally used to dye denim and the artist's pigments gamboge and rose madder.
+Sugar, starch, cotton, linen, hemp, some types of rope, wood and particle boards, papyrus and paper, vegetable oils, wax, and natural rubber are examples of commercially important materials made from plant tissues or their secondary products. Charcoal, a pure form of carbon made by pyrolysis of wood, has a long history as a metal-smelting fuel, as a filter material and adsorbent and as an artist's material and is one of the three ingredients of gunpowder. Cellulose, the world's most abundant organic polymer,[96] can be converted into energy, fuels, materials and chemical feedstock. Products made from cellulose include rayon and cellophane, wallpaper paste, biobutanol and gun cotton. Sugarcane, rapeseed and soy are some of the plants with a highly fermentable sugar or oil content that are used as sources of biofuels, important alternatives to fossil fuels, such as biodiesel.[97]  Sweetgrass was used by Native Americans to ward off bugs like mosquitoes.[98] These bug repelling properties of sweetgrass were later found by the American Chemical Society in the molecules phytol and coumarin.[98]
+
+Plant ecology is the science of the functional relationships between plants and their habitats – the environments where they complete their life cycles. Plant ecologists study the composition of local and regional floras, their biodiversity, genetic diversity and fitness, the adaptation of plants to their environment, and their competitive or mutualistic interactions with other species.[99] Some ecologists even rely on empirical data from indigenous people that is gathered by ethnobotanists.[100] This information can relay a great deal of information on how the land once was thousands of years ago and how it has changed over that time.[100] The goals of plant ecology are to understand the causes of their distribution patterns, productivity, environmental impact, evolution, and responses to environmental change.[101]
+
+Plants depend on certain edaphic (soil) and climatic factors in their environment but can modify these factors too. For example, they can change their environment's albedo, increase runoff interception, stabilise mineral soils and develop their organic content, and affect local temperature. Plants compete with other organisms in their ecosystem for resources.[102][103] They interact with their neighbours at a variety of spatial scales in groups, populations and communities that collectively constitute vegetation. Regions with characteristic vegetation types and dominant plants as well as similar abiotic and biotic factors, climate, and geography make up biomes like tundra or tropical rainforest.[104]
+
+Herbivores eat plants, but plants can defend themselves and some species are parasitic or even carnivorous. Other organisms form mutually beneficial relationships with plants. For example, mycorrhizal fungi and rhizobia provide plants with nutrients in exchange for food, ants are recruited by ant plants to provide protection,[106] honey bees, bats and other animals pollinate flowers[107][108] and humans and other animals[109] act as dispersal vectors to spread spores and seeds.
+
+Plant responses to climate and other environmental changes can inform our understanding of how these changes affect ecosystem function and productivity. For example, plant phenology can be a useful proxy for temperature in historical climatology, and the biological impact of climate change and global warming. Palynology, the analysis of fossil pollen deposits in sediments from thousands or millions of years ago allows the reconstruction of past climates.[110] Estimates of atmospheric CO2 concentrations since the Palaeozoic have been obtained from stomatal densities and the leaf shapes and sizes of ancient land plants.[111] Ozone depletion can expose plants to higher levels of ultraviolet radiation-B (UV-B), resulting in lower growth rates.[112] Moreover, information from studies of community ecology, plant systematics, and taxonomy is essential to understanding vegetation change, habitat destruction and species extinction.[113]
+
+Inheritance in plants follows the same fundamental principles of genetics as in other multicellular organisms. Gregor Mendel discovered the genetic laws of inheritance by studying inherited traits such as shape in Pisum sativum (peas). What Mendel learned from studying plants has had far reaching benefits outside of botany. Similarly, "jumping genes" were discovered by Barbara McClintock while she was studying maize.[114] Nevertheless, there are some distinctive genetic differences between plants and other organisms.
+
+Species boundaries in plants may be weaker than in animals, and cross species hybrids are often possible. A familiar example is peppermint, Mentha × piperita, a sterile hybrid between Mentha aquatica and spearmint, Mentha spicata.[115] The many cultivated varieties of wheat are the result of multiple inter- and intra-specific crosses between wild species and their hybrids.[116] Angiosperms with monoecious flowers often have self-incompatibility mechanisms that operate between the pollen and stigma so that the pollen either fails to reach the stigma or fails to germinate and produce male gametes.[117] This is one of several methods used by plants to promote outcrossing.[118] In many land plants the male and female gametes are produced by separate individuals. These species are said to be dioecious when referring to vascular plant sporophytes and dioicous when referring to bryophyte gametophytes.[119]
+
+Unlike in higher animals, where parthenogenesis is rare, asexual reproduction may occur in plants by several different mechanisms. The formation of stem tubers in potato is one example. Particularly in arctic or alpine habitats, where opportunities for fertilisation of flowers by animals are rare, plantlets or bulbs, may develop instead of flowers, replacing sexual reproduction with asexual reproduction and giving rise to clonal populations genetically identical to the parent. This is one of several types of apomixis that occur in plants. Apomixis can also happen in a seed, producing a seed that contains an embryo genetically identical to the parent.[120]
+
+Most sexually reproducing organisms are diploid, with paired chromosomes, but doubling of their chromosome number may occur due to errors in cytokinesis. This can occur early in development to produce an autopolyploid or partly autopolyploid organism, or during normal processes of cellular differentiation to produce some cell types that are polyploid (endopolyploidy), or during gamete formation. An allopolyploid plant may result from a hybridisation event between two different species. Both autopolyploid and allopolyploid plants can often reproduce normally, but may be unable to cross-breed successfully with the parent population because there is a mismatch in chromosome numbers. These plants that are reproductively isolated from the parent species but live within the same geographical area, may be sufficiently successful to form a new species.[121] Some otherwise sterile plant polyploids can still reproduce vegetatively or by seed apomixis, forming clonal populations of identical individuals.[121] Durum wheat is a fertile tetraploid allopolyploid, while bread wheat is a fertile hexaploid. The commercial banana is an example of a sterile, seedless triploid hybrid. Common dandelion is a triploid that produces viable seeds by apomictic seed.
+
+As in other eukaryotes, the inheritance of endosymbiotic organelles like mitochondria and chloroplasts in plants is non-Mendelian. Chloroplasts are inherited through the male parent in gymnosperms but often through the female parent in flowering plants.[122]
+
+A considerable amount of new knowledge about plant function comes from studies of the molecular genetics of model plants such as the Thale cress, Arabidopsis thaliana, a weedy species in the mustard family (Brassicaceae).[90] The genome or hereditary information contained in the genes of this species is encoded by about 135 million base pairs of DNA, forming one of the smallest genomes among flowering plants. Arabidopsis was the first plant to have its genome sequenced, in 2000.[123] The sequencing of some other relatively small genomes, of rice (Oryza sativa)[124] and Brachypodium distachyon,[125] has made them important model species for understanding the genetics, cellular and molecular biology of cereals, grasses and monocots generally.
+
+Model plants such as Arabidopsis thaliana are used for studying the molecular biology of plant cells and the chloroplast. Ideally, these organisms have small genomes that are well known or completely sequenced, small stature and short generation times. Corn has been used to study mechanisms of photosynthesis and phloem loading of sugar in C4 plants.[126] The single celled green alga Chlamydomonas reinhardtii, while not an embryophyte itself, contains a green-pigmented chloroplast related to that of land plants, making it useful for study.[127] A red alga Cyanidioschyzon merolae has also been used to study some basic chloroplast functions.[128] Spinach,[129] peas,[130] soybeans and a moss Physcomitrella patens are commonly used to study plant cell biology.[131]
+
+Agrobacterium tumefaciens, a soil rhizosphere bacterium, can attach to plant cells and infect them with a callus-inducing Ti plasmid by horizontal gene transfer, causing a callus infection called crown gall disease. Schell and Van Montagu (1977) hypothesised that the Ti plasmid could be a natural vector for introducing the Nif gene responsible for nitrogen fixation in the root nodules of legumes and other plant species.[132] Today, genetic modification of the Ti plasmid is one of the main techniques for introduction of transgenes to plants and the creation of genetically modified crops.
+
+Epigenetics is the study of heritable changes in gene function that cannot be explained by changes in the underlying DNA sequence[133] but cause the organism's genes to behave (or "express themselves") differently.[134] One example of epigenetic change is the marking of the genes by DNA methylation which determines whether they will be expressed or not. Gene expression can also be controlled by repressor proteins that attach to silencer regions of the DNA and prevent that region of the DNA code from being expressed. Epigenetic marks may be added or removed from the DNA during programmed stages of development of the plant, and are responsible, for example, for the differences between anthers, petals and normal leaves, despite the fact that they all have the same underlying genetic code. Epigenetic changes may be temporary or may remain through successive cell divisions for the remainder of the cell's life. Some epigenetic changes have been shown to be heritable,[135] while others are reset in the germ cells.
+
+Epigenetic changes in eukaryotic biology serve to regulate the process of cellular differentiation. During morphogenesis, totipotent stem cells become the various pluripotent cell lines of the embryo, which in turn become fully differentiated cells. A single fertilised egg cell, the zygote, gives rise to the many different plant cell types including parenchyma, xylem vessel elements, phloem sieve tubes, guard cells of the epidermis, etc. as it continues to divide. The process results from the epigenetic activation of some genes and inhibition of others.[136]
+
+Unlike animals, many plant cells, particularly those of the parenchyma, do not terminally differentiate, remaining totipotent with the ability to give rise to a new individual plant. Exceptions include highly lignified cells, the sclerenchyma and xylem which are dead at maturity, and the phloem sieve tubes which lack nuclei. While plants use many of the same epigenetic mechanisms as animals, such as chromatin remodelling, an alternative hypothesis is that plants set their gene expression patterns using positional information from the environment and surrounding cells to determine their developmental fate.[137]
+
+Epigenetic changes can lead to paramutations, which do not follow the Mendelian heritage rules. These epigenetic marks are carried from one generation to the next, with one allele inducing a change on the other.[138]
+
+The chloroplasts of plants have a number of biochemical, structural and genetic similarities to cyanobacteria, (commonly but incorrectly known as "blue-green algae") and are thought to be derived from an ancient endosymbiotic relationship between an ancestral eukaryotic cell and a cyanobacterial resident.[139][140][141][142]
+
+The algae are a polyphyletic group and are placed in various divisions, some more closely related to plants than others. There are many differences between them in features such as cell wall composition, biochemistry, pigmentation, chloroplast structure and nutrient reserves. The algal division Charophyta, sister to the green algal division Chlorophyta, is considered to contain the ancestor of true plants.[143] The Charophyte class Charophyceae and the land plant sub-kingdom Embryophyta together form the monophyletic group or clade Streptophytina.[144]
+
+Nonvascular land plants are embryophytes that lack the vascular tissues xylem and phloem. They include mosses, liverworts and hornworts. Pteridophytic vascular plants with true xylem and phloem that reproduced by spores germinating into free-living gametophytes evolved during the Silurian period and diversified into several lineages during the late Silurian and early Devonian. Representatives of the lycopods have survived to the present day. By the end of the Devonian period, several groups, including the lycopods, sphenophylls and progymnosperms, had independently evolved "megaspory" – their spores were of two distinct sizes, larger megaspores and smaller microspores. Their reduced gametophytes developed from megaspores retained within the spore-producing organs (megasporangia) of the sporophyte, a condition known as endospory. Seeds consist of an endosporic megasporangium surrounded by one or two sheathing layers (integuments). The young sporophyte develops within the seed, which on germination splits to release it. The earliest known seed plants date from the latest Devonian Famennian stage.[145][146] Following the evolution of the seed habit, seed plants diversified, giving rise to a number of now-extinct groups, including seed ferns, as well as the modern gymnosperms and angiosperms.[147] Gymnosperms produce "naked seeds" not fully enclosed in an ovary; modern representatives include conifers, cycads, Ginkgo, and Gnetales. Angiosperms produce seeds enclosed in a structure such as a carpel or an ovary.[148][149] Ongoing research on the molecular phylogenetics of living plants appears to show that the angiosperms are a sister clade to the gymnosperms.[150]
+
+Plant physiology encompasses all the internal chemical and physical activities of plants associated with life.[151] Chemicals obtained from the air, soil and water form the basis of all plant metabolism. The energy of sunlight, captured by oxygenic photosynthesis and released by cellular respiration, is the basis of almost all life. Photoautotrophs, including all green plants, algae and cyanobacteria gather energy directly from sunlight by photosynthesis. Heterotrophs including all animals, all fungi, all completely parasitic plants, and non-photosynthetic bacteria take in organic molecules produced by photoautotrophs and respire them or use them in the construction of cells and tissues.[152] Respiration is the oxidation of carbon compounds by breaking them down into simpler structures to release the energy they contain, essentially the opposite of photosynthesis.[153]
+
+Molecules are moved within plants by transport processes that operate at a variety of spatial scales. Subcellular transport of ions, electrons and molecules such as water and enzymes occurs across cell membranes. Minerals and water are transported from roots to other parts of the plant in the transpiration stream. Diffusion, osmosis, and active transport and mass flow are all different ways transport can occur.[154] Examples of elements that plants need to transport are nitrogen, phosphorus, potassium, calcium, magnesium, and sulfur. In vascular plants, these elements are extracted from the soil as soluble ions by the roots and transported throughout the plant in the xylem. Most of the elements required for plant nutrition come from the chemical breakdown of soil minerals.[155] Sucrose produced by photosynthesis is transported from the leaves to other parts of the plant in the phloem and plant hormones are transported by a variety of processes.
