title: Missile guidance

text: Preset guidance is the simplest type of missile guidance. From the distance and direction of the target, the trajectory of the flight path is determined. Before firing, this information is programmed into the missile's guidance system, which, during flight, maneuvers the missile to follow that path. All of the guidance components (including sensors such as accelerometers or gyroscopes) are contained within the missile, and no outside information (such as radio instructions) is used. An example of a missile using preset guidance is the V-2 rocket.


title: Missile guidance

text: Inertial guidance uses sensitive measurement devices to calculate the location of the missile due to the acceleration put on it after leaving a known position. Early mechanical systems were not very accurate, and required some sort of external adjustment to allow them to hit targets even the size of a city. Modern systems use solid state ring laser gyros that are accurate to within metres over ranges of 10,000 km, and no longer require additional inputs. Gyroscope development has culminated in the AIRS found on the MX missile, allowing for an accuracy of less than 100 m at intercontinental ranges. Many civilian aircraft use inertial guidance using a ring laser gyroscope, which is less accurate than the mechanical systems found in ICBMs, but which provide an inexpensive means of attaining a fairly accurate fix on location (when most airliners such as Boeing's 707 and 747 were designed, GPS was not the widely commercially available means of tracking that it is today). Today guided weapons can use a combination of INS, GPS and radar terrain mapping to achieve extremely high levels of accuracy such as that found in modern cruise missiles.


title: Missile guidance

text: Inertial guidance is most favored for the initial guidance and reentry vehicles of strategic missiles, because it has no external signal and cannot be jammed. Additionally, the relatively low precision of this guidance method is less of an issue for large nuclear warheads.


title: Missile guidance

text: Astro-inertial guidance is a sensor fusion-information fusion of inertial guidance and celestial navigation. It is usually employed on submarine-launched ballistic missiles. Unlike silo-based intercontinental ballistic missiles, whose launch point does not move and thus can serve as a reference, SLBMs are launched from moving submarines, which complicates the necessary navigational calculations and increases circular error probable. This stellar-inertial guidance is used to correct small position and velocity errors that result from launch condition uncertainties due to errors in the submarine navigation system and errors that may have accumulated in the guidance system during the flight due to imperfect instrument calibration.


title: Missile guidance

text: The USAF sought a precision navigation system for maintaining route accuracy and target tracking at very high speeds. Nortronics, Northrop's electronics development division, had developed an astro-inertial navigation system (ANS), which could correct inertial navigation errors with celestial observations, for the SM-62 Snark missile, and a separate system for the ill-fated AGM-48 Skybolt missile, the latter of which was adapted for the SR-71.


title: Missile guidance

text: It uses star positioning to fine-tune the accuracy of the inertial guidance system after launch. As the accuracy of a missile is dependent upon the guidance system knowing the exact position of the missile at any given moment during its flight, the fact that stars are a fixed reference point from which to calculate that position makes this a potentially very effective means of improving accuracy.


title: Missile guidance

text: In the Trident missile system this was achieved by a single camera that was trained to spot just one star in its expected position (it is believed that the missiles from Soviet submarines would track two separate stars to achieve this), if it was not quite aligned to where it should be then this would indicate that the inertial system was not precisely on target and a correction would be made.


title: Missile guidance

text: TERCOM, for "terrain contour matching", uses altitude maps of the strip of land from the launch site to the target, and compares them with information from a radar altimeter on board. More sophisticated TERCOM systems allow the missile to fly a complex route over a full 3D map, instead of flying directly to the target. TERCOM is the typical system for cruise missile guidance, but is being supplanted by GPS systems and by DSMAC, digital scene-matching area correlator, which employs a camera to view an area of land, digitizes the view, and compares it to stored scenes in an onboard computer to guide the missile to its target.


title: Missile guidance

text: DSMAC is reputed to be so lacking in robustness that destruction of prominent buildings marked in the system's internal map (such as by a preceding cruise missile) upsets its navigation.


title: Balaji Srinivasan

text: Balaji S. Srinivasan (born May 24, 1980) is an American entrepreneur and investor. He was the co-founder of Counsyl, the former Chief Technology Officer (CTO) of Coinbase, and former general partner at the venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz.


title: Balaji Srinivasan

text: Srinivasan grew up on Long Island, in Plainview, New York. He received BS, MS, and PhD degrees in Electrical Engineering from Stanford University and an MS in Chemical Engineering, also from Stanford.


title: Balaji Srinivasan

text: In 2007, Srinivasan co-founded genetic testing company Counsyl, which provided tests to prospective parents to screen for Mendelian diseases. Counsyl was acquired by Myriad Genetics for $375 million in 2018.


title: Balaji Srinivasan

text: In 2013, Srinivasan co-founded 21e6, which later became 21 Inc, a Bitcoin mining startup that failed as a bitcoin mining business after raising over $120 million from investors. The company later pivoted to become Earn.com, which allowed senders to pay users in digital currency to reply to emails. Earn.com was acquired by digital currency exchange company Coinbase in April 2018 for over $100 million. After Coinbase purchased Earn.com, it became Coinbase Earn and Srinivasan became Coinbase’s first CTO. He left the company in 2019. Coinbase shut down Coinbase Earn in December 2019.


title: Balaji Srinivasan

text: In July 2022, Srinivasan published "The Network State: How To Start a New Country" which coined the concept of a Network State which proposes the setting up of decentralized digital communities that crowdfund resources to build new autonomous cities and states. The ideas in the book are inspired by the work of the economist Albert O. Hirschman who sees two basic paths to reform - voice (remake the system from within) and exit (leave and build something new).


