title: Metropolitan Transportation Authority

text: In June 2017, New York Governor Andrew Cuomo declared a state of emergency for the MTA due to ongoing reliability and crowding problems. This order applied particularly to the New York City Subway, which was the most severely affected by dilapidated infrastructure, causing overcrowding and delays. With many parts of the system approaching or exceeding 100 years of age, general deterioration could be seen in many subway stations. By 2017, only 65% of weekday trains reached their destinations on time, the lowest rate since a transit crisis in the 1970s. A corresponding bus crisis was not covered as heavily in the media, but in November 2017, New York City Comptroller Scott Stringer identified several causes for the bus system's unreliability. The average speeds of New York City buses were found to be , the slowest of any major bus system nationwide.


title: Metropolitan Transportation Authority

text: Asian Americans hold few positions in MTA leadership. Additionally, many anti-Asian hate crimes have occurred on MTA property.


title: Metropolitan Transportation Authority

text: In 2002, following the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, the MTA introduced the slogan "If you see something, say something." The campaign, which was based from a theme created by Korey Kay & Partners, consisted of public safety announcements, posted on advertisement boards in stations, subway, buses, and trains, urging people to report suspicious activity. Allen Kay, CEO of Korey Kay and Partners, stated in 2007 that the company had to do a lot of research to ensure that consumers understood the message correctly. Since 2002 the campaign has evolved from simple print ads to television spots, and reports of suspicious packages in the system rose over 40-fold, from 814 in 2002 to over 37,000 in 2003.


title: Metropolitan Transportation Authority

text: The MTA moved to trademark the slogan in 2005. The slogan was used by more than 30 other "transport and governmental" organizations by 2007. That year, the MTA spent $3 million to run 4,000 television ads and 84 newspaper ads in 11 total papers, over a span of more than four months. The idea gained traction, and in 2010, the domestic-security branch of the United States federal government, the United States Department of Homeland Security (DHS), started its own "see something, say something" campaign. Kevin Ortiz, a spokesman for the MTA, described the slogan as having "engaged the public in serving as the eyes and ears of our system." Meanwhile, the DHS's campaign had attracted at least 215 partners in the private, public, and nonprofit sectors by 2014, which one writer called "a true smart practice." However, the MTA program has not been universally well-received; in 2012, sociologists from New York University and the Illinois Institute of Technology noted that the campaign had not netted any thwarted terrorist plots, and that the sheer volume of calls to the MTA hotline resulted in MTA workers possibly not being able to identify genuine threats.


title: Metropolitan Transportation Authority

text: In 2016, MTA updated the campaign, renaming it "New Yorkers Keep New York Safe." As before, the campaign features public service announcements in advertisement spaces. However, this new campaign now features the pictures, names, and quotes of New Yorkers who called to report suspicious people or things on the MTA's system. The rebooted campaign also shows 15- to 30-second videos of these New Yorkers who speak about their experiences. The two-year "New Yorkers Keep New York Safe" campaign received $2 million of funding from the DHS. The MTA still owns the trademark for "If you see something, say something."


title: Metropolitan Transportation Authority

text: In MTA buses, there are stickers plastered on the frontmost seats. The front seats are priority seating, and the stickers state "Won't you please give up your seat to the disabled or elderly" with the "o" in "Won't" replaced with a heart symbol. In 2009, it was codified into an enforceable policy that could be punished with a fine.


title: Metropolitan Transportation Authority

text: Since 2014, the MTA has had a "Courtesy Counts" campaign consisting of posters that show colored stick figures having either correct or incorrect etiquette. Green stick figures show what riders should do, such as taking off their backpacks, while red stick figures show what riders should not do, such as manspreading. All of the posters have the tagline “Courtesy Counts: Manners Make a Better Ride.” Starting in January 2015, these posters were installed in subway cars, with the posters coming to commuter rail and buses the following month.


title: Metropolitan Transportation Authority

text: In May 2017, the MTA started a three-month pilot program to encourage riders to give up their seats for the pregnant, disabled, or elderly. It created a website where pregnant women, the disabled, and the elderly could request specialized buttons. There are two designs: a "Baby on Board" button for pregnant mothers and a more generic "Please offer me a seat" button. This idea stemmed from the "Baby on Board" buttons that were given out across the London Underground in 2013 after the Duchess of Cambridge, Kate Middleton, wore such a button there.


title: Metropolitan Transportation Authority

text: The MTA launched the "Hate Has No Place in Our Transportation System" campaign in January 2020. This involved placing notices on several thousand subway and bus screens.


title: Metropolitan Transportation Authority

text: In May 2021, the MTA operated eight walk-up COVID-19 vaccination sites in subway, Metro-North and Long Island Rail Road stations as part of a five-day pilot project. This pilot project was subsequently extended another week at two stations. Over 11,000 people received the Janssen COVID-19 vaccine as part of the program.


title: Third Taiwan Strait Crisis

text: The Third Taiwan Strait Crisis, also called the 1995–1996 Taiwan Strait Crisis or the 1996 Taiwan Strait Crisis, was the effect of a series of missile tests conducted by the People's Republic of China (PRC) in the waters surrounding Taiwan, including the Taiwan Strait from 21 July 1995 to 23 March 1996. The first set of missiles fired in mid-to-late 1995 were allegedly intended to send a strong signal to the Republic of China government under President Lee Teng-hui, who had been seen as moving its foreign policy away from the One-China policy. The second set of missiles were fired in early 1996, allegedly intending to intimidate the Taiwanese electorate in the run-up to the 1996 presidential election.


title: Third Taiwan Strait Crisis

text: The crisis began when President Lee Teng-hui accepted an invitation from his alma mater, Cornell University to deliver a speech on "Taiwan's Democratization Experience". Seeking to diplomatically isolate the Republic of China, the PRC opposed such visits by ROC (Taiwanese) leaders. A year earlier, in 1994, when President Lee's plane had stopped in Honolulu to refuel after a trip to South America, the U.S. government under President Bill Clinton refused Lee's request for a visa. Lee had been confined to the military airfield where he landed, forcing him to spend a night on his plane. A U.S. State Department official called the situation "embarrassing" and Lee complained that he was being treated as a second-class leader.


title: Third Taiwan Strait Crisis

text: After Lee had decided to visit Cornell, U.S. Secretary of State Warren Christopher assured PRC Foreign Minister Qian Qichen that a visa for Lee would be "inconsistent with [the U.S.'s] unofficial relationship [with Taiwan]." However, the humiliation from Lee's last visit caught the attention of many pro-Taiwan figures in the U.S. and this time, the United States Congress acted on Lee's behalf. In May 1995, a concurrent resolution asking the State Department to allow Lee to visit the U.S. passed the House on 2 May with a vote of 396 to 0 (with 38 not voting), and the Senate on 9 May with a vote of 97 to 1 (with 2 not voting). The State Department relented on 22 May 1995. Lee spent June 9–10, 1995, in the U.S. at a Cornell alumni reunion as the PRC state press branded him a "traitor" attempting to "split China".


title: Third Taiwan Strait Crisis

text: The People's Republic of China government under CCP general secretary Jiang Zemin was furious over the U.S.'s policy reversal. On 7 July 1995, PRC responded, the Xinhua News Agency announced missile tests would be conducted by the People's Liberation Army (PLA) and argued that this attitude would endanger the peace and safety of the region (Mainlander refers to it as the fourth Taiwan strait crisis). At the same time, the PRC mobilized forces in Fujian. In the later part of July and early August, numerous commentaries were published by Xinhua and the "People's Daily" condemning Lee and his cross-strait policies.


title: Third Taiwan Strait Crisis

text: Another set of missile firings, accompanied by live ammunition exercises, occurred from August 15 to 25, 1995. Naval exercises in August were followed by highly publicized amphibious assault exercises in November.


title: Third Taiwan Strait Crisis

text: The U.S. government responded by staging the biggest display of American military might in Asia since the Vietnam War. In July 1995, USS "Belleau Wood" (LHA-3) transited the Taiwan Strait, followed by the USS O'Brien (DD-975) and USS McClusky FFG-41 on December 11-12, 1995. Finally on December 19, 1995, the USS "Nimitz" (CVN-68) and her battle group passed through the straits.


title: Third Taiwan Strait Crisis

text: Beijing intended to send a message to the Taiwanese electorate that voting for Lee Teng-hui in the 1996 presidential election on March 23 meant war. A third set of PLA tests from March 8 to March 15 (just before the election), sent missiles within (just inside the ROC's territorial waters) off the ports of Keelung and Kaohsiung. Over 70 percent of commercial shipping passed through the targeted ports, which were disrupted by the proximity of the tests. Flights to Japan and trans-Pacific flights were prolonged by ten minutes because airplanes needed to detour away from the flight path. Ships traveling between Kaohsiung and Hong Kong had to take a two-hour detour.


title: Third Taiwan Strait Crisis

text: On 8 March 1996, also a presidential election year in the U.S., President Clinton announced that the USS "Independence" CV-62 and her Carrier Battlegroup (Carrier Group Five), returning back to Japan from its visit to the Philippines, to international waters near Taiwan. On the following day, the PRC announced live-fire exercises to be conducted near Penghu from March 12–20. On March 11, the U.S. dispatched USS "Nimitz" CVN-68 and her battlegroup, Carrier Group Seven, which steamed at high speed from the Persian Gulf. Tensions rose further on March 15 when Beijing announced a simulated amphibious assault planned for March 18–25. "Nimitz" and her battle group, along with "Belleau Wood", sailed through the Taiwan Strait, while "Independence" did not.


title: Third Taiwan Strait Crisis

text: Sending two carrier battle groups showed not only a symbolic gesture towards the ROC, but a readiness to fight on the part of the U.S. The ROC government and Democratic Progressive Party welcomed America's support, but staunch unificationist presidential candidate Lin Yang-kang and the PRC decried "foreign intervention."


title: Third Taiwan Strait Crisis

text: Aware of U.S. Navy carrier battle groups' credible threat to the PLA Navy, the PRC decided to accelerate its military buildup. Soon the People's Republic ordered s from Russia, a Cold War-era class designed to counter U.S. Navy carrier battle groups, allegedly in mid-December 1996 during the visit to Moscow by Chinese Premier Li Peng. The PRC subsequently ordered modern attack submarines () and warplanes (76 Su-30MKK and 24 Su-30MK2) to counter the U.S. Navy's carrier groups.