+
+Plants are not passive, but respond to external signals such as light, touch, and injury by moving or growing towards or away from the stimulus, as appropriate. Tangible evidence of touch sensitivity is the almost instantaneous collapse of leaflets of Mimosa pudica, the insect traps of Venus flytrap and bladderworts, and the pollinia of orchids.[157]
+
+The hypothesis that plant growth and development is coordinated by plant hormones or plant growth regulators first emerged in the late 19th century. Darwin experimented on the movements of plant shoots and roots towards light[158] and gravity, and concluded "It is hardly an exaggeration to say that the tip of the radicle . . acts like the brain of one of the lower animals . . directing the several movements".[159] About the same time, the role of auxins (from the Greek auxein, to grow) in control of plant growth was first outlined by the Dutch scientist Frits Went.[160] The first known auxin, indole-3-acetic acid (IAA), which promotes cell growth, was only isolated from plants about 50 years later.[161] This compound mediates the tropic responses of shoots and roots towards light and gravity.[162] The finding in 1939 that plant callus could be maintained in culture containing IAA, followed by the observation in 1947 that it could be induced to form roots and shoots by controlling the concentration of growth hormones were key steps in the development of plant biotechnology and genetic modification.[163]
+
+Cytokinins are a class of plant hormones named for their control of cell division (especially cytokinesis). The natural cytokinin zeatin was discovered in corn, Zea mays, and is a derivative of the purine adenine. Zeatin is produced in roots and transported to shoots in the xylem where it promotes cell division, bud development, and the greening of chloroplasts.[164][165] The gibberelins, such as Gibberelic acid are diterpenes synthesised from acetyl CoA via the mevalonate pathway. They are involved in the promotion of germination and dormancy-breaking in seeds, in regulation of plant height by controlling stem elongation and the control of flowering.[166] Abscisic acid (ABA) occurs in all land plants except liverworts, and is synthesised from carotenoids in the chloroplasts and other plastids. It inhibits cell division, promotes seed maturation, and dormancy, and promotes stomatal closure. It was so named because it was originally thought to control abscission.[167] Ethylene is a gaseous hormone that is produced in all higher plant tissues from methionine. It is now known to be the hormone that stimulates or regulates fruit ripening and abscission,[168][169] and it, or the synthetic growth regulator ethephon which is rapidly metabolised to produce ethylene, are used on industrial scale to promote ripening of cotton, pineapples and other climacteric crops.
+
+Another class of phytohormones is the jasmonates, first isolated from the oil of Jasminum grandiflorum[170] which regulates wound responses in plants by unblocking the expression of genes required in the systemic acquired resistance response to pathogen attack.[171]
+
+In addition to being the primary energy source for plants, light functions as a signalling device, providing information to the plant, such as how much sunlight the plant receives each day. This can result in adaptive changes in a process known as photomorphogenesis. Phytochromes are the photoreceptors in a plant that are sensitive to light.[172]
+
+Plant anatomy is the study of the structure of plant cells and tissues, whereas plant morphology is the study of their external form.[173]
+All plants are multicellular eukaryotes, their DNA stored in nuclei.[174][175] The characteristic features of plant cells that distinguish them from those of animals and fungi include a primary cell wall composed of the polysaccharides cellulose, hemicellulose and pectin, [176] larger vacuoles than in animal cells and the presence of plastids with unique photosynthetic and biosynthetic functions as in the chloroplasts. Other plastids contain storage products such as starch (amyloplasts) or lipids (elaioplasts). Uniquely, streptophyte cells and those of the green algal order Trentepohliales[177] divide by construction of a phragmoplast as a template for building a cell plate late in cell division.[81]
+
+The bodies of vascular plants including clubmosses, ferns and  seed plants (gymnosperms and angiosperms) generally have aerial and subterranean subsystems. The shoots consist of stems bearing green photosynthesising leaves and reproductive structures. The underground vascularised roots bear root hairs at their tips and generally lack chlorophyll.[179] Non-vascular plants, the liverworts, hornworts and mosses do not produce ground-penetrating vascular roots and most of the plant participates in photosynthesis.[180] The sporophyte generation is nonphotosynthetic in liverworts but may be able to contribute part of its energy needs by photosynthesis in mosses and hornworts.[181]
+
+The root system and the shoot system are interdependent – the usually nonphotosynthetic root system depends on the shoot system for food, and the usually photosynthetic shoot system depends on water and minerals from the root system.[179] Cells in each system are capable of creating cells of the other and producing adventitious shoots or roots.[182] Stolons and tubers are examples of shoots that can grow roots.[183] Roots that spread out close to the surface, such as those of willows, can produce shoots and ultimately new plants.[184] In the event that one of the systems is lost, the other can often regrow it. In fact it is possible to grow an entire plant from a single leaf, as is the case with Saintpaulia,[185] or even a single cell – which can dedifferentiate into a callus (a mass of unspecialised cells) that can grow into a new plant.[182]
+In vascular plants, the xylem and phloem are the conductive tissues that transport resources between shoots and roots. Roots are often adapted to store food such as sugars or starch,[179] as in sugar beets and carrots.[184]
+
+Stems mainly provide support to the leaves and reproductive structures, but can store water in succulent plants such as cacti, food as in potato tubers, or reproduce vegetatively as in the stolons of strawberry plants or in the process of layering.[186] Leaves gather sunlight and carry out photosynthesis.[187] Large, flat, flexible, green leaves are called foliage leaves.[188] Gymnosperms, such as conifers, cycads, Ginkgo, and gnetophytes are seed-producing plants with open seeds.[189] Angiosperms are seed-producing plants that produce flowers and have enclosed seeds.[148] Woody plants, such as azaleas and oaks, undergo a secondary growth phase resulting in two additional types of tissues: wood (secondary xylem) and bark (secondary phloem and cork). All gymnosperms and many angiosperms are woody plants.[190] Some plants reproduce sexually, some asexually, and some via both means.[191]
+
+Although reference to major morphological categories such as root, stem, leaf, and trichome are useful, one has to keep in mind that these categories are linked through intermediate forms so that a continuum between the categories results.[192] Furthermore, structures can be seen as processes, that is, process combinations.[46]
+
+Systematic botany is part of systematic biology, which is concerned with the range and diversity of organisms and their relationships, particularly as determined by their evolutionary history.[193] It involves, or is related to, biological classification, scientific taxonomy and phylogenetics. Biological classification is the method by which botanists group organisms into categories such as genera or species. Biological classification is a form of scientific taxonomy. Modern taxonomy is rooted in the work of Carl Linnaeus, who grouped species according to shared physical characteristics. These groupings have since been revised to align better with the Darwinian principle of common descent – grouping organisms by ancestry rather than superficial characteristics. While scientists do not always agree on how to classify organisms, molecular phylogenetics, which uses DNA sequences as data, has driven many recent revisions along evolutionary lines and is likely to continue to do so. The dominant classification system is called Linnaean taxonomy. It includes ranks and binomial nomenclature. The nomenclature of botanical organisms is codified in the International Code of Nomenclature for algae, fungi, and plants (ICN) and administered by the International Botanical Congress.[194][195]
+
+Kingdom Plantae belongs to Domain Eukarya and is broken down recursively until each species is separately classified. The order is: Kingdom; Phylum (or Division); Class; Order; Family; Genus (plural genera); Species. The scientific name of a plant represents its genus and its species within the genus, resulting in a single worldwide name for each organism.[195] For example, the tiger lily is Lilium columbianum. Lilium is the genus, and columbianum the specific epithet. The combination is the name of the species. When writing the scientific name of an organism, it is proper to capitalise the first letter in the genus and put all of the specific epithet in lowercase. Additionally, the entire term is ordinarily italicised (or underlined when italics are not available).[196][197][198]
+
+The evolutionary relationships and heredity of a group of organisms is called its phylogeny. Phylogenetic studies attempt to discover phylogenies. The basic approach is to use similarities based on shared inheritance to determine relationships.[199] As an example, species of Pereskia are trees or bushes with prominent leaves. They do not obviously resemble a typical leafless cactus such as an Echinocactus. However, both Pereskia and Echinocactus have spines produced from areoles (highly specialised pad-like structures) suggesting that the two genera are indeed related.[200][201]
+
+Judging relationships based on shared characters requires care, since plants may resemble one another through convergent evolution in which characters have arisen independently. Some euphorbias have leafless, rounded bodies adapted to water conservation similar to those of globular cacti, but characters such as the structure of their flowers make it clear that the two groups are not closely related. The cladistic method takes a systematic approach to characters, distinguishing between those that carry no information about shared evolutionary history – such as those evolved separately in different groups (homoplasies) or those left over from ancestors (plesiomorphies) – and derived characters, which have been passed down from innovations in a shared ancestor (apomorphies). Only derived characters, such as the spine-producing areoles of cacti, provide evidence for descent from a common ancestor. The results of cladistic analyses are expressed as cladograms: tree-like diagrams showing the pattern of evolutionary branching and descent.[202]
+
+From the 1990s onwards, the predominant approach to constructing phylogenies for living plants has been molecular phylogenetics, which uses molecular characters, particularly DNA sequences, rather than morphological characters like the presence or absence of spines and areoles. The difference is that the genetic code itself is used to decide evolutionary relationships, instead of being used indirectly via the characters it gives rise to. Clive Stace describes this as having "direct access to the genetic basis of evolution."[203] As a simple example, prior to the use of genetic evidence, fungi were thought either to be plants or to be more closely related to plants than animals. Genetic evidence suggests that the true evolutionary relationship of multicelled organisms is as shown in the cladogram below – fungi are more closely related to animals than to plants.[204]
+
+plants
+
+fungi
+
+animals
+
+In 1998, the Angiosperm Phylogeny Group published a phylogeny for flowering plants based on an analysis of DNA sequences from most families of flowering plants. As a result of this work, many questions, such as which families represent the earliest branches of angiosperms, have now been answered.[51] Investigating how plant species are related to each other allows botanists to better understand the process of evolution in plants.[205] Despite the study of model plants and increasing use of DNA evidence, there is ongoing work and discussion among taxonomists about how best to classify plants into various taxa.[206] Technological developments such as computers and electron microscopes have greatly increased the level of detail studied and speed at which data can be analysed.[207]

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+Botany, also called plant science(s), plant biology or phytology, is the science of plant life and a branch of biology. A botanist, plant scientist or phytologist is a scientist who specialises in this field. The term "botany" comes from the Ancient Greek word βοτάνη (botanē) meaning "pasture", "grass", or "fodder"; βοτάνη is in turn derived from βόσκειν (boskein), "to feed" or "to graze".[1][2][3]  Traditionally, botany has also included the study of fungi and algae by mycologists and phycologists respectively, with the study of these three groups of organisms remaining within the sphere of interest of the International Botanical Congress. Nowadays, botanists (in the strict sense) study approximately 410,000 species of land plants of which some 391,000 species are vascular plants (including approximately 369,000 species of flowering plants),[4] and approximately 20,000 are bryophytes.[5]
+
+Botany originated in prehistory as herbalism with the efforts of early humans to identify – and later cultivate – edible, medicinal and poisonous plants, making it one of the oldest branches of science. Medieval physic gardens, often attached to monasteries, contained plants of medical importance. They were forerunners of the first botanical gardens attached to universities, founded from the 1540s onwards. One of the earliest was the Padua botanical garden. These gardens facilitated the academic study of plants. Efforts to catalogue and describe their collections were the beginnings of plant taxonomy, and led in 1753 to the binomial system of Carl Linnaeus that remains in use to this day.
+
+In the 19th and 20th centuries, new techniques were developed for the study of plants, including methods of optical microscopy and live cell imaging, electron microscopy, analysis of chromosome number, plant chemistry and the structure and function of enzymes and other proteins. In the last two decades of the 20th century, botanists exploited the techniques of molecular genetic analysis, including genomics and proteomics and DNA sequences to classify plants more accurately.
+
+Modern botany is a broad, multidisciplinary subject with inputs from most other areas of science and technology. Research topics include the study of plant structure, growth and differentiation, reproduction, biochemistry and primary metabolism, chemical products, development, diseases, evolutionary relationships, systematics, and plant taxonomy. Dominant themes in 21st century plant science are molecular genetics and epigenetics, which are the mechanisms and control of gene expression during differentiation of plant cells and tissues. Botanical research has diverse applications in providing staple foods, materials such as timber, oil, rubber, fibre and drugs, in modern horticulture, agriculture and forestry, plant propagation, breeding and genetic modification, in the synthesis of chemicals and raw materials for construction and energy production, in environmental management, and the maintenance of biodiversity.
+
+Botany originated as herbalism, the study and use of plants for their medicinal properties.[6] Many records of the Holocene period date early botanical knowledge as far back as 10,000 years ago.[7] This early unrecorded knowledge of plants was discovered in ancient sites of human occupation within Tennessee, which make up much of the Cherokee land today.[7] The early recorded history of botany includes many ancient writings and plant classifications. Examples of early botanical works have been found in ancient texts from India dating back to before 1100 BC,[8][9] in archaic Avestan writings, and in works from China before it was unified in 221 BC.[8][10]
+
+Modern botany traces its roots back to Ancient Greece specifically to Theophrastus (c. 371–287 BC), a student of Aristotle who invented and described many of its principles and is widely regarded in the scientific community as the "Father of Botany".[11] His major works, Enquiry into Plants and On the Causes of Plants, constitute the most important contributions to botanical science until the Middle Ages, almost seventeen centuries later.[11][12]
+
+Another work from Ancient Greece that made an early impact on botany is De Materia Medica, a five-volume encyclopedia about herbal medicine written in the middle of the first century by Greek physician and pharmacologist Pedanius Dioscorides. De Materia Medica was widely read for more than 1,500 years.[13] Important contributions from the medieval Muslim world include Ibn Wahshiyya's Nabatean Agriculture, Abū Ḥanīfa Dīnawarī's (828–896) the Book of Plants, and Ibn Bassal's The Classification of Soils. In the early 13th century, Abu al-Abbas al-Nabati, and Ibn al-Baitar (d. 1248) wrote on botany in a systematic and scientific manner.[14][15][16]
+
+In the mid-16th century, "botanical gardens" were founded in a number of Italian universities – the Padua botanical garden in 1545 is usually considered to be the first which is still in its original location. These gardens continued the practical value of earlier "physic gardens", often associated with monasteries, in which plants were cultivated for medical use. They supported the growth of botany as an academic subject. Lectures were given about the plants grown in the gardens and their medical uses demonstrated. Botanical gardens came much later to northern Europe; the first in England was the University of Oxford Botanic Garden in 1621. Throughout this period, botany remained firmly subordinate to medicine.[17]
+
+German physician Leonhart Fuchs (1501–1566) was one of "the three German fathers of botany", along with theologian Otto Brunfels (1489–1534) and physician Hieronymus Bock (1498–1554) (also called Hieronymus Tragus).[18][19] Fuchs and Brunfels broke away from the tradition of copying earlier works to make original observations of their own. Bock created his own system of plant classification.