title: Balaji Srinivasan

text: "MIT Technology Review" named Srinivasan on its list of "Innovators Under 35" in 2013. In 2018, "Fortune" ranked him 26th on its "The Ledger 40 Under 40" list.


title: Balaji Srinivasan

text: In 2013, Srinivasan gave a talk at Y Combinator's Startup School titled "Silicon Valley's Ultimate Exit" and published "Software Is Reorganizing the World" in "Wired", which advocated for the technology industry to digitally exit the United States and move abroad. The talk was received positively by Reason, Wired, and Bloomberg News, but was criticized by "The New York Times" and "The Wall Street Journal". In 2022, Srinivasan extended this idea, publishing "The Network State", about online nationality and the breakaway from geographical governments.


title: Balaji Srinivasan

text: In 2013, after TechCrunch published an article exploring links between Silicon Valley tech leaders and the Dark Enlightenment movement that mentioned this speech, Srinivasan suggested doxing reporters who bring these links to the attention of the public. In an email to Curtis Yarvin, he wrote, "If things get hot, it may be interesting to sic the Dark Enlightenment audience on a single vulnerable hostile reporter to dox them and turn them inside out with hostile reporting sent to *their* advertisers/friends/contacts.”


title: Balaji Srinivasan

text: In 2017, the Trump Administration considered appointing Srinivasan as FDA Commissioner. While being considered for the appointment, Srinivasan deleted all of his tweets, including tweets critical of the FDA. In one such deleted tweet, Srinivasan wrote, "For every thalidomide, many dead from slowed approvals.”


title: Balaji Srinivasan

text: In July 2020, Srinivasan drew attention after criticizing Taylor Lorenz's reporting alleged misbehavior of Away's CEO on Twitter. On the Twitter thread, he suggested Lorenz and journalists like her are "sociopaths." Lorenz defended herself and characterized Srinivasan's previous actions as harassment on Clubhouse and other platforms.


title: Balaji Srinivasan

text: In April 2021, Srinivasan donated $50,000 in cryptocurrency to aid in Indian COVID-19 relief in during a resurgence of the virus in the country. On Twitter, he pledged to donate another $50 for every time his post was retweeted, up to $100,000.


title: Triple bottom line

text: The triple bottom line (or otherwise noted as TBL or 3BL) is an accounting framework with three parts: social, environmental (or ecological) and economic. Some organizations have adopted the TBL framework to evaluate their performance in a broader perspective to create greater business value. Business writer John Elkington claims to have coined the phrase in 1994.


title: Triple bottom line

text: In traditional business accounting and common usage, the "bottom line" refers to either the "profit" or "loss", which is usually recorded at the very bottom line on a statement of revenue and expenses. Over the last 50 years, environmentalists and social justice advocates have struggled to bring a broader definition of bottom line into public consciousness by introducing full cost accounting. For example, if a corporation shows a monetary profit, but their asbestos mine causes thousands of deaths from asbestosis, and their copper mine pollutes a river, and the government ends up spending taxpayer money on health care and river clean-up, how do we perform a full societal cost benefit analysis? The triple bottom line adds two more "bottom lines": social and environmental (ecological) concerns. With the ratification of the United Nations and ICLEI TBL standard for urban and community accounting in early 2007, this became the dominant approach to public sector full cost accounting. Similar UN standards apply to natural capital and human capital measurement to assist in measurements required by TBL, e.g. the EcoBudget standard for reporting ecological footprint. Use of the TBL is fairly widespread in South African media, as found in a 1990–2008 study of worldwide national newspapers.


title: Triple bottom line

text: An example of an organization seeking a triple bottom line would be a social enterprise run as a non-profit, but earning income by offering opportunities for handicapped people who have been labelled "unemployable", to earn a living by recycling. The organization earns a profit, which is invested back into the community. The social benefit is the meaningful employment of disadvantaged citizens, and the reduction in the society's welfare or disability costs. The environmental benefit comes from the recycling accomplished. In the private sector, a commitment to corporate social responsibility (CSR) implies an obligation to public reporting about the business's substantial impact for the better of the environment and people. Triple bottom line is one framework for reporting this material impact. This is distinct from the more limited changes required to deal only with ecological issues. The triple bottom line has also been extended to encompass four pillars, known as the quadruple bottom line (QBL). The fourth pillar denotes a future-oriented approach (future generations, intergenerational equity, etc.). It is a long-term outlook that sets sustainable development and sustainability concerns apart from previous social, environmental, and economic considerations.


title: Triple bottom line

text: The challenges of putting the TBL into practice relate to the measurement of social and ecological categories. Despite this, the TBL framework enables organizations to take a longer-term perspective and thus evaluate the future consequences of decisions.


title: Triple bottom line

text: Sustainable development was defined by the Brundtland Commission of the United Nations in 1987. Triple bottom line (TBL) accounting expands the traditional reporting framework to take into account social and environmental performance in addition to financial performance.


title: Triple bottom line

text: In 1981, Freer Spreckley first articulated the triple bottom line in a publication called "Social Audit - A Management Tool for Co-operative Working". In this work, he argued that enterprises should measure and report on financial performance, social wealth creation, and environmental responsibility. The phrase "triple bottom line" was articulated more fully by John Elkington in his 1997 book "Cannibals with Forks: the Triple Bottom Line of 21st Century Business", where he adopted a question asked by the Polish poet Stanisław Lec, "Is it progress if a cannibal uses a fork?" as the opening line of his foreword. Elkington suggests that it can be, particularly in the case of "sustainable capitalism", wherein competing corporate entities seek to maintain their relative position by addressing people and planet issues as well as profit maximisation.


