title: Christianity in the United States

text: The first generation of New England Puritans required that church members undergo a conversion experience that they could describe publicly. Their successors were not as successful in reaping harvests of redeemed souls. The movement began with Jonathan Edwards, a Massachusetts preacher who sought to return to the Pilgrims' strict Calvinist roots. British preacher George Whitefield and other itinerant preachers continued the movement, traveling across the colonies and preaching in a dramatic and emotional style. Followers of Edwards and other preachers of similar religiosity called themselves the "New Lights," as contrasted with the "Old Lights," who disapproved of their movement. To promote their viewpoints, the two sides established academies and colleges, including Princeton and Williams College. The Great Awakening has been called the first truly American event.


title: Christianity in the United States

text: The supporters of the Awakening and its evangelical thrust—Presbyterians, Baptists, and Methodists—became the largest American Protestant denominations by the first decades of the 19th century. By the 1770s, the Baptists were growing rapidly both in the north (where they founded Brown University), and in the South. Opponents of the Awakening or those split by it—Anglicans, Quakers, and Congregationalists—were left behind.


title: Christianity in the United States

text: The First Great Awakening of the 1740s increased religiosity in most of the colonies. By 1780 the percentage of adult colonists who formally held membership in a church was between 10-30%. North Carolina had the lowest percentage at about 4%, while New Hampshire and South Carolina were tied for the highest, at about 16%. Many others informally associated with the churches.


title: Christianity in the United States

text: The Revolution split some denominations, notably the Church of England, most of whose ministers supported the king. The Quakers and some German sects were pacifists and remained neutral. Religious practice suffered in certain places because of the absence of ministers and the destruction of churches, but in other areas, religion flourished.


title: Christianity in the United States

text: In 1794, the Russian Orthodox missionary St. Herman of Alaska arrived on Kodiak island in Alaska and began significantly evangelizing the native peoples. Nearly all Russians left in 1867 when the U.S. purchased Alaska, but the Eastern Orthodox faith remained.


title: Christianity in the United States

text: Lambert (2003) has examined the religious affiliations and beliefs of the Founding Fathers of the United States. Of the 55 delegates to the 1787 Constitutional Convention, 49 were Protestants, and two were Catholics (D. Carroll, and Fitzsimons). Among the Protestant delegates to the Constitutional Convention, 28 were Church of England (or Episcopalian, after the American Revolutionary War was won), eight were Presbyterians, seven were Congregationalists, two were Lutherans, two were Dutch Reformed, and two were Methodists.


title: Christianity in the United States

text: After independence, the American states were obliged to write constitutions establishing how each would be governed. For three years, from 1778 to 1780, the political energies of Massachusetts were absorbed in drafting a charter of government that the voters would accept. One of the most contentious issues was whether the state would support the church financially. Advocating such a policy were the ministers and most members of the Congregational Church, which received public financial support, during the colonial period. The Baptists tenaciously adhered to their ancient conviction that churches should receive no support from the state. The Constitutional Convention chose to support the church and Article Three authorized a general religious tax to be directed to the church of a taxpayers' choice.


title: Christianity in the United States

text: In October 1801, members of the Danbury Baptists Associations wrote a letter to the new President-elect Thomas Jefferson. Baptists, being a minority in Connecticut, were still required to pay fees to support the Congregationalist majority. The Baptists found this intolerable. The Baptists, well aware of Jefferson's own unorthodox beliefs, sought him as an ally in making all religious expression a fundamental human right and not a matter of government largesse.


title: Christianity in the United States

text: In his January 1, 1802, reply to the Danbury Baptist Association Jefferson summed up the First Amendment's original intent, and used for the first time anywhere a now-familiar phrase in today's political and judicial circles: the amendment, he wrote, established a "wall of separation between church and state." Largely unknown in its day, this phrase has since become a major Constitutional issue. The first time the U.S. Supreme Court cited that phrase from Jefferson was in 1878, 76 years later.


title: Christianity in the United States

text: The Second Great Awakening was a Protestant movement that began around 1790, gained momentum by 1800, and after 1820 membership rose rapidly among Baptist and Methodist congregations whose preachers led the movement. It was past its peak by the 1840s. It was a reaction against skepticism, deism, and rational Christianity, and was especially attractive to young women. Millions of new members enrolled in existing evangelical denominations and led to the formation of new denominations. Many converts believed that the Awakening heralded a new millennial age. The Second Great Awakening stimulated the establishment of many reform movements designed to remedy the evils of society before the anticipated Second Coming of Jesus Christ. The network of voluntary reform societies inspired by the Awakening was called the Benevolent Empire.


title: Christianity in the United States

text: During the Second Great Awakening, new Protestant denominations emerged such as Adventists, churches in the Restoration Movement, and groups such as Jehovah's Witnesses and the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints. While the First Great Awakening was centered on reviving the spirituality of established congregations, the Second focused on the unchurched and sought to instill in them a deep sense of personal salvation as experienced in revival meetings.


title: Christianity in the United States

text: The principal innovation produced by the revivals was the camp meeting. When assembled in a field or at the edge of a forest for a prolonged religious meeting, the participants transformed the site into a camp meeting. Singing and preaching were the main activities for several days. The revivals were often intense and created intense emotions. Some fell away but many if not most became permanent church members. The Methodists and Baptists made them one of the evangelical signatures of the denomination.


title: Christianity in the United States

text: The Christianity of the black population was grounded in evangelicalism. The Second Great Awakening has been called the "central and defining event in the development of Afro-Christianity." During these revivals Baptists and Methodists converted large numbers of blacks. However, many were disappointed at the treatment they received from their fellow believers and at the backsliding in the commitment to abolish slavery that many white Baptists and Methodists had advocated immediately after the American Revolution.


title: Christianity in the United States

text: When their discontent could not be contained, forceful black leaders followed what was becoming an American habit—they formed new denominations. In 1787, Richard Allen and his colleagues in Philadelphia broke away from the Methodist Church and in 1815 founded the African Methodist Episcopal (AME) Church.


title: Christianity in the United States

text: After the Civil War, Black Baptists desiring to practice Christianity away from racial discrimination, rapidly set up several separate state Baptist conventions. In 1866, black Baptists of the South and West combined to form the Consolidated American Baptist Convention. This convention eventually collapsed but three national conventions formed in response. In 1895 the three conventions merged to create the National Baptist Convention. It is now the largest African-American religious organization in the United States.


title: Christianity in the United States

text: The "secularization of society" is attributed to the time of the Enlightenment. In the United States, religious observance is much higher than in Europe, and the United States' culture leans conservative in comparison to other western nations, in part due to the Christian element.


title: Christianity in the United States

text: Liberal Christianity, exemplified by some theologians, sought to bring to churches new critical approaches to the Bible. Sometimes called "liberal theology", liberal Christianity is an umbrella term covering movements and ideas within 19th- and 20th-century Christianity. New attitudes became evident, and the practice of questioning the nearly universally accepted Christian orthodoxy began to come to the forefront.


title: Christianity in the United States

text: In the post–World War I era, liberalism was the faster-growing sector of the American church. Liberal wings of denominations were on the rise, and a considerable number of seminaries held and taught from a liberal perspective as well. In the post–World War II era, the trend began to swing back towards the conservative camp in America's seminaries and church structures.


title: Christianity in the United States

text: By 1850 Catholics had become the country's largest single denomination. Between 1860 and 1890 the population of Catholics in the United States tripled through immigration; by the end of the decade, it would reach seven million. These huge numbers of immigrant Catholics came from Ireland, Quebec, Southern Germany, Italy, Poland and Eastern Europe. This influx would eventually bring increased political power for the Catholic Church and a greater cultural presence led at the same time to a growing fear of the Catholic "menace". As the 19th century wore on, animosity waned; Protestant Americans realized that Catholics were not trying to seize control of the government.


title: Christianity in the United States

text: Protestant fundamentalism began as a movement in the late 19th century and early 20th century to reject influences of secular humanism and source criticism in modern Christianity. In reaction to liberal Protestant groups that denied doctrines considered fundamental to these conservative groups, they sought to establish tenets necessary to maintaining a Christian identity, the "fundamentals," hence the term fundamentalist.


title: Christianity in the United States

text: Over time, the movement divided, with the label "Fundamentalist" being retained by the smaller and more hard-line group(s). "Evangelical" has become the main identifier of the groups holding to the movement's moderate and earliest ideas.


title: Christianity in the United States

text: In the U.S. and elsewhere in the world, there has been a marked rise in the evangelical wing of Protestant denominations, especially those that are more exclusively evangelical, and a corresponding decline in the mainstream liberal churches.


title: Christianity in the United States

text: The 1950s saw a boom in the Evangelical church in America. The post–World War II prosperity experienced in the U.S. also had its effects on the church. Church buildings were erected in large numbers, and the Evangelical church's activities grew along with this expansive physical growth. In the southern U.S., the Evangelicals, represented by leaders such as Billy Graham, have experienced a notable surge displacing the caricature of the pulpit pounding country preachers of fundamentalism. The stereotypes have gradually shifted.


title: Christianity in the United States

text: Although the Evangelical community worldwide is diverse, the ties that bind all Evangelicals are still apparent: a "high view" of Scripture, belief in the Deity of Christ, the Trinity, salvation by grace through faith, and the bodily resurrection of Christ.


title: Christianity in the United States

text: The Federal Council of Churches, founded in 1908, marked the first major expression of a growing modern ecumenical movement among Christians in the United States. It was active in pressing for reform of public and private policies, particularly as they impacted the lives of those living in poverty, and developed a comprehensive and widely debated "Social Creed" which served as a humanitarian "bill of rights" for those seeking improvements in American life.


title: Christianity in the United States

text: In 1950, the National Council of the Churches of Christ in the USA (usually identified as National Council of Churches, or NCC) represented a dramatic expansion in the development of ecumenical cooperation. It was a merger of the Federal Council of Churches, the International Council of Religious Education, and several other interchurch ministries. Today, the NCC is a joint venture of 35 Christian denominations in the United States with 100,000 local congregations and 45,000,000 adherents. Its member communions include Mainline Protestant, Eastern Orthodox, Oriental Orthodox, African-American, Evangelical and historic Peace churches. The NCC took a prominent role in the Civil Rights Movement and fostered the publication of the widely used "Revised Standard Version of the Bible", followed by an updated "New Revised Standard Version", the first translation to benefit from the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls. The organization is headquartered in New York City, with a public policy office in Washington, DC. The NCC is related fraternally to hundreds of local and regional councils of churches, to other national councils across the globe, and to the World Council of Churches. All of these bodies are independently governed.