+
+Physician Valerius Cordus (1515–1544) authored a botanically and pharmacologically important herbal Historia Plantarum in 1544 and a pharmacopoeia of lasting importance, the Dispensatorium in 1546.[20] Naturalist Conrad von Gesner (1516–1565) and herbalist John Gerard (1545–c. 1611) published herbals covering the medicinal uses of plants. Naturalist Ulisse Aldrovandi (1522–1605) was considered the father of natural history, which included the study of plants. In 1665, using an early microscope, Polymath Robert Hooke discovered cells, a term he coined, in cork, and a short time later in living plant tissue.[21]
+
+During the 18th century, systems of plant identification were developed comparable to dichotomous keys, where unidentified plants are placed into taxonomic groups (e.g. family, genus and species) by making a series of choices between pairs of characters. The choice and sequence of the characters may be artificial in keys designed purely for identification (diagnostic keys) or more closely related to the natural or phyletic order of the taxa in synoptic keys.[22] By the 18th century, new plants for study were arriving in Europe in increasing numbers from newly discovered countries and the European colonies worldwide. In 1753, Carl von Linné (Carl Linnaeus) published his Species Plantarum, a hierarchical classification of plant species that remains the reference point for modern botanical nomenclature. This established a standardised binomial or two-part naming scheme where the first name represented the genus and the second identified the species within the genus.[23] For the purposes of identification, Linnaeus's Systema Sexuale classified plants into 24 groups according to the number of their male sexual organs. The 24th group, Cryptogamia, included all plants with concealed reproductive parts, mosses, liverworts, ferns, algae and fungi.[24]
+
+Increasing knowledge of plant anatomy, morphology and life cycles led to the realisation that there were more natural affinities between plants than the artificial sexual system of Linnaeus. Adanson (1763), de Jussieu (1789), and Candolle (1819) all proposed various alternative natural systems of classification that grouped plants using a wider range of shared characters and were widely followed. The Candollean system reflected his ideas of the progression of morphological complexity and the later classification by Bentham and Hooker, which was influential until the mid-19th century, was influenced by Candolle's approach. Darwin's publication of the Origin of Species in 1859 and his concept of common descent required modifications to the Candollean system to reflect evolutionary relationships as distinct from mere morphological similarity.[25]
+
+Botany was greatly stimulated by the appearance of the first "modern" textbook, Matthias Schleiden's Grundzüge der Wissenschaftlichen Botanik, published in English in 1849 as Principles of Scientific Botany.[26]  Schleiden was a microscopist and an early plant anatomist who co-founded the cell theory with Theodor Schwann and Rudolf Virchow and was among the first to grasp the significance of the cell nucleus that had been described by Robert Brown in 1831.[27]
+In 1855, Adolf Fick formulated Fick's laws that enabled the calculation of the rates of molecular diffusion in biological systems.[28]
+
+Building upon the gene-chromosome theory of heredity that originated with Gregor Mendel (1822–1884), August Weismann (1834–1914) proved that inheritance only takes place through gametes. No other cells can pass on inherited characters.[29] The work of Katherine Esau (1898–1997) on plant anatomy is still a major foundation of modern botany. Her books Plant Anatomy and Anatomy of Seed Plants have been key plant structural biology texts for more than half a century.[30][31]
+
+The discipline of plant ecology was pioneered in the late 19th century by botanists such as Eugenius Warming, who produced the hypothesis that plants form communities, and his mentor and successor Christen C. Raunkiær whose system for describing plant life forms is still in use today. The concept that the composition of plant communities such as temperate broadleaf forest changes by a process of ecological succession was developed by Henry Chandler Cowles, Arthur Tansley and Frederic Clements. Clements is credited with the idea of climax vegetation as the most complex vegetation that an environment can support and Tansley introduced the concept of ecosystems to biology.[32][33][34] Building on the extensive earlier work of Alphonse de Candolle, Nikolai Vavilov (1887–1943) produced accounts of the biogeography, centres of origin, and evolutionary history of economic plants.[35]
+
+Particularly since the mid-1960s there have been advances in understanding of the physics of plant physiological processes such as transpiration (the transport of water within plant tissues),  the temperature dependence of rates of water evaporation from the leaf surface and the molecular diffusion of water vapour and carbon dioxide through stomatal apertures. These developments, coupled with new methods for measuring the size of stomatal apertures, and the rate of photosynthesis have enabled precise description of the rates of gas exchange between plants and the atmosphere.[36][37] Innovations in statistical analysis by Ronald Fisher,[38] Frank Yates and others at Rothamsted Experimental Station facilitated rational experimental design and data analysis in botanical research.[39] The discovery and identification of the auxin plant hormones by Kenneth V. Thimann in 1948 enabled regulation of plant growth by externally applied chemicals. Frederick Campion Steward pioneered techniques of micropropagation and plant tissue culture controlled by plant hormones.[40] The synthetic auxin 2,4-Dichlorophenoxyacetic acid or 2,4-D was one of the first commercial synthetic herbicides.[41]
+
+20th century developments in plant biochemistry have been driven by modern techniques of organic chemical analysis, such as spectroscopy, chromatography and electrophoresis. With the rise of the related molecular-scale biological approaches of molecular biology, genomics, proteomics and metabolomics, the relationship between the plant genome and most aspects of the biochemistry, physiology, morphology and behaviour of plants can be subjected to detailed experimental analysis.[42] The concept originally stated by Gottlieb Haberlandt in 1902[43] that all plant cells are totipotent and can be grown in vitro ultimately enabled the use of genetic engineering experimentally to knock out a gene or genes responsible for a specific trait, or to add genes such as GFP that report when a gene of interest is being expressed. These technologies enable the biotechnological use of whole plants or plant cell cultures grown in bioreactors to synthesise pesticides, antibiotics or other pharmaceuticals, as well as the practical application of genetically modified crops designed for traits such as improved yield.[44]
+
+Modern morphology recognises a continuum between the major morphological categories of root, stem (caulome), leaf (phyllome) and trichome.[45] Furthermore, it emphasises structural dynamics.[46] Modern systematics aims to reflect and discover phylogenetic relationships between plants.[47][48][49][50] Modern Molecular phylogenetics largely ignores morphological characters, relying on DNA sequences as data. Molecular analysis of DNA sequences from most families of flowering plants enabled the Angiosperm Phylogeny Group to publish in 1998 a phylogeny of flowering plants, answering many of the questions about relationships among angiosperm families and species.[51] The theoretical possibility of a practical method for identification of plant species and commercial varieties by DNA barcoding is the subject of active current research.[52][53]
+
+The study of plants is vital because they underpin almost all animal life on Earth by generating a large proportion of the oxygen and food that provide humans and other organisms with aerobic respiration with the chemical energy they need to exist. Plants, algae and cyanobacteria are the major groups of organisms that carry out photosynthesis, a process that uses the energy of sunlight to convert water and carbon dioxide[54] into sugars that can be used both as a source of chemical energy and of organic molecules that are used in the structural components of cells.[55] As a by-product of photosynthesis, plants release oxygen into the atmosphere, a gas that is required by nearly all living things to carry out cellular respiration. In addition, they are influential in the global carbon and water cycles and plant roots bind and stabilise soils, preventing soil erosion.[56] Plants are crucial to the future of human society as they provide food, oxygen, medicine, and products for people, as well as creating and preserving soil.[57]
+
+Historically, all living things were classified as either animals or plants[58] and botany covered the study of all organisms not considered animals.[59] Botanists examine both the internal functions and processes within plant organelles, cells, tissues, whole plants, plant populations and plant communities. At each of these levels, a botanist may be concerned with the classification (taxonomy), phylogeny and evolution, structure (anatomy and morphology), or function (physiology) of plant life.[60]
+
+The strictest definition of "plant" includes only the "land plants" or embryophytes, which include seed plants (gymnosperms, including the pines, and flowering plants) and the free-sporing cryptogams including ferns, clubmosses, liverworts, hornworts and mosses. Embryophytes are multicellular eukaryotes descended from an ancestor that obtained its energy from sunlight by photosynthesis. They have life cycles with alternating haploid and diploid phases. The sexual haploid phase of embryophytes, known as the gametophyte, nurtures the developing diploid embryo sporophyte within its tissues for at least part of its life,[61] even in the seed plants, where the gametophyte itself is nurtured by its parent sporophyte.[62] Other groups of organisms that were previously studied by botanists include bacteria (now studied in bacteriology), fungi (mycology) – including lichen-forming fungi (lichenology), non-chlorophyte algae (phycology), and viruses (virology). However, attention is still given to these groups by botanists, and fungi (including lichens) and photosynthetic protists are usually covered in introductory botany courses.[63][64]
+
+Palaeobotanists study ancient plants in the fossil record to provide information about the evolutionary history of plants. Cyanobacteria, the first oxygen-releasing photosynthetic organisms on Earth, are thought to have given rise to the ancestor of plants by entering into an endosymbiotic relationship with an early eukaryote, ultimately becoming the chloroplasts in plant cells. The new photosynthetic plants (along with their algal relatives) accelerated the rise in atmospheric oxygen started by the cyanobacteria, changing the ancient oxygen-free, reducing, atmosphere to one in which free oxygen has been abundant for more than 2 billion years.[65][66]
+
+Among the important botanical questions of the 21st century are the role of plants as primary producers in the global cycling of life's basic ingredients: energy, carbon, oxygen, nitrogen and water, and ways that our plant stewardship can help address the global environmental issues of resource management, conservation, human food security, biologically invasive organisms, carbon sequestration, climate change, and sustainability.[67]
+
+Virtually all staple foods come either directly from primary production by plants, or indirectly from animals that eat them.[68]  Plants and other photosynthetic organisms are at the base of most food chains because they use the energy from the sun and nutrients from the soil and atmosphere, converting them into a form that can be used by animals. This is what ecologists call the first trophic level.[69]  The modern forms of the major staple foods, such as hemp, teff, maize, rice, wheat and other cereal grasses, pulses, bananas and plantains,[70] as well as hemp, flax and cotton grown for their fibres, are the outcome of prehistoric selection over thousands of years from among wild ancestral plants with the most desirable characteristics.[71]
+
+Botanists study how plants produce food and how to increase yields, for example through plant breeding, making their work important to humanity's ability to feed the world and provide food security for future generations.[72] Botanists also study weeds, which are a considerable problem in agriculture, and the biology and control of plant pathogens in agriculture and natural ecosystems.[73] Ethnobotany is the study of the relationships between plants and people. When applied to the investigation of historical plant–people relationships ethnobotany may be referred to as archaeobotany or palaeoethnobotany.[74] Some of the earliest plant-people relationships arose between the indigenous people of Canada in identifying edible plants from inedible plants.[75] This relationship the indigenous people had with plants was recorded by ethnobotanists.[75]
+
+Plant biochemistry is the study of the chemical processes used by plants. Some of these processes are used in their primary metabolism like the photosynthetic Calvin cycle and crassulacean acid metabolism.[76] Others make specialised materials like the cellulose and lignin used to build their bodies, and secondary products like resins and aroma compounds.
+
+Plants and various other groups of photosynthetic eukaryotes collectively known as "algae" have unique organelles known as chloroplasts. Chloroplasts are thought to be descended from cyanobacteria that formed endosymbiotic relationships with ancient plant and algal ancestors. Chloroplasts and cyanobacteria contain the blue-green pigment chlorophyll a.[77] Chlorophyll a (as well as its plant and green algal-specific cousin chlorophyll b)[a] absorbs light in the blue-violet and orange/red parts of the spectrum while reflecting and transmitting the green light that we see as the characteristic colour of these organisms. The energy in the red and blue light that these pigments absorb is used by chloroplasts to make energy-rich carbon compounds from carbon dioxide and water by oxygenic photosynthesis, a process that generates molecular oxygen (O2) as a by-product.
+
+The light energy captured by chlorophyll a is initially in the form of electrons (and later a proton gradient) that's used to make molecules of ATP and NADPH which temporarily store and transport energy. Their energy is used in the light-independent reactions of the Calvin cycle by the enzyme rubisco to produce molecules of the 3-carbon sugar glyceraldehyde 3-phosphate (G3P). Glyceraldehyde 3-phosphate is the first product of photosynthesis and the raw material from which glucose and almost all other organic molecules of biological origin are synthesised. Some of the glucose is converted to starch which is stored in the chloroplast.[81] Starch is the characteristic energy store of most land plants and algae, while inulin, a polymer of fructose is used for the same purpose in the sunflower family Asteraceae. Some of the glucose is converted to sucrose (common table sugar) for export to the rest of the plant.
+
+Unlike in animals (which lack chloroplasts), plants and their eukaryote relatives have delegated many biochemical roles to their chloroplasts, including synthesising all their fatty acids,[82][83] and most amino acids.[84] The fatty acids that chloroplasts make are used for many things, such as providing material to build cell membranes out of and making the polymer cutin which is found in the plant cuticle that protects land plants from drying out. [85]
+
+Plants synthesise a number of unique polymers like the polysaccharide molecules cellulose, pectin and xyloglucan[86] from which the land plant cell wall is constructed.[87]
+Vascular land plants make lignin, a polymer used to strengthen the secondary cell walls of xylem tracheids and vessels to keep them from collapsing when a plant sucks water through them under water stress. Lignin is also used in other cell types like sclerenchyma fibres that provide structural support for a plant and is a major constituent of wood. Sporopollenin is a chemically resistant polymer found in the outer cell walls of spores and pollen of land plants responsible for the survival of early land plant spores and the pollen of seed plants in the fossil record. It is widely regarded as a marker for the start of land plant evolution during the Ordovician period.[88]
+The concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere today is much lower than it was when plants emerged onto land during the Ordovician and Silurian periods. Many monocots like maize and the pineapple and some dicots like the Asteraceae have since independently evolved[89] pathways like Crassulacean acid metabolism and the C4 carbon fixation pathway for photosynthesis which avoid the losses resulting from photorespiration in the more common C3 carbon fixation pathway. These biochemical strategies are unique to land plants.