title: Triple bottom line

text: A "Triple Bottom Line Investing" group advocating and publicizing these principles was founded in 1998 by Robert J. Rubinstein.


title: Triple bottom line

text: For reporting their efforts companies may demonstrate their commitment to corporate social responsibility (CSR) through the following:


title: Triple bottom line

text: The concept of TBL demands that a company's responsibility lies with stakeholders rather than shareholders. In this case, "stakeholders" refers to anyone who is influenced, either directly or indirectly, by the actions of the firm. Examples of stakeholders include employees, customers, suppliers, local residents, government agencies, and creditors. According to the stakeholder theory, the business entity should be used as a vehicle for coordinating stakeholder interests, instead of maximizing shareholder (owner) profit. A growing number of financial institutions incorporate a triple bottom line approach in their work. It is at the core of the business of banks in the Global Alliance for Banking on Values, for example.


title: Triple bottom line

text: The Detroit-based Avalon International Breads interprets the triple bottom line as consisting of "Earth", "Community", and "Employees".


title: Triple bottom line

text: The triple bottom line consists of social equity, economic, and environmental factors. The phrase, "people, planet, and profit" to describe the triple bottom line and the goal of sustainability, was coined by John Elkington in 1994 while at SustainAbility, and was later used as the title of the Anglo-Dutch oil company Shell's first sustainability report in 1997. As a result, one country in which the 3P concept took deep root was The Netherlands.


title: Triple bottom line

text: The people, social equity, or human capital bottom line pertains to fair and beneficial business practices toward labour and the community and region in which a corporation conducts its business. A TBL company conceives a reciprocal social structure in which the well-being of corporate, labour and other stakeholder interests are interdependent.


title: Triple bottom line

text: An enterprise dedicated to the triple bottom line seeks to provide benefit to many constituencies and not to exploit or endanger any group of them. The "up streaming" of a portion of profit from the marketing of finished goods back to the original producer of raw materials, for example, a farmer in fair trade agricultural practice, is a common feature. In concrete terms, a TBL business would not use child labour and monitor all contracted companies for child labour exploitation, would pay fair salaries to its workers, would maintain a safe work environment and tolerable working hours, and would not otherwise exploit a community or its labour force. A TBL business also typically seeks to "give back" by contributing to the strength and growth of its community with such things as health care and education. Quantifying this bottom line is relatively new, problematic and often subjective. The Global Reporting Initiative (GRI) has developed guidelines to enable corporations and NGOs alike to comparably report on the social impact of a business.


title: Triple bottom line

text: The planet, environmental bottom line, or natural capital bottom line refers to sustainable environmental practices. A TBL company endeavors to benefit the natural order as much as possible or at the least do no harm and minimize environmental impact. A TBL endeavour reduces its ecological footprint by, among other things, carefully managing its consumption of energy and non-renewables and reducing manufacturing waste as well as rendering waste less toxic before disposing of it in a safe and legal manner. "Cradle to grave" is uppermost in the thoughts of TBL manufacturing businesses, which typically conduct a life cycle assessment of products to determine what the true environmental cost is from the growth and harvesting of raw materials to manufacture to distribution to eventual disposal by the end user.


title: Triple bottom line

text: Currently, the cost of disposing of non-degradable or toxic products is born financially and environmentally by future generations, the governments, and residents near the disposal site and elsewhere. In TBL thinking, an enterprise which produces and markets a product which will create a waste problem should not be given a free ride by society. It would be more equitable for the business which manufactures and sells a problematic product to bear part of the cost of its ultimate disposal.


title: Triple bottom line

text: Ecologically destructive practices, such as overfishing or other endangering depletions of resources are avoided by TBL companies. Often environmental sustainability is the more profitable course for a business in the long run. Arguments that it costs more to be environmentally sound are often specious when the course of the business is analyzed over a period of time. Generally, sustainability reporting metrics are better quantified and standardized for environmental issues than for social ones. A number of respected reporting institutes and registries exist including the Global Reporting Initiative, CERES, Institute for Sustainability and others.


title: Triple bottom line

text: The profit or economic bottom line deals with the economic value created by the organization after deducting the cost of all inputs, including the cost of the capital tied up. It therefore differs from traditional accounting definitions of profit. In the original concept, within a sustainability framework, the "profit" aspect needs to be seen as the real economic benefit enjoyed by the host society. It is the real economic impact the organization has on its economic environment. This is often confused to be limited to the internal profit made by a company or organization (which nevertheless remains an essential starting point for the computation). Therefore, an original TBL approach cannot be interpreted as simply traditional corporate accounting profit "plus" social and environmental impacts unless the "profits" of other entities are included as a social benefit.


title: Triple bottom line

text: Following the initial publication of the triple bottom line concept, students and practitioners have sought greater detail in how the pillars can be evaluated.


title: Triple bottom line

text: The "people" concept for example can be viewed in three dimensions – organisational needs, individual needs, and community issues.


title: Triple bottom line

text: Equally, "profit" is a function of both a healthy sales stream, which needs a high focus on customer service, coupled with the adoption of a strategy to develop new customers to replace those that die away.


title: Triple bottom line

text: And "planet" can be divided into a multitude of subdivisions, although reduce, reuse and recycle is a succinct way of steering through this division.


title: Triple bottom line

text: The initial understanding is now supplanted by thinking BEYOND TBL. The above examples give good reason why. Added to the TBL concept of Economics Ethics and Environment is the idea of thinking of the Environment as a Mantel that the other pillars hold up, and add to Economics and Ethics, the notions of Energy, and Health or the 4 E's.