title: Christianity in the United States

text: Carl McIntire led in organizing the American Council of Christian Churches (ACCC), now with 7 member bodies, in September 1941. It was a more militant and fundamentalist organization set up in opposition to what became the National Council of Churches.


title: Christianity in the United States

text: The National Association of Evangelicals for United Action was formed in St. Louis, Missouri on April 7–9, 1942. It soon shortened its name to the National Association of Evangelicals (NEA). There are currently 60 denominations with about 45,000 churches in the organization. The NEA is related fraternally the World Evangelical Fellowship.


title: Christianity in the United States

text: In 2006, 39 communions and 7 Christian organizations officially launched Christian Churches Together in the USA (CCT). CCT provides a space that is inclusive of the diversity of Christian traditions in the United States—Evangelical/Pentecostal, Eastern Orthodox, Oriental Orthodox, Catholic, historic Protestant, and historic Black churches. CCT is characterized by its emphasis on relationships and prayer. Every year these communions and organizations meet over four days to discuss critical social issues, pray and strengthen their relationships.


title: Christianity in the United States

text: Another noteworthy development in 20th-century Christianity was the rise of the modern Pentecostal movement. Pentecostalism, which had its roots in the Pietism and the Holiness movement, many will cite that it arose out of the meetings in 1906 at an urban mission on Azusa Street in Los Angeles, but it actually started in 1900 in Topeka, Kansas with a group led by Charles Parham and the Bethel Bible School. From there it spread by those who experienced what they believed to be miraculous moves of God there.


title: Christianity in the United States

text: Pentecostalism would later birth the Charismatic movement within already established denominations, and it continues to be an important force in Western Christianity.


title: Christianity in the United States

text: By the beginning of the 20th century, approximately one-sixth of the population of the United States was Catholic. Modern Catholic immigrants come to the United States from the Philippines, Poland, and Latin America, especially from Mexico. This multiculturalism and diversity have greatly impacted the flavor of Catholicism in the United States. For example, many dioceses serve in both the English language and the Spanish language.


title: Christianity in the United States

text: While children and youth in the colonial era were treated as small adults, awareness of their special status and needs grew in the nineteenth century, as one after another the denominations large and small began special programs for their young people. Protestant theologian Horace Bushnell in "Christian Nurture" (1847) emphasized the necessity of identifying and supporting the religiosity of children and young adults. Beginning in the 1790s the Protestant denominations set up Sunday school programs. They provided a major source of new members. Urban Protestant churchmen set up the interdenominational YMCA (and later the YWCA) programs in cities from the 1850s. Methodists looked on their youth as potential political activists, providing them with opportunities to engage in social justice movements such as prohibition. Black Protestants, especially after they could form their own separate churches, integrated their young people directly into the larger religious community. Their youth played a major role in the leadership of the Civil Rights Movement of the 1950s and the 1960s. White evangelicals in the twentieth century set up Bible clubs for teenagers and experimented with the use of music to attract young people. The Catholics set up an entire network of parochial schools, and by the late nineteenth century probably more than half of their young members were attending elementary schools run by local parishes. Some Missouri Synod German Lutherans and Dutch Reformed churches also set up parochial schools. In the twentieth century, all the denominations sponsored programs such as the Boy Scouts and Girl Scouts.


title: Christianity in the United States

text: The Baylor University Institute for Studies of Religion conducted a survey covering various aspects of American religious life. The researchers analyzing the survey results have categorized the responses into what they call the "four Gods": An "authoritarian" God (31%), a "benevolent" God (25%), a "distant God" (23%), and a "critical" God (16%). A major implication to emerge from this survey is that "the type of god people believe in can predict their political and moral attitudes more so than just looking at their religious tradition."


title: Christianity in the United States

text: As far as religious tradition, the survey determined that 33.6% of respondents are evangelical Protestants, while 10.8% had no religious affiliation at all. Out of those without affiliation, 62.9% still indicated that they "believe in God or some higher power".


title: Christianity in the United States

text: Another study, conducted by "Christianity Today" with "Leadership" magazine, attempted to understand the range and differences among American Christians. A national attitudinal and behavioral survey found that their beliefs and practices clustered into five distinct segments. Spiritual growth for two large segments of Christians may be occurring in non-traditional ways. Instead of attending church on Sunday mornings, many opt for personal, individual ways to stretch themselves spiritually.


title: Christianity in the United States

text: Gallup International indicates that 41% of American citizens report they regularly attend religious services, compared to 15% of French citizens, 10% of British citizens, and 7.5% of Australian citizens.


title: Christianity in the United States

text: The Bible Belt is an informal term for a region in the Southern United States in which socially conservative evangelical Protestantism is a significant part of the culture and Christian church attendance across the denominations is generally higher than the nation's average. By contrast, religion plays the least important role in New England and in the Western United States.


title: Christianity in the United States

text: Church attendance varies significantly by state and region. In a 2014 Gallup survey, less than half of Americans said that they attended church or synagogue weekly. The figures ranged from 51% in Utah to 17% in Vermont.


title: Christianity in the United States

text: Data from the Pew Research Center show that as of 2008, the majority of White Americans were Christian, and about 51% of the White American were Protestant, and 26% were Catholic.


title: Christianity in the United States

text: The most methodologically rigorous study of Hispanic and Latino Americans religious affiliation to date was the Hispanic Churches in American Public Life (HCAPL) National Survey, conducted between August and October 2000. This survey found that 70% of all Hispanic and Latino Americans are Catholic, 20% are Protestant, 3% are "alternative Christians" (such as Latter-Day Saints or Jehovah's Witnesses). According to a Public Religion Research Institute study in 2017, the majority of Hispanic and Latino Americans are Christians (76%), and about 11% of Americans identify as Hispanic or Latino Christian.


title: Christianity in the United States

text: The majority of African Americans are Protestant (78%), many of whom follow the historically black churches. A 2012 Pew Research Center study found that 42% of Asian Americans identify themselves as Christians.


title: Christianity in the United States

text: Beginning around 1600, Northern European settlers introduced Anglican and Puritan religion, as well as Baptist, Presbyterian, Lutheran, Quaker, and Moravian denominations.


title: Christianity in the United States

text: Beginning in the 16th century, the Spanish (and later the French and English) introduced Catholicism. From the 19th century to the present, Catholics came to the US in large numbers due to the immigration of Irish, Germans, Italians, Hispanics, Portuguese, French, Polish, Highland Scots, Dutch, Flemish, Hungarians, Lebanese (Maronite), and other ethnic groups.


title: Christianity in the United States

text: Most of the Eastern Orthodox adherents in the United States are descended from immigrants of Eastern European or Middle Eastern background, especially from Greek, Russian, Ukrainian, Arab, Bulgarian, Romanian, or Serbian backgrounds.


title: Christianity in the United States

text: Most of the Oriental Orthodox adherents in the United States are from Armenian, Coptic-Egyptian and Ethiopian-Eritrean backgrounds.


title: Christianity in the United States

text: Along with the Ethiopian-Eritrean Christians also came the P'ent'ay Evangelical Churches, a part of Evangelicalism that maintains the Eastern Christian Calendar and other cultural traditions.


title: Christianity in the United States

text: Data from the Pew Research Center show that as of 2013, there were about 1.6 million Christians from Jewish background, most of them Protestant. According to the same data, most of the Christians of Jewish descent were raised as Jews or are Jews by ancestry.


title: Christianity in the United States

text: A study from 2015 estimated some 450,000 American Muslims who had converted to Christianity, most of whom belong to an evangelical or Pentecostal community. In 2010 there were approximately 180,000 Arab-Americans and about 130,000 Iranian Americans who converted from Islam to Christianity. Dudley Woodbury, a Fulbright scholar of Islam, estimates that 20,000 Muslims convert to Christianity annually in the United States. Many Druze immigrants to the United States converted to Protestantism, becoming communicants of the Presbyterian or Methodist Churches.


title: Christianity in the United States

text: It's been also reported that conversion into Christianity is significantly increasing among Korean Americans, Chinese Americans, and Japanese Americans. By 2012, the percentage of Christians within the mentioned communities was 71%, more than 30% and 37%.


title: Christianity in the United States

text: Messianic Judaism (or Messianic Movement) is the name of a Protestant movement comprising a number of streams, whose members may consider themselves Jewish. It blends elements of religious Jewish practice with evangelical Protestantism. Messianic Judaism affirms Christian creeds such as the messiahship and divinity of "Yeshua" (the Hebrew name of Jesus) and the Triune Nature of God, while also adhering to some Jewish dietary laws and customs. , population estimates for the United States were between 175,000 and 250,000 members.


title: Christianity in the United States

text: A 2013 Pew Research Center report found that 1.7 million American Jewish adults, 1.6 million of whom were raised in Jewish homes or had Jewish ancestry, identified as Christians or Messianic Jews but also consider themselves ethnically Jewish. According to a 2020 study by the Pew Research Center, 19% of those who say they were raised Jewish, consider themselves Christian.


title: Christianity in the United States

text: This table lists total membership and number of congregations in the United States for religious bodies with more than 1 million members. Numbers are from reports on the official web sites, which can vary widely based on information source and membership definition.


title: B vitamins

text: B vitamins are a class of water-soluble vitamins that play important roles in cell metabolism and synthesis of red blood cells. Though these vitamins share similar names (B, B, B, etc.), they are chemically distinct compounds that often coexist in the same foods. In general, dietary supplements containing all eight are referred to as a vitamin B complex. Individual B vitamin supplements are referred to by the specific number or name of each vitamin, such as B for thiamine, B for riboflavin, and B for niacin. Some are more commonly recognized by name than by number, for example pantothenic acid, biotin, and folate.


title: B vitamins

text: Each B vitamin is either a cofactor (generally a coenzyme) for key metabolic processes or is a precursor needed to make one and is thus an essential nutrient.