+
+Phytochemistry is a branch of plant biochemistry primarily concerned with the chemical substances produced by plants during secondary metabolism.[90] Some of these compounds are toxins such as the alkaloid coniine from hemlock. Others, such as the essential oils peppermint oil and lemon oil are useful for their aroma, as flavourings and spices (e.g., capsaicin), and in medicine as pharmaceuticals as in opium from opium poppies. Many medicinal and recreational drugs, such as tetrahydrocannabinol (active ingredient in cannabis), caffeine, morphine and nicotine come directly from plants. Others are simple derivatives of botanical natural products. For example, the pain killer aspirin is the acetyl ester of salicylic acid, originally isolated from the bark of willow trees,[91] and a wide range of opiate painkillers like heroin are obtained by chemical modification of morphine obtained from the opium poppy.[92] Popular stimulants come from plants, such as caffeine from coffee, tea and chocolate, and nicotine from tobacco. Most alcoholic beverages come from fermentation of carbohydrate-rich plant products such as barley (beer), rice (sake) and grapes (wine).[93] Native Americans have used various plants as ways of treating illness or disease for thousands of years.[94] This knowledge Native Americans have on plants has been recorded by enthnobotanists and then in turn has been used by pharmaceutical companies as a way of drug discovery.[95]
+
+Plants can synthesise useful coloured dyes and pigments such as the anthocyanins responsible for the red colour of red wine, yellow weld and blue woad used together to produce Lincoln green, indoxyl, source of the blue dye indigo traditionally used to dye denim and the artist's pigments gamboge and rose madder.
+Sugar, starch, cotton, linen, hemp, some types of rope, wood and particle boards, papyrus and paper, vegetable oils, wax, and natural rubber are examples of commercially important materials made from plant tissues or their secondary products. Charcoal, a pure form of carbon made by pyrolysis of wood, has a long history as a metal-smelting fuel, as a filter material and adsorbent and as an artist's material and is one of the three ingredients of gunpowder. Cellulose, the world's most abundant organic polymer,[96] can be converted into energy, fuels, materials and chemical feedstock. Products made from cellulose include rayon and cellophane, wallpaper paste, biobutanol and gun cotton. Sugarcane, rapeseed and soy are some of the plants with a highly fermentable sugar or oil content that are used as sources of biofuels, important alternatives to fossil fuels, such as biodiesel.[97]  Sweetgrass was used by Native Americans to ward off bugs like mosquitoes.[98] These bug repelling properties of sweetgrass were later found by the American Chemical Society in the molecules phytol and coumarin.[98]
+
+Plant ecology is the science of the functional relationships between plants and their habitats – the environments where they complete their life cycles. Plant ecologists study the composition of local and regional floras, their biodiversity, genetic diversity and fitness, the adaptation of plants to their environment, and their competitive or mutualistic interactions with other species.[99] Some ecologists even rely on empirical data from indigenous people that is gathered by ethnobotanists.[100] This information can relay a great deal of information on how the land once was thousands of years ago and how it has changed over that time.[100] The goals of plant ecology are to understand the causes of their distribution patterns, productivity, environmental impact, evolution, and responses to environmental change.[101]
+
+Plants depend on certain edaphic (soil) and climatic factors in their environment but can modify these factors too. For example, they can change their environment's albedo, increase runoff interception, stabilise mineral soils and develop their organic content, and affect local temperature. Plants compete with other organisms in their ecosystem for resources.[102][103] They interact with their neighbours at a variety of spatial scales in groups, populations and communities that collectively constitute vegetation. Regions with characteristic vegetation types and dominant plants as well as similar abiotic and biotic factors, climate, and geography make up biomes like tundra or tropical rainforest.[104]
+
+Herbivores eat plants, but plants can defend themselves and some species are parasitic or even carnivorous. Other organisms form mutually beneficial relationships with plants. For example, mycorrhizal fungi and rhizobia provide plants with nutrients in exchange for food, ants are recruited by ant plants to provide protection,[106] honey bees, bats and other animals pollinate flowers[107][108] and humans and other animals[109] act as dispersal vectors to spread spores and seeds.
+
+Plant responses to climate and other environmental changes can inform our understanding of how these changes affect ecosystem function and productivity. For example, plant phenology can be a useful proxy for temperature in historical climatology, and the biological impact of climate change and global warming. Palynology, the analysis of fossil pollen deposits in sediments from thousands or millions of years ago allows the reconstruction of past climates.[110] Estimates of atmospheric CO2 concentrations since the Palaeozoic have been obtained from stomatal densities and the leaf shapes and sizes of ancient land plants.[111] Ozone depletion can expose plants to higher levels of ultraviolet radiation-B (UV-B), resulting in lower growth rates.[112] Moreover, information from studies of community ecology, plant systematics, and taxonomy is essential to understanding vegetation change, habitat destruction and species extinction.[113]
+
+Inheritance in plants follows the same fundamental principles of genetics as in other multicellular organisms. Gregor Mendel discovered the genetic laws of inheritance by studying inherited traits such as shape in Pisum sativum (peas). What Mendel learned from studying plants has had far reaching benefits outside of botany. Similarly, "jumping genes" were discovered by Barbara McClintock while she was studying maize.[114] Nevertheless, there are some distinctive genetic differences between plants and other organisms.
+
+Species boundaries in plants may be weaker than in animals, and cross species hybrids are often possible. A familiar example is peppermint, Mentha × piperita, a sterile hybrid between Mentha aquatica and spearmint, Mentha spicata.[115] The many cultivated varieties of wheat are the result of multiple inter- and intra-specific crosses between wild species and their hybrids.[116] Angiosperms with monoecious flowers often have self-incompatibility mechanisms that operate between the pollen and stigma so that the pollen either fails to reach the stigma or fails to germinate and produce male gametes.[117] This is one of several methods used by plants to promote outcrossing.[118] In many land plants the male and female gametes are produced by separate individuals. These species are said to be dioecious when referring to vascular plant sporophytes and dioicous when referring to bryophyte gametophytes.[119]
+
+Unlike in higher animals, where parthenogenesis is rare, asexual reproduction may occur in plants by several different mechanisms. The formation of stem tubers in potato is one example. Particularly in arctic or alpine habitats, where opportunities for fertilisation of flowers by animals are rare, plantlets or bulbs, may develop instead of flowers, replacing sexual reproduction with asexual reproduction and giving rise to clonal populations genetically identical to the parent. This is one of several types of apomixis that occur in plants. Apomixis can also happen in a seed, producing a seed that contains an embryo genetically identical to the parent.[120]
+
+Most sexually reproducing organisms are diploid, with paired chromosomes, but doubling of their chromosome number may occur due to errors in cytokinesis. This can occur early in development to produce an autopolyploid or partly autopolyploid organism, or during normal processes of cellular differentiation to produce some cell types that are polyploid (endopolyploidy), or during gamete formation. An allopolyploid plant may result from a hybridisation event between two different species. Both autopolyploid and allopolyploid plants can often reproduce normally, but may be unable to cross-breed successfully with the parent population because there is a mismatch in chromosome numbers. These plants that are reproductively isolated from the parent species but live within the same geographical area, may be sufficiently successful to form a new species.[121] Some otherwise sterile plant polyploids can still reproduce vegetatively or by seed apomixis, forming clonal populations of identical individuals.[121] Durum wheat is a fertile tetraploid allopolyploid, while bread wheat is a fertile hexaploid. The commercial banana is an example of a sterile, seedless triploid hybrid. Common dandelion is a triploid that produces viable seeds by apomictic seed.
+
+As in other eukaryotes, the inheritance of endosymbiotic organelles like mitochondria and chloroplasts in plants is non-Mendelian. Chloroplasts are inherited through the male parent in gymnosperms but often through the female parent in flowering plants.[122]
+
+A considerable amount of new knowledge about plant function comes from studies of the molecular genetics of model plants such as the Thale cress, Arabidopsis thaliana, a weedy species in the mustard family (Brassicaceae).[90] The genome or hereditary information contained in the genes of this species is encoded by about 135 million base pairs of DNA, forming one of the smallest genomes among flowering plants. Arabidopsis was the first plant to have its genome sequenced, in 2000.[123] The sequencing of some other relatively small genomes, of rice (Oryza sativa)[124] and Brachypodium distachyon,[125] has made them important model species for understanding the genetics, cellular and molecular biology of cereals, grasses and monocots generally.
+
+Model plants such as Arabidopsis thaliana are used for studying the molecular biology of plant cells and the chloroplast. Ideally, these organisms have small genomes that are well known or completely sequenced, small stature and short generation times. Corn has been used to study mechanisms of photosynthesis and phloem loading of sugar in C4 plants.[126] The single celled green alga Chlamydomonas reinhardtii, while not an embryophyte itself, contains a green-pigmented chloroplast related to that of land plants, making it useful for study.[127] A red alga Cyanidioschyzon merolae has also been used to study some basic chloroplast functions.[128] Spinach,[129] peas,[130] soybeans and a moss Physcomitrella patens are commonly used to study plant cell biology.[131]
+
+Agrobacterium tumefaciens, a soil rhizosphere bacterium, can attach to plant cells and infect them with a callus-inducing Ti plasmid by horizontal gene transfer, causing a callus infection called crown gall disease. Schell and Van Montagu (1977) hypothesised that the Ti plasmid could be a natural vector for introducing the Nif gene responsible for nitrogen fixation in the root nodules of legumes and other plant species.[132] Today, genetic modification of the Ti plasmid is one of the main techniques for introduction of transgenes to plants and the creation of genetically modified crops.
+
+Epigenetics is the study of heritable changes in gene function that cannot be explained by changes in the underlying DNA sequence[133] but cause the organism's genes to behave (or "express themselves") differently.[134] One example of epigenetic change is the marking of the genes by DNA methylation which determines whether they will be expressed or not. Gene expression can also be controlled by repressor proteins that attach to silencer regions of the DNA and prevent that region of the DNA code from being expressed. Epigenetic marks may be added or removed from the DNA during programmed stages of development of the plant, and are responsible, for example, for the differences between anthers, petals and normal leaves, despite the fact that they all have the same underlying genetic code. Epigenetic changes may be temporary or may remain through successive cell divisions for the remainder of the cell's life. Some epigenetic changes have been shown to be heritable,[135] while others are reset in the germ cells.
+
+Epigenetic changes in eukaryotic biology serve to regulate the process of cellular differentiation. During morphogenesis, totipotent stem cells become the various pluripotent cell lines of the embryo, which in turn become fully differentiated cells. A single fertilised egg cell, the zygote, gives rise to the many different plant cell types including parenchyma, xylem vessel elements, phloem sieve tubes, guard cells of the epidermis, etc. as it continues to divide. The process results from the epigenetic activation of some genes and inhibition of others.[136]
+
+Unlike animals, many plant cells, particularly those of the parenchyma, do not terminally differentiate, remaining totipotent with the ability to give rise to a new individual plant. Exceptions include highly lignified cells, the sclerenchyma and xylem which are dead at maturity, and the phloem sieve tubes which lack nuclei. While plants use many of the same epigenetic mechanisms as animals, such as chromatin remodelling, an alternative hypothesis is that plants set their gene expression patterns using positional information from the environment and surrounding cells to determine their developmental fate.[137]
+
+Epigenetic changes can lead to paramutations, which do not follow the Mendelian heritage rules. These epigenetic marks are carried from one generation to the next, with one allele inducing a change on the other.[138]
+
+The chloroplasts of plants have a number of biochemical, structural and genetic similarities to cyanobacteria, (commonly but incorrectly known as "blue-green algae") and are thought to be derived from an ancient endosymbiotic relationship between an ancestral eukaryotic cell and a cyanobacterial resident.[139][140][141][142]
+
+The algae are a polyphyletic group and are placed in various divisions, some more closely related to plants than others. There are many differences between them in features such as cell wall composition, biochemistry, pigmentation, chloroplast structure and nutrient reserves. The algal division Charophyta, sister to the green algal division Chlorophyta, is considered to contain the ancestor of true plants.[143] The Charophyte class Charophyceae and the land plant sub-kingdom Embryophyta together form the monophyletic group or clade Streptophytina.[144]
+
+Nonvascular land plants are embryophytes that lack the vascular tissues xylem and phloem. They include mosses, liverworts and hornworts. Pteridophytic vascular plants with true xylem and phloem that reproduced by spores germinating into free-living gametophytes evolved during the Silurian period and diversified into several lineages during the late Silurian and early Devonian. Representatives of the lycopods have survived to the present day. By the end of the Devonian period, several groups, including the lycopods, sphenophylls and progymnosperms, had independently evolved "megaspory" – their spores were of two distinct sizes, larger megaspores and smaller microspores. Their reduced gametophytes developed from megaspores retained within the spore-producing organs (megasporangia) of the sporophyte, a condition known as endospory. Seeds consist of an endosporic megasporangium surrounded by one or two sheathing layers (integuments). The young sporophyte develops within the seed, which on germination splits to release it. The earliest known seed plants date from the latest Devonian Famennian stage.[145][146] Following the evolution of the seed habit, seed plants diversified, giving rise to a number of now-extinct groups, including seed ferns, as well as the modern gymnosperms and angiosperms.[147] Gymnosperms produce "naked seeds" not fully enclosed in an ovary; modern representatives include conifers, cycads, Ginkgo, and Gnetales. Angiosperms produce seeds enclosed in a structure such as a carpel or an ovary.[148][149] Ongoing research on the molecular phylogenetics of living plants appears to show that the angiosperms are a sister clade to the gymnosperms.[150]
+
+Plant physiology encompasses all the internal chemical and physical activities of plants associated with life.[151] Chemicals obtained from the air, soil and water form the basis of all plant metabolism. The energy of sunlight, captured by oxygenic photosynthesis and released by cellular respiration, is the basis of almost all life. Photoautotrophs, including all green plants, algae and cyanobacteria gather energy directly from sunlight by photosynthesis. Heterotrophs including all animals, all fungi, all completely parasitic plants, and non-photosynthetic bacteria take in organic molecules produced by photoautotrophs and respire them or use them in the construction of cells and tissues.[152] Respiration is the oxidation of carbon compounds by breaking them down into simpler structures to release the energy they contain, essentially the opposite of photosynthesis.[153]
+
+Molecules are moved within plants by transport processes that operate at a variety of spatial scales. Subcellular transport of ions, electrons and molecules such as water and enzymes occurs across cell membranes. Minerals and water are transported from roots to other parts of the plant in the transpiration stream. Diffusion, osmosis, and active transport and mass flow are all different ways transport can occur.[154] Examples of elements that plants need to transport are nitrogen, phosphorus, potassium, calcium, magnesium, and sulfur. In vascular plants, these elements are extracted from the soil as soluble ions by the roots and transported throughout the plant in the xylem. Most of the elements required for plant nutrition come from the chemical breakdown of soil minerals.[155] Sucrose produced by photosynthesis is transported from the leaves to other parts of the plant in the phloem and plant hormones are transported by a variety of processes.