title: Triple bottom line

text: Fiscal policy of governments usually claims to be concerned with identifying social and natural deficits on a less formal basis. However, such choices may be guided more by ideology than by economics. The primary benefit of embedding one approach to measurement of these deficits would be first to direct monetary policy to reduce them, and eventually achieve a global monetary reform by which they could be systematically and globally reduced in some uniform way.


title: Triple bottom line

text: The argument is that the Earth's carrying capacity is at risk, and that in order to avoid catastrophic breakdown of climate or ecosystems, there is need for comprehensive reform of global financial institutions similar in scale to what was undertaken at Bretton Woods in 1944.


title: Triple bottom line

text: With the emergence of an externally consistent green economics and agreement on definitions of potentially contentious terms such as full-cost accounting, natural capital and social capital, the prospect of formal metrics for ecological and social loss or risk has grown less remote since the 1990s.


title: Triple bottom line

text: In the United Kingdom in particular, the London Health Observatory has undertaken a formal programme to address social deficits via a fuller understanding of what "social capital" is, how it functions in a real community (that being the City of London), and how losses of it tend to require both financial capital and significant political and social attention from volunteers and professionals to help resolve. The data they rely on is extensive, building on decades of statistics of the Greater London Council since World War II. Similar studies have been undertaken in North America.


title: Triple bottom line

text: Studies of the value of Earth have tried to determine what might constitute an ecological or natural life deficit. The Kyoto Protocol relies on some measures of this sort, and actually relies on some value of life calculations that, among other things, are explicit about the ratio of the price of a human life between developed and developing nations (about 15 to 1). While the motive of this number was to simply assign responsibility for a cleanup, such stark honesty opens not just an economic but political door to some kind of negotiation — presumably to reduce that ratio in time to something seen as more equitable. As it is, people in developed nations can be said to benefit 15 times more from ecological devastation than in developing nations, in pure financial terms. According to the IPCC, they are thus obliged to pay 15 times more per life to avoid a loss of each such life to climate change — the Kyoto Protocol seeks to implement exactly this formula, and is therefore sometimes cited as a first step towards getting nations to accept formal liability for damage inflicted on ecosystems shared globally.


title: Triple bottom line

text: Advocacy for triple bottom line reforms is common in Green Parties. Some of the measures undertaken in the European Union towards the Euro currency integration standardize the reporting of ecological and social losses in such a way as to seem to endorse in principle the notion of unified accounts, or unit of account, for these deficits.


title: Triple bottom line

text: To address financial bottom line profitability concerns, some argue that focusing on the TBL will indeed increase profit for the shareholders in the long run. In practice, John Mackey, CEO of Whole Foods, uses Whole Foods's Community Giving Days as an example. On days when Whole Foods donates 5% of their sales to charity, this action benefits the community, creates goodwill with customers, and energizes employees—which may lead to increased, sustainable profitability in the long-run.


title: Triple bottom line

text: Furthermore, planning a sustainability strategy with the triple bottom line in mind could save companies a lot of money if a disaster were to strike. For example, when British Petroleum (BP) spilled "two hundred million gallons of oil in the Gulf of Mexico", it cost the company "billions". This company focused mostly on the financial and economic costs of this disaster, instead of the company’s environmental bottom line, furthering damage to the company and its reputation.


title: Triple bottom line

text: While many people agree with the importance of good social conditions and preservation of the environment, there are also many who disagree with the triple bottom line as the way to enhance these conditions. The following are the reasons why:


title: Triple bottom line

text: In response to these limitations, the concept of the "Triple Depreciation Line" (also called "CARE - Comprehensive Accounting in Respect of Ecology - model") has been proposed


title: Triple bottom line

text: A focus on people, planet and profit has led to legislation changes around the world, often through social enterprise or social investment or through the introduction of a new legal form, the Community Interest Company. In the United States, the BCorp movement has been part of a call for legislation change to allow and encourage a focus on social and environmental impact, with BCorp a legal form for a company focused on "stakeholders, not just shareholders".


title: Triple bottom line

text: In Western Australia, the triple bottom line was adopted as a part of the State Sustainability Strategy, and accepted by the Government of Western Australia but its status was increasingly marginalised by subsequent premiers Alan Carpenter and Colin Barnett.


title: Hội An

text: Hội An (), formerly known as Fai-Fo or Faifoo, is a city with a population of approximately 120,000 in Vietnam's Quảng Nam Province and is noted as a UNESCO World Heritage Site since 1999. Along with the Cu Lao Cham archipelago, it is part of the Cu Lao Cham-Hoi An Biosphere Reserve, designated in 2009.


title: Hội An

text: Old Town Hội An, the city's historic district, is recognized as an exceptionally well-preserved example of a Southeast Asian trading port dating from the 15th to the 19th century, its buildings and street plan reflecting a blend of indigenous and foreign influences. Prominent in the city's old town is its covered "Japanese Bridge", dating to the 16th–17th century.


title: Hội An

text: Hội An (會安) translates as "peaceful meeting place" from Sino-Vietnamese. In English and other European languages, the town was known historically as "Faifo". This word is derived from Vietnamese "Hội An phố" (the town of Hội An), which was shortened to "Hoi-pho", and then to "Faifo". It has also been known as Hải Phố, Hoài Phố, Hội Phố, Hoa Phố, Haiso and during the Champa period, it was named Lam Ap Pho.


title: Hội An

text: Between the seventh and 10th centuries, the Cham (people of Champa) controlled the strategic spice trade and with this came tremendous wealth.