title: Third Taiwan Strait Crisis

text: The PRC's attempts at intimidation were counterproductive. Arousing more anger than fear, it boosted Lee by 5% in the polls, earning him a majority as opposed to a mere plurality. The military tests and exercises also strengthened the argument for further U.S. arms sales to the ROC and led to the strengthening of military ties between the U.S. and Japan, increasing the role Japan would play in defending Taiwan.


title: Third Taiwan Strait Crisis

text: During the military exercises in March, there were preoccupations in Taiwan that the PRC would occupy some small islands controlled by Taiwan, causing panic among many citizens. Therefore, many flights from Taiwan to the United States and Canada were full. The most likely target was Wuqiu (Wuchiu), then garrisoned by 500 soldiers. The outlying islands were placed on high alert. The then secretary general of the National Security Council of Taiwan, Ting Mao-shih, flew to New York to meet Samuel Berger, Deputy National Security Advisor of the United States.


title: Third Taiwan Strait Crisis

text: In 1999, Major General Liu Liankun, a top Chinese military logistics officer, and his subordinate Senior Colonel Shao Zhengzhong were arrested, court-martialed and executed for disclosing to Taiwan that the missiles had unarmed warheads despite the Chinese government's claims.


title: Third Taiwan Strait Crisis

text: According to Sankei Shimbun series "Secret Records on Lee Teng-hui" dated April 1, 2019, Tseng Yong-hsien, Lee's National Policy Adviser, received a direct message from China official in early July 1995; "Our ballistic missiles will be launched toward Taiwan a couple of weeks later, but you guys don't have to worry." This was communicated to Lee soon after, to prevent escalation. Tseng, as an envoy of Lee, had met President Yang Shangkun in 1992 and had a secret connection with Ye Xuanning, Head of the Liaison Department of the PLA.


title: Memphis Belle (aircraft)

text: The Memphis Belle is a Boeing B-17F Flying Fortress used during the Second World War that inspired the making of two motion pictures: a 1944 documentary film, "" and the 1990 Hollywood feature film, "Memphis Belle". It was one of the first United States Army Air Forces B-17 heavy bombers to complete 25 combat missions, after which the aircrew returned with the bomber to the United States to sell war bonds. In 2005 restoration began on the "Memphis Belle" at the National Museum of the United States Air Force at Wright-Patterson AFB in Dayton, Ohio where, since May 2018, it has been on display. The B-17 used in the 1990 feature film is housed at the National Warplane Museum in Geneseo, New York.


title: Memphis Belle (aircraft)

text: The "Memphis Belle", a Boeing-built B-17F-10-BO, manufacturer's serial number 3470, USAAC Serial No. 41-24485, was added to the USAAF inventory on 15 July 1942, and delivered in September 1942 to the 91st Bombardment Group at Dow Field, Bangor, Maine. It deployed to Prestwick, Scotland, on 30 September 1942, moving to a temporary base at RAF Kimbolton on 1 October, and then finally to its permanent base at RAF Bassingbourn, England, on 14 October. Each side of the fuselage bore the unit and aircraft identification markings of a B-17 of the 324th Bomb Squadron (Heavy), with the squadron code "DF" and individual aircraft letter "A".


title: Memphis Belle (aircraft)

text: Captain Robert K. Morgan's crew flew 25 combat missions with the 324th Bomb Squadron; all but four were in the "Memphis Belle". The bomber's 25 combat missions, during which eight German aircraft were shot down by its aircrew, were:


title: Memphis Belle (aircraft)

text: <nowiki>*</nowiki> Sources disagree on which two of these three missions the "Memphis Belle" received mission credits.


title: Memphis Belle (aircraft)

text: The "Memphis Belle" was flown back to the United States on 8 June 1943 by a composite crew chosen by the Eighth Air Force, airmen who had flown combat aboard; they were led by Capt. Morgan for a 31-city war bond tour. Morgan's original co-pilot was Capt. James A. Verinis, who himself piloted the "Memphis Belle" for one mission. Verinis was promoted to aircraft commander of another B-17 for his final 16 missions and finished his tour on 13 May. He rejoined Morgan's crew as co-pilot for the flight back to the United States.


title: Memphis Belle (aircraft)

text: The B-17 "Hell's Angels" (41-24577) of the 303rd Bomb Group completed 25 combat missions on 13 May 1943, becoming the first to complete the feat, one week before the "Memphis Belle".


title: Memphis Belle (aircraft)

text: The B-17 was named after pilot Robert K Morgan's sweetheart, Margaret Polk, a resident of Memphis, Tennessee. Morgan originally intended to call the bomber "Little One", which was his pet name for Polk. After Morgan and copilot Jim Verinis viewed the feature film "Lady for a Night", in which the leading character owns a riverboat named the "Memphis Belle", he proposed that name to his aircrew. Morgan then contacted George Petty at the offices of "Esquire" magazine and asked him for a pinup drawing to go with the name, which Petty supplied from the magazine's April 1941 issue.


title: Memphis Belle (aircraft)

text: The 91st's group artist, Corporal Tony Starcer, copied, then transferred the Petty girl artwork to both sides of the forward fuselage, depicting her swimsuit in blue on the aircraft's port side and in red on the starboard side. The nose art later included 25 bomb shapes, one for each mission credit, and eight Nazi swastikas, one for each German aircraft claimed shot down by the crew. Station and crew names were stenciled below station windows on the bomber after its tour of duty was completed.


title: Memphis Belle (aircraft)

text: In his memoirs Morgan claimed that during his publicity tour he flew the "Memphis Belle" between the Buncombe County Courthouse and the City Hall of Asheville, North Carolina, his home town. Morgan wrote that after leaving a local airport he decided to buzz the town, telling his copilot, Captain Verinis, "I think we'll just drive up over the city and give them a little goodbye salute". Morgan turned the bomber down Patton Avenue, a main thoroughfare, toward downtown Asheville. When he observed the courthouse and the city hall (two tall buildings that are only about 50 ft (20 m) apart) dead ahead, he lowered his left wing in a 60 degree bank and flew between the structures. He wrote that the city hall housed an AAF weather detachment, whose commanding officer allegedly complained immediately to the Pentagon, but was advised by a duty officer that "Major Morgan...has been given permission to buzz by General Henry "Hap" Arnold".


title: Memphis Belle (aircraft)

text: On 23 Dec 1943, the "Memphis Belle", having completed its combat assignment with the Eighth Air Force (8 AF), 91st Bombardment Group (91 BG) in Europe, and its subsequent stateside war bond drive, was assigned to MacDill Field, Florida. It became a B-17 aircrew and ground crew training aircraft, remaining at MacDill Field until after Victory in Europe Day (VE Day). After VE Day, the aircraft was flown to Altus AAF, Oklahoma for storage and eventual reclamation.


title: Memphis Belle (aircraft)

text: After the war, the "Memphis Belle" was saved by the mayor of Memphis, Walter Chandler, from Altus Army Airfield where it had been consigned since 1 August 1945. He arranged for the city of Memphis to buy the B-17 for (). It was flown to Memphis in July 1946 and stored until mid-1949, when the bomber was placed on display at the National Guard armory near the city's fairgrounds. It sat out-of-doors into the 1980s, slowly deteriorating from weather and vandalism. Souvenir hunters removed almost all of the interior components. Eventually, no instruments were left in the cockpit, and virtually every removable piece of the B-17's interior had been scavenged, often severing the wiring and control cables in the process.


title: Memphis Belle (aircraft)

text: In the early 1970s another mayor donated the historic B-17 back to the custody of the United States Air Force, but they allowed it to remain in Memphis, contingent on it being maintained. Efforts by the locally organized "Memphis Belle" Memorial Association, Inc. (MBMA) saw the bomber moved to Mud Island in the Mississippi River in 1987 for display in a new pavilion with large tarp cover. It was still open to the elements, however, and prone to weathering. Pigeons would also nest inside the tarp, and their droppings were constantly needing removal from the bomber. Dissatisfaction with the site led to efforts to create a new museum facility in Shelby County. In the summer of 2003 the "Memphis Belle" was disassembled and moved to a restoration facility at the former Naval Air Station Memphis in Millington, Tennessee for the work needed. In September 2004, however, the National Museum of the United States Air Force, apparently tiring of the ups-and-downs of the city's attempts to preserve the B-17, indicated that they wanted it back for restoration and eventual display at the museum at Wright-Patterson AFB near Dayton, Ohio. "The Memphis Belle-The Final Chapter in Memphis", a documentary film by Ken Axmaker, Jr., focuses on the history of the "Belle" in Memphis, emphasizing the final days and the volunteers who tried to keep one of the most famous aircraft in the world and another Memphis icon from disappearing.


title: Memphis Belle (aircraft)

text: On 30 August 2005, the MBMA announced that a consultant that they hired determined that the MBMA would not be able to raise enough money to restore the "Belle" and otherwise fulfill the Air Force's requirements to keep possession of the bomber. They announced plans to return the B-17 to the National Museum of the United States Air Force at Wright-Patterson AFB near Dayton, Ohio, after a final exhibition at an airshow in Millington, Tennessee from 30 September–2 October 2005. The "Belle" arrived safely at the museum in mid-October 2005 and was placed in one of the museum's restoration hangars.


title: Memphis Belle (aircraft)

text: Restoration of the "Memphis Belle" was put near the top of the museum's priorities. In "Friends Journal", the magazine of the museum's foundation, director Major General Charles D. Metcalf, USAF (Ret), stated that it might take eight to 10 years to fully restore the bomber.


title: Memphis Belle (aircraft)

text: By the spring of 2009, considerable preparatory work had been accomplished, but the fuselage and wings were still disassembled.


title: Memphis Belle (aircraft)

text: After stripping the paint from the aft fuselage, hundreds of names and personal messages were found scratched in the aluminum skin. It turned out that, during the B-17's war bond tour, people were allowed to leave their marks. Footage of people writing on the bomber can be seen in the documentary film "The Cold Blue".


title: Memphis Belle (aircraft)

text: In May 2017 the museum announced the goal of completing the restoration and putting the "Memphis Belle" on display by 17 May 2018, the 75th anniversary of the aircraft completing its 25th mission.


title: Memphis Belle (aircraft)

text: On 14 March 2018, the "Memphis Belle" was moved into the museum's WWII Gallery in a private event and was officially unveiled two months later on 17 May 2018.


title: Memphis Belle (aircraft)

text: Five airworthy B-17s were used in the filming of the 1990 British-American war drama "Memphis Belle". Two were from the US B-17G serial number 44-83546 and B-17F serial number 42-29782 and one from the United Kingdom, B-17G serial number 44-85784. Two French geographic survey B-17Gs were also used: serial number 44-85643 (French civilian registration F-BEEA), which crashed on take-off near the end of filming, and serial number 44-8846 (French civilian registration F-AZDX; "The Pink Lady").