+
+Plants are not passive, but respond to external signals such as light, touch, and injury by moving or growing towards or away from the stimulus, as appropriate. Tangible evidence of touch sensitivity is the almost instantaneous collapse of leaflets of Mimosa pudica, the insect traps of Venus flytrap and bladderworts, and the pollinia of orchids.[157]
+
+The hypothesis that plant growth and development is coordinated by plant hormones or plant growth regulators first emerged in the late 19th century. Darwin experimented on the movements of plant shoots and roots towards light[158] and gravity, and concluded "It is hardly an exaggeration to say that the tip of the radicle . . acts like the brain of one of the lower animals . . directing the several movements".[159] About the same time, the role of auxins (from the Greek auxein, to grow) in control of plant growth was first outlined by the Dutch scientist Frits Went.[160] The first known auxin, indole-3-acetic acid (IAA), which promotes cell growth, was only isolated from plants about 50 years later.[161] This compound mediates the tropic responses of shoots and roots towards light and gravity.[162] The finding in 1939 that plant callus could be maintained in culture containing IAA, followed by the observation in 1947 that it could be induced to form roots and shoots by controlling the concentration of growth hormones were key steps in the development of plant biotechnology and genetic modification.[163]
+
+Cytokinins are a class of plant hormones named for their control of cell division (especially cytokinesis). The natural cytokinin zeatin was discovered in corn, Zea mays, and is a derivative of the purine adenine. Zeatin is produced in roots and transported to shoots in the xylem where it promotes cell division, bud development, and the greening of chloroplasts.[164][165] The gibberelins, such as Gibberelic acid are diterpenes synthesised from acetyl CoA via the mevalonate pathway. They are involved in the promotion of germination and dormancy-breaking in seeds, in regulation of plant height by controlling stem elongation and the control of flowering.[166] Abscisic acid (ABA) occurs in all land plants except liverworts, and is synthesised from carotenoids in the chloroplasts and other plastids. It inhibits cell division, promotes seed maturation, and dormancy, and promotes stomatal closure. It was so named because it was originally thought to control abscission.[167] Ethylene is a gaseous hormone that is produced in all higher plant tissues from methionine. It is now known to be the hormone that stimulates or regulates fruit ripening and abscission,[168][169] and it, or the synthetic growth regulator ethephon which is rapidly metabolised to produce ethylene, are used on industrial scale to promote ripening of cotton, pineapples and other climacteric crops.
+
+Another class of phytohormones is the jasmonates, first isolated from the oil of Jasminum grandiflorum[170] which regulates wound responses in plants by unblocking the expression of genes required in the systemic acquired resistance response to pathogen attack.[171]
+
+In addition to being the primary energy source for plants, light functions as a signalling device, providing information to the plant, such as how much sunlight the plant receives each day. This can result in adaptive changes in a process known as photomorphogenesis. Phytochromes are the photoreceptors in a plant that are sensitive to light.[172]
+
+Plant anatomy is the study of the structure of plant cells and tissues, whereas plant morphology is the study of their external form.[173]
+All plants are multicellular eukaryotes, their DNA stored in nuclei.[174][175] The characteristic features of plant cells that distinguish them from those of animals and fungi include a primary cell wall composed of the polysaccharides cellulose, hemicellulose and pectin, [176] larger vacuoles than in animal cells and the presence of plastids with unique photosynthetic and biosynthetic functions as in the chloroplasts. Other plastids contain storage products such as starch (amyloplasts) or lipids (elaioplasts). Uniquely, streptophyte cells and those of the green algal order Trentepohliales[177] divide by construction of a phragmoplast as a template for building a cell plate late in cell division.[81]
+
+The bodies of vascular plants including clubmosses, ferns and  seed plants (gymnosperms and angiosperms) generally have aerial and subterranean subsystems. The shoots consist of stems bearing green photosynthesising leaves and reproductive structures. The underground vascularised roots bear root hairs at their tips and generally lack chlorophyll.[179] Non-vascular plants, the liverworts, hornworts and mosses do not produce ground-penetrating vascular roots and most of the plant participates in photosynthesis.[180] The sporophyte generation is nonphotosynthetic in liverworts but may be able to contribute part of its energy needs by photosynthesis in mosses and hornworts.[181]
+
+The root system and the shoot system are interdependent – the usually nonphotosynthetic root system depends on the shoot system for food, and the usually photosynthetic shoot system depends on water and minerals from the root system.[179] Cells in each system are capable of creating cells of the other and producing adventitious shoots or roots.[182] Stolons and tubers are examples of shoots that can grow roots.[183] Roots that spread out close to the surface, such as those of willows, can produce shoots and ultimately new plants.[184] In the event that one of the systems is lost, the other can often regrow it. In fact it is possible to grow an entire plant from a single leaf, as is the case with Saintpaulia,[185] or even a single cell – which can dedifferentiate into a callus (a mass of unspecialised cells) that can grow into a new plant.[182]
+In vascular plants, the xylem and phloem are the conductive tissues that transport resources between shoots and roots. Roots are often adapted to store food such as sugars or starch,[179] as in sugar beets and carrots.[184]
+
+Stems mainly provide support to the leaves and reproductive structures, but can store water in succulent plants such as cacti, food as in potato tubers, or reproduce vegetatively as in the stolons of strawberry plants or in the process of layering.[186] Leaves gather sunlight and carry out photosynthesis.[187] Large, flat, flexible, green leaves are called foliage leaves.[188] Gymnosperms, such as conifers, cycads, Ginkgo, and gnetophytes are seed-producing plants with open seeds.[189] Angiosperms are seed-producing plants that produce flowers and have enclosed seeds.[148] Woody plants, such as azaleas and oaks, undergo a secondary growth phase resulting in two additional types of tissues: wood (secondary xylem) and bark (secondary phloem and cork). All gymnosperms and many angiosperms are woody plants.[190] Some plants reproduce sexually, some asexually, and some via both means.[191]
+
+Although reference to major morphological categories such as root, stem, leaf, and trichome are useful, one has to keep in mind that these categories are linked through intermediate forms so that a continuum between the categories results.[192] Furthermore, structures can be seen as processes, that is, process combinations.[46]
+
+Systematic botany is part of systematic biology, which is concerned with the range and diversity of organisms and their relationships, particularly as determined by their evolutionary history.[193] It involves, or is related to, biological classification, scientific taxonomy and phylogenetics. Biological classification is the method by which botanists group organisms into categories such as genera or species. Biological classification is a form of scientific taxonomy. Modern taxonomy is rooted in the work of Carl Linnaeus, who grouped species according to shared physical characteristics. These groupings have since been revised to align better with the Darwinian principle of common descent – grouping organisms by ancestry rather than superficial characteristics. While scientists do not always agree on how to classify organisms, molecular phylogenetics, which uses DNA sequences as data, has driven many recent revisions along evolutionary lines and is likely to continue to do so. The dominant classification system is called Linnaean taxonomy. It includes ranks and binomial nomenclature. The nomenclature of botanical organisms is codified in the International Code of Nomenclature for algae, fungi, and plants (ICN) and administered by the International Botanical Congress.[194][195]
+
+Kingdom Plantae belongs to Domain Eukarya and is broken down recursively until each species is separately classified. The order is: Kingdom; Phylum (or Division); Class; Order; Family; Genus (plural genera); Species. The scientific name of a plant represents its genus and its species within the genus, resulting in a single worldwide name for each organism.[195] For example, the tiger lily is Lilium columbianum. Lilium is the genus, and columbianum the specific epithet. The combination is the name of the species. When writing the scientific name of an organism, it is proper to capitalise the first letter in the genus and put all of the specific epithet in lowercase. Additionally, the entire term is ordinarily italicised (or underlined when italics are not available).[196][197][198]
+
+The evolutionary relationships and heredity of a group of organisms is called its phylogeny. Phylogenetic studies attempt to discover phylogenies. The basic approach is to use similarities based on shared inheritance to determine relationships.[199] As an example, species of Pereskia are trees or bushes with prominent leaves. They do not obviously resemble a typical leafless cactus such as an Echinocactus. However, both Pereskia and Echinocactus have spines produced from areoles (highly specialised pad-like structures) suggesting that the two genera are indeed related.[200][201]
+
+Judging relationships based on shared characters requires care, since plants may resemble one another through convergent evolution in which characters have arisen independently. Some euphorbias have leafless, rounded bodies adapted to water conservation similar to those of globular cacti, but characters such as the structure of their flowers make it clear that the two groups are not closely related. The cladistic method takes a systematic approach to characters, distinguishing between those that carry no information about shared evolutionary history – such as those evolved separately in different groups (homoplasies) or those left over from ancestors (plesiomorphies) – and derived characters, which have been passed down from innovations in a shared ancestor (apomorphies). Only derived characters, such as the spine-producing areoles of cacti, provide evidence for descent from a common ancestor. The results of cladistic analyses are expressed as cladograms: tree-like diagrams showing the pattern of evolutionary branching and descent.[202]
+
+From the 1990s onwards, the predominant approach to constructing phylogenies for living plants has been molecular phylogenetics, which uses molecular characters, particularly DNA sequences, rather than morphological characters like the presence or absence of spines and areoles. The difference is that the genetic code itself is used to decide evolutionary relationships, instead of being used indirectly via the characters it gives rise to. Clive Stace describes this as having "direct access to the genetic basis of evolution."[203] As a simple example, prior to the use of genetic evidence, fungi were thought either to be plants or to be more closely related to plants than animals. Genetic evidence suggests that the true evolutionary relationship of multicelled organisms is as shown in the cladogram below – fungi are more closely related to animals than to plants.[204]
+
+plants
+
+fungi
+
+animals
+
+In 1998, the Angiosperm Phylogeny Group published a phylogeny for flowering plants based on an analysis of DNA sequences from most families of flowering plants. As a result of this work, many questions, such as which families represent the earliest branches of angiosperms, have now been answered.[51] Investigating how plant species are related to each other allows botanists to better understand the process of evolution in plants.[205] Despite the study of model plants and increasing use of DNA evidence, there is ongoing work and discussion among taxonomists about how best to classify plants into various taxa.[206] Technological developments such as computers and electron microscopes have greatly increased the level of detail studied and speed at which data can be analysed.[207]

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+
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+in the African Union (light blue)
+
+Botswana (/bɒtˈswɑːnə/ (listen), also UK: /bʊt-, bʊˈtʃw-/[14]), officially the Republic of Botswana (Setswana: Lefatshe la Botswana; Kalanga: Hango yeBotswana), is a landlocked country in Southern Africa. Formerly the British protectorate of Bechuanaland, Botswana adopted its name after becoming independent within the Commonwealth on 30 September 1966.[15] Since then, it has been a representative republic, with a consistent record of uninterrupted democratic elections and the lowest perceived corruption ranking in Africa since at least 1998.[16] It is currently Africa's oldest continuous democracy.[17] Botswana is topographically flat, with up to 70 percent of its territory being the Kalahari Desert. It is bordered by South Africa to the south and southeast, Namibia to the west and north, and Zimbabwe to the northeast. Its border with Zambia to the north near Kazungula is poorly defined but is, at most, a few hundred metres long.[18]
+
+A mid-sized country of just over 2.3 million people, Botswana is one of the most sparsely populated countries in the world. Around 10 percent of the population lives in the capital and largest city, Gaborone. Formerly one of the poorest countries in the world—with a GDP per capita of about US$70 per year in the late 1960s—Botswana has since transformed itself into an upper middle income country, with one of the world's fastest-growing economies.[19] The economy is dominated by mining, cattle, and tourism. Botswana boasts a GDP (purchasing power parity) per capita of about $18,825 per year as of 2015[update], which is one of the highest in Africa.[1] Its high gross national income (by some estimates the fourth-largest in Africa) gives the country a relatively high standard of living and the highest Human Development Index of continental Sub-Saharan Africa.[20]
+
+Botswana is a member of the African Union, the Southern African Development Community, the Commonwealth of Nations, and the United Nations. The country has been among the hardest hit by the HIV/AIDS epidemic. Despite the success in programmes to make treatments available to those infected, and to educate the populace in general about how to stop the spread of HIV/AIDS, the number of people with AIDS rose from 290,000 in 2005 to 320,000 in 2013.[21]:A20 As of 2014[update], Botswana has the third-highest prevalence rate for HIV/AIDS, with roughly 20% of the population infected.[22]
+
+The country's name means "Land of the Tswana", referring to the dominant ethnic group in Botswana.[23] The term Batswana was originally applied to the Tswana, which is still the case.[24] However, it has also come to be used generally as a demonym for all citizens of Botswana.[25] Many English dictionaries also recommend the term Botswanan to refer to people of Botswana even though that term is rarely used in the country.[26]
+
+Archaeological digs have shown that hominids have lived in Botswana for around two million years. Stone tools and fauna remains have shown that all areas of the country were inhabited at least 400,000 years ago.[27] In October 2019, researchers reported that Botswana was the birthplace of all modern humans about 200,000 years ago.[28][29] Evidence left by modern humans such as cave paintings are about 73,000 years old.[30] The original inhabitants of southern Africa were the Bushmen (San) and Khoi peoples. Both speak Khoisan languages and hunted, gathered, and traded over long distances. When cattle were first introduced about 2000 years ago into southern Africa, pastoralism became a major feature of the economy, since the region had large grasslands free of tsetse fly.[31]
+
+It is unclear when Bantu-speaking peoples first moved into the country from the north, although AD 600 seems to be a consensus estimate. In that era, the ancestors of the modern-day Kalanga moved into what is now the north-eastern areas of the country. These proto-Kalanga were closely connected to states in Zimbabwe as well as to the Mapungubwe state and the notable of these was Domboshaba ruins which is a cultural and heritage site in Botswana originally occupied towards the end of the Great Zimbabwe period (1250–1450 AD) with stone walls that have an average height of 1.8 metres.. The site is a respected place for the people living in the region and it is believed that the chief lived on the top of the hill together with his helpers or assistants. These states, located outside of current Botswana's borders, appear to have kept massive cattle herds in what is now the Central District—apparently at numbers approaching modern cattle density.[32] This massive cattle-raising complex prospered until 1300 AD or so, and seems to have regressed following the collapse of Mapungubwe. During this era, the first Tswana-speaking groups, the Bakgalagadi, moved into the southern areas of the Kalahari. All these various peoples were connected to trade routes that ran via the Limpopo River to the Indian Ocean, and trade goods from Asia such as beads made their way to Botswana most likely in exchange for ivory, gold, and rhinoceros horn.[33]
+Toutswemogala Hill Iron Age Settlement's radio-carbon dates for this settlement range from 7th to late 19th century AD indicating occupation of more than one thousand years. The hill was part of the formation of early states in Southern Africa with cattle keeping as major source of economy. Toutswe settlement include house-floors, large heaps of vitrified cow-dog and burials while the outstanding structure is the stone wall. There are large traits of centaurs ciliaris, a type of grass which has come to be associated with cattle-keeping settlements in South, Central Africa.Around 700 A.D., the Toutswe people moved westward into Botswana and began an agricultural and pastoral land tenure system based on sorghum and millet, and domesticated stock, respectively.[34] The site was situated in the center of a broader cultural area in Eastern Botswana and shares many commonalities with other archaeological sites of this region, in both ceramic production styles and also timeframes inhabited.[34] Large structures were observed that contained vitrified remains of animal dung, leading to the theory that these were animal enclosures and that Toutswemogala Hill was thus a major center of animal husbandry in the region.[34] However, agriculture also played a vital role in the longevity of Toutswemogala Hill's extended occupation, as many grain storage structures have also been found on the site.  Many different stratified layers of housing floors further signal continuous occupation over hundreds of years.