title: Hội An

text: The early history of Hội An is that of the Cham. These Austronesian-speaking Malayo-Polynesian peoples created the Champa Empire which occupied much of what is now central and lower Vietnam, from Huế to beyond Nha Trang. Various linguistic connections between Cham and the related Jarai language and the Austronesian languages of Indonesia (particularly Acehnese), Malaysia, and Hainan has been documented. In the early years, Mỹ Sơn was the spiritual capital, Trà Kiệu was the political capital and Hội An was the commercial capital of the Champa Empire - later, by the 14th century, the Cham moved further down towards Nha Trang. The river system was used for the transport of goods between the highlands, inland countries of Laos and Thailand and the low lands.


title: Hội An

text: In 1306, the Vietnamese and the Cham signed a land treaty, in which Cham king Jaya Simhavarman III gave Dai Viet the two provinces of Ô and Lý in exchange for a long-term peace and marriage with king Trần Nhân Tông's daughter Huyền Trân. In 1471 Emperor Lê Thánh Tông of Đại Việt annexed Champa and Hội An became a Vietnamese urban, also the capital of province Quảng Nam. In 1535 Portuguese explorer and sea captain António de Faria, coming from Da Nang, tried to establish a major trading centre at the port village of Faifo. Since 1570, Southern Vietnam had been under control of powerful Nguyễn clan, established by governor Nguyễn Hoàng. The Nguyễn lords were far more interested in commercial activity than the Trịnh lords who ruled the north. As a result, Hội An flourished as a trading port and became the most important trade port on the South China sea. Captain William Adams, the English sailor and confidant of Tokugawa Ieyasu, is known to have made one trading mission to Hội An in 1617 on a Red Seal Ship.


title: Hội An

text: Hội An was a divided town with the Japanese settlement across the "Japanese Bridge" (16th-17th century). The bridge (Chùa cầu) is a unique covered structure built by the Japanese merchants, the only known covered bridge with a Buddhist temple attached to one side. In the 18th century, Hội An was considered by Chinese and Japanese merchants to be the best destination for trading in all of Southeast Asia, even Asia. The city also rose to prominence as a powerful and exclusive trade conduit between Europe, China, India, and Japan, especially for the ceramic industry. Shipwreck discoveries have shown that Vietnamese and Asian ceramics were transported from Hội An to as far as Sinai, Egypt.


title: Hội An

text: Hội An's importance waned sharply at the end of the 18th century because of the collapse of Nguyễn rule (thanks to the Tây Sơn Rebellion - which was opposed to foreign trade). In 1775, Hội An had been the battleground between Trịnh army and Tây Sơn rebels, and the city was destroyed. Then, with the triumph of Emperor Gia Long, he repaid the French for their aid by giving them exclusive trade rights to the nearby port town of Đà Nẵng. Đà Nẵng became the new centre of trade (and later French influence) in central Vietnam while Hội An was a forgotten backwater. Local historians also say that Hội An lost its status as a desirable trade port due to silting up of the river mouth. The result was that Hội An remained almost untouched by the changes to Vietnam over the next 200 years. The efforts to revive the city were only done in 1990s by a Polish architect and conservator from Lublin and influential cultural educator, Kazimierz Kwiatkowski "Kazik", who finally brought back Hội An to the world. There is a statue for the Polish architect in the city, and remains a symbol of the relationship between Poland and Vietnam, which share many historical commons despite its distance.


title: Hội An

text: Today, the town is a tourist attraction because of its history, traditional architecture, and crafts such as textiles and ceramics. Many bars, hotels, and resorts have been constructed both in Hội An and the surrounding area. The port mouth and boats are still used for both fishing and tourism.


title: Hội An

text: Hoi An has two main seasons during the year: rainy and dry seasons, with a warm average temperature of 29 °C during the year. The hottest period is from June to August when the highest temperature can reach 38°C during day time. November to January are the coldest months, with an average temperature of 20 °C. The rainy season lasts from September to January with heavy rains which can cause floods and affect tourism. The city's dry season is between February and May, when the weather becomes very mild with moderate temperature and less humid.


title: Hội An

text: Calm mild weather is now limited to the season of May/June - end of August when the seas are calm and wind changes direction and comes from the South. The remainder of the year the weather is intermittent between rain & cold and hot & mild. Activities such as visiting the offshore Cù lao Chàm islands are only guaranteed to be likely during the short season of the of May to the end of August, which is the high season for domestic tourism.


title: Hội An

text: In 1999 the old town was declared a World Heritage Site by UNESCO as a well-preserved example of a Southeast Asian trading port of the 15th to 19th centuries, with buildings that display a blend of local and foreign influences. According to the UNESCO Impact Report 2008 on Hội An, there are challenges for stakeholders to protect the heritage from tourism.


title: Hội An

text: Owing to the increased number of tourists visiting Hoi An a variety of activities are emerging that allow guests to get out of the old quarter and explore by motorbike, bicycle, kayak, or motorboat. The Thu Bon River is still essential to the region more than 500 years after António de Faria first navigated it and it remains an essential form of food production and transport. As such kayak and motorboat rides are becoming an increasingly common tourist activity.


title: Hội An

text: This longtime trading port city offers a distinctive regional cuisine that blends centuries of cultural influences from East and Southeast Asia. Hoi An hosts a number of cooking classes where tourists can learn to make "cao lầu" or braised spiced pork noodle, a signature dish of the city.


title: Hội An

text: The Hoi An wreck, a shipwreck from the late fifteenth or early sixteenth century, was discovered near the Cham Islands, off the coast of the city in the 1990s. Between 1996 and 1999, nearly three hundred thousand artifacts were recovered by the excavation teams, that included the Vietnamese National Salvage Corporation and Oxford University’s Marine Archaeology Research Division.