title: Memphis Belle (aircraft)

text: The B-17Gs had some sections converted for the film into the B-17F configuration. Serial number 44-83546 was converted by installing a Sperry top turret, early-style tail gunner's compartment, and waist gunner's positions; it also had its chin turret removed. After appearing in the film, the bomber continued to make air show appearances in that configuration. Originally painted with the Warner Bros. film versions of the nose art and markings, this plane (owned by restaurateur David Tallichet until his death in 2007) now carries the historic markings found on the real "Memphis Belle". It is currently leased by the National Warplane Museum in Geneseo, New York, and provides historical flight experiences to the public. It carries civilian registration N3703G and is colloquially known as "the movie "Memphis Belle"".


title: Memphis Belle (aircraft)

text: Serial number 44-85784 is the last airworthy B-17 in the United Kingdom and is based at the Imperial War Museum Duxford. It is part of the USAAC World War II Memorial Flight and makes dozens of appearances across the United Kingdom and Northern Europe. It is maintained and run by volunteers, relying solely upon donations to keep it restored and flying. It carries UK civilian registration G-BEDF and is known as "Sally B".


title: Memphis Belle (aircraft)

text: In addition to the airworthy B-17s used for the taxiing and flying sequences, others were used as background aircraft for scenes shot at the film's airbase; these were not used to portray the "Memphis Belle". Serial number 42-29782 is now located at the Museum of Flight, in Seattle, Washington. It carries civilian registration N17W and is now known as the "Boeing Bee".


title: OCaml

text: OCaml ( , formerly Objective Caml) is a general-purpose, multi-paradigm programming language which extends the Caml dialect of ML with object-oriented features. OCaml was created in 1996 by Xavier Leroy, Jérôme Vouillon, Damien Doligez, Didier Rémy, Ascánder Suárez, and others.


title: OCaml

text: The OCaml toolchain includes an interactive top-level interpreter, a bytecode compiler, an optimizing native code compiler, a reversible debugger, and a package manager (OPAM). OCaml was initially developed in the context of automated theorem proving, and has an outsize presence in static analysis and formal methods software. Beyond these areas, it has found serious use in systems programming, web development, and financial engineering, among other application domains.


title: OCaml

text: The acronym "CAML" originally stood for "Categorical Abstract Machine Language", but OCaml omits this abstract machine. OCaml is a free and open-source software project managed and principally maintained by the French Institute for Research in Computer Science and Automation (Inria). In the early 2000s, elements from OCaml were adopted by many languages, notably F# and Scala.


title: OCaml

text: ML-derived languages are best known for their static type systems and type-inferring compilers. OCaml unifies functional, imperative, and object-oriented programming under an ML-like type system. Thus, programmers need not be highly familiar with the pure functional language paradigm to use OCaml.


title: OCaml

text: By requiring the programmer to work within the constraints of its static type system, OCaml eliminates many of the type-related runtime problems associated with dynamically typed languages. Also, OCaml's type-inferring compiler greatly reduces the need for the manual type annotations that are required in most statically typed languages. For example, the data types of variables and the signatures of functions usually need not be declared explicitly, as they do in languages like Java and C#, because they can be inferred from the operators and other functions that are applied to the variables and other values in the code. Effective use of OCaml's type system can require some sophistication on the part of a programmer, but this discipline is rewarded with reliable, high-performance software.


title: OCaml

text: OCaml is perhaps most distinguished from other languages with origins in academia by its emphasis on performance. Its static type system prevents runtime type mismatches and thus obviates runtime type and safety checks that burden the performance of dynamically typed languages, while still guaranteeing runtime safety, except when array bounds checking is turned off or when some type-unsafe features like serialization are used. These are rare enough that avoiding them is quite possible in practice.


title: OCaml

text: Aside from type-checking overhead, functional programming languages are, in general, challenging to compile to efficient machine language code, due to issues such as the funarg problem. Along with standard loop, register, and instruction optimizations, OCaml's optimizing compiler employs static program analysis methods to optimize value boxing and closure allocation, helping to maximize the performance of the resulting code even if it makes extensive use of functional programming constructs.


title: OCaml

text: Xavier Leroy has stated that "OCaml delivers at least 50% of the performance of a decent C compiler", although a direct comparison is impossible. Some functions in the OCaml standard library are implemented with faster algorithms than equivalent functions in the standard libraries of other languages. For example, the implementation of set union in the OCaml standard library in theory is asymptotically faster than the equivalent function in the standard libraries of imperative languages (e.g., C++, Java) because the OCaml implementation exploits the immutability of sets to reuse parts of input sets in the output (see persistent data structure).


title: OCaml

text: Between the 1970s and 1980s, Robin Milner, a British computer scientist and Turing Award winner, worked at the University of Edinburgh's Laboratory for Foundations of Computer Science. Milner and others were working on theorem provers, which were historically developed in languages such as Lisp. Milner repeatedly ran into the issue that the theorem provers would attempt to claim a proof was valid by putting non-proofs together. As a result, he went on to develop the meta language for his Logic for Computable Functions, a language that would only allow the writer to construct valid proofs with its polymorphic type system. ML was turned into a compiler in order to simplify using LCF on different machines, and, by the 1980s, was turned into a complete system of its own. ML would eventually serve as a basis for the creation of OCaml.


title: OCaml

text: In the early 1980s, there were some developments that prompted INRIA's Formel team to become interested in the ML language. Luca Cardelli, a research professor at University of Oxford, used his Functional Abstract Machine to develop a faster implementation of ML, and Robin Milner proposed a new definition of ML in order to avoid divergence between various implementations. Simultaneously, Pierre-Louis Curien, a senior researcher at Paris Diderot University, developed a calculus of categorical combinators and linked it to lambda calculus, which led to the definition of the Categorical Abstract Machine (CAM). Guy Cousineau, a researcher at Paris Diderot University, recognized that this could be applied as a compilation technique for ML.


title: OCaml

text: Caml was initially designed and developed by INRIA's Formel team headed by Gérard Huet. The first implementation of Caml was created in 1987 and was further developed until 1992. Though it was spearheaded by Ascánder Suárez, Pierre Weis and Michel Mauny carried on with development after he left in 1988.


title: OCaml

text: Guy Cousineau is quoted recalling that his experience with programming language implementation was initially very limited, and that there were multiple inadequacies for which he is responsible. Despite this, he believes that "Ascander, Pierre and Michel did quite a nice piece of work.”


title: OCaml

text: Between 1990 and 1991, Xavier Leroy designed a new implementation of Caml based on a bytecode interpreter written in C. In addition to this, Damien Doligez wrote a memory management system, also known as a sequential garbage collector, for this implementation. This new implementation, known as Caml Light, replaced the old Caml implementation and ran on small desktop machines. In the following years, libraries such as Michel Mauny's syntax manipulation tools appeared and helped promote the use of Caml in educational and research teams.


title: OCaml

text: In 1995, Xavier Leroy released Caml Special Light, which was an improved version of Caml. An optimizing native-code compiler was added to the bytecode compiler, which greatly increased performance to comparable levels with mainstream languages such as C++. Additionally, Leroy designed a high-level module system inspired by the module system of Standard ML which provided powerful facilities for abstraction and parameterization and made larger-scale programs easier to construct.


title: OCaml

text: Didier Rémy and Jérôme Vouillon designed an expressive type system for objects and classes, which was integrated within Caml Special Light. This led to the emergence of the Objective Caml language, first released in 1996 and subsequently renamed to OCaml in 2011. This object system notably supported many prevalent object-oriented idioms in a statically type-safe way, while those same idioms caused unsoundness or required runtime checks in languages such as C++ or Java. In 2000, Jacques Garrigue extended Objective Caml with multiple new features such as polymorphic methods, variants, and labeled and optional arguments.


title: OCaml

text: Language improvements have been incrementally added for the last two decades in order to support the growing commercial and academic codebases in OCaml. The OCaml 4.0 release in 2012 added Generalized Algebraic Data Types (GADTs) and first-class modules in order to increase the flexibility of the language. The OCaml 5.0.0 release in 2022 is a complete rewrite of the language runtime, removing the global GC lock and adding effect handlers via delimited continuations. These changes enable support for shared-memory parallelism and color-blind concurrency respectively.


title: OCaml

text: OCaml's development continued within the Cristal team at INRIA until 2005, when it was succeeded by the Gallium team. Subsequently, Gallium was succeeded by the Cambium team in 2019.


title: OCaml

text: OCaml features a static type system, type inference, parametric polymorphism, tail recursion, pattern matching, first class lexical closures, functors (parametric modules), exception handling, effect handling, and incremental generational automatic garbage collection.


title: OCaml

text: OCaml is notable for extending ML-style type inference to an object system in a general-purpose language. This permits structural subtyping, where object types are compatible if their method signatures are compatible, regardless of their declared inheritance (an unusual feature in statically typed languages).


title: OCaml

text: A foreign function interface for linking to C primitives is provided, including language support for efficient numerical arrays in formats compatible with both C and Fortran. OCaml also supports creating libraries of OCaml functions that can be linked to a "main" program in C, so that an OCaml library can be distributed to C programmers who have no knowledge or installation of OCaml.


title: OCaml

text: The native code compiler is available for many platforms, including Unix, Microsoft Windows, and Apple macOS. Portability is achieved through native code generation support for major architectures: IA-32, X86-64 (AMD64), Power, RISC-V, ARM, and ARM64.


title: OCaml

text: OCaml bytecode and native code programs can be written in a multithreaded style, with preemptive context switching. OCaml threads in the same domain execute by time sharing only. However, an OCaml program can contain several domains. There are several libraries for distributed computing such as Functory and ocamlnet/Plasma.


title: OCaml

text: Snippets of OCaml code are most easily studied by entering them into the "top-level REPL". This is an interactive OCaml session that prints the inferred types of resulting or defined expressions. The OCaml top-level is started by simply executing the OCaml program:


title: OCaml

text: OCaml infers the type of the expression to be "int" (a machine-precision integer) and gives the result "7".


title: OCaml

text: The first argument to ocamlc, "hello.ml", specifies the source file to compile and the "-o hello" flag specifies the output file.


title: OCaml

text: The option type constructor in OCaml, similar to the Maybe monad in Haskell, augments a given data type to either return Some value of the given data type, or to return None. This is used to express that a value might or might not be present.