title: B vitamins

text: Note: other substances once thought to be vitamins were given numbers in the B-vitamin numbering scheme, but were subsequently discovered to be either not essential for life or manufactured by the body, thus not meeting the two essential qualifiers for a vitamin. See section #Related compounds for numbers 4, 8, 10, 11, and others.


title: B vitamins

text: B vitamins are found in abundance in meat, eggs, and dairy products. Processed carbohydrates such as sugar and white flour tend to have lower B vitamin than their unprocessed counterparts. For this reason, it is required by law in many countries (including the United States) that the B vitamins thiamine, riboflavin, niacin, and folic acid be added back to white flour after processing. This is referred to as "enriched flour" on food labels. B vitamins are particularly concentrated in meat such as turkey, tuna and liver.


title: B vitamins

text: Sources for B vitamins also include spinach, legumes (pulses or beans), whole grains, asparagus, potatoes, bananas, chili peppers, breakfast cereals.


title: B vitamins

text: The B vitamin is not abundantly available from plant products (although it has been found in moderate abundance in fermented vegetable products, certain seaweeds, and in certain mushrooms, with the bioavailability of the vitamin in these cases remaining uncertain), making B deficiency a legitimate concern for those maintaining a vegan diet. Manufacturers of plant-based foods will sometimes report B content, leading to confusion about what sources yield B. The confusion arises because the standard US Pharmacopeia (USP) method for measuring the B content does not measure the B directly. Instead, it measures a bacterial response to the food. Chemical variants of the B vitamin found in plant sources are active for bacteria, but cannot be used by the human body. This same phenomenon can cause significant over-reporting of B content in other types of foods as well.


title: B vitamins

text: A common way to increase vitamin B intake is by using dietary supplements. B vitamins are commonly added to energy drinks, many of which have been marketed with large amounts of B vitamins.


title: B vitamins

text: Because they are soluble in water, excess B vitamins are generally readily excreted, although individual absorption, use and metabolism may vary. The elderly and athletes may need to supplement their intake of B and other B vitamins due to problems in absorption and increased needs for energy production. In cases of severe deficiency, B vitamins, especially B, may also be delivered by injection to reverse deficiencies. Both type 1 and type 2 diabetics may also be advised to supplement thiamine based on high prevalence of low plasma thiamine concentration and increased thiamine clearance associated with diabetes. Also, folate deficiency in early embryo development has been linked to neural tube defects. Thus, women planning to become pregnant are usually encouraged to increase daily dietary folate intake or take a supplement.


title: B vitamins

text: Several named vitamin deficiency diseases may result from the lack of sufficient B vitamins. Deficiencies of other B vitamins result in symptoms that are not part of a named deficiency disease.


title: B vitamins

text: Because water-soluble B vitamins are eliminated in the urine, taking large doses of certain B vitamins usually only produces transient side effects (only exception is pyridoxine). General side effects may include restlessness, nausea and insomnia. These side effects are almost always caused by dietary supplements and not foodstuffs.


title: B vitamins

text: Many of the following substances have been referred to as vitamins as they were once believed to be vitamins. They are no longer considered as such, and the numbers that were assigned to them now form the "gaps" in the true series of B-complex vitamins described above (for example, there is no vitamin B). Some of them, though not essential to humans, are essential in the diets of other organisms; others have no known nutritional value and may even be toxic under certain conditions.


title: Job (biblical figure)

text: Job ( ;  – "Īyyōḇ"; – "Iṓb") is the central figure of the Book of Job in the Bible. In rabbinical literature, Job is called one of the prophets of the Gentiles. In Islam, Job () is also considered a prophet.


title: Job (biblical figure)

text: Job is presented as a good and prosperous family man who is suddenly beset with horrendous disasters that take away all he holds dear—a scenario intended to test Job's faith in God. Struggling mightily to understand this situation, Job reflects on his despair but consistently remains devout.


title: Job (biblical figure)

text: The Hebrew Book of Job is part of Ketuvim ("Writings") of the Hebrew Bible. Not much is known about Job based on the Masoretic Text.


title: Job (biblical figure)

text: The characters in the Book of Job consist of Job, his wife, his three friends (Bildad, Eliphaz, and Zophar), a man named Elihu, God, and angels (one of whom is named Satan).


title: Job (biblical figure)

text: It begins with an introduction to Job's character—he is described as a blessed man who lives righteously in the Land of Uz. The Lord's praise of Job prompts an angel with the title of "satan" ("accuser") to suggest that Job served God simply because God protected him. God removes Job's protection and gives permission to the angel to take his wealth, his children, and his physical health (but not his life). Despite his difficult circumstances, he does not curse God, but rather curses the day of his birth. And although he anguishes over his plight, he stops short of accusing God of injustice. Job's miserable earthly condition is simply God's will.


title: Job (biblical figure)

text: In the following, Job debates with three friends concerning his condition. They argue whether it was justified, and they debate solutions to his problems. Job ultimately condemns all their counsel, beliefs, and critiques of him as false. God then appears to Job and his friends out of a whirlwind, not answering Job's central questions. Job, by staying silent before God, stresses the point that he understands that his affliction is God's will even though he despairs at not knowing why. Job appears faithful without direct knowledge of God and without demands for special attention from God, even for a cause that all others would declare to be just. And the text gives an allusion to : "And unto man he said, Behold, the fear of the Lord, that is wisdom; and to depart from evil is understanding".


title: Job (biblical figure)

text: God rebukes the three friends and gives them instruction for the remission of sin, followed by Job being restored to an even better condition than his former wealthy state (). Job is blessed to have seven sons, and three daughters named Jemimah (which means "dove"), Keziah ("cinnamon"), and Keren-happuch ("horn of eye-makeup"). His daughters were said to be the most beautiful women in the land.


title: Job (biblical figure)

text: The Septuagint, an ancient Greek translation of the Hebrew Old Testament, has a revised and updated final verse that claims Job's genealogy, asserting him to be a grandson of Esau and a ruler of Edom.


title: Job (biblical figure)

text: The Quran describes Job as a righteous servant of Allah, who was afflicted by suffering for a lengthy period of time. However, it clearly states that Job never lost faith in God and forever called to God in prayer, asking Him to remove his affliction:


title: Job (biblical figure)

text: According to a minority view, Job never existed. In this view, Job was a literary creation by a prophet who used this form of writing to convey a divine message. On the other hand, the Talmud (in Tractate Baba Batra 15a–16b) goes to great lengths trying to ascertain when Job actually lived, citing many opinions and interpretations by the leading sages.


title: Job (biblical figure)

text: Christianity accepts the Book of Job as canon in its Old Testament. In addition, Job is mentioned in the New Testament of the Christian Bible: the Epistle of James () paraphrases Job as an example of patience in suffering.


title: Job (biblical figure)

text: Job's declaration, "I know "that" my redeemer liveth" (), is considered by some Christians to be a proto-Christian reference to Christ as the Redeemer, and is the basis of several Christian hymns, as well as the opening scene of Part III of Handel's "Messiah". However, Jewish bible commentators and scholars point out that Job "insists on a divine hearing in his lifetime" (cf. Job 16:19–22).


title: Job (biblical figure)

text: He is commemorated by the Lutheran Church–Missouri Synod in their Calendar of Saints on May 9, by the Roman Catholic Church on May 10, and by the Eastern Orthodox and Byzantine Catholic churches on May 6.


title: Job (biblical figure)

text: He is also commemorated by the Armenian Apostolic Church on May 6 and December 26, and by the Coptic Orthodox Church on April 27 and August 29. The Armenian Apostolic Church commemorates Job along with John the Baptist on the Thursday after the third Sunday of the Feast of the Assumption.


title: Job (biblical figure)

text: In the Qur'an, Job () is considered a prophet in Islam. The narrative frame of Job's story in Islam is similar to the Hebrew Bible story but, in Islam, the emphasis is paid to Job remaining steadfast to God and there is no record of his bitterness or defiance, or mention of lengthy discussions with friends. Some Muslim commentators also spoke of Job as being the ancestor of the Romans.


title: Job (biblical figure)

text: Muslim literature also comments on Job's time and place of prophecy, saying that he came after Joseph in the prophetic series and that he preached to his own people rather than being sent to a specified community. Tradition further recounts that Job will be the leader of the group of "those who patiently endured" in Heaven. Philip K. Hitti asserted that the subject was an Arab and the setting was Northern Arabia.


title: Job (biblical figure)

text: The Qur'an mentions Job's narrative in a concise manner. Similar to the Hebrew Bible narrative, Islamic tradition mentions that Satan heard the angels of God speak of Job as being the most faithful man of his generation. Job, being a chosen prophet of God, would remain committed in daily prayer and would frequently call to God, thanking God for blessing him with abundant wealth and a large family. But Satan planned to turn the God-fearing Job away from God and wanted Job to fall into disbelief and corruption. Therefore, God allowed Satan to afflict Job with distress and intense illness and suffering, as God knew that Job would never turn away from his Lord.


title: Job (biblical figure)

text: The Qur'an describes Job as a righteous servant of Allah (God), who was afflicted by suffering for a lengthy period of time. However, it clearly states that Job never lost faith in God and forever called to God in prayer, asking him to remove his affliction:


title: Job (biblical figure)

text: The narrative goes on to state that after many years of suffering, God ordered Job to "Strike with thy foot!". At once, Job struck the ground with his foot and God caused a cool spring of water to gush forth from the Earth, from which Job could replenish himself. The Qur'an says that it was then that God removed his pain and suffering and He returned Job's family to him, blessed him with many generations of descendants and granted him great wealth. In addition to the brief descriptions of Job's narrative, the Qur'an further mentions Job twice in the lists of those whom God had given special guidance, wisdom and inspiration (IV: 163) and as one of the men who received authority, the Book and the gift of prophethood (VI:84).


title: Job (biblical figure)

text: There are at least two locations that claim to be the place of Job's ordeal, and at least three that claim to have his tomb.


title: Job (biblical figure)

text: The Eyüp Sultan Mosque in Istanbul, Turkey, holds the tomb of Abu Ayyub al-Ansari, a companion of Muhammad, not the biblical/Qur'anic Job (Ayyub in Arabic, Eyüp in Turkish), though some locals tend to conflate the two.