+
+The arrival of the ancestors of the Tswana-speakers who came to control the region has yet to be dated precisely. Members of the Bakwena, a chieftaincy under a legendary leader named Kgabo II, made their way into the southern Kalahari by AD 1500, at the latest, and his people drove the Bakgalagadi inhabitants west into the desert. Over the years, several offshoots of the Bakwena moved into adjoining territories. The Bangwaketse occupied areas to the west, while the Bangwato moved northeast into formerly Kalanga areas.[35] Not long afterwards, a Bangwato offshoot known as the Batawana migrated into the Okavango Delta, probably in the 1790s.[36]
+
+The first written records relating to modern-day Botswana appear in 1824. What these records show is that the Bangwaketse had become the predominant power in the region. Under the rule of Makaba II, the Bangwaketse kept vast herds of cattle in well-protected desert areas, and used their military prowess to raid their neighbours.[37] Other chiefdoms in the area, by this time, had capitals of 10,000 or so and were fairly prosperous.[38] This equilibrium came to end during the Mfecane period, 1823–1843, when a succession of invading peoples from South Africa entered the country. Although the Bangwaketse were able to defeat the invading Bakololo in 1826, over time all the major chiefdoms in Botswana were attacked, weakened, and impoverished. The Bakololo and Amandebele raided repeatedly and took large numbers of cattle, women, and children from the Batswana—most of whom were driven into the desert or sanctuary areas such as hilltops and caves. Only after 1843, when the Amandebele moved into western Zimbabwe, did this threat subside.[39]
+
+During the 1840s and 1850s trade with Cape Colony-based merchants opened up and enabled the Batswana chiefdoms to rebuild. The Bakwena, Bangwaketse, Bangwato and Batawana cooperated to control the lucrative ivory trade and then used the proceeds to import horses and guns, which in turn enabled them to establish control over what is now Botswana. This process was largely complete by 1880, and thus the Bushmen, the Kalanga, the Bakgalagadi, and other current minorities were subjugated by the Batswana.[40]
+
+Following the Great Trek, Afrikaners from the Cape Colony established themselves on the borders of Botswana in the Transvaal. In 1852 a coalition of Tswana chiefdoms led by Sechele I resisted Afrikaner incursions during Battle of Dimawe, and after about eight years of intermittent tensions and hostilities, eventually came to a peace agreement in Potchefstroom in 1860. From that point on, the modern-day border between South Africa and Botswana was agreed on, and the Afrikaners and Batswana traded and worked together comparatively peacefully.[41][42]
+
+In 1884 Batawana a northern based Tswana clan's Cavalry under the command of Kgosi Moremi fought & defeated the Ndebele's invasion of northern Botswana at the Battle of Khutiyabasadi, this blow to the larger invading Ndebele force signaled the start of the collapse of the Ndebele Kingdom in Zimbabwe & this helped galvanize Tswana speaking authority of the area now making part of northern Botswana. .[43]
+
+Due to newly peaceful conditions, trade thrived between 1860 and 1880. Taking advantage of this were Christian missionaries. The Lutherans and the London Missionary Society both became established in the country by 1856. By 1880 every major village had a resident missionary, and their influence slowly became felt. Khama III (reigned 1875–1923) was the first of the Tswana chiefs to make Christianity a state religion and changed a great deal of Tswana customary law as a result. Christianity became the de facto official religion in all the chiefdoms by World War I.[44]
+
+During the Scramble for Africa the territory of Botswana was coveted by both Germany and Great Britain. During the Berlin Conference, Britain decided to annex Botswana in order to safeguard the Road to the North and thus connect the Cape Colony to its territories further north. It unilaterally annexed Tswana territories in January 1885 and then sent the Warren Expedition north to consolidate control over the area and convince the chiefs to accept British overrule. Despite their misgivings, they eventually acquiesced to this fait accompli.[45]
+
+In 1890 areas north of 22 degrees were added to the new Bechuanaland Protectorate. During the 1890s the new territory was divided into eight different reserves, with fairly small amounts of land being left as freehold for white settlers. During the early 1890s, the British government decided to hand over the Bechuanaland Protectorate to the British South Africa Company. This plan, which was well on its way to fruition despite the entreaties of Tswana leaders who toured England in protest, was eventually foiled by the failure of the Jameson Raid in January 1896.[46][47]
+
+When the Union of South Africa was formed in 1910 from the main British colonies in the region, the High Commission Territories – the Bechuanaland Protectorate, Basutoland (now Lesotho), and Swaziland (now Eswatini) — were not included, but provision was made for their later incorporation. However, the UK began to consult with their inhabitants as to their wishes. Although successive South African governments sought to have the territories transferred to their jurisdiction, the UK kept delaying; consequently, it never occurred. The election of the Nationalist government in 1948, which instituted apartheid, and South Africa's withdrawal from the Commonwealth in 1961, ended any prospect of the UK or these territories agreeing to incorporation into South Africa.[48]
+
+An expansion of British central authority and the evolution of tribal government resulted in the 1920 establishment of two advisory councils to represent both Africans and Europeans.[49] The African Council consisted of the eight heads of the Tswana tribes and some elected members.[49] Proclamations in 1934 regulated tribal rule and powers. A European-African advisory council was formed in 1951, and the 1961 constitution established a consultative legislative council.
+
+In June 1964, the United Kingdom accepted proposals for a democratic self-government in Botswana. The seat of government was moved in 1965 from Mahikeng in South Africa, to the newly established Gaborone, which is located near Botswana's border with South Africa. Based on the 1965 constitution, the country held its first general elections under universal suffrage and gained independence on 30 September 1966.[50] Seretse Khama, a leader in the independence movement and the legitimate claimant to the Ngwato chiefship, was elected as the first President, and subsequently re-elected twice.
+
+The presidency passed to the sitting vice-president, Quett Masire, who was elected in his own right in 1984 and re-elected in 1989 and 1994. Masire retired from office in 1998. He was succeeded by Festus Mogae, who was elected in his own right in 1999 and re-elected in 2004. The presidency passed in 2008 to Ian Khama (son of the first President), who had been serving as Mogae's vice-president since resigning his position in 1998 as Commander of the Botswana Defence Force to take up this civilian role.
+
+A long-running dispute over the northern border with Namibia's Caprivi Strip was the subject of a ruling by the International Court of Justice in December 1999. It ruled that Kasikili Island belongs to Botswana.[51]
+
+At 581,730 km2 (224,607 sq mi) Botswana is the world's 48th-largest country. It is similar in size to Madagascar or France. It lies between latitudes 17° and 27°S, and longitudes 20° and 30°E.
+
+The country is predominantly flat, tending toward gently rolling tableland. Botswana is dominated by the Kalahari Desert, which covers up to 70% of its land surface. The Okavango Delta, one of the world's largest inland deltas, is in the northwest. The Makgadikgadi Pan, a large salt pan, lies in the north.
+
+The Limpopo River Basin, the major landform of all of southern Africa, lies partly in Botswana, with the basins of its tributaries, the Notwane, Bonwapitse, Mahalapye, Lotsane, Motloutse and the Shashe, located in the eastern part of the country. The Notwane provides water to the capital through the Gaborone Dam. The Chobe River lies to the north, providing a boundary between Botswana and Namibia's Zambezi Region. The Chobe River meets with the Zambezi River at a place called Kazungula (meaning a small sausage tree, a point where Sebitwane and his Makololo tribe crossed the Zambezi into Zambia).
+
+Botswana has diverse areas of wildlife habitat. In addition to the delta and desert areas, there are grasslands and savannas, where blue wildebeest, antelopes, and other mammals and birds are found. Northern Botswana has one of the few remaining large populations of the endangered African wild dog. Chobe National Park, found in the Chobe District, has the world's largest concentration of African elephants. The park covers about 11,000 km2 (4,247 sq mi) and supports about 350 species of birds.
+
+The Chobe National Park and Moremi Game Reserve (in the Okavango Delta) are major tourist destinations. Other reserves include the Central Kalahari Game Reserve located in the Kalahari desert in Ghanzi District; Makgadikgadi Pans National Park and Nxai Pan National Park are in Central District in the Makgadikgadi Pan. Mashatu Game Reserve is privately owned: located where the Shashe River and Limpopo River meet in eastern Botswana. The other privately owned reserve is Mokolodi Nature Reserve near Gaborone. There are also specialised sanctuaries like Khama Rhino Sanctuary (for rhinoceros) and Makgadikgadi Sanctuary (for flamingos). They are both located in Central District.
+
+Botswana faces two major environmental problems, drought and desertification, which are heavily linked. Three-quarters of the country's human and animal populations depend on groundwater due to drought. Groundwater use through deep borehole drilling has somewhat eased the effects of drought. Surface water is scarce in Botswana and less than 5% of the agriculture in the country is sustainable by rainfall. In the remaining 95% of the country, raising livestock is the primary source of rural income. Approximately 71% of the country's land is used for communal grazing, which has been a major cause of the desertification and the accelerating soil erosion of the country.[52]
+
+Since raising livestock has proven to be profitable for the people of Botswana, they continue to exploit the land. The animal populations have continued to dramatically increase. From 1966 to 1991, the livestock population has increased from 1.7 million to 5.5 million.[52]:64 Similarly, the human population has increased from 574,000 in 1971 to 1.5 million in 1995, a 161% increase in 24 years. "Over 50% of all households in Botswana own cattle, which is currently the largest single source of rural income." "Rangeland degradation or desertification is regarded as the reduction in land productivity as a result of overstocking and overgrazing, or as a result of veld product gathering for commercial use. Degradation is exacerbated by the effects of drought and climate change."[52]
+
+Environmentalists report that the Okavango Delta is drying up due to the increased grazing of livestock.[53] The Okavango Delta is one of the major semi-forested wetlands in Botswana and one of the largest inland deltas in the world; it is a crucial ecosystem to the survival of many animals.[53]
+
+The Department of Forestry and Range Resources has already begun to implement a project to reintroduce indigenous vegetation into communities in Kgalagadi South, Kweneng North and Boteti.[54] Reintroduction of indigenous vegetation will help with the degradation of the land. The United States Government has also entered into an agreement with Botswana, giving them US$7 million to reduce Botswana's debt by US$8.3 million. The stipulation of the US reducing Botswana's debt is that Botswana will focus on more extensive conservation of the land.[53]
+
+The United Nations Development Programme claims that poverty is a major problem behind the overexploitation of resources, including land, in Botswana. To help change this the UNDP joined in with a project started in the southern community of Struizendam in Botswana. The purpose of the project is to draw from "indigenous knowledge and traditional land management systems". The leaders of this movement are supposed to be the people in the community, to draw them in, in turn increasing their possibilities to earn an income and thus decreasing poverty. The UNDP also stated that the government has to effectively implement policies to allow people to manage their own local resources and are giving the government information to help with policy development.[55]
+
+Botswana is the continent's oldest democracy. The Constitution of Botswana is the rule of law, which protects the citizens of Botswana and represents their rights. The politics of Botswana take place in a framework of a multi-party representative democratic republic, whereby the President of Botswana is both head of state and head of government, and is elected by and accountable to the Parliament of Botswana. Executive power is exercised by the government. Legislative power is vested in both the government and the Parliament of Botswana. The most recent election, its eleventh, was held on 23 October 2019. Since independence was declared, the party system has been dominated by the Botswana Democratic Party.[56]
+
+The judiciary is independent of the executive and the legislature.[57] Botswana ranked 30th out of 167 states in the 2012 Democracy Index.[58] According to Transparency International, Botswana is the least corrupt country in Africa and ranks close to Portugal and South Korea.[59]
+
+It consists of a typical court system of local Magistrates Courts, a High Court and a Court of Appeal. The High Court is a superior court of record with unlimited original jurisdiction to hear and determine any criminal, civil or constitutional cases under any law. Appeals can be heard by the Court of Appeal. The Head of the High Court is the Chief Justice.[60]
+
+The Court of Appeal is the highest and final court in the country and deals with appeals from the High Court and the Industrial Court. The Head of the Court of Appeal is the Judge President.