title: OCaml

text: This is an example of a function that either extracts an int from an option, if there is one inside, and converts it into a string, or if not, returns an empty string:


title: OCaml

text: Lists are one of the fundamental datatypes in OCaml. The following code example defines a recursive function "sum" that accepts one argument, "integers", which is supposed to be a list of integers. Note the keyword codice_1 which denotes that the function is recursive. The function recursively iterates over the given list of integers and provides a sum of the elements. The "match" statement has similarities to C's switch element, though it is far more general.


title: OCaml

text: OCaml lends itself to concisely expressing recursive algorithms. The following code example implements an algorithm similar to quicksort that sorts a list in increasing order.


title: OCaml

text: The following program calculates the smallest number of people in a room for whom the probability of completely unique birthdays is less than 50% (the birthday problem, where for 1 person the probability is 365/365 (or 100%), for 2 it is 364/365, for 3 it is 364/365 × 363/365, etc.) (answer = 23).


title: OCaml

text: The following code defines a Church encoding of natural numbers, with successor (succ) and addition (add). A Church numeral is a higher-order function that accepts a function and a value and applies to exactly times. To convert a Church numeral from a functional value to a string, we pass it a function that prepends the string to its input and the constant string .


title: OCaml

text: A variety of libraries are directly accessible from OCaml. For example, OCaml has a built-in library for arbitrary-precision arithmetic. As the factorial function grows very rapidly, it quickly overflows machine-precision numbers (typically 32- or 64-bits). Thus, factorial is a suitable candidate for arbitrary-precision arithmetic.


title: OCaml

text: In OCaml, the Num module (now superseded by the ZArith module) provides arbitrary-precision arithmetic and can be loaded into a running top-level using:


title: OCaml

text: Far more sophisticated, high-performance 2D and 3D graphical programs can be developed in OCaml. Thanks to the use of OpenGL and OCaml, the resulting programs can be cross-platform, compiling without any changes on many major platforms.


title: OCaml

text: The following code calculates the Fibonacci sequence of a number "n" inputted. It uses tail recursion and pattern matching.


title: OCaml

text: Functions may take functions as input and return functions as result. For example, applying "twice" to a function "f" yields a function that applies "f" two times to its argument.


title: OCaml

text: The function "twice" uses a type variable" 'a" to indicate that it can be applied to any function "f" mapping from a type" 'a" to itself, rather than only to "int->int" functions. In particular, "twice" can even be applied to itself.


title: OCaml

text: MetaOCaml is a multi-stage programming extension of OCaml enabling incremental compiling of new machine code during runtime. Under some circumstances, significant speedups are possible using multistage programming, because more detailed information about the data to process is available at runtime than at the regular compile time, so the incremental compiler can optimize away many cases of condition checking, etc.


title: OCaml

text: As an example: if at compile time it is known that some power function is needed often, but the value of is known only at runtime, a two-stage power function can be used in MetaOCaml:


title: Vitis vinifera

text: Vitis vinifera, the common grape vine, is a species of flowering plant, native to the Mediterranean region, Central Europe, and southwestern Asia, from Morocco and Portugal north to southern Germany and east to northern Iran. There are currently between 5,000 and 10,000 varieties of "Vitis vinifera" grapes though only a few are of commercial significance for wine and table grape production.


title: Vitis vinifera

text: The wild grape is often classified as "Vitis vinifera" "sylvestris" (in some classifications considered "Vitis sylvestris"), with "Vitis vinifera" "vinifera" restricted to cultivated forms. Domesticated vines have hermaphrodite flowers, but "sylvestris" is dioecious (male and female flowers on separate plants) and pollination is required for fruit to develop.


title: Vitis vinifera

text: Grapes can be eaten fresh or dried to produce raisins, sultanas, and currants. Grape leaves are used in the cuisine of many cultures. The fresh grapes can also be processed into juice that is fermented to make wine and vinegar. Cultivars of "Vitis vinifera" form the basis of the majority of wines produced around the world. All of the familiar wine varieties belong to "Vitis vinifera", which is cultivated on every continent except for Antarctica, and in all the major wine regions of the world.


title: Vitis vinifera

text: Wild grapes were harvested by neolithic foragers and early farmers. For thousands of years, the fruit has been harvested for both medicinal and nutritional value; its history is intimately entwined with the history of wine.


title: Vitis vinifera

text: Changes in pip (seed) shape (narrower in domesticated forms) and distribution point to domestication occurring about 3500–3000 BC, in southwest Asia, South Caucasus (Georgia), or the Western Black Sea shore region (Romania and Bulgaria). The earliest evidence of domesticated grapes has been found at Gadachrili Gora, near the village of Imiri, Marneuli Municipality, in southeastern Georgia; carbon-dating points to the date of about 6000 BC. Grape pips dating back to the 5th–4th millennium BC were also found in Shulaveri; others dating back to the 4th millennium BC were also found in Khizanaant Gora, all in the country of Georgia.


title: Vitis vinifera

text: Cultivation of the domesticated grape spread to other parts of the Old World in pre-historic or early historic times. The first written accounts of grapes and wine can be found in the "Epic of Gilgamesh", an ancient Sumerian text from the 3rd millennium BC. There are also numerous hieroglyphic references from ancient Egypt, according to which wine was reserved exclusively for priests, state functionaries and the pharaoh.


title: Vitis vinifera

text: Hesiod in his Works and Days gives detailed descriptions of grape harvests and wine making techniques, and there are also many references in Homer. Greek colonists then introduced these practices in their colonies, especially in southern Italy (Magna Grecia), which was even known as Enotria due to its propitious climate.


title: Vitis vinifera

text: The Etruscans improved wine making techniques and developed an export trade even beyond the Mediterranean basin. The ancient Romans further developed the techniques learnt from the Etruscans, as shown by numerous works of literature containing information that is still valid today: "De Agri Cultura" (around 160 BC) by Cato the Elder, "De re rustica" by Marcus Terentius Varro, the "Georgics" by Virgil and "De re rustica" by Columella. During the 3rd and 4th centuries AD, the long crisis of the Roman Empire generated instability in the countryside which led to a reduction of viticulture in general, which was mainly sustained only close to towns and cities and along coastlines.


title: Vitis vinifera

text: Between the 5th and 10th centuries, viticulture was sustained almost exclusively by the different religious orders in monasteries. The Benedictines and others extended the grape growing limit northwards and also planted new vineyards at higher altitudes than was customary before. Apart from 'ecclesiastical' viticulture, there also developed, especially in France, a 'noble' viticulture, practiced by the aristocracy as a symbol of prestige. Grape growing was a significant economic activity in the Middle east up to the 7th century, when the expansion of Islam caused it to decline.


title: Vitis vinifera

text: Between the Low Middle Ages and the Renaissance, viticulture began to flourish again. Demographic pressure, population concentration in towns and cities, and the increased spending power of artisans and merchants gave rise to increased investment in viticulture, which became economically feasible once more. Much was written during the Renaissance on grape growing and wine production, favouring a more scientific approach. This literature can be considered the origin of modern ampelography.


title: Vitis vinifera

text: Grapes followed European colonies around the world, coming to North America around the 17th century, and to Africa, South America and Australia. In North America it formed hybrids with native species from the genus "Vitis"; some of these were intentional hybrids created to combat "phylloxera", an insect pest which affected the European grapevine to a much greater extent than North American ones and in fact managed to devastate European wine production in a matter of years. Later, North American rootstocks became widely used to graft "V. vinifera" cultivars so as to withstand the presence of phylloxera.


title: Vitis vinifera

text: In the second half of the 20th century there was a shift in attitude in viticulture from traditional techniques to the scientific method based on fields such as microbiology, chemistry and ampelography. This change came about also due to changes in economic and cultural aspects and in the way of life and in the consumption habits of wide sectors of the population starting to demand quality products.


title: Vitis vinifera

text: In 2007, "Vitis vinifera" was the fourth angiosperm species whose genome was completely sequenced. These data contributed significantly to understanding the evolution of plants and also how the aromatic characteristics of wine are determined in part by the plant's genes. This work was a collaboration between Italian researchers (Consorzio Interuniversitario Nazionale per la Biologia Molecolare delle Piante, Istituto di Genomica Applicata) and French researchers (Genoscope and Institut National de la Recherche Agronomique).


title: Vitis vinifera

text: Also in 2007, scientists from Australia's Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO), working in the Cooperative Research Centre for Viticulture, reported that their "research suggests that extremely rare and independent mutations in two genes ["VvMYBA1" and "VvMYBA2" of red grapes] produced a single white grapevine that was the parent of almost all of the world's white grape varieties. If only one gene had been mutated, most grapes would still be red and we would not have the more than 3000 white grape cultivars available today."


title: Vitis vinifera

text: It is a liana growing tall at a fast rate. Having a flaky bark, its leaves are alternate, palmately lobed, deciduous, with 3 to 5 pointed lobes, coarsely prickly-toothed leaf margins and a heart-shaped foot, long and broad. They are glossy dark green on top, light green below, usually hairless.


title: Vitis vinifera

text: The vine attaches to supports by tendrils. The stems, called twigs, grow through their tip, the cauline apex. A branch consists of several internodes separated by knots, which grow the leaves, flowers, tendrils and between-core and where to train future buds. During their hardening, the twigs become woody branches that can reach a great length. Its roots usually sink to a depth of 2 to 5 meters and sometimes up to 12–15 meters or even more.


title: Vitis vinifera

text: Their flowers, small and greenish to white, are grouped in inflorescences and their fruits, of different shapes depending on the subspecies, are berries grouped in clusters. The calyx is single-leaf with 5 short, deciduous teeth. The corolla consists of five petals, fused at the top and base, and then falls off in its entirety. Opposite the petals there are five stamens interspersed with glands. The upper ovary bears a very short style with a button-shaped stigma. The wild vine is a dioecious plant, the male and female flowers arise on different plants, but the cultivated forms are hermaphroditic, allowing self-pollination.


title: Vitis vinifera

text: The fruit is a berry, known as a grape that is ovoid or globular, dark blue or greenish, usually 2-locular with 5 seeds; in the wild species it is diameter and ripens dark purple to blackish with a pale wax bloom; in cultivated plants it is usually much larger, up to long, and can be green, red, or purple (black).


title: Vitis vinifera

text: "V. vinifera" accounts for the majority of world wine production; all of the most familiar grape varieties used for wine production belong to "V. vinifera".