title: Job (biblical figure)

text: In Palestinian folk tradition, Job's place of trial is Al-Jura, or Al-Joura, a village outside the town of Al-Majdal (today's Ashkelon, Israel). It was there God rewarded him with a fountain of youth that removed whatever illnesses he had, and gave him back his youth.


title: Job (biblical figure)

text: To the northwest of the depopulated Palestinian village of Dayr Ayyub is an area which, according to the village belief, contained the tomb of the prophet Ayyub, the biblical Job.


title: Job (biblical figure)

text: In the area of Tabgha (Greek: Heptapegon), on the shore of the Sea of Galilee, a few sites are associated by local tradition with the life of Ayyub. A small grotto near the base of what is known to Christians as the Mount of Beatitudes, or Mount Eremos, is known as Mghraret Ayub ("Job's Cave"). Two of the towers built in the Byzantine period to collect the water of the Heptapegon springs are named in Arabic Tannur Ayub ("Job's Kiln") and Hammam Ayyub ("Job's Bath"). Hammam Ayyub was initially called "the Leper's Bath", but the leper was later identified with Job; the nearby spring, now a waterfall, is known as Ain Ayub, "Job's Spring".


title: Job (biblical figure)

text: The town of al-Shaykh Saad in the Hauran region in Syria has been associated with Job since at least the 4th-century AD. Karnein was mentioned in Eusebius' Onomasticon as a town of Bashan that was said to be the location of the house of Job. Egeria the pilgrim relates that a church was built over the place in March or February 384 AD, and that the place was known as the "town of Job", or ""civitas Job"". According to Egeria's account the body of Job was laid in a stone coffin below the altar. According to tradition, "Hammam Ayyub" is a fountain in the town where Job washed himself when he was sick, and is reputed to have healing powers. Another holy artifact in the town is the "Rock of Job", known in local folklore as the place where he sat when he was afflicted with the disease.


title: Job (biblical figure)

text: The city of Urfa (ancient Adma', later Edessa) in the Şanlıurfa Province, or Harran region of southeastern Turkey, also claims to be the location at which Job underwent his ordeal in a cave. The location boasts an Ottoman-style mosque and madrasa that runs as shops today. A well exists within the complex, said to be the one formed when he struck the ground with his foot as described in the Quran. The water is considered to be miraculously curing. The whole complex underwent recent restoration. The tomb of Job is located outside the city of Urfa.


title: Job (biblical figure)

text: The Tomb of Job is also said to be situated in Jabal Qarah outside the city of Salalah in southern Oman.


title: Job (biblical figure)

text: Additionally, the Druze community also maintains a shrine for the Prophet Job in Niha village in the Chouf mountains of Lebanon. This shrine is said to be the place where Job was healed from his ailments after his wife carried his frail body up the steep mountain in a basket so he dies up there. Instead, he was healed and given an even larger wealth.


title: Betty Davis

text: Betty Davis (born Betty Gray Mabry; July 26, 1944 – February 9, 2022) was an American singer, songwriter, and model. She was known for her controversial sexually-oriented lyrics and performance style, and was the second wife of trumpeter Miles Davis. Her AllMusic profile describes her as "a wildly flamboyant funk diva with few equals ... [who] combined the gritty emotional realism of Tina Turner, the futurist fashion sense of David Bowie, and the trendsetting flair of Miles Davis".


title: Betty Davis

text: Betty Gray Mabry was born in Durham, North Carolina, on July 26, 1944. She developed an interest in music when she was about ten, and was introduced to various blues musicians by her grandmother, Beulah Blackwell, while staying at her farm in Reidsville. At 12, she wrote one of her first songs, "I'm Going to Bake That Cake of Love". The family relocated to Homestead, Pennsylvania, so her father, Henry Mabry, could work at a Pennsylvania steel mill. Davis attended and graduated Homestead High School. She decided to pursue a career in showbusiness after watching her father dance like Elvis Presley.


title: Betty Davis

text: When she was 16, Betty left Homestead for New York City, enrolling at the Fashion Institute of Technology (FIT) while living with her aunt. She soaked up the Greenwich Village culture and folk music of the early 1960s. She associated herself with frequenters of the Cellar, a hip uptown club where young and stylish people congregated. It was a multiracial, artsy crowd of models, design students, actors, and singers. At the Cellar she played records and chatted people up. She was a friend and early muse to fashion designer Stephen Burrows, who also studied at the FIT at the time. She also worked as a model, appearing in photo spreads in "Seventeen", "Ebony" and "Glamour".


title: Betty Davis

text: In New York, she met musicians including Jimi Hendrix and Sly Stone. The seeds of her musical career were planted through her friendship with soul singer Lou Courtney, who reputedly produced her first single, "The Cellar", though the existence of that record has been questioned. She secured a contract with Don Costa, who had written arrangements for Frank Sinatra. As Betty Mabry, she recorded "Get Ready For Betty" b/w "I'm Gonna Get My Baby Back" in 1964 for Costa's DCP International label. Around the same time, she recorded a single, "I'll Be There", with Roy Arlington for Safice Records, under the joint name "Roy and Betty".


title: Betty Davis

text: Her first professional gig came after she wrote "Uptown (to Harlem)" for the Chambers Brothers. Their 1967 album was a major success, but Mabry focused on her modeling career. She was successful as a model but felt bored by the work—"I didn't like modeling because you didn't need brains to do it. It's only going to last as long as you look good."


title: Betty Davis

text: In 1968, when she was in a relationship with Hugh Masekela, she recorded several songs for Columbia Records, with Masekela doing the arrangements. Two of them were released as a single: "Live, Love, Learn" b/w "It's My Life". Her relationship with Miles Davis began soon after her breakup from Masekela. She featured on the cover of Miles Davis' album "Filles de Kilimanjaro", which included his tribute to her, "Mademoiselle Mabry", and she introduced him to psychedelic rock and the flamboyant clothing styles of the era. In the spring of 1969, Betty returned to Columbia's 52nd St. Studios to record a series of demo tracks, with Miles and Teo Macero producing. At least five songs were taped during those sessions, three of which were Mabry originals, two of which were covers of Cream and Creedence Clearwater Revival. Miles attempted to use these demo songs to secure an album deal for Betty, but neither Columbia nor Atlantic were interested and they were archived into a vault until 2016 when they were released in the compilation, "The Columbia Years, 1968–1969", by Seattle's Light in the Attic Records.


title: Betty Davis

text: After the end of her marriage with Miles, Betty moved to London, probably around 1971, to pursue her modeling career. She wrote music while in the UK and, after about a year, returned to the US with the intention of recording songs with Santana. Instead, she recorded her own songs with a group of West Coast funk musicians including Larry Graham, Greg Errico, the Pointer Sisters, and members of Tower of Power. Davis wrote and arranged all her songs. Her first record, "Betty Davis", was released in 1973. She released two more studio albums, "They Say I'm Different" (1974) and her major label debut on Island Records "Nasty Gal" (1975). None of the three albums were a commercial success, but she had two minor hits on the "Billboard" R&B chart: "If I'm in Luck I Might Get Picked Up", which reached no. 66 in 1973, and "Shut Off the Lights", which reached no. 97 in 1975.


title: Betty Davis

text: Davis remained a cult figure as a singer, due in part to her unabashedly sexual lyrics and performance style, which were both controversial for the time. She had success in Europe, but in the U.S. she was barred from performing on television because of her sexually aggressive stage persona. Some of her shows were boycotted, and her songs were not played on the radio due to pressure by religious groups and the NAACP. Carlos Santana recalled Betty as "indomitable – she couldn't be tamed. Musically, philosophically and physically, she was extreme and attractive."


title: Betty Davis

text: In 1976, Davis completed another album for Island Records (which was shelved and unreleased for 33 years), before being dropped by the label. She spent a year in Japan, spending time with silent monks.


title: Betty Davis

text: In 1980, Davis' father died which prompted her return to the US to live with her mother in Homestead, Pennsylvania. Davis struggled to overcome her father's death, and subsequent mental illness. She acknowledged that she suffered a setback at the time, but stayed in Homestead, accepted the end of her career, and lived a quiet life.


title: Betty Davis

text: The tracks from Davis' final recording sessions in 1979 were released on two bootleg albums, "Crashin' from Passion" (1995) and "Hangin' Out in Hollywood" (1996). A greatest hits album, "Anti Love: The Best of Betty Davis," was also released in 1995.


title: Betty Davis

text: In 2007, "Betty Davis" (1973) and "They Say I'm Different" (1974) were reissued by Light in the Attic Records. In 2009, the label reissued "Nasty Gal" and her unreleased fourth studio album recorded in 1976, re-titled as "Is It Love or Desire?". Both reissues contained extensive liner notes and shed some light on the mystery of why her fourth album, considered possibly to be her best work by members of her last band (Herbie Hancock, Chuck Rainey, and Alphonse Mouzon), was shelved and remained unreleased for 33 years.


title: Betty Davis

text: In 2017, an independent documentary directed by Phil Cox entitled "Betty: They Say I'm Different", was released, which renewed interest in her life and music career.


title: Betty Davis

text: When Cox tracked Davis down, he found her living in the basement of a house with no internet, cell phone, or car. He said: "This wasn't a woman with riches or luxury. She was living on the bare essentials."


title: Betty Davis

text: In 2019, Davis released "A Little Bit Hot Tonight", her first new song in over 40 years, which was performed and sung by Danielle Maggio, an ethnomusicologist who was a friend and associate producer on "Betty: They Say I'm Different".


title: Betty Davis

text: As a model in 1966, Betty met jazz musician Miles Davis, who was 19 years her senior. He was separated from his first wife, dancer Frances Davis, and was dating actress Cicely Tyson. Betty began dating Miles in early 1968, and they were married that September. During their year of marriage, she introduced him to the fashions and popular music trends of the era that influenced his music. In his autobiography, Miles credited Betty with helping to plant the seeds of his further musical explorations by introducing the trumpeter to psychedelic rock guitarist Jimi Hendrix and funk innovator Sly Stone. The Miles Davis album "Filles de Kilimanjaro" (1968) features Betty on the cover and includes a song named after her.


title: Betty Davis

text: In his autobiography, Miles said Betty was "too young and wild", and accused her of having an affair with Jimi Hendrix, which hastened the end of their marriage. Betty denied the affair stating, "I was so angry with Miles when he wrote that. It was disrespectful to Jimi and to me. Miles and I broke up because of his violent temper." After accusing her of adultery, he filed for divorce in 1969. Miles told "Jet" magazine that the divorce was obtained on a "temperament" charge. He added, "I'm just not the kind of cat to be married." Hendrix and Miles remained close, planning to record, until Hendrix's death. The influence of Hendrix and especially Sly Stone on Miles Davis was obvious on the album "Bitches Brew" (1970), which ushered in the era of jazz fusion. It has been said that he wanted to call the album "Witches Brew" but Betty convinced him to change it.


title: Betty Davis

text: In 1975 Davis' lover Robert Palmer helped her secure a deal with Island Records. Shortly thereafter she released her album "Nasty Gal".


title: Betty Davis

text: Davis died from cancer at her home in Homestead, Pennsylvania, on February 9, 2022, at the age of 77.


title: Betty Davis

text: The live action/animated TV series "" ended its 2018 season with an episode focusing on Davis' controversial career.


title: Betty Davis

text: Davis' music has been featured in television series including "Orange Is the New Black", "Girlboss", "Mixed-ish", "High Fidelity" and "Pistol".