+
+Judges are appointed by the President of Botswana on the recommendation of the Judicial Services Commission.
+
+Chief Justices:[61]
+
+With regard to the legal profession, although the Law Society of Botswana has been in existence since 1997,[62] there is still no clear indication in their registry of attorneys as to how certain demographics, such as women, have fared in the legal field.
+
+At the time of independence, Botswana had no armed forces. It was only after the Rhodesian and South African militaries struck respectively against the Zimbabwe People's Revolutionary Army and Umkhonto we Sizwe[63] bases that the Botswana Defence Force (BDF) was formed in 1977.[64] The President is commander-in-chief of the armed forces and appoints a defence council and the BDF currently consists of roughly 60,000 servicemen. In 2019, Botswana signed the UN treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons.[65]
+
+Following political changes in South Africa and the region, the BDF's missions have increasingly focused on prevention of poaching, preparing for disasters, and foreign peacekeeping. The United States has been the largest single foreign contributor to the development of the BDF, and a large segment of its officer corps have received U.S. training. The Botswana government gave the United States permission to explore the possibility of establishing an Africa Command (AFRICOM) base in the country.[66]
+
+Many of the indigenous San people have been forcibly relocated from their land to reservations. To make them relocate, they were denied access to water on their land and faced arrest if they hunted, which was their primary source of food.[67] Their lands lie in the middle of the world's richest diamond field. Officially, the government denies that there is any link to mining and claims the relocation is to preserve the wildlife and ecosystem, even though the San people have lived sustainably on the land for millennia.[67] On the reservations, they struggle to find employment and alcoholism is rampant.[67]
+On 24 August 2018 the UN Special Rapporteur on Minorities, Fernand de Varennes, issued a statement calling on Botswana "to step up efforts to recognize and protect the rights of minorities in relation to public services, land and resource use and the use of minority languages in education and other critical areas."
+
+Until June 2019, homosexuality was illegal in Botswana. A Botswana High Court decision of 11 June of that year, however, struck down provisions in the Criminal Code that punished "carnal knowledge of any person against the order of nature" and "acts of gross indecency", making Botswana one of only twenty-two African countries that have either decriminalised or legalised homosexuality.[68]
+
+Capital punishment in Botswana includes the death penalty by hanging.
+
+The Botswana Centre for Human Rights, Ditshwanelo, was established in 1993.[69]
+
+Botswana's ten districts are:
+
+Botswana's councils created from urban or town councils are: Gaborone City, Francistown, Lobatse Town, Selebi-Phikwe Town, Jwaneng Town, Orapa Town and Sowa Township.
+
+Since independence, Botswana has had one of the fastest growth rates in per capita income in the world.[70] Botswana has transformed itself from one of the poorest countries in the world to an upper middle-income country. GDP per capita grew from $1,344 in 1950 to $15,015 in 2016.[71] Although Botswana was resource-abundant, a good institutional framework allowed the country to reinvest resource-income in order to generate stable future income.[72] By one estimate, it has the fourth highest gross national income at purchasing power parity in Africa, giving it a standard of living around that of Mexico.[73]
+
+The Ministry of Trade and Industry of Botswana is responsible for promoting business development throughout the country. According to the International Monetary Fund, economic growth averaged over 9% per year from 1966 to 1999. Botswana has a high level of economic freedom compared to other African countries.[74] The government has maintained a sound fiscal policy, despite consecutive budget deficits in 2002 and 2003, and a negligible level of foreign debt. It earned the highest sovereign credit rating in Africa and has stockpiled foreign exchange reserves (over $7 billion in 2005/2006) amounting to almost two and a half years of current imports.
+
+An array of financial institutions populates the country's financial system, with pension funds and commercial banks being the two most important segments by asset size. Banks remain profitable, well-capitalised, and liquid, as a result of growing national resources and high interest rates.[75] The Bank of Botswana serves as a central bank. The country's currency is the Botswana pula.
+
+Botswana's competitive banking system is one of Africa's most advanced.[clarification needed] Generally adhering to global standards in the transparency of financial policies and banking supervision, the financial sector provides ample access to credit for entrepreneurs.[citation needed] The Capital Bank opened in 2008.[76] As of August 2015[update], there are a dozen licensed banks in the country.[77] The government is involved in banking through state-owned financial institutions and a special financial incentives program that is aimed at increasing Botswana's status as a financial centre.[citation needed] Credit is allocated on market terms, although the government provides subsidised loans.[citation needed] Reform of non-bank financial institutions has continued in recent years, notably through the establishment of a single financial regulatory agency that provides more effective supervision.[78] The government has abolished exchange controls, and with the resulting creation of new portfolio investment options, the Botswana Stock Exchange is growing.[79]
+
+Botswana's trading partners in 2004 (Imports: $3.37 billion)
+
+Botswana's trading partners in 2004 (Exports: $3.67 billion)
+
+The constitution provides for an independent judiciary, and the government respects this in practice. The legal system is sufficient to conduct secure commercial dealings, although a serious and growing backlog of cases prevents timely trials. The protection of intellectual property rights has improved significantly. Botswana is ranked second only to South Africa among sub-Saharan Africa countries in the 2014 International Property Rights Index.[80]
+
+While generally open to foreign participation in its economy, Botswana reserves some sectors for citizens. Increased foreign investment plays a significant role in the privatisation of state-owned enterprises. Investment regulations are transparent, and bureaucratic procedures are streamlined and open, although somewhat slow. Investment returns such as profits and dividends, debt service, capital gains, returns on intellectual property, royalties, franchise's fees, and service fees can be repatriated without limits.
+
+Botswana imports refined petroleum products and electricity from South Africa. There is some domestic production of electricity from coal.
+
+In Botswana, the Department of Mines[81] and Mineral Resources, Green Technology and Energy Security[82] led by Hon Sadique Kebonang in Gaborone, maintains data regarding mining throughout the country.
+Debswana, the largest diamond mining company operating in Botswana, is 50% owned by the government.[83] The mineral industry provides about 40% of all government revenues.[84] In 2007, significant quantities of uranium were discovered, and mining was projected to begin by 2010. Several international mining corporations have established regional headquarters in Botswana, and prospected for diamonds, gold, uranium, copper, and even oil, many coming back with positive results. Government announced in early 2009 that they would try to shift their economic dependence on diamonds, over serious concern that diamonds are predicted to dry out in Botswana over the next twenty years.
+
+Botswana's Orapa mine is the largest diamond mine in the world in terms of value and quantity of carats produced annually.[85] Estimated to have produced over 11 million carats in 2013, with an average price of $145/carat, the Orapa mine was estimated to produce over $1.6 billion worth of diamonds in 2013.[86]
+
+As of 2012, the Tswana are the majority ethnic group in Botswana, making up approximately 79% of the population, followed by Kalanga at 11% and the San (Basarwa) at 3%. Another 7% is made up of a number of other smaller Southern African ethnic groups, as well as Indians and people of European descent.[1] The native groups include the Shona, Bayei, Bambukushu, Basubia, Baherero and Bakgalagadi. The Indian minority is made up of both recent migrants and descendants of Indian migrants who arrived from Mozambique, Kenya, Tanzania, Mauritius and South Africa.
+Since 2000, because of deteriorating economic conditions in Zimbabwe, the number of Zimbabweans in Botswana has risen into the tens of thousands.[87]
+
+Fewer than 10,000 San people are still living their traditional hunter-gatherer way of life. Since the mid-1990s the central government of Botswana has been trying to move San out of their historic lands.[88] James Anaya, as the Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights and fundamental freedoms of indigenous people for the United Nations in 2010, described loss of land as a major contributor to many of the problems facing Botswana's indigenous people, citing the San's eviction from the Central Kalahari Game Reserve (CKGR) as a special example.[89]:2 Among Anaya's recommendations in a report to the United Nations Human Rights Council was that development programs should promote, in consultation with indigenous communities such as the San and Bakgalagadi people, activities in harmony with the culture of those communities such as traditional hunting and gathering activities.[89]:19
+
+The official language of Botswana is English although Setswana is widely spoken across the country. In Setswana, prefixes are more important than they are in many other languages, since Setswana is a Bantu language and has noun classes denoted by these prefixes. They include Bo, which refers to the country, Ba, which refers to the people, Mo, which is one person, and Se which is the language. For example, the main ethnic group of Botswana is the Tswana people, hence the name Botswana for its country. The people as a whole are Batswana, one person is a Motswana, and the language they speak is Setswana.
+
+Other languages spoken in Botswana include Kalanga (sekalanga), Sarwa (sesarwa), Ndebele, Kgalagadi, Tswapong, !Xóõ, Yeyi, and, in some parts, Afrikaans.
+
+An estimated 77% of the country's citizens identify as Christians. Anglicans, Methodists, and the United Congregational Church of Southern Africa make up the majority of Christians. There are also congregations of Lutherans, Baptists, Roman Catholics, The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (Mormons), the Dutch Reformed Church, Mennonites, Seventh-day Adventists and Jehovah's Witnesses in the country. According to the 2001 census, the country has around 5,000 Muslims, mainly from South Asia, 3,000 Hindus and 700 Baha'is. Approximately 20% of citizens identify with no religion.
+
+Besides referring to the language of the dominant people groups in Botswana, Setswana is the adjective used to describe the rich cultural traditions of the Batswana—whether construed as members of the Tswana ethnic groups or of all citizens of Botswana. In Botswana, most of the tribes have different ways to greet one another, but for easy communication and connection, batswana use a three-way hand shake or just greet one another by saying "Dumelang" as a way of saying "hello" without physical contact. In community celebrations like Dikgafela or during marriage ceremonies, batswana women show excitement and happiness by the use of ululations as part of their culture.
+
+Botswana literature belongs somewhere in the strong African literary writing circles. African literature is known for its consciousness and didactic writing styles. Writing as an art form has existed in Botswana for a long while from the rock painting era especially in the Tsodilo Hills known to be 20,000 years old, to the present day with the movie production of the No.1 Ladies Detective Agency story.
+
+In recent times and to date Botswana has seen a remarkable appearance of distinguished writers whose genres range from historical, political and witty story writing. Prominent amongst these are the South African born Bessie Head who settled in Serowe village, Andrew Sesinyi, Barolong Seboni (His works include Images of the Sun, Screams and Pleas, Lovesongs, Windsongs of the Kgalagadi and Lighting the Fire, and several other publications that include a play; Sechele I, and Setswana Riddles Translated into English), Unity Dow, Galesiti Baruti, Caitlin Davies, Lauri Kubuetsile, Albert Malikongwa, Toro Mositi and Moteane Melamu.[91]
+
+Most of Bessie Head's important works are set in Serowe. The three novels When Rain Clouds Gather (1968), Maru (1971), and A Question of Power (1973) all have this setting. The three are also autobiographical; When Rain Clouds Gather is based on her experience living on a development farm, Maru incorporates her experience of being considered racially inferior, and A Question of Power draws on her understanding of what it was like to experience acute psychological distress. Head also published a number of short stories, including the collection The Collector of Treasures (1977). She published a book on the history of Serowe, the village she settled in, called Serowe: Village of the Rainwind. Her last novel, A Bewitched Crossroad (1984), is historical, set in 19th-century Botswana. She had also written a story of two prophets, one wealthy and one who lived poorly called "Jacob: The Faith-Healing Priest".[92][93]
+
+The 1981 comedy, "The Gods Must Be Crazy" was set in Botswana and became a major international hit, 2000's Disney production "Whispers: An Elephant's Tale" was filmed in Botswana, starring Hollywood legend Angela Bassett. Later on, during 2009, parts of M. Saravanan's Tamil language Indian action film, "Ayan" were recorded in Botswana.
+
+The critically acclaimed "A United Kingdom", about the real-life love story of Seretse Khama and Ruth Williams, was filmed partly between Botswana and London, England and was released internationally in 2016.[94]
+
+There are five television stations in Botswana, one of which is state-owned (Botswana TV), along with Now TV, Khuduga HD, Maru TV and EBotswana. There are five local radio stations (RB1, RB2, Duma FM, Gabz FM, and Yarona FM) and thirteen newspapers (Mmegi, Sunday Standard, The Telegraph, Business Weekly, The Botswana Gazette, The Voice, The Guardian, Echo, Botswana People's Daily, DailyNews, Tswana Times, Weekend Post, and The Monitor) that publish regularly.
+
+[95][96]
+
+Botswana's music is mostly vocal and performed, sometimes without drums depending on the occasion; it also makes heavy use of string instruments. Botswana folk music has instruments such as setinkane (a sort of miniature piano), segankure/segaba (a Botswana version of the Chinese instrument erhu), moropa (meropa -plural) (many varieties of drums), phala (a whistle used mostly during celebrations, which comes in a variety of forms). Botswana cultural musical instruments are not confined only to the strings or drums. The hands are used as musical instruments too, by either clapping them together or against phathisi (goat skin turned inside out wrapped around the calf area, only used by men) to create music and rhythm. For the last few decades, the guitar has been celebrated as a versatile music instrument for Tswana music as it offers a variety in string which the segaba instrument does not have. The national anthem is "Fatshe leno la rona". Written and composed by Kgalemang Tumediso Motsete, it was adopted upon independence in 1966.[97]
+
+In the northern part of Botswana, women in the villages of Etsha and Gumare are noted for their skill at crafting baskets from Mokola Palm and local dyes. The baskets are generally woven into three types: large, lidded baskets used for storage, large, open baskets for carrying objects on the head or for winnowing threshed grain, and smaller plates for winnowing pounded grain. The artistry of these baskets is being steadily enhanced through colour use and improved designs as they are increasingly produced for international markets.[98]
+
+The oldest paintings from both Botswana and South Africa depict hunting, animal and human figures, and were made by the Khoisan (!Kung San/Bushmen) over twenty thousand years ago within the Kalahari desert.