title: Vitis vinifera

text: In Europe, "Vitis vinifera" is concentrated in the central and southern regions; in Asia, in the western regions such as Anatolia, the Caucasus, the Middle East, and in China; in Africa, along the northern Mediterranean coast and in South Africa; in North America, in California and also other areas like Michigan, New Mexico, New York, Oregon, Washington state, British Columbia, Ontario and Québec; in South America in Chile, Argentina, Uruguay, Peru and Brazil; and in Oceania in Australia and New Zealand.


title: Vitis vinifera

text: Use of grapes is known to date back to Neolithic times, following the discovery in 1996 of 7,000-year-old wine storage jars in present-day northern Iran. Further evidence shows the Mesopotamians and Ancient Egyptians had vine plantations and winemaking skills. Greek philosophers praised the healing powers of grapes both whole and in the form of wine. "Vitis vinifera" cultivation and winemaking in China began during the Han Dynasty in the 2nd century with the importation of the species from Ta-Yuan. However, wild vine "mountain grapes" like "Vitis thunbergii" were being used for wine making before that time. In traditional medicine of India "V. vinifera" is used in prescriptions for cough, respiratory tract catarrh, subacute cases of enlarged liver and spleen, as well as in alcohol-based tonics (Aasavs).


title: Vitis vinifera

text: In the Mediterranean Basin, leaves and young stems are traditionally used to feed sheep and goats after grapevine pruning.


title: Vitis vinifera

text: Using the sap of grapevines, European folk healers sought to cure skin and eye diseases. Other historical uses include the leaves being used to stop bleeding, pain and inflammation of hemorrhoids. Unripe grapes were used for treating sore throats, and raisins were given as treatments for consumption (tuberculosis), constipation and thirst. Ripe grapes were used for the treatment of cancer, cholera, smallpox, nausea, skin and eye infections as well as kidney and liver diseases.


title: Vitis vinifera

text: Seedless grape varieties were developed to appeal to consumers, but researchers are now discovering that many of the healthful properties of grapes may actually come from the seeds themselves, thanks to their enriched phytochemical content.


title: Vitis vinifera

text: Grapevine leaves are filled with minced meat (such as lamb, pork or beef), rice and onions in the making of Balkan traditional dolma.


title: Vitis vinifera

text: A popular cultivar in Australia, "Vitis 'Ornamental Grape'", derived from Vitis vinifera x Vitis rupestris, is used in gardens for its impressive foliage that turn brilliant red, scarlet, purple and/or orange in autumn. Originally bred in France, it thrives in a range of climates from hot and dry, to cool moist and subtropical, with different soil types benefitting the plant.


title: Vitis vinifera

text: "V. vinifera" contains many phenolic compounds. Anthocyanins can be found in the skin of the berries, hydroxycinnamic acids in the pulp and condensed tannins of the proanthocyanidins type in the seeds. Stilbenoids can be found in the skin and in wood.


title: Vitis vinifera

text: "Trans"-resveratrol is a phytoalexin produced against the growth of fungal pathogens such as "Botrytis cinerea" and delta-viniferin is another grapevine phytoalexin produced following fungal infection by "Plasmopara viticola".


title: Vitis vinifera

text: "Vitis vinifera" red cultivars are rich in anthocyanins that impart their colour to the berries (generally in the skin). The 5 most basic anthocyanins found in grape are:


title: Vitis vinifera

text: Isoprenoid monoterpenes are present in grape, above all acyclic linalool, geraniol, nerol, citronellol, homotrienol and monocyclic α-terpineol, mostly occurring as glycosides. Carotenoids accumulate in ripening grape berries. Oxidation of carotenoids produces volatile fragments, C13-norisoprenoids. These are strongly odoriferous compounds, such as β-ionone (aroma of viola), damascenone (aroma of exotic fruits), β-damascone (aroma of rose) and β-ionol (aroma of flowers and fruits). Melatonin, an alkaloid, has been identified in grape. In addition, seeds are rich in unsaturated fatty acids, which helps lowering levels of total cholesterol and LDL cholesterol in the blood.


title: Demographics of Iceland

text: This article is about the demographic features of the population of Iceland, including population density, education level, health of the populace, economic status, religious affiliations and other aspects of the population.


title: Demographics of Iceland

text: As of 2022, the Icelandic population was just over 376,000. About 86,000 residents (23.7%) were of foreign background.


title: Demographics of Iceland

text: About 99% of the nation's inhabitants live in urban areas (localities with populations greater than 200) and 60% live in the Capital Region.


title: Demographics of Iceland

text: The population of Iceland probably wavered between about 30,000 and 80,000 for most of the time since settlement. Official statistics begin in 1703, since which the population has grown from 50,358 to 376,248 (January 2022).


title: Demographics of Iceland

text: Most Icelandic people are descendants of Norwegian settlers, and of Gaels from Ireland and Scotland who were brought over as slaves during the settlement of Iceland in the ninth century AD. Recent DNA analysis suggests that about 66 percent of the male settler-era population was of Norse ancestry and that the female population was 60 percent Celtic. Iceland remained extremely homogenous from its settlement era until the twentieth century.


title: Demographics of Iceland

text: Large numbers of Icelanders began to emigrate from Iceland in the 1850s. It has been estimated that 17,000 Icelanders immigrated to North America in the period 1870–1914, and that 2,000 of them moved back to Iceland; this net loss, 15,000, was about 20% of the Icelandic population in 1887. According to historian Gunnar Karlsson, "migration from Iceland is unique in that most went to Canada, whereas from most or all other European countries the majority went to the United States. This was partly due to the late beginning of emigration from Iceland after the Canadian authorities had begun to promote emigration in cooperation with the Allan Line, which already had an agent in Iceland in 1873. Contrary to most European countries, this promotion campaign was successful in Iceland, because emigration was only just about to start from there and Icelandic emigrants had no relatives in the United States to help them take the first steps".


title: Demographics of Iceland

text: Before the 1990s, there was little immigration to Iceland, and most of it was from other Scandinavian countries: about 1% of Icelanders in 1900 were of Danish heritage (born either in Denmark or to Danish parents). In the mid-1990s, 95% of Icelanders had parents of Icelandic origin, and 2% of Icelanders were first-generation immigrants (born abroad with both parents and all grandparents foreign-born).


title: Demographics of Iceland

text: Immigration to Iceland rose rapidly in the late twentieth century, encouraged by Iceland's accession to the European Economic Area in 1994, its entry into the Schengen Agreement in 2001, and the country's economic boom in the early twenty-first century. The largest ethnic minority is Poles, who are about a third of the immigrant population. In 2017, 10.6% of the people were first-generation immigrants.


title: Demographics of Iceland

text: Iceland is also developing relatively small populations of religious minorities, including Catholics (about 15,000 in 2020, 4.02% of Icelanders), Baháʼís (about 400 in 2010), Jews (about 250 in 2018), Buddhists (about 1,500 in 2021), and Muslims (about 1,300 in 2015).


title: Demographics of Iceland

text: Research on the experience of immigrants to Iceland is in its early days. There is some evidence that racism is not as acute in Iceland as in neighbouring countries [Which countries are neighbors to Iceland?]. But, while it is popularly believed in Iceland that racism does not exist there, there is evidence that in some respects immigrant populations experience prejudice and inequalities. For example, Iceland has a higher dropout rate from upper secondary school among young immigrants than the EEA average.


title: Demographics of Iceland

text: Iceland does not formally collect data on the ethnicity or racial identification of its citizens, but does collect data of the origin and background group by birth.


title: Demographics of Iceland

text: Due to a shortage of labor, immigration to Iceland will most likely increase in the future. Estimates show that the number of immigrants could be as high as 15% of the total population by 2030.


title: Demographics of Iceland

text: Most Icelandic surnames are based on patronymy, or the adoption of the father's first given name, followed by "son" or "daughter". For example, Magnús and Anna, children of a man named Pétur Jónsson, would have the full name Magnús Pétursson and Anna Pétursdóttir, respectively. Magnús's daughter Sigríður Ásta would be Sigríður Ásta Magnúsdóttir, and would remain so for the rest of her life regardless of marriage. An Icelandic patronymic is essentially only a designation of fatherhood, and is therefore redundant in Icelandic social life except to differentiate people of the same first name the phone directory, for example, lists people by their given name first, patronymic second. Thus it has little in common with traditional surnames except for its position after the given name. It is legally possible in Iceland to rework the patronymic into a matronymic, replacing the father's name with the mother's. Use of the patronymic system is required by law, except for the descendants of those who had acquired family names before 1913 (about 10% of the population). One notable Icelander who has an inherited family name is football star Eiður Smári Guðjohnsen.


title: Demographics of Iceland

text: According to University of Iceland economists Davíd F. Björnsson and Gylfi Zoega, "The policies of the colonial masters in Copenhagen delayed urbanisation. The Danish king maintained a monopoly in trade with Iceland from 1602 until 1855, which made the price of fish artificially low – the price of fish was higher in Britain – and artificially raised the price of agricultural products. Instead, Denmark bought the fish caught from Iceland at below world market prices. Although the trade monopoly ended in 1787, Icelanders could not trade freely with other countries until 1855. Following trade liberalisation, there was a substantial increase in fish exports to Britain, which led to an increase in the number of sailing ships used in fishing, introduced for the first time in 1780. The growth of the fishing industry then created demand for capital, and in 1885 Parliament created the first state bank (Landsbanki). In 1905 came the first motorised fishing vessel, which marked an important step in the development of a specialised fishing industry in Iceland. Iceland exported fresh fish to Britain and salted cod to southern Europe, with Portugal an important export market. Fishing replaced agriculture as the country’s main industry. These developments set the stage for the urbanisation that was to follow in the twentieth century."


title: Demographics of Iceland

text: A 2017 study looking at individuals going to the capital area for higher education found that "Only about one in three [University of Iceland] students from regions beyond commuting distance return after graduation, while about half remain in the capital area and others mostly emigrate."


title: Demographics of Iceland

text: In 2016, 71.6% of the population belonged to the state church (the Evangelical Lutheran Church of Iceland), approximately 5% in free churches, 3.7% to the Roman Catholic Church, approximately 1% to the "Ásatrúarfélagið" (a legally recognized revival of the pre-Christian religion of Iceland), approximately 1% to Zuism, 8% in unrecognized or unspecified religious groups, and 9% do not belong to any religious group.


title: Demographics of Iceland

text: All living Icelanders, as well as all foreign citizens with permanent residence in Iceland, have a personal identification number ("kennitala") identifying them in the National Registry. This number is composed of 10 digits, whereof the first six are made up of the individual's birth date in the format DDMMYY. The next two digits are chosen at random when the "kennitala" is allocated, the 9th digit is a check digit, and the last digit indicates the period of one hundred years in which the individual was born (for instance, '9' for the period 1900–1999). An example would be 120192-3389. While similar, all-inclusive personal registries exist in other countries, the use of the national registry is unusually extensive in Iceland. It is worth noting that the completeness of the National Registry eliminates any need for census to be performed.