Money Heist: Korea – Joint Economic Area () is a Korean television series and second series in the "Money Heist" franchise, based on the original Spanish series. The Korean series directed by Kim Hong-sun and written by Ryu Yong-jae, is an original Netflix series, starring Yoo Ji-tae, Yunjin Kim, Park Hae-soo, Jeon Jong-seo, Lee Hyun-woo, Lee Won-jong, and Park Myung-hoon. It depicts a hostage crisis situation set in a unified Korean Peninsula, involving a genius strategist and people with different personalities and abilities. The first 6 episodes were released on June 24, 2022 on Netflix.


title: Money Heist: Korea – Joint Economic Area

text: The series, both a remake and spin-off/continuation of the Spanish TV drama, follows the storyline and characters of the original. "The Professor" (Yoo Ji-tae), a strategist criminal mastermind, plans to pull off a heist in the reunified Korean Peninsula inspired by those in Spain. The operation involves strategists and desperados with different characteristics and abilities, who have to face unusual situations. Thieves overtake the mint of a unified Korea. With hostages trapped inside, the police must stop them — as well as the shadowy mastermind behind it all.


text: In June 2020, it was reported that BH Entertainment was planning for a remake of "Money Heist" co-producing it with Zium Content. They were in talks with Netflix, and it was in the development stage. On December 1, it was reported that a Korean remake of the series has been confirmed by Netflix with Kim Hong-sun as director and Ryu Yong-jae as script writer. BH Entertainment will be in charge of production, with the series having 12 episodes.


text: On March 31, the casting line-up was confirmed by Netflix. After finalising the cast, the story and characters were formulated. The focus was to keep the narrative of the original and the attributes of the characters alive. Lim Ji-yeon joined the cast in April 2021. Lee Hyun-woo replaced Park Jung-woo due to date conflicts with the series "Fly High Butterfly". The Korean cast was compared by drawing the similarities and differences among the original and the adaptation.


text: Filming was suspended on July 7, 2021 to accommodate guidelines intended to limit the spread of COVID-19.


text: On January 17, 2022, Netflix revealed the English title of the series: "Money Heist: Korea – Joint Economic Area".


text: On April 29, 2022, it was announced that "Money Heist: Korea – Joint Economic Area" would be released on June 24, 2022.


text: "Money Heist: Korea – Joint Economic Area" featuring in Global Top 10 weekly list of the most-watched international Netflix TV shows, topped the list with 33,740,000 viewing hours in the week from June 20 to June 26 and with 49,000,000 viewing hours in the week from June 27 to July 3. In the week July 4 to July 10 it was at 3rd place with 15,630,000 viewing hours. Additionally it ranked first in the Top-10 list of 51 countries.


text: On the review aggregator Rotten Tomatoes, the series has an approval rating of 79% based on 14 reviews, with an average rating of 6.60/10. Its critical consensus reads "This Korean remake of "Money Heist" pilfers from the original to the point of holding no surprises for established fans, but the execution is slick and blueprint rock-solid." On Metacritic, the series has a weighted average score of 56 out of 100 based on 6 critics, indicating "mixed or average reviews".


text: Joel Keller of "Decider" appreciated the performances of Yoo Ji-tae as the Professor, Jeon Jong-seo as Tokyo and Kim Yun-jin as Seon Woo-jin, writing, "each providing just the right tone to make the show less an over-the-top heist series and more of a layered treatise on the economic gap that everyone is suffering through at this stage in world history." Keller concluded, "If you’re a fan of "Money Heist", you’ll like "Money Heist: Korea – Joint Economic Area"." Pierce Conran of the "South China Morning Post" rated the series with 3.5 out of 5 stars and wrote, "the purpose of "Money Heist" is to entertain rather than educate, and entertain it does with a story that hums along with all the thrills and twists required of a well-planned and inventively thwarted heist narrative."


text: Daniel Hart of Ready Steady Cut graded the part 1 of season 1 with 3.5 stars out of 5 and wrote, "The production is impressive, the script is punchy, and the characters do well to represent their original counterparts." In conclusion, Hart wrote, "this remake is worth the time and investment, at least for the purely invested performances and production. "Money Heist" is back, so we shouldn’t grumble." Kate Sánchez writing in Butwhythopodcast rated the part 1 8.5/10 and praised the cast writing, ""Money Heist Korea" is a phenomenal series because of its cast". Sánchez liked the chemistry between cast, writing, "chemistry that crackles between each and every cast member that pushes "Money Heist Korea" to be a dynamic show with uncertainty running through every scene." Concluding her review, Sánchez wrote, "Ultimately "Money Heist" is expertly crafted to push tension and showcase action while also managing to investigate the way people interact with each other." S. Poorvaja of "The Hindu" wrote, "The first season of "Money Heist: Korea - Joint Economic Area" gets right in terms of its setting and characters, but here's hoping the makers push the envelope and take some risks in the second season."


title: Paul Dirac

text: Paul Adrien Maurice Dirac (; 8 August 1902 – 20 October 1984) was an English theoretical physicist who is regarded as one of the most significant physicists of the 20th century. He was the Lucasian Professor of Mathematics at the University of Cambridge, a professor of physics at Florida State University and the University of Miami, and a 1933 Nobel Prize recipient.


title: Paul Dirac

text: Dirac made fundamental contributions to the early development of both quantum mechanics and quantum electrodynamics. Among other discoveries, he formulated the Dirac equation which describes the behaviour of fermions and predicted the existence of antimatter. Dirac shared the 1933 Nobel Prize in Physics with Erwin Schrödinger "for the discovery of new productive forms of atomic theory". He also made significant contributions to the reconciliation of general relativity with quantum mechanics.


title: Paul Dirac

text: Dirac was regarded by his friends and colleagues as unusual in character. In a 1926 letter to Paul Ehrenfest, Albert Einstein wrote of a Dirac paper, "I am toiling over Dirac. This balancing on the dizzying path between genius and madness is awful." In another letter concerning the Compton effect he wrote, "I don't understand the details of Dirac at all."


title: Paul Dirac

text: Paul Adrien Maurice Dirac was born at his parents' home in Bristol, England, on 8 August 1902, and grew up in the Bishopston area of the city. His father, Charles Adrien Ladislas Dirac, was an immigrant from Saint-Maurice, Switzerland who worked in Bristol as a French teacher. His mother, Florence Hannah Dirac, née Holten, was born to a Cornish Methodist family in Liskeard, Cornwall. She was named after Florence Nightingale by her father, a ship's captain, who had met Nightingale while he was a soldier during the Crimean war. His mother moved to Bristol as a young woman, where she worked as a librarian at the Bristol Central Library; despite this she still considered her identity to be Cornish rather than English. Paul had a younger sister, Béatrice Isabelle Marguerite, known as Betty, and an older brother, Reginald Charles Félix, known as Felix, who died by suicide in March 1925. Dirac later recalled: "My parents were terribly distressed. I didn't know they cared so much ... I never knew that parents were supposed to care for their children, but from then on I knew."


title: Paul Dirac

text: Charles and the children were officially Swiss nationals until they became naturalised on 22 October 1919. Dirac's father was strict and authoritarian, although he disapproved of corporal punishment. Dirac had a strained relationship with his father, so much so that after his father's death, Dirac wrote, "I feel much freer now, and I am my own man." Charles forced his children to speak to him only in French so that they might learn the language. When Dirac found that he could not express what he wanted to say in French, he chose to remain silent.


title: Paul Dirac

text: Dirac was educated first at Bishop Road Primary School and then at the all-boys Merchant Venturers' Technical College (later Cotham School), where his father was a French teacher. The school was an institution attached to the University of Bristol, which shared grounds and staff. It emphasised technical subjects like bricklaying, shoemaking and metalwork, and modern languages. This was unusual at a time when secondary education in Britain was still dedicated largely to the classics, and something for which Dirac would later express his gratitude.


title: Paul Dirac

text: Dirac studied electrical engineering on a City of Bristol University Scholarship at the University of Bristol's engineering faculty, which was co-located with the Merchant Venturers' Technical College. Shortly before he completed his degree in 1921, he sat for the entrance examination for St John's College, Cambridge. He passed and was awarded a £70 scholarship, but this fell short of the amount of money required to live and study at Cambridge. Despite his having graduated with a first class honours Bachelor of Science degree in engineering, the economic climate of the post-war depression was such that he was unable to find work as an engineer. Instead, he took up an offer to study for a Bachelor of Arts degree in mathematics at the University of Bristol free of charge. He was permitted to skip the first year of the course owing to his engineering degree.