+
+The cuisine of Botswana is unique and mostly includes meat as Botswana is a cattle country, the national dish is seswaa, pounded meat made from goat meat or beef, Segwapa dried, cured meat ranging from beef to game meats & the cut may also vary, either fillets of meat cut into strips following the grain of the muscle, or flat pieces sliced across the grain. Madila is a popular fermented milk product of Botswana in a yogurt form. Botswana's cuisine shares some characteristics with other cuisine of Southern Africa. Examples of Botswana food are Bogobe, pap (maize porridge), boerewors, samp, Magwinya (fried dough bread) and mopane worms. Porridge (bogobe) is made by putting sorghum, maize or millet flour into boiling water, stirring into a soft paste, and then cooking it slowly. Sometimes the sorghum or maize is fermented, and milk and sugar added. This dish is called ting. Without the milk and sugar, ting is sometimes eaten with meat or vegetables as lunch or dinner. Another way of making bogobe is to add sour milk and a cooking melon (lerotse). This dish is called tophi by the Kalanga tribe. Many different kinds of beans are grown, including cowpeas, ditloo, and letlhodi. There are some vegetables that grow in the wild that are available seasonally including thepe and Delele (okra). Many fruits are locally available, including marula. Watermelons, believed to have come originally from Botswana, are plentiful in season. Another kind of melon, called lerotse or lekatane, is also grown. There are some kinds of wild melon found in sandy desert areas which are an important food and water source for the people who live in those areas. Kgalagadi Breweries Limited produces the national beer St. Louis Larger Botswana's first and only proud local beer brand that has also been a part of Batswana's rich history since 1989 & non-alcoholic beverage Keone Mooka Mageu a traditional fermented porridge.
+
+Football is the most popular sport in Botswana, with qualification for the 2012 Africa Cup of Nations being the national team's highest achievement to date. Other popular sports are softball, cricket, tennis, rugby, badminton, handball, golf, and track and field.[99][100] Botswana is an associate member of the International Cricket Council. Botswana became a member of The International Badminton Federation and Africa Badminton Federation in 1991. The Botswana Golf Union offers an amateur golf league in which golfers compete in tournaments and championships.
+Botswana won the country's first Olympic medal in 2012 when runner Nijel Amos won silver in the 800 metres. In 2011, Amantle Montsho became world champion in the 400 metres and won Botswana's first athletics medal on the world level. High jumper Kabelo Kgosiemang is a three-time African champion, Isaac Makwala is a sprinter who specializes in the 400 metres, he was the gold medallist at the Commonwealth Games in 2018, Baboloki Thebe was a silver medallist in the 200 metres at the 2014 Summer Youth Olympics and reached the semi-finals at the 2014 World Junior Championships in Athletics & Ross Branch Ross a motorbiker holds the number one plate in the South African Cross Country Championship and has competed at the Dakar Rally.
+
+The card game bridge has a strong following; it was first played in Botswana over 30 years ago, and it grew in popularity during the 1980s. Many British expatriate school teachers informally taught the game in Botswana's secondary schools. The Botswana Bridge Federation (BBF) was founded in 1988 and continues to organise tournaments. Bridge has remained popular and the BBF has over 800 members.[101] In 2007, the BBF invited the English Bridge Union to host a week-long teaching program in May 2008.[102]
+
+Botswana has made great strides in educational development since independence in 1966. At that time there were very few graduates in the country and only a very small percentage of the population attended secondary school. Botswana increased its adult literacy rate from 69% in 1991 to 83% in 2008.[103]
+
+With the discovery of diamonds and the increase in government revenue that this brought, there was a huge increase in educational provision in the country. All students were guaranteed ten years of basic education, leading to a Junior Certificate qualification. Approximately half of the school population attends a further two years of secondary schooling leading to the award of the Botswana General Certificate of Secondary Education (BGCSE). Secondary education in Botswana is neither free nor compulsory.
+
+After leaving school, students can attend one of the seven technical colleges in the country, or take vocational training courses in teaching or nursing. Students enter the University of Botswana, Botswana College of Agriculture, Botswana International University of Science and Technology and the Botswana Accountancy College in Gaborone. Many other students end up in the numerous private tertiary education colleges around the country. Notable amongst these is Botho University, the country's first private university which offers undergraduate programmes in Accounting, Business and Computing. Another international university is the Limkokwing University of Creative Technology which offers various associate degrees in Creative Arts.[104] Other tertiary institutions include Ba Isago, ABM University College the largest school of business and management, New Era, Gaborone Institute of Professional Studies, Gaborone University College of Law And Professional Studies etc. Tremendous strides in providing quality education have been made by private education providers such that a large number of the best students in the country are now applying to them as well. A vast majority of these students are government sponsored. The nation's second international university, the Botswana International University of Science and Technology, was completed in Palapye in 2011.
+The quantitative gains have not always been matched by qualitative ones. Primary schools in particular still lack resources, and the teachers are less well paid than their secondary school colleagues. The Botswana Ministry of Education[105] is working to establish libraries in primary schools in partnership with the African Library Project.[106] The Government of Botswana hopes that by investing a large part of national income in education, the country will become less dependent on diamonds for its economic survival, and less dependent on expatriates for its skilled workers.[107] Those objectives are in part pursued through policies in favour of vocational education, gathered within the NPVET (National Policy on Vocational Education and Training), aiming to "integrate the different types of vocational education and training into one comprehensive system".[107] Botswana invests 21% of its government spending in education.[103]
+
+In January 2006, Botswana announced the reintroduction of school fees after two decades of free state education[108] though the government still provides full scholarships with living expenses to any Botswana citizen in university, either at the University of Botswana or if the student wishes to pursue an education in any field not offered locally, such as medicine, they are provided with a full scholarship to study abroad.
+
+Botswana is planning to use science and technology to diversify its economy and thereby reduce its dependence on diamond mining. To this end, the government has set up six hubs since 2008, in the agriculture, diamonds, innovation, transport, health and education sectors.[109]
+
+Botswana published its updated National Policy on Research, Science and Technology in 2011, within a UNESCO project sponsored by the Spanish Agency for International Cooperation and Development (AECID). This policy aims to take up the challenges of rapid technological evolution, globalisation and the achievement of the national development goals formulated in high-level strategic documents that include Botswana's Tenth National Development Plan to 2016 and Vision 2016.[109]
+The National Policy on Research, Science, Technology and Innovation (2011) fixes the target of raising gross domestic expenditure on research and development (R&D) from 0.26% of GDP in 2012 to over 2% of GDP by 2016. This target can only be reached within the specified time frame by raising public spending on R&D.[109]
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+Despite the modest level of financial investment in research, Botswana counts one of the highest researcher densities in sub-Saharan Africa: 344 per million inhabitants (in head counts), compared to an average of 91 per million inhabitants for the subcontinent in 2013.[109]
+
+In 2009, Botswana-based company Deaftronics launched a solar-powered hearing aid after six years of prototype development. Since then, Deaftronics has sold over 10,000 of the hearing aids. Priced at $200 per unit, each hearing aid includes four rechargeable batteries (lasting up to three years) and a solar charger for them. The product is inexpensive compared to many similar devices, that can start from around $600.
+[110][111]
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+In 2011, Botswana's Department of Agricultural Research (DAR) unveiled Musi cattle, designed to ultimately optimise the overall efficiency for beef production under Botswana conditions. A hybrid of Tswana, Bonsmara, Brahman, Tuli and Simmental breeds,[112] it is hoped that the composite with lead to increased beef production. The objective of the research was to find a genetic material that could perform like crossbreeds already found in Botswana and well above the indigenous Tswana breed while retaining the hardiness and adaptability of the native stock in one package.[113]
+
+In 2016, the Botswana Institute of Technology Research and Innovation (BITRI) developed a rapid testing kit for foot and-mouth in collaboration with the Botswana Vaccine Institute and Canadian Food Inspection Agency.  The existing diagnostic methods required highly trained laboratory personnel and special equipment, which caused delays in the implementation of control procedures; whereas the kit developed in Botswana allows for on-site diagnosis to be made.[114]
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+The Square Kilometre Array (SKA) (MeerKAT) will consist of thousands of dishes and antennas spread over large distances linked together to form one giant telescope. Additional dishes will be located in eight other African countries Botswana among them. Botswana was selected to participate because of its ideal location in the southern hemisphere and environment, which could enable easier data collection from the universe. Botswana government has built SKA precursor telescope at Kgale View, called the African Very Long Base Line Interferometry Network (AVN) & sent student on Astronomy scholarships.[115]
+
+In the IT sector in 2016 a firm, Almaz, opened a first-of-its-kind computer assembly company.[116][117] Ditec, a Botswana company, also customizes, designs and manufactures mobile phones. Ditec is one of the leading experts in design, development and customisation of Microsoft powered devices.[118]
+
+Botswana has 971 kilometres (603 mi) of railway lines, 18,482 kilometres (11,484 mi) of roads, and 92 airports, of which 12 have paved runways. The paved road network has almost entirely been constructed since independence in 1966. The national airline is Air Botswana, which flies domestically and to other countries in Africa. Botswana Railways is the national railways company that forms a crucial link in the Southern African regional railway systems. Botswana Railways offers rail-based transport logistics solutions to move a range of commodities for the mining sector and primary industries, passenger trains services and dry ports.[119][120]
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+In terms of power infrastructure in Botswana, the country produces coal for electricity and oil is imported into the country. Recently, the country has taken a large interest in renewable energy sources and has completed a comprehensive strategy that will attract investors in the wind, solar and biomass renewable energy industries. Botswana's power stations include Morupule B Power Station (600 MW), Morupule A Power Station (132 MW), Orapa Power Station (90 MW), Phakalane Power Station (1.3 MW) and Mmamabula Power Station (300 MW) which is expected to be online in the near future.
+A 200 MW solar power plant is at planning and designing stage by Ministry of Mineral Resources, Green Technology and Energy Security.[121][122][122]
+
+The Ministry of Health in Botswana is responsible for overseeing the quality and distribution of healthcare throughout the country. Life expectancy at birth was 55 in 2009 according to the World Bank, having previously fallen from a peak of 64.1 in 1990 to a low of 49 in 2002.[123] After Botswana's 2011 census, current life expectancy is estimated at 54.06 years.[1]
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+The Cancer Association of Botswana is a voluntary non-governmental organisation. The association is a member of the Union for International Cancer Control. The Association supplements existing services through provision of cancer prevention and health awareness programmes, facilitating access to health services for cancer patients and offering support and counseling to those affected.[124]
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+Like elsewhere in Sub-Saharan Africa, the economic impact of AIDS is considerable. Economic development spending was cut by 10% in 2002–3 as a result of recurring budget deficits and rising expenditure on healthcare services. Botswana has been hit very hard by the AIDS pandemic; in 2006 it was estimated that life expectancy at birth had dropped from 65 to 35 years.[125] However, after Botswana's 2011 census current life expectancy is estimated at 54.06 years.[1]
+
+The prevalence of HIV/AIDS in Botswana was estimated at 25.4% for adults aged 15–49 in 2009 and 21.9% in 2013,[21]:A8 exceeded by Lesotho and Swaziland in sub-Saharan African nations. This places Botswana at the third highest prevalence in the world, in 2013, while "leading the way in prevention and treatment programmes".[22] In 2003, the government began a comprehensive program involving free or cheap generic antiretroviral drugs as well as an information campaign designed to stop the spread of the virus; in 2013, over 40% of adults in Botswana had access to antiretroviral therapy.[21]:28 In the age group of 15–19 years old, prevalence was estimated at about 6% for females and 3.5% for males in 2013,[21]:33 and for the 20–24 age group, 15% for females and 5% for males.[21]:33 Botswana is one of 21 priority countries identified by the UN AIDS group in 2011 in the Global Plan to eliminate new HIV infections among children and to keep their mothers alive.[21]:37 From 2009 to 2013, the country saw a decrease over 50% in new HIV infections in children.[21]:38 A further measure of the success, or reason for hope, in dealing with HIV in Botswana, is that less than 10% of pregnant HIV-infected women were not receiving antiretroviral medications in 2013, with a corresponding large decrease (over 50%) in the number of new HIV infections in children under 5.[21]:39, 40 Among the UN Global Plan countries, people living with HIV in Botswana have the highest percentage receiving antiretroviral treatment: about 75% for adults (age 15+) and about 98% for children.[21]:237
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+With a nationwide Prevention of Mother-to-Child Transmission program, Botswana has reduced HIV transmission from infected mothers to their children from about 40% to just 4%. Under the leadership of Festus Mogae, the Government of Botswana solicited outside help in fighting HIV/AIDS and received early support from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, the Merck Foundation, and together formed the African Comprehensive HIV/AIDS Partnership (ACHAP). Other early partners include the Botswana-Harvard AIDS Institute, of the Harvard School of Public Health and the Botswana-UPenn Partnership of the University of Pennsylvania. According to the 2011 UNAIDS Report, universal access to treatment – defined as 80% coverage or greater – has been achieved in Botswana.[126]
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+Potential reasons for Botswana's high HIV prevalence include concurrent sexual partnerships, transactional sex, cross-generational sex, and a significant number of people who travel outside of their local communities in pursuit of work. The polyamorous nature of many sexual relationships further impacts the health situation, to the extent that it has given rise to a love vocabulary[127] that is unique to the region.
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+The Botswana Tourism Organisation[128] is the country's official tourism group. Primarily, tourists visit Gaborone due to the city having numerous activities for visitors. The Lion Park Resort[129] is Botswana's first permanent amusement park and hosts events such as birthday parties for families. Other destinations in Botswana include the Gaborone Yacht Club and the Kalahari Fishing Club and natural attractions such as the Gaborone Dam and Mokolodi Nature Reserve. There are golf courses which are maintained by the Botswana Golf Union (BGU).[130] The Phakalane Golf Estate is a multimillion-dollar clubhouse that offers both hotel accommodations and access to golf courses.
+Museums in Botswana include:
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+This article incorporates text from a free content work.  Licensed under CC-BY-SA IGO 3.0 UNESCO Science Report: towards 2030, 546–547, UNESCO, UNESCO Publishing. To learn how to add open license text to Wikipedia articles, please see this how-to page. For information on reusing text from Wikipedia, please see the terms of use.
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+Coordinates: 24°39.5′S 25°54.5′E / 24.6583°S 25.9083°E / -24.6583; 25.9083
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