title: Demographics of Iceland

text: Evangelical Lutheran Church of Iceland (official) 69.9%, Roman Catholic 3.8%, Reykjavik Free Church 2.9%, Hafnarfjörður Free Church 2%, Ásatrú Association 1.1%, The Independent Congregation 1%, other religions 4% (includes Zuist and Pentecostal), none 6.1%, other or unspecified 9.2% (2017 est.)


title: Demographics of Iceland

text: Icelandic (English and a second Nordic language, Danish by default, are also a part of the Icelandic compulsory education)


title: Jochi

text: Jochi Khan (Mongolian: , ; ; ; ; also spelled Juchi; Djochi, and Jöchi c. 1182– February 1227) was a Mongol army commander who was the eldest son of Temüjin (aka Genghis Khan), and presumably one of the four sons by his principal wife Börte, though issues concerning his paternity followed him throughout his life. An accomplished military leader, he participated in his father's conquest of Central Asia, along with his brothers and uncles.


title: Jochi

text: There is some question as to Jochi's true paternity. Shortly after Börte's marriage to Temüjin (later to become Genghis Khan), she was abducted by members of the Mergid confederation. She was given to a certain Chilger Bökh, who was the brother of the Yehe Chiledu, as a spoil of war. She remained in Chilger Bökh's captivity for a few months before she was recovered by Temüjin. Shortly afterwards she gave birth to Jochi. By all accounts, Temüjin treated Jochi as his first son, but a doubt always remained whether Temüjin or Chilger Bökh was his real father. Jochi's descendants, although they formed the oldest branch of Temüjin's family, were never considered for the succession in claiming their father's heritage and there were signs of estrangement between Jochi and Temüjin.


title: Jochi

text: In 1207, Jochi conquered several of the forest peoples in Siberia, extending the northern border of the Mongol Empire for the first time. On behalf of his father, Jochi led two campaigns against the Kyrgyz, in 1210 and in 1218.


title: Jochi

text: Jochi played a major role in the Khwarezm war of 1219–1221 in Central Asia – his forces captured the towns of Signak, Jand, and Yanikant in April, 1220, during this war. Subsequently, he was given the command of operation against the city of Urgench (Gurganj, in present-day Turkmenistan), the capital of the Khwarezmian Empire. Here the siege of the town suffered delays because Jochi engaged in extensive negotiation with the town to persuade it to surrender peacefully and to save it from destruction. Jochi's brother Chagatai regarded this action as militarily unsound: Chagatai wanted to destroy the city but Temüjin (now Genghis Khan) had promised the city to Jochi after his victory. This difference of opinion on military affairs deepened a rift between Jochi and Chagatai. Genghis Khan intervened in the campaign and appointed Ögedei as the commander of the operation. Ögedei resumed the operations vigorously – capturing, sacking and thoroughly destroying the town and massacring its inhabitants (1221).


title: Jochi

text: The differences in tactics between Jochi and Chagatai in early 1221 added to their personal quarrel about the succession. To settle the matter, Genghis Khan called for a "kurultai", a political and military council - a formal meeting used both in familial matters and in matters of state. Genghis Khan had won election/appointment as Khan of his tribe during a kurultai, and he called them often during his early campaigns to garner public support for his wars – such meetings were key to Genghis Khan's legitimacy. Tribal tradition was also critical. As Genghis Khan's first-born son, Jochi was favored to rule the clan and the empire after his father died. At the familial kurultai called in 1222, Chagatai raised the issue of Jochi's legitimacy. At that meeting, Genghis Khan made it clear that Jochi was his legitimate first-born son. However, he worried that the quarrelsome nature of the two would split the empire. By early 1223 Genghis Khan had selected Ögedei, his third son, as his successor. For the sake of preserving the Empire, both Jochi and Chagatai agreed, but the rift between them never healed. Their rift would later politically divide the European part of the Mongol Empire from its Asian part permanently.


title: Jochi

text: During the autumn of 1223 Genghis Khan started for Mongolia after completing the Khwarezm campaign. Ögedei, Chagatai and Tolui went with him but Jochi withdrew to his territories north of Aral and Caspian Seas. There he remained until his death and would not see his father again in his lifetime.


title: Jochi

text: Genghis Khan had divided his empire into khanates among his four surviving sons during his lifetime. Jochi was entrusted with the westernmost part of the empire, then lying between Ural (Jaiq, Djaik, Iaik, Jaiakh) and Irtysh rivers. In the Kurultai of 1229 following Genghis Khan's death, this partition was formalized and Jochi's family (Jochi himself had died six months before Genghis Khan) was allocated the lands in the west up to 'as far as the hooves of Mongol horses had trodden'. Following the Mongol custom, Genghis Khan bequeathed only four thousand 'original' Mongol troops to each of his three elder sons and 101,000 to Tolui, his youngest son. Consequently, Jochi's descendants extended their empire mostly with the help of auxiliary troops from the subjugated populations which happened to be Turkic. This was the chief reason why the Golden Horde acquired a Turkic identity. Jochi's inheritance was divided among his sons. His sons Orda and Batu founded the White Horde and the Blue Horde, respectively, and would later combine their territories into the Kipchak Khanate or Golden Horde. Another of Jochi's sons, Shiban, received territories that lay north of Batu and Orda's Ülüs.


title: Jochi

text: Genghis Khan had made Jochi responsible for the supervision and conduct of the community hunt. Hunting was essentially a large scale military exercise designed specifically for the training of the army. It frequently encompassed thousands of square kilometers of area, required the participation of several tumens and lasted anywhere between one and three months. Rules and procedure of the conduct of the military exercise were encoded in the Yassa.


title: Jochi

text: Certain incidents hint towards the fact that Jochi was of a kinder disposition than Genghis Khan, though the adjective “kind” must be interpreted by the standards of his times and milieu because Jochi had had his share of indulgence in massacres of civilians. On one occasion Jochi pleaded with his father to spare the life of a son of an enemy chief who had been taken captive and who happened to be a great archer. Jochi argued that such a great archer could be an asset to the Mongol army. Genghis Khan brushed aside this argument and had the captive executed.


title: Jochi

text: In 2019, researchers uncovered genetic evidence supporting the claim that Jochi was Genghis Khan's first true-born son. Scientists found that the Lu clan of Northwestern China, which claimed descent from the sixth son of Genghis Khan Toghan, largely belonged to a Y-chromosomal haplogroup (C2b1a1b1-F1756) closely related to one frequently found in the Tore clan from Kazakhstan which claimed descent from Jochi with the time of divergence ~1000 years ago. This result could however, also arise by different avenues of shared paternity or by Y-chromosomal sharing between Chilger Bökh and Genghis Khan.


title: Jochi

text: Jochi's son Berke was among the earliest Mongols to convert to Islam. Among his other descendants were Öz Beg Khan, Tokhtamysh and Hacı I Giray.


title: Jochi

text: Under Jochi's son Batu, Mongol rule expanded to its westernmost limit, and the Golden Horde (Kipchak Khanate) was established to consolidate the Jochid "ulus". Öz Beg Khan would later oversee the economic, military and political golden age of the Horde and presided over its Islamisation.


title: Jochi

text: The first mention about his mausoleum is found in 16th century "Sharaf-name-yi shahi", describing the 1582 the campaign of the Abdullah Khan II:


title: Jochi

text: Like his father, Jochi had a large number of wives and concubines, however the exact details of these women are scarce.


title: Jochi

text: Jochi appeared as a supporting character in the 2007 Japanese-Mongolian film "", played by Kenichi Matsuyama and in the 1978 Pakistani drama Aakhri Chattan played by Wakeel Farooqui.


title: Clive Palmer

text: Clive Frederick Palmer (born 26 March 1954) is an Australian businessman and politician. He has iron ore, nickel, and coal holdings. Palmer owns many businesses such as Mineralogy, Waratah Coal, Queensland Nickel at Townsville, the Palmer Coolum Resort on the Sunshine Coast, Palmer Sea Reef Golf Course at Port Douglas, Palmer Colonial Golf Course at Robina, and the Palmer Gold Coast Golf Course, also at Robina. He owned Gold Coast United FC from 2008 to 2012. Palmer created the Palmer United Party in April 2013, winning the Sunshine Coast seat of Fairfax in the 2013 Australian federal election and sitting as an MP for one term.


title: Clive Palmer

text: In 2018, after formally de-registering the party on 5 May 2017, Palmer revived his party as the United Australia Party, announcing that he would be running candidates for all 151 seats in the House of Representatives and later that he would run as a Queensland candidate for the Senate. In the 2019 federal election, despite extensive advertising, he and his party won no seats. His party later contested the 2022 federal election, and won 1 seat in the Senate.


title: Clive Palmer

text: Palmer has frequently been involved in legal cases relating to his businesses, and once listed litigation as one of his hobbies in "Who's Who". He at times has been involved in complex cases, and journalist Hedley Thomas has written that Palmer's "lawyers take legal steps, presumably on his instructions, that prolong litigation and rack up costs for the other side" which can result in his opponents being unable to continue their case due to a lack of resources. Palmer has argued that the litigation he is involved in is justified as it rights wrongs. Palmer also attempted to use litigation as a gag order against his workers in his now defunct Queensland Nickel refinery, promising to pay the money he owed them only if they agreed not to make any disparaging comments about him.


title: Clive Palmer

text: , Palmer was the seventh richest Australian, when "The Australian Financial Review" assessed his net worth at 13.01 billion on the 2021 Rich List.


title: Clive Palmer

text: Palmer was born on 26 March 1954 at Footscray Hospital in Footscray, a suburb of Melbourne, Victoria. He spent his early years in the nearby suburb of Williamstown. His family moved to Queensland in 1963, and Palmer was largely raised on the Gold Coast, where he attended Aquinas College and Southport State High School, although he also attended Toowoomba Grammar School for a short time. Palmer's father, George, was a travel agent, and the family travelled the world extensively. George Palmer was also the proprietor of the Akron Tyre Co and the Akron Broadcasting Co and was the founder of Melbourne broadcasting station 3AK (now operating as SEN 1116).


title: Clive Palmer

text: Palmer studied law, journalism and politics at the University of Queensland from 1973 to 1975, but did not finish the course. He later completed a Diploma of Law through the Queensland Bar Board, and worked as a clerk and interviewing officer for the Public Defender's Office.