title: Paul Dirac

text: In 1923, Dirac graduated, once again with first class honours, and received a £140 scholarship from the Department of Scientific and Industrial Research. Along with his £70 scholarship from St John's College, this was enough to live at Cambridge. There, Dirac pursued his interests in the theory of general relativity, an interest he had gained earlier as a student in Bristol, and in the nascent field of quantum physics, under the supervision of Ralph Fowler. From 1925 to 1928 he held an 1851 Research Fellowship from the Royal Commission for the Exhibition of 1851. He completed his PhD in June 1926 with the first thesis on quantum mechanics to be submitted anywhere. He then continued his research in Copenhagen and Göttingen. In the spring of 1929, he was a visiting professor at the University of Wisconsin–Madison.


title: Paul Dirac

text: In 1937, Dirac married Margit Wigner, a sister of physicist Eugene Wigner and a divorcee. Dirac raised Margit's two children, Judith and Gabriel, as if they were his own. Paul and Margit Dirac also had two daughters together, Mary Elizabeth and Florence Monica.


title: Paul Dirac

text: Margit, known as Manci, had visited her brother in 1934 in Princeton, New Jersey, from their native Hungary and, while at dinner at the Annex Restaurant, met the "lonely-looking man at the next table". This account from a Korean physicist, Y. S. Kim, who met and was influenced by Dirac, also says: "It is quite fortunate for the physics community that Manci took good care of our respected Paul A. M. Dirac. Dirac published eleven papers during the period 1939–46... Dirac was able to maintain his normal research productivity only because Manci was in charge of everything else".


title: Paul Dirac

text: Dirac was known among his colleagues for his precise and taciturn nature. His colleagues in Cambridge jokingly defined a unit called a "dirac", which was one word per hour. When Niels Bohr complained that he did not know how to finish a sentence in a scientific article he was writing, Dirac replied, "I was taught at school never to start a sentence without knowing the end of it." He criticised the physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer's interest in poetry: "The aim of science is to make difficult things understandable in a simpler way; the aim of poetry is to state simple things in an incomprehensible way. The two are incompatible."


title: Paul Dirac

text: Dirac himself wrote in his diary during his postgraduate years that he concentrated solely on his research, and stopped only on Sunday when he took long strolls alone.


title: Paul Dirac

text: An anecdote recounted in a review of the 2009 biography tells of Werner Heisenberg and Dirac sailing on an ocean liner to a conference in Japan in August 1929. "Both still in their twenties, and unmarried, they made an odd couple. Heisenberg was a ladies' man who constantly flirted and danced, while Dirac—'an Edwardian geek', as biographer Graham Farmelo puts it—suffered agonies if forced into any kind of socializing or small talk. 'Why do you dance?' Dirac asked his companion. 'When there are nice girls, it is a pleasure,' Heisenberg replied. Dirac pondered this notion, then blurted out: 'But, Heisenberg, how do you know beforehand that the girls are nice?


title: Paul Dirac

text: Margit Dirac told both George Gamow and Anton Capri in the 1960s that her husband had said to a house visitor, "Allow me to present Wigner's sister, who is now my wife."


title: Paul Dirac

text: Another story told of Dirac is that when he first met the young Richard Feynman at a conference, he said after a long silence, "I have an equation. Do you have one too?"


title: Paul Dirac

text: After he presented a lecture at a conference, one colleague raised his hand and said: "I don't understand the equation on the top-right-hand corner of the blackboard". After a long silence, the moderator asked Dirac if he wanted to answer the question, to which Dirac replied: "That was not a question, it was a comment."


title: Paul Dirac

text: Dirac was also noted for his personal modesty. He called the equation for the time evolution of a quantum-mechanical operator, which he was the first to write down, the "Heisenberg equation of motion". Most physicists speak of Fermi–Dirac statistics for half-integer-spin particles and Bose–Einstein statistics for integer-spin particles. While lecturing later in life, Dirac always insisted on calling the former "Fermi statistics". He referred to the latter as "Bose statistics" for reasons, he explained, of "symmetry".


title: Paul Dirac

text: Heisenberg recollected a conversation among young participants at the 1927 Solvay Conference about Einstein and Planck's views on religion between Wolfgang Pauli, Heisenberg and Dirac. Dirac's contribution was a criticism of the political purpose of religion, which Bohr regarded as quite lucid when hearing it from Heisenberg later. Among other things, Dirac said:


title: Paul Dirac

text: I cannot understand why we idle discussing religion. If we are honest—and scientists have to be—we must admit that religion is a jumble of false assertions, with no basis in reality. The very idea of God is a product of the human imagination. It is quite understandable why primitive people, who were so much more exposed to the overpowering forces of nature than we are today, should have personified these forces in fear and trembling. But nowadays, when we understand so many natural processes, we have no need for such solutions. I can't for the life of me see how the postulate of an Almighty God helps us in any way. What I do see is that this assumption leads to such unproductive questions as to why God allows so much misery and injustice, the exploitation of the poor by the rich, and all the other horrors He might have prevented. If religion is still being taught, it is by no means because its ideas still convince us, but simply because some of us want to keep the lower classes quiet. Quiet people are much easier to govern than clamorous and dissatisfied ones. They are also much easier to exploit. Religion is a kind of opium that allows a nation to lull itself into wishful dreams and so forget the injustices that are being perpetrated against the people. Hence the close alliance between those two great political forces, the State and the Church. Both need the illusion that a kindly God rewards—in heaven if not on earth—all those who have not risen up against injustice, who have done their duty quietly and uncomplainingly. That is precisely why the honest assertion that God is a mere product of the human imagination is branded as the worst of all mortal sins.


title: Paul Dirac

text: Heisenberg's view was tolerant. Pauli, raised as a Catholic, had kept silent after some initial remarks, but when finally he was asked for his opinion, said: "Well, our friend Dirac has got a religion and its guiding principle is 'There is no God, and Paul Dirac is His prophet. Everybody, including Dirac, burst into laughter.


title: Paul Dirac

text: Later in life, Dirac's views towards the idea of God were less acerbic. As an author of an article appearing in the May 1963 edition of "Scientific American", Dirac wrote:


title: Paul Dirac

text: It seems to be one of the fundamental features of nature that fundamental physical laws are described in terms of a mathematical theory of great beauty and power, needing quite a high standard of mathematics for one to understand it. You may wonder: Why is nature constructed along these lines? One can only answer that our present knowledge seems to show that nature is so constructed. We simply have to accept it. One could perhaps describe the situation by saying that God is a mathematician of a very high order, and He used very advanced mathematics in constructing the universe. Our feeble attempts at mathematics enable us to understand a bit of the universe, and as we proceed to develop higher and higher mathematics we can hope to understand the universe better.


title: Paul Dirac

text: In 1971, at a conference meeting, Dirac expressed his views on the existence of God. Dirac explained that the existence of God could be justified only if an improbable event were to have taken place in the past:


title: Paul Dirac

text: It could be that it is extremely difficult to start life. It might be that it is so difficult to start a life that it has happened only once among all the planets... Let us consider, just as a conjecture, that the chance of life starting when we have got suitable physical conditions is 10. I don't have any logical reason for proposing this figure, I just want you to consider it as a possibility. Under those conditions ... it is almost certain that life would not have started. And I feel that under those conditions it will be necessary to assume the existence of a god to start off life. I would like, therefore, to set up this connection between the existence of a god and the physical laws: if physical laws are such that to start off life involves an excessively small chance so that it will not be reasonable to suppose that life would have started just by blind chance, then there must be a god, and such a god would probably be showing his influence in the quantum jumps which are taking place later on. On the other hand, if life can start very easily and does not need any divine influence, then I will say that there is no god.


title: Paul Dirac

text: Dirac did not commit himself to any definite view, but he described the possibilities for scientifically answering the question of God.


title: Paul Dirac

text: Dirac established the most general theory of quantum mechanics and discovered the relativistic equation for the electron, which now bears his name. The remarkable notion of an antiparticle to each fermion particle – e.g. the positron as antiparticle to the electron – stems from his equation. He was the first to develop quantum field theory, which underlies all theoretical work on sub-atomic or "elementary" particles today, work that is fundamental to our understanding of the forces of nature. He proposed and investigated the concept of a magnetic monopole, an object not yet known empirically, as a means of bringing even greater symmetry to James Clerk Maxwell's equations of electromagnetism.


title: Paul Dirac

text: Dirac's first step into a new quantum theory was taken late in September 1925. Ralph Fowler, his research supervisor, had received a proof copy of an exploratory paper by Werner Heisenberg in the framework of the old quantum theory of Bohr and Sommerfeld. Heisenberg leaned heavily on Bohr's correspondence principle but changed the equations so that they involved directly observable quantities, leading to the matrix formulation of quantum mechanics. Fowler sent Heisenberg's paper on to Dirac, who was on vacation in Bristol, asking him to look into this paper carefully.


title: Paul Dirac

text: Dirac's attention was drawn to a mysterious mathematical relationship, at first sight unintelligible, that Heisenberg had established. Several weeks later, back in Cambridge, Dirac suddenly recognised that this mathematical form had the same structure as the Poisson brackets that occur in the classical dynamics of particle motion. At the time, his memory of Poisson brackets was rather vague, but he found E. T. Whittaker's "Analytical Dynamics of Particles and Rigid Bodies" illuminating. From his new understanding, he developed a quantum theory based on non-commuting dynamical variables. This led him to the most profound and significant general formulation of quantum mechanics to date. Dirac's formulation allowed him to obtain the quantisation rules in a novel and more illuminating manner. For this work, published in 1926, Dirac received a PhD from Cambridge. This formed the basis for Fermi-Dirac statistics that applies to systems consisting of many identical spin 1/2 particles (i.e. that obey the Pauli exclusion principle), e.g. electrons in solids and liquids, and importantly to the field of conduction in semi-conductors.


title: Paul Dirac

text: Dirac was famously not bothered by issues of interpretation in quantum theory. In fact, in a paper published in a book in his honour, he wrote: "The interpretation of quantum mechanics has been dealt with by many authors, and I do not want to discuss it here. I want to deal with more fundamental things."