title: Hội An

text: Another attraction is the "Hoi An Lantern Full Moon Festival" taking place every full moon cycle. The celebrations honour the ancestors. People exchange flowers, lanterns, candles, and fruits for prosperity and good fortune.


title: Hội An

text: The Faifo Coffee house has an open air rooftop that has become a particularly popular location for Asian tourists to stop for well dressed selfies and posed photos.


title: Hội An

text: In 2019, Hoi An was listed as one of Vietnam's key culture-based tourist areas where rampant tourism growth 'threatens the sustainability". Excessive tourism in the past has also damaged the eco-system of Chàm Islands-Hội An Marine Protected Area.


title: Hội An

text: The city has four museums highlighting the history of the region. These museums are managed by the Hoi An Center for Cultural Heritage Management and Preservation. Entrance to the museum is permitted with a Hoi An Entrance Ticket.


title: Hội An

text: The Museum of History and Culture, at 13 Nguyen Hue St, was originally a pagoda, built in the 17th century by Minh Huong villagers to worship the Guanyin, and is adjacent to the Guan Yu temple. It contains original relics from the Sa Huynh, Champa, Dai Viet and Dai Nam periods, tracing the history of Hoi An's inhabitants from its earliest settlers through to French colonial times.


title: Hội An

text: The Hoi An Folklore Museum, at 33 Nguyen Thai Hoc Street, was opened in 2005, and is the largest two-storey wooden building in the old town, at 57m long and 9m wide, with fronts at Nguyen Thai Hoc St and Bach Dang St. On the second floor, there are 490 artifacts, organised into four areas: plastic folk arts, performing folk arts, traditional occupations and artifacts related to the daily life of Hoi An residents.


title: Hội An

text: The Museum of Trade Ceramics is located at 80 Tran Phu Street, and was established in 1995, in a restored wooden building, originally built around 1858. The items originating from Persia, China, Thailand, India and other countries are proof of the importance of Hội An as a major trading port in South East Asia.


title: Hội An

text: The Museum of Sa Huỳnh Culture, is located at 149 Tran Phu Street. Established in 1994, this museum displays a collection of over 200 artifacts from the Sa Huỳnh culture—considered to be the original settlers on the Hội An site—dating to over 2000 years ago. This museum is considered to be the most unusual collection of Sa Huỳnh artefacts in Vietnam.


title: Hội An

text: The Precious Heritage Art Gallery Museum is located at 26 Phan Boi Chau. It includes a 500m2 display of photos and artifacts collected by Réhahn during the past 10 years of the French photographer's explorations of Vietnam.


title: Hội An

text: According to CNN, Hoi An is the "banh mi capital of Vietnam." Banh Mi is a type of Vietnamese sandwich, consisting of a baguette, pâté, meats and fresh herbs.


title: Hội An

text: The regional dish is Cao lầu, consisting of rice noodles, meat, greens, bean sprouts, and herbs, most commonly served with a small amount of broth. The water for the broth has been traditionally taken from the Ba Le Well, thought to have been built in the 10th century by the Chams.


title: Hội An

text: Other regional specialties include mi quang noodles, banh bao banh vac, hoanh thanh, com ga (chicken with rice), bánh xèo, sweet corn soup and baby clam salad are also regional specialties. They make a local chili sauce, Ớt Tương Triều Phát, widely popular throughout Vietnam.


title: Song Ji-eun

text: Song Ji-eun, (born May 5, 1990), better known mononymously as Jieun, is a South Korean singer and actress best known as a member of the South Korean girl group Secret. Aside from her group's activities, she has released several solo songs and participated in various OSTs. In 2011, her second single, "Going Crazy" featuring Bang Yong-guk, went to become her first number one single on the Gaon Chart as a solo artist.


title: Song Ji-eun

text: Song Ji-eun was born on May 5, 1990, in South Korea, she is an only child. Having interest in music when she was young, she auditioned for JYP Entertainment at an early age. While in JYP Entertainment, she sang OSTs of Korean dramas in 2007 and 2008 such as "Learning To Fly" for "Air City". Under JYP Entertainment, she was set off to debut as a four-member girl group with Sistar's Hyorin, BESTie's Uji and EXID's Hani, but the plan was scrapped and Ji-eun then left JYP Entertainment and joined TS Entertainment.


title: Song Ji-eun

text: In September 2009, TS Entertainment announced that they will be debuting a four-member girl group in October 2009. Song, along with Han Sunhwa, Jung Hana and Jun Hyoseong, debuted as the group, Secret. Prior to their debut, the group was on a documentary show called "Secret Story" which chronicled their debut process. They released their debut single "I Want You Back" in October 2009.


title: Song Ji-eun

text: After Secret's success with "Shy Boy", TS Entertainment announced that Song will make her solo debut with the song "Going Crazy". The song was dubbed as an "emotional ballad track" and "different to what she's shown through Secret". The single, released in March 2011, was a success and peaked at number one on Gaon Singles Chart, making it Song's and Bang's first number one single in Korea.


title: Song Ji-eun

text: In 2013, Song released her first single album "Hope Torture", which she unveiled at her album showcase at the Olleh Square in Gwanghwamun.


title: Song Ji-eun

text: In 2014, Song released her first extended play, titled "25", which contained two singles "Don't Look At Me Like That" and "Pretty Age 25". The same year, Song made her acting debut in the web drama "Drawing, Spring", as a part-time worker for a PR team, who loves all living things but has traumatic experience with horses.