title: Clive Palmer

text: During the early to mid-1980s Palmer was a real estate agent. He did well from the property boom on the Gold Coast, and "retired" at the age of 29.


title: Clive Palmer

text: In 1985 and 1986 Palmer founded three companies which undertook mining exploration in Western Australia (WA). These included Mineralogy, a company which in 2006 had of iron ore reserves in the Pilbara Ranges, in remote northern Western Australia. In 2008, Palmer bought Waratah Coal. Palmer transferred Mineralogy to New Zealand in December 2018, and moved it again to Singapore in January 2019.


title: Clive Palmer

text: Mineralogy has been involved in a long-running dispute with CITIC over a royalty payment. Mineralogy and CITIC entered into an agreement in 2006 to develop some of the iron ore reserves Palmer owns. In November 2017, Justice Kenneth Martin of the Supreme Court of Western Australia awarded Mineralogy nearly $200 million. Palmer said the decision was "a win for Australian law over Chinese Communist government powerhouses". As of May 2019, CITIC was suing Palmer and he had counter-sued them for $5 billion.


title: Clive Palmer

text: In August 2020, the WA Parliament passed an emergency bill to block a legal claim against the government by Palmer, relating to Mineralogy. WA Attorney-General John Quigley estimated the claim as totalling $30 billion, which he described as "rapacious" and equivalent to the annual budget of WA. Palmer denied that estimate and mounted a challenge in the Federal Court to the legislation as unconstitutional.


title: Clive Palmer

text: In 2009, he bought Queensland Nickel and the Palmer Nickel and Cobalt Refinery after BHP was going to close the refinery. In the first year after purchasing the refinery, Palmer gifted staff 50 Mercedes Benz cars and thousands of overseas holidays after the refinery turned a huge profit. On 18 January 2016, Queensland Nickel entered voluntary administration. Palmer declined to pay the entitlements of workers who lost their jobs when Queensland Nickel closed, stating that "I have no personal responsibility, I retired from business over three years ago". He also blamed the administrators for sacking the workforce. This forced the Federal Government to cover the workers' entitlements.


title: Clive Palmer

text: In April 2019 Palmer announced that he intended to re-open the Queensland Nickel refinery and pay the $7.16 million still owed to workers following the 2019 federal election.


title: Clive Palmer

text: The Special Purpose Liquidator of Queensland Nickel stated that Palmer's offer was inadequate as it did not cover the money owed to small businesses and was unclear whether he would repay the Federal Government. The Liquidator was seeking $200 million from Palmer, other individuals and related entities, with a trial to take place from July 2019. The Australian Government was also seeking to recover $70 million from Palmer personally to meet the costs of the payments it made to Queensland Nickel workers through the same trial. Palmer stated in April 2019 that the administrators should repay the government as they were responsible for sacking the refinery's workers, and not him. "The Canberra Times" reported that 218 workers were made redundant shortly before the operation was placed into voluntary administration.


title: Clive Palmer

text: In August 2019 Palmer reached a settlement two weeks into a trial in the Queensland Supreme Court, understood to total $110m. He agreed to repay the federal government for the entitlements it has already paid under the Fair Entitlements Guarantee (FEG), “all other outstanding employee entitlements, and a full recovery for the majority of unsecured creditors”. Palmer maintained his position that the scheme should never have been triggered by the liquidators in the first place and under the terms of the Settlement Agreement, the Special Purpose Liquidator withdrew all claims the SPL made against Palmer and all of the defendants associated with him. All parties paid their own costs in the court matter; Palmer personally appeared in court and represented himself.


title: Clive Palmer

text: A small number of debt claims against Mineralogy remain in dispute and before the courts. Palmer claimed that the settlement of the debts had left him “vindicated”. “Today’s settlement confirms the actions against me were nothing more than a witch-hunt designed to smear my good reputation”, Palmer said.


title: Clive Palmer

text: Palmer purchased the Coolum Hyatt Resort in 2011. He later announced plans to build a park featuring animatronic dinosaurs there. Palmer ordered more than 160 animatronic dinosaurs, which included an initial shipment of a tall, long "T. rex", nicknamed "Jeff". Palmer received full council approval for the park on 25 July 2013, and it was expected to open to the public in 2014. On 14 December 2013, the dinosaur park, now called "Palmersaurus", was opened to the public. Palmer's installation of dinosaurs along the side of the resort's golf course led the Australian PGA Championship to be relocated from it.


title: Clive Palmer

text: The Palmer Coolum Resort was mothballed in 2015 due to low occupancy rates, with 600 people losing their jobs over the period after Palmer purchased the complex. In 2017, the ABC reported that "once regarded as one of south-east Queensland's most prestigious resorts, the site is a shadow of its former self and has been the centre of a legal battle between retirees who own villa shares and Clive Palmer". In 2018 the Australian Securities and Investments Commission charged Palmer with violations of the Corporation Act in relation to an attempt to take over timeshare villas at the resort in 2012. Palmer has stated that the charges are an attempt to stop him standing for election.


title: Clive Palmer

text: Palmer purchased the Gold Coast United football club in 2008. In October 2009, he made a decision to cap attendances of Gold Coast United home games at Skilled Park stadium to 5,000, in a bid to save money by avoiding transport subsidies on crowds over 5,000. After a widespread backlash and only 2,616 fans attending the next home game, and the intervention of Football Federation Australia (FFA), the idea was scrapped.


title: Clive Palmer

text: On 29 February 2012, Ben Buckley and Frank Lowy announced that Palmer's licence for Gold Coast United FC was to be revoked for constant breaches of FFA rules and regulations and sought to pay out the contracts of the players for the remaining month of the season. Lowy stated that he acted to protect the integrity of the sport. However, Palmer stipulated that he would contest the decisions through legal action and claimed Lowy was a dictator. Despite a ruling ordering the removal of "Freedom of Speech" logos on team shirts, Palmer indicated they would remain. On 2 March 2012, Palmer lost his Supreme Court bid against Gold Coast United's expulsion from the A-League.


title: Clive Palmer

text: In 2012, after the FFA revoked his Gold Coast United A-League licence, Palmer founded Football Australia – a competing organisation for the sport of football in Australia.


title: Clive Palmer

text: In February 2013, at a press conference in New York, Palmer announced plans to build a modern-day replica of the liner . It was planned that "Titanic II" would be built in China and make its maiden voyage from Southampton to New York City in 2016 (later postponed to 2018). Palmer hoped to recreate the "Titanic" as closely as possible to its familiar external and internal appearance. According to Palmer, the "Titanic II" would be long, weigh gross, and carry 2,435 passengers and 900 crew. Palmer said the "Titanic II" would honour the memories of those who died and survived on the "Titanic". The "Titanic" was operated by the White Star Line and Palmer's company is named Blue Star Line.


title: Clive Palmer

text: During the first half of 2015, evidence accumulated strongly suggesting that the project had been abandoned. The Blue Star Line trademark was listed as "abandoned". No construction had been ordered in the Chinese shipyard identified as the likely building site with the workers highly skeptical that the project would ever move beyond the proposal stage. In May 2016 it was reported by the administrators for an insolvent Palmer company, Queensland Nickel, that no significant money had been spent on the development of "Titanic II" in over two years. On 27 September 2018, in a press release on its official web site, the Blue Star Line announced that work on the project would recommence, but there has been no confirmation of that since. Despite the media release, the web site had not been updated since May 2014.


title: Clive Palmer

text: In March 2020, as the COVID-19 pandemic was spreading in Australia, Palmer placed a prominent media advertisement offering to personally fund one million doses of a "cure" for the disease. The medication would include hydroxychloroquine, which is established in other countries as an anti-malarial drug but is known to have serious side-effects. The Australian drugs regulator, the Therapeutic Goods Administration (TGA), had warned that this drug and its derivatives “pose well-known serious risks to patients including cardiac toxicity potentially leading to sudden heart attacks, irreversible eye damage and severe depletion of blood sugar potentially leading to coma”. The TGA stated that it was considering legal action against Palmer. Other experts also criticised Palmer, concerning safety as well as the ethics of potentially producing a shortage of the drug in countries where it is needed to combat malaria. However, it was later confirmed that the federal health department planned to import hydroxychloroquine for emergency use, with a written agreement for partial funding by Palmer. On 28 April, Palmer placed further prominent advertisements in News Corp media, claiming to have purchased 32.9 million doses of hydroxychloroquine. The TGA stated that no action would be taken with respect to either set of advertisements, since they were "assessed as not intended to promote the sale of the product”. However, the President of the Royal Australian College of General Practitioners, Harry Nespolon, warned that trials of the drug were still ongoing and were "not looking particularly promising”. He was also concerned that "people may think that a cure is imminent and be lulled into a false sense of security so that they don’t exercise social distancing responsibilities”.


title: Clive Palmer

text: In June 2021, as the COVID-19 pandemic continued, a Queensland radio network stopped playing an advertisement from Palmer that had stated:


title: Clive Palmer

text: The TGA had warned the network and Palmer that this was seriously misleading to the public: the figure of 210 deaths a few days or weeks after vaccination was statistically normal; only one of those deaths could be linked to the vaccination itself.


title: Clive Palmer

text: The same month, it was reported that Palmer had sent letters to households across Australia urging against vaccination for COVID-19, based on the discredited death figures. This was reported again in July, and that Palmer had disregarded a further warning from the TGA.


title: Clive Palmer

text: Palmer had requested that his name and logo be printed on the doses of donated hydroxychloroquine. The Department of Health denied Palmer's request.


title: Clive Palmer

text: In July 2020, Palmer claimed that the closing of the borders by the Western Australian government owing to the COVID-19 pandemic was unconstitutional and challenged the WA legislation in the Federal Court. In response the Western Australian Premier Mark McGowan labelled Palmer an enemy of the state. Palmer also claimed that the border closure would "destroy the lives of hundreds of thousands of people for decades" and compared the death toll of COVID-19 with that of road accidents and influenza. By August, the Prime Minister of Australia Scott Morrison withdrew support of Palmer's legal challenge after receiving a public backlash on his previous supportive stance. Mark McGowan praised the Commonwealth for its withdrawal and indicated the Western Australian government would continue to fight the case and urging Palmer to withdraw the case labelling him "Australia's greatest egomaniac" and an "Olympic scale narcissist".


title: Clive Palmer

text: As the issues moved to the constitutional level, they came to involve possible conflict between major constitutional principles: parliamentary sovereignty and the rule of law. On 6 November 2020, the High Court upheld the legislation. Challenges to the constitutionality of amendments to the Act made in 2020 failed in the High Court on 13 October 2021.