title: Paul Dirac

text: In 1928, building on 2×2 spin matrices which he purported to have discovered independently of Wolfgang Pauli's work on non-relativistic spin systems (Dirac told Abraham Pais, "I believe I got these [matrices] independently of Pauli and possibly Pauli got these independently of me."), he proposed the Dirac equation as a relativistic equation of motion for the wave function of the electron. This work led Dirac to predict the existence of the positron, the electron's antiparticle, which he interpreted in terms of what came to be called the "Dirac sea". The positron was observed by Carl Anderson in 1932. Dirac's equation also contributed to explaining the origin of quantum spin as a relativistic phenomenon.


title: Paul Dirac

text: The necessity of fermions (matter) being created and destroyed in Enrico Fermi's 1934 theory of beta decay led to a reinterpretation of Dirac's equation as a "classical" field equation for any point particle of spin "ħ"/2, itself subject to quantisation conditions involving anti-commutators. Thus reinterpreted, in 1934 by Werner Heisenberg, as a (quantum) field equation accurately describing all elementary matter particles – today quarks and leptons – this Dirac field equation is as central to theoretical physics as the Maxwell, Yang–Mills and Einstein field equations. Dirac is regarded as the founder of quantum electrodynamics, being the first to use that term. He also introduced the idea of vacuum polarisation in the early 1930s. This work was key to the development of quantum mechanics by the next generation of theorists, in particular Schwinger, Feynman, Sin-Itiro Tomonaga and Dyson in their formulation of quantum electrodynamics.


title: Paul Dirac

text: Dirac's "The" "Principles of Quantum Mechanics", published in 1930, is a landmark in the history of science. It quickly became one of the standard textbooks on the subject and is still used today. In that book, Dirac incorporated the previous work of Werner Heisenberg on matrix mechanics and of Erwin Schrödinger on wave mechanics into a single mathematical formalism that associates measurable quantities to operators acting on the Hilbert space of vectors that describe the state of a physical system. The book also introduced the Dirac delta function. Following his 1939 article, he also included the bra–ket notation in the third edition of his book, thereby contributing to its universal use nowadays.


title: Paul Dirac

text: In 1931, Dirac proposed that the existence of a single magnetic monopole in the universe would suffice to explain the quantisation of electrical charge. In 1975, 1982 and 2009, intriguing results suggested the possible detection of magnetic monopoles, but there is, to date, no direct evidence for their existence (see also Searches for magnetic monopoles).


title: Paul Dirac

text: He quantized the gravitational field and developed a general theory of the quantum field with dynamical constraints, which forms the basis of the gauge theories and superstring theories of today. The influence and importance of Dirac's work have increased with the decades, and physicists use the concepts and equations that he developed daily.


title: Paul Dirac

text: Dirac was the Lucasian Professor of Mathematics at the University of Cambridge from 1932 to 1969. In 1937, he proposed a speculative cosmological model based on the so-called large numbers hypothesis. During World War II, he conducted important theoretical and experimental research on uranium enrichment by gas centrifuge.


title: Paul Dirac

text: Dirac's quantum electrodynamics (QED) made predictions that were – more often than not – infinite and therefore unacceptable. A workaround known as renormalisation was developed, but Dirac never accepted this. "I must say that I am very dissatisfied with the situation", he said in 1975, "because this so-called 'good theory' does involve neglecting infinities which appear in its equations, neglecting them in an arbitrary way. This is just not sensible mathematics. Sensible mathematics involves neglecting a quantity when it is small – not neglecting it just because it is infinitely great and you do not want it!" His refusal to accept renormalisation resulted in his work on the subject moving increasingly out of the mainstream.


title: Paul Dirac

text: However, from his once rejected notes he managed to work on putting quantum electrodynamics on "logical foundations" based on Hamiltonian formalism that he formulated. He found a rather novel way of deriving the anomalous magnetic moment "Schwinger term" and also the Lamb shift, afresh in 1963, using the Heisenberg picture and without using the joining method used by Weisskopf and French, and by the two pioneers of modern QED, Schwinger and Feynman. That was two years before the Tomonaga–Schwinger–Feynman QED was given formal recognition by an award of the Nobel Prize for physics.


title: Paul Dirac

text: Weisskopf and French (FW) were the first to obtain the correct result for the Lamb shift and the anomalous magnetic moment of the electron. At first FW results did not agree with the incorrect but independent results of Feynman and Schwinger. The 1963–1964 lectures Dirac gave on quantum field theory at Yeshiva University were published in 1966 as the Belfer Graduate School of Science, Monograph Series Number, 3.


title: Paul Dirac

text: After having relocated to Florida to be near his elder daughter, Mary, Dirac spent his last fourteen years of both life and physics research at the University of Miami in Coral Gables, Florida, and Florida State University in Tallahassee, Florida.


title: Paul Dirac

text: In the 1950s in his search for a better QED, Paul Dirac developed the Hamiltonian theory of constraints based on lectures that he delivered at the 1949 International Mathematical Congress in Canada. Dirac had also solved the problem of putting the Schwinger–Tomonaga equation into the Schrödinger representation and given explicit expressions for the scalar meson field (spin zero pion or pseudoscalar meson), the vector meson field (spin one rho meson), and the electromagnetic field (spin one massless boson, photon).


title: Paul Dirac

text: The Hamiltonian of constrained systems is one of Dirac's many masterpieces. It is a powerful generalisation of Hamiltonian theory that remains valid for curved spacetime. The equations for the Hamiltonian involve only six degrees of freedom described by formula_1,formula_2 for each point of the surface on which the state is considered. The formula_3 ("m" = 0, 1, 2, 3) appear in the theory only through the variables formula_4, formula_5 which occur as arbitrary coefficients in the equations of motion.


title: Paul Dirac

text: There are four constraints or weak equations for each point of the surface formula_6 = constant. Three of them formula_7 form the four vector density in the surface. The fourth formula_8 is a 3-dimensional scalar density in the surface "H" ≈ 0; "H" ≈ 0 ("r" = 1, 2, 3)


title: Paul Dirac

text: In the late 1950s, he applied the Hamiltonian methods he had developed to cast Einstein's general relativity in Hamiltonian form and to bring to a technical completion the quantization problem of gravitation and bring it also closer to the rest of physics according to Salam and DeWitt. In 1959 he also gave an invited talk on "Energy of the Gravitational Field" at the New York Meeting of the American Physical Society. In 1964 he published his "Lectures on Quantum Mechanics" (London: Academic) which deals with constrained dynamics of nonlinear dynamical systems including quantization of curved spacetime. He also published a paper entitled "Quantization of the Gravitational Field" in the 1967 ICTP/IAEA Trieste Symposium on Contemporary Physics.


title: Paul Dirac

text: From September 1970 to January 1971, Dirac was a Visiting Professor at Florida State University in Tallahassee. During that time he was offered a permanent position there, which he accepted, becoming a full professor in 1972. Contemporary accounts of his time there describe it as happy except that he apparently found the summer heat oppressive and liked to escape from it to Cambridge.


title: Paul Dirac

text: He would walk about a mile to work each day and was fond of swimming in one of the two nearby lakes (Silver Lake and Lost Lake), and was also more sociable than he had been at the University of Cambridge, where he mostly worked at home apart from giving classes and seminars. At Florida State, he would usually eat lunch with his colleagues before taking a nap.


title: Paul Dirac

text: Dirac published over 60 papers in those last twelve years of his life, including a short book on general relativity. His last paper (1984), entitled "The inadequacies of quantum field theory," contains his final judgment on quantum field theory: "These rules of renormalisation give surprisingly, excessively good agreement with experiments. Most physicists say that these working rules are, therefore, correct. I feel that is not an adequate reason. Just because the results happen to be in agreement with observation does not prove that one's theory is correct." The paper ends with the words: "I have spent many years searching for a Hamiltonian to bring into the theory and have not yet found it. I shall continue to work on it as long as I can and other people, I hope, will follow along such lines."


title: Paul Dirac

text: Amongst his many students were Homi J. Bhabha, Fred Hoyle, John Polkinghorne and Freeman Dyson. Polkinghorne recalls that Dirac "was once asked what was his fundamental belief. He strode to a blackboard and wrote that the laws of nature should be expressed in beautiful equations."


title: Paul Dirac

text: Dirac shared the 1933 Nobel Prize for physics with Erwin Schrödinger "for the discovery of new productive forms of atomic theory". Dirac was also awarded the Royal Medal in 1939 and both the Copley Medal and the Max Planck Medal in 1952. He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1930, an Honorary Fellow of the American Physical Society in 1948, and an Honorary Fellow of the Institute of Physics, London in 1971. He received the inaugural J. Robert Oppenheimer Memorial Prize in 1969. Dirac became a member of the Order of Merit in 1973, having previously turned down a knighthood as he did not want to be addressed by his first name.


title: Paul Dirac

text: In 1984, Dirac died in Tallahassee, Florida, and was buried at Tallahassee's Roselawn Cemetery. Dirac's childhood home in Bishopston, Bristol is commemorated with a blue plaque, and the nearby Dirac Road is named in recognition of his links with the city of Bristol. A commemorative stone was erected in a garden in Saint-Maurice, Switzerland, the town of origin of his father's family, on 1 August 1991. On 13 November 1995 a commemorative marker, made from Burlington green slate and inscribed with the Dirac equation, was unveiled in Westminster Abbey. The Dean of Westminster, Edward Carpenter, had initially refused permission for the memorial, thinking Dirac to be anti-Christian, but was eventually (over a five-year period) persuaded to relent.


title: Paul Dirac

text: In 1975, Dirac gave a series of five lectures at the University of New South Wales which were subsequently published as a book, "Directions in Physics" (1978). He donated the royalties from this book to the university for the establishment of the Dirac Lecture Series. The Silver Dirac Medal for the Advancement of Theoretical Physics is awarded by the University of New South Wales to commemorate the lecture.


title: Paul Dirac

text: Immediately after his death, two organizations of professional physicists established annual awards in Dirac's memory. The Institute of Physics, the United Kingdom's professional body for physicists, awards the Paul Dirac Medal for "outstanding contributions to theoretical (including mathematical and computational) physics". The first three recipients were Stephen Hawking (1987), John Stewart Bell (1988), and Roger Penrose (1989). The International Centre for Theoretical Physics awards the Dirac Medal of the ICTP each year on Dirac's birthday (8 August).