title: Song Ji-eun

text: In April 2015, Song featured in fantasy youth comedy "The Superman Age", an 8-episode series which aired on cable channel tvN. She then starred in the web drama " The Immutable Law of First Love", based on a web novel of the same name, playing a photographer who loves abandoned dogs. In November, she starred in KBS's daily drama "Sweet Home, Sweet Honey" and received positive reception on her performance.


title: Song Ji-eun

text: In September 2016, Song released her second extended play, titled "Bobby Doll" containing six tracks, including the title track of the same name.


title: Song Ji-eun

text: In August 2017, Song submitted a request to the Korean Commercial Arbitration Board to verify that her contract is no longer valid due to TS Entertainment not following the terms of the contract. Song later took to her Instagram where she announced her departure from Secret.


title: Clarissa Ward

text: Clarissa Ward (born January 31, 1980) is a British-American television journalist, who is currently chief international correspondent for CNN. She was with CBS News, based in London. Before her CBS News position, Ward was a Moscow-based news correspondent for ABC News programs.


title: Clarissa Ward

text: Ward was born in London to a British father and American mother. She grew up in London and New York City and attended the Godstowe and Wycombe Abbey boarding schools in England. She graduated from Yale University in 2002 and holds an honorary doctor of letters degree from Middlebury College.


title: Clarissa Ward

text: Ward began her career as an overnight desk assistant at Fox News in 2003. From 2004 to 2005, she was an assignment editor for Fox News in New York City. She worked on the international desk coordinating coverage for stories such as the capture of Saddam Hussein, the Indian Ocean tsunami in 2004 and the deaths of Yasir Arafat and Pope John Paul II. In 2006, she worked as a field producer for Fox News. She produced coverage of the Israeli-Lebanese war, the kidnapping of Gilad Shalit and subsequent Israeli military action in the Gaza Strip, the trial of Saddam Hussein and the 2005 Iraqi constitutional referendum.


title: Clarissa Ward

text: Prior to October 2007, Ward was based in Beirut and worked as a correspondent for Fox News. She covered the execution of Saddam Hussein, the Iraq War troop surge of 2007, the Beirut Arab University riots and the 2007 Bikfaya bombings. She conducted interviews with notable figures such as Gen. David Petraeus, Iraqi Deputy Prime Minister Barham Salih and Lebanese President Emile Lahoud. She also spent time embedded with the U.S. military in Iraq, most notably in Baqubah.


title: Clarissa Ward

text: From October 2007 to October 2010, Ward was an ABC News correspondent based in Moscow. She reported from Russia for all ABC News broadcasts and platforms, including "World News with Charles Gibson", "Nightline" and "Good Morning America", as well as ABC News Radio, and ABC News Now. On assignment in Russia, she covered the 2008 Russian presidential election. She was in Georgia at the time of the Russian intervention into Georgian territory. She was transferred to Beijing to serve as the ABC News Asian Correspondent, where she covered the 2011 Tōhoku earthquake and tsunami in Japan. She has also covered the war in Afghanistan.


title: Clarissa Ward

text: Ward's CBS career started as the network's foreign news correspondent in October 2011. She was a contributor for "60 Minutes" and served as a fill-in anchor on "CBS This Morning" beginning in January 2014.


title: Clarissa Ward

text: On September 21, 2015, CNN announced that Ward was joining the network and reporting for all of CNN's platforms, and would remain based in London. With more than a decade as a war correspondent, on August 8, 2016, she spoke at a United Nations Security Council meeting on the situation in the civil war-torn Aleppo.


title: Clarissa Ward

text: In July 2018, CNN named her its chief international correspondent, succeeding Christiane Amanpour. In 2019, she became one of the first Western journalists to report on the life in areas controlled by the Taliban in Afghanistan. In August 2020, reports emerged that she and her team were under surveillance while in the Central African Republic in May 2019.


title: Clarissa Ward

text: In December 2020, in a joint investigation by "The Insider" and Bellingcat in co-operation with CNN and "Der Spiegel", she reported how Russian Federal Security Service (FSB) members stalked Alexei Navalny for years, including just before his poisoning in August 2020. The investigation detailed a special unit of the FSB specializing in chemical substances and investigators tracked members of the unit using telecom and travel data.


title: Clarissa Ward

text: In February 2022, CNN deployed Ward, initially, to the city of Kharkiv in order to cover the first moves from Russian Invasion in Ukraine. After the first days of war, she was relocated to Kyiv, where she engaged in a series of wartime reports on the advance of Russian troops and the flight of Ukrainian refugees away from Russian artillery strikes. She was among the journalists who travelled to Ukraine to give insights into the humanitarian situation for children and wounded civilians in Ukrainian hospitals amidst the ongoing conflict.


title: Clarissa Ward

text: Ward received a Peabody Award on May 21, 2012, in New York City for her journalistic coverage inside Syria during the Syrian uprising. In October 2014, Washington State University announced that she would receive the 2015 Murrow Award for International Reporting in April 2015. She has also received seven Emmy Awards, an Alfred I. duPont-Columbia Silver Baton, and honors from the Radio and Television Correspondents' Association.


title: Clarissa Ward

text: Ward was married in November 2016 at London's Chelsea Old Town Hall to Philipp von Bernstorff, a fund manager, whom she met at a 2007 dinner party in Moscow. They have two children. Ward knows French and Italian, is conversational in Russian, Arabic, and Spanish, and knows basic Mandarin Chinese.