title: Clive Palmer

text: In this context, Palmer sued McGowan for defamation and McGowan counter-sued Palmer for defamation. The Federal Court found on 2 August 2022 that each had defamed the other, awarded each a relatively small amount in damages and warned that such a dispute between prominent political figures should never have wasted the court's time and resources.


title: Clive Palmer

text: In August 2021, Australian airline Qantas announced that it would require all of its 22,000 employees to be fully vaccinated against COVID-19. In reaction to this, the Palmer Group sold off its entire stake in Qantas.


title: Clive Palmer

text: In June 2002, Palmer was appointed adjunct professor of business at Deakin University's Faculty of Business and Law, a role he held until 2006. During that time, he delivered a series of lectures as part of Deakin's MBA residential programs. In 2008, Palmer was appointed adjunct professor of management at Bond University on the Gold Coast.


title: Clive Palmer

text: In December 2012, Palmer was appointed joint secretary general of the World Leadership Alliance, a new democracy-promoting council that included former US president Bill Clinton and Myanmar's opposition leader Aung San Suu Kyi. Palmer was named president of the alliance's business chapter, the World Economic Council.


title: Clive Palmer

text: In December 2012, on Christmas Day, Palmer hosted a buffet lunch for 650 disadvantaged people, mostly children and their families.


title: Clive Palmer

text: In July 2013, Palmer was referred to in an iPhone application as making light of Australian Prime Minister Julia Gillard by having sandwiches thrown at her. News Corp Australia publications were critical of the app, calling it sexist, while referring to his weight in an opinion poll with an option saying "We should have one for big Clive Palmer".


title: Clive Palmer

text: On 4 March 2012, Palmer was named, amid controversy, as a National Living Treasure by the New South Wales Branch of the National Trust of Australia.


title: Clive Palmer

text: In 2015, Palmer donated a house, car and food to victims of a house fire in Beenleigh that saw their son tragically lose his life.


title: Clive Palmer

text: Palmer has been a regular poster of memes on his official Facebook page. The memes often have nonsensical or ironic undertones, and contain reoccurring themes – such as Rupert Murdoch's control of the media in Australia, contrasting himself with other political figures such as Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull, or paying homage to Tim Tam packets and his pet "Grog Dog". Palmer was once required to provide an affidavit explaining a tweet sent out during a hearing on 1 December 2017.


title: Clive Palmer

text: In September 2019, Palmer threatened to sue internet comedian Jordan Shanks for $500,000 for defamation relating to a YouTube video posted before the May 2019 election. The video created by Shanks called Palmer a "dense Humpty Dumpty" and a profane nickname that stated Palmer was a 'Fatty McF*ckhead'. Shanks responded that he had not defamed Palmer and being required to prove his claims in court would not help Palmer.


title: Clive Palmer

text: Palmer was active in the Liberal Movement headed by former Premier of South Australia Steele Hall in the 1970s. He joined the Queensland division of the Nationals in 1974, having been influenced by the policies of Joh Bjelke-Petersen, Premier of Queensland at the time. From the early 1980s, he was involved in state politics, serving as the National Party's campaign director during the 1983 state election and as media spokesman during its 1986 election campaign, both of which were successful.


title: Clive Palmer

text: Palmer was a backer of the aborted "Joh for Canberra" campaign, which attempted to get Queensland Premier Bjelke-Petersen elected as Prime Minister of Australia at the 1987 federal election. Palmer was elected to life membership of the party in 1992, which he retained after the state branches of the Nationals and Liberal Party merged to form the Liberal National Party of Queensland in 2008.


title: Clive Palmer

text: In late April 2012, Palmer announced that he would contest Liberal National Party preselection for the Division of Lilley at the 2013 federal election, held by Wayne Swan, the then Deputy Prime Minister and Treasurer. However, in July that year, he announced his intention to seek preselection for a different seat, including possibly the Division of Kennedy, held by Bob Katter of Katter's Australian Party (formerly sitting as a National and an independent).


title: Clive Palmer

text: Several months after announcing his intent to seek preselection, Palmer resigned his life membership of the Liberal National Party. His membership of the party had been suspended on 9 November 2012, following his comments on the actions of state government ministers. He was re-instated to the party on 22 November, but resigned the same day.


title: Clive Palmer

text: In March 2012, Palmer accused Drew Hutton and Greenpeace of receiving funding from the CIA, due to Hutton's involvement in the preparation of a Greenpeace strategy titled "Stopping the Australian Coal Export Boom". His claims were dismissed by Greenpeace senior campaigner John Hepburn as "ludicrous", and he said that Greenpeace would not accept money from any government, corporation or secret service. His claims were also rejected by the CIA.


title: Clive Palmer

text: On 25 April 2013, Palmer announced a "reformation" of the United Australia Party, which had been folded into the present-day Liberal Party in 1945, to stand candidates in the 2013 federal election, and had applied for its registration in Queensland. Another representative of a former South Australian political party, The United Party, lodged a formal objection to the registration of the name "Palmer United Party" with the Australian Electoral Commission (AEC). The AEC further determined that the names "Uniting Australia Party" and "Palmer United Party" were distinct and the name "Palmer United Party" was not prohibited.


title: Clive Palmer

text: Palmer ran as the candidate in the Sunshine Coast seat of Fairfax for his party in the 2013 Australian federal election. In the first count he won by only 7 votes over Liberal National Party (LNP) candidate Ted O'Brien, triggering an automatic recount. While he had won only 26.5 percent of the primary vote, Palmer overtook O'Brien on Labor and Green preferences. During the recount, he filed many challenges to votes cast for O'Brien, and made unsupported claims that the Australian Electoral Commission was tainted by corruption. Ultimately, he was confirmed as winner with 50.3% of the vote – a margin of 53 votes.


title: Clive Palmer

text: His party was also successful in the Senate in 2013, where three of his party members were elected and won a shared balance of power. The senators were elected in Queensland, Western Australia and Tasmania. But soon the party fell into disarray. The Tasmanian Senator Jacqui Lambie resigned from the Palmer United Party on 24 November 2014 announcing that she would remain in the Senate as an independent. Lambie's resignation followed several weeks of disagreements with Palmer. The Queensland Senator Glenn Lazarus also quit the party on 13 March 2015 citing issues with Palmer.


title: Clive Palmer

text: In his maiden speech to federal parliament, Palmer implied that the government was "deaf to the everyday struggles of all Australians" and stated that "the entrenchment of the two-party system in this country not only threatens democracy but destroys the creativity of the nation."


title: Clive Palmer

text: Palmer was absent from Parliament more than any other MP in the 44th Parliament; he attended only 64 percent of sitting days in 2014 and 54 percent in 2015. He was rarely seen in his own electorate, preferring to reside at his Gold Coast residence. At one point, he went seven months without setting foot in Fairfax. His LNP opponent in 2013, O'Brien, claimed that many residents had come to him for help after not being able to get help from Palmer, to the point that many of them considered him their MP.


title: Clive Palmer

text: In May 2016, Palmer announced he would not seek reelection to his seat of Fairfax or run for the Senate and retire from politics. This all but assured that Fairfax would revert to the LNP; like most Sunshine Coast seats, it would have been a comfortably safe LNP seat in a traditional two-party matchup. O'Brien then reclaimed the seat for the LNP.


title: Clive Palmer

text: Palmer deregistered the party's state branches in September 2016, initially intending to keep it active at the federal level. However, in April 2017, he announced that the party would be wound up.


title: Clive Palmer

text: In February 2018, Palmer announced his intention to resurrect his party and return to federal politics. The party was revived in June under its original name, the United Australia Party. Even when using the name Palmer United, the party continued to brand itself as a revival of the original UAP, claiming the three leaders of the original UAP – Joseph Lyons, Robert Menzies and Billy Hughes – as its former leaders. Former One Nation senator Brian Burston joined the United Australia Party in June 2018.


title: Clive Palmer

text: In April 2019, Palmer stated that he would stand for the Senate in Queensland in the 2019 Australian federal election. Palmer spent $60 million at the 2019 election, with most of the advertising consisting of attacks on the Australian Labor Party (ALP). He and his party did not win any seats in the election.


title: Clive Palmer

text: During the campaign for the 2020 Queensland state election, at which the United Australia Party endorsed 55 candidates, Palmer is estimated to have spent about $8 million in advertising. As in the 2019 federal election, the advertising mainly attacked the ALP, particularly alleging that Labor planned to impose a 20 per cent "death tax" to pay for its election promises, a claim that was dismissed by the ALP as a lie. No UAP candidates were elected.


title: Clive Palmer

text: Ahead of the 2019 election, Palmer altered the lyrics of the Twisted Sister song "We're Not Gonna Take It" to "Australia ain't gonna cop it" in a national TV campaign for United Australia Party. Twisted Sister condemned the unauthorised use of the song. Palmer disputed Twisted Sister's claim that they held any copyright over the portion of the song used in the advertisements, as he composed the lyrics and the melody was derived from "O Come, All Ye Faithful". In April 2021, Palmer was ordered by the Federal Court of Australia to pay $1.5 million dollars in damages for copyright infringement. Palmer was also ordered to pay legal costs and to remove all copies of the song and accompanying videos from the internet.


title: Clive Palmer

text: In 2021, Palmer welcomed Liberal Party defector Craig Kelly, an outspoken critic of climate and vaccine-based scientific findings, to his party.


title: Clive Palmer

text: Like Kelly, Palmer has been frequently criticised for spreading misinformation about COVID-19 and in particular the effectiveness of vaccines.


title: Clive Palmer

text: In December 2021, Palmer was rated Australia's "least likeable politician" in a Resolve Political Monitor survey that showed that only 8% of surveyed Australians had a positive view of him.


title: Clive Palmer

text: In March 2020, Palmer appeared in Brisbane Magistrates Court to answer four charges of fraud and other dishonesty, brought by the Australian Securities and Investments Commission (ASIC). The charges alleged improper transfers of money totalling several million dollars shortly before the 2013 general election, as fraud and dishonest use of Palmer's position as a company director (of Mineralogy) regarding funding of the Palmer United Party. Palmer denied that the charges relate to the collapse of Queensland Nickel, commenting: "It's just a fabricated charge which will be dismissed pretty easily which is what we do with ASIC charges which are political in nature." The case was adjourned until 28 August, with Palmer still claiming that the charges were "nonsense". Each offence carries a potential prison sentence of up to five years and, for the fraud charges, up to 12 years.