title: Paul Dirac

text: The Dirac-Hellman Award at Florida State University was endowed by Bruce P. Hellman in 1997 to reward outstanding work in theoretical physics by FSU researchers. The Paul A.M. Dirac Science Library at Florida State University, which Manci opened in December 1989, is named in his honour, and his papers are held there. Outside is a statue of him by Gabriella Bollobás. The street on which the National High Magnetic Field Laboratory in Innovation Park of Tallahassee, Florida, is located is named Paul Dirac Drive. As well as in his hometown of Bristol, there is also a road named after him, Dirac Place, in Didcot, Oxfordshire.


title: Paul Dirac

text: The BBC named a video codec, Dirac, in his honour. An asteroid discovered in 1983 was named after Dirac. The Distributed Research utilising Advanced Computing (DiRAC) and Dirac software are named in his honour.


title: Trump–Ukraine scandal

text: Efforts by U.S. President Donald Trump to coerce Ukraine and other countries into providing damaging narratives about 2020 Democratic Party presidential candidate Joe Biden as well as misinformation relating to Russian interference in the 2016 United States elections caused a political scandal in the United States. Trump enlisted surrogates within and outside his official administration, including his personal lawyer Rudy Giuliani and Attorney General William Barr, to pressure Ukraine and other foreign governments to cooperate in supporting conspiracy theories concerning American politics. Trump blocked payment of a congressionally mandated $400 million military aid package to allegedly obtain "quid pro quo" cooperation from Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskyy. Trump released the aid after becoming aware of a whistleblower complaint about his activities relating to Ukraine, before the complaint was known by Congress or the public. A number of contacts were established between the White House and the government of Ukraine, culminating in a phone call between Trump and Zelenskyy on July 25, 2019.


title: Trump–Ukraine scandal

text: The scandal reached public attention in mid-September 2019 due to a whistleblower complaint made in August 2019. The complaint raised concerns about Trump using presidential powers to solicit foreign electoral intervention in the 2020 U.S. presidential election. The White House corroborated several allegations raised by the whistleblower. A non-verbatim transcript of the Trump–Zelenskyy call confirmed that Trump requested investigations into Joe Biden and his son Hunter Biden, as well as a conspiracy theory involving a Democratic National Committee server, while repeatedly urging Zelenskyy to work with Giuliani and Barr on these matters. The White House also confirmed that a record of the call had been stored in a highly restricted system.


title: Trump–Ukraine scandal

text: Former acting chief of staff Mick Mulvaney said one reason why Trump withheld military aid to Ukraine was Ukrainian "corruption related to the DNC server", referring to a debunked theory that Ukrainians framed Russia for hacking into the DNC computer system. Trump has also publicly urged Ukraine and China to investigate the Bidens. The Trump administration's top diplomat to Ukraine, Bill Taylor, testified that he was told U.S. military aid to Ukraine and a Trump–Zelenskyy White House meeting were conditioned on Zelenskyy publicly announcing investigations into the Bidens and alleged Ukrainian interference in the 2016 U.S. elections. U.S. ambassador to the European Union Gordon Sondland testified that he worked with Giuliani at Trump's "express direction" to arrange a "quid pro quo" with the Ukraine government.


title: Trump–Ukraine scandal

text: On September 24, 2019, the House of Representatives began a formal impeachment inquiry into Trump, led by six House committees. On October 31, 2019, the House of Representatives voted to approve guidelines for the next phase of the impeachment inquiry. Trump was impeached on charges of abusing the power of his office and obstructing Congress, but was acquitted by the Senate.


title: Trump–Ukraine scandal

text: On December 3, 2019, as part of the impeachment inquiry, the House Intelligence Committee published a 300-page report detailing that "the impeachment inquiry has found that President Trump, personally and acting through agents within and outside of the U.S. government, solicited the interference of a foreign government, Ukraine, to benefit his reelection. In furtherance of this scheme, President Trump conditioned official acts on a public announcement by the new Ukrainian president, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, of politically-motivated investigations, including one into Joe Biden, one of Trump's domestic political opponents. In pressuring President Zelenskyy to carry out his demand, President Trump withheld a White House meeting desperately sought by the Ukrainian President, and critical U.S. military assistance to fight Russian aggression in eastern Ukraine." In January 2020, the Government Accountability Office, a non-partisan watchdog, concluded that the White House broke federal law by withholding Congress-approved military aid to Ukraine.


title: Trump–Ukraine scandal

text: The scandal came to light when a whistleblower report revealed that President Trump had asked Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskyy in July 2019 to investigate Joe Biden, Trump's political opponent in the 2020 presidential election, his son Hunter Biden, and company CrowdStrike, to discuss these matters with Trump's personal attorney Rudy Giuliani and Attorney General William Barr. The allegations were confirmed by a non-verbatim summary of the conversation released by the White House. Trump acknowledged he had told Zelenskyy "we don't want our people like Vice President Biden and his son [contributing] to the corruption already in the Ukraine." According to the whistleblower, the call was part of a wider campaign by Trump, his administration, and Giuliani to pressure Ukraine into investigating the Bidens, which may have included Trump's cancelling a scheduled trip to Ukraine by Vice President Mike Pence, and Trump withholding $400million in military aid from Ukraine.


title: Trump–Ukraine scandal

text: Immediately after the Trump–Zelenskyy call ended, White House national security aides discussed their deep concerns, with at least one National Security Council (NSC) official alerting White House national security lawyers. A text message between a State Department envoy to Ukraine and a Ukrainian official showed the envoy understood from the White House that a Zelenskyy visit with Trump was contingent upon Ukraine's investigating a conspiracy theory about alleged Ukrainian meddling in the 2016 U.S. presidential election.


title: Trump–Ukraine scandal

text: Records of the Trump–Zelenskyy call were moved from the system where presidential call transcripts are typically stored to a system reserved for the government's most sensitive secrets. The Trump administration had also similarly restricted access to records of Trump's conversations with the leaders of China, Russia, Saudi Arabia, and Australia. It was subsequently revealed that this placement was made for political rather than for national security reasons.<ref name="Subramanian_Brook_9/26/2019"></ref>


title: Trump–Ukraine scandal

text: The first whistleblower complaint was filed on August 12, 2019, reportedly by a CIA officer detailed to the White House. It was based both on "direct knowledge of certain alleged conduct" and on the accounts of more than "half a dozen U.S. officials". The complaint was eventually released to congressional intelligence committees on September 25, 2019, and a redacted version of the complaint was made public the next day. On October 6, 2019, attorney Mark Zaid announced the existence of a second official whistleblower, an intelligence official with firsthand knowledge who had spoken with the inspector general of the Intelligence Community but had not yet contacted the congressional committees involved in the investigation.


title: Trump–Ukraine scandal

text: The whistleblower's complaint prompted a referral to the Department of Justice Criminal Division. On September 25, a Department of Justice spokeswoman, Kerri Kupec, announced that the division had "concluded the matter" and determined that the call did not constitute a campaign finance violation. On October 3, after Trump publicly called for China and Ukraine to investigate Joe and Hunter Biden, Federal Election Commission (FEC) chair Ellen Weintraub reiterated that "it is illegal for any person to solicit, accept, or receive anything of value from a foreign national in connection with a U.S. election."


title: Trump–Ukraine scandal

text: Trump has denied all wrongdoing. He confirmed that he had withheld aid from Ukraine, while offering contradicting reasons for doing so. Trump first claimed it was withheld because of corruption in Ukraine, but later said it was because other nations, including those in Europe, were not contributing enough aid to Ukraine. European Union institutions provided more than twice the amount of aid to Ukraine than did the United States during 2016-17, and Trump's budget proposal sought to cut billions of dollars from U.S. initiatives to fight corruption and encourage reform in Ukraine and elsewhere.


title: Trump–Ukraine scandal

text: Trump has repeatedly attacked the whistleblower and sought information about the whistleblower. In October 2019, after mentioning that the U.S. has "tremendous power" in the trade war with China "if they don't do what we want", Trump publicly urged Ukraine and China to investigate the Bidens. As of October 2019, there has been no evidence produced of any alleged wrongdoing by the Bidens. Trump, his supporters, and right-wing media have spread multiple conspiracy theories regarding Ukraine, the Bidens, the whistleblower, and the foreign interference in the 2016 election. The scope of the scandal expanded on October 9, when arrests were made by the FBI of two of Giuliani's clients involved in political and business affairs in the U.S. and Ukraine, as well as news two days later that Giuliani himself was under federal investigation.


title: Trump–Ukraine scandal

text: Before this scandal came to light, U.S. president Donald Trump indicated he would accept foreign intelligence on his political rivals. In June 2019, Trump was interviewed by George Stephanopoulos, who asked: "If foreigners, if Russia, if China, if someone else offers you information on an opponent, should they accept it or should they call the FBI?" Trump responded: "I think maybe you do both. I think you might want to listen. I don't. There's nothing wrong with listening. If somebody called from a country—Norway—we have information on your opponent. Oh. I think I'd want to hear it." After Trump said this, the chair of the Federal Election Commission, Ellen Weintraub, reminded Americans that according to federal law: "It is illegal for any person to solicit, accept, or receive anything of value from a foreign national in connection with a U.S. election." Previously in July 2016, while Trump was still a candidate in the 2016 United States presidential election, he made a request: "Russia, if you're listening, I hope you're able to find the 30,000 emails that are missing" from 2016 Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton's email server.


title: Trump–Ukraine scandal

text: In 2014, the Obama administration was trying to provide diplomatic support to the post-2014 Ukrainian revolution Yatsenyuk government in Ukraine, and then-vice president Joe Biden was "at the forefront" of those efforts. Biden's son Hunter Biden joined the board of directors of Burisma Holdings, a Ukrainian energy company, on April 18, 2014. Hunter, then an attorney with Boies Schiller Flexner, was hired to help Burisma with corporate governance best practices, and a consulting firm in which Hunter is a partner was also retained by Burisma. In a December 2015 interview, Joe Biden said he had never discussed Hunter's work at Burisma. Joe Biden traveled to Ukrainian capital Kyiv on April 21, 2014, and urged the Ukrainian government "to reduce its dependence on Russia for supplies of natural gas". He discussed how the United States could help provide technical expertise for expanding domestic production of natural gas.