title: Former eastern territories of Germany

text: The former eastern territories of Germany () refer in present-day Germany to those territories east of the current eastern border of Germany i.e. Oder–Neisse line which historically had been considered German and which were annexed by Poland and Soviet Union after World War II, these territories were also the lands where Germans used to be only or main ethnicity. So in contrast to the lands awarded to the restored Polish state by the Treaty of Versailles after World War I, the German territories lost with the Potsdam Agreement after World War II on 1 August 1945 were either almost exclusively inhabited by Germans before 1945 (bulk of East Prussia, bulk of Lower Silesia, Farther Pomerania, and parts of Western Pomerania, Lusatia, and Neumark awarded to Poland), mixed German-Polish with a German majority (Danzig, Posen-West Prussia Border March, Lauenburg and Bütow Land, the southern and western rim of East Prussia, Ermland, West Upper Silesia, and the part of Lower Silesia east of the Oder), or mixed German-Czech with a German majority (Glatz District). The German population of the territories that had not fled in 1945 fled or was expelled to Germany forming the majority of the Germans expelled from Eastern Europe, with their possessions being expropriated.


title: Former eastern territories of Germany

text: Territories acquired by Poland after World War II were officially called there the Recovered Territories. These territories had been ruled as part of Poland by the Piast dynasty in the High Middle Ages with the exception of East Prussia which originally was inhabited by Old Prussians and came under Polish suzerainty in the Late Middle Ages. The northern half of historic East Prussia was, however, made part of the Soviet Union, with the former Klaipeda Region reattached to the Lithuanian Soviet Socialist Republic, and the rest being annexed by the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic as the Kaliningrad Oblast, now forming a Russian exclave.


title: Former eastern territories of Germany

text: The post-war border between Germany and Poland along the Oder–Neisse line was defined in August 1945 by the Potsdam Agreement of the leaders of the three Allied Powers, the Soviet Union, the United Kingdom, and the United States; and was formally recognized by East Germany in 1950, by the Treaty of Zgorzelec, under pressure from Stalin. In 1952, recognition of the Oder–Neisse line as a permanent boundary was one of Stalin's conditions for the Soviet Union to agree to a reunification of Germany (see Stalin Note). The offer was rejected by West German Chancellor Konrad Adenauer. The then official West German government position on the status of former eastern territories of Germany east of the Oder and Neisse rivers was that the areas were "temporarily under Polish [or Soviet] administration", because the border regulation at the Potsdam Conference had been taken as preliminary provisions to be revisited at a final peace conference, which, also due to the Cold War had been indefinitely postponed; however by 1970, West Germany recognised the Oder-Neisse line as the western boundary of Poland by the Treaty of Warsaw; and in 1973, the Federal Constitutional Court acknowledged the capability of East Germany to negotiate the Treaty of Zgorzelec as an international agreement binding as a legal definition of its boundaries. In signing the Helsinki Final Act in 1975, both West Germany and East Germany recognised the existing boundaries of post-war Europe, including the Oder-Neisse line, as valid in international law.


title: Former eastern territories of Germany

text: In 1990, as part of the reunification of Germany, both German countries accepted clauses in the peace treaty with the four countries representing the Allies (Treaty on the Final Settlement With Respect to Germany) to replace the Potsdam Agreement before and end the aftermath of World War II in Germany whereby Germany renounced all claims to territory outside East and West Germany. As the result of this treaty, Germany's recognition of the Oder–Neisse line as the border was formalised by the re-united Germany in the German–Polish Border Treaty on 14 November 1990 and by the repeal of Article 23 of the Basic Law for the Federal Republic of Germany under which German states outside the Federal Republic could formerly have declared their accession. Germany went from a territory of 468,787 km before the annexation of Austria (1937) to 357,022 km after the reunification of Germany (1990).


title: Former eastern territories of Germany

text: Farther Pomerania comprised the eastern part of the Prussian Province of Pomerania. It stretched roughly from the Oder River in the West to Pomerelia in the East. It roughly correspond to today's Polish West Pomeranian Voivodeship. Along with Farther Pomerania a small area of Western Pomerania including Stettin (today "Szczecin") and Swinemünde (today "Świnoujście") was transferred to Poland in 1945.


title: Former eastern territories of Germany

text: The Pomeranian parts of the former eastern territories of Germany had been under Polish rule several times from the late 10th century on, when Mieszko I acquired at least significant parts of them. Mieszko's son Bolesław I established a bishopric in the Kołobrzeg area in 1000–1005–07, before the area was lost by Poland again to pagan Slavic tribes.


title: Former eastern territories of Germany

text: The Duchy of Pomerania was established as a vassal state of Poland in 1121, which it remained until the fragmentation of Poland after the death of Polish ruler Bolesław III Wrymouth in 1138. Afterwards the Dukes of Pomerania were independent, and later were vassals of the Duchy of Saxony from 1164 to 1181, of the Holy Roman Empire from 1181 to 1185, of Denmark from 1185 to 1227 and finally, from 1227 on, staying with the Holy Roman Empire (including periods of vassalage to the Margraves of Brandenburg). By the end of the Middle Ages, by influx of Germanic settlers, the assimilation of the Slavic population, the introduction of German town law, the influence of Germanic customs and the trade of the Hanse the area had been largely Germanized.


title: Former eastern territories of Germany

text: Following the Peace of Westphalia in 1648, Farther Pomerania became part of Brandenburg-Prussia. In 1772 the Lauenburg and Bütow Land and the former Starostwo of Draheim were annexed by the King in Prussia and integrated into the Province of Pomerania of the Kingdom of Prussia, though not into the Holy Roman Empire, and did not become part of Germany until being included in the German Confederation in 1815. After the Napoleonic Wars, Swedish Pomerania was merged into the Prussian province in 1815, both now constituting the Province of Pomerania. In 1938, the northern part of the dissolved Grenzmark Posen-West Prussia became part of the province.


title: Former eastern territories of Germany

text: At the turn of the 20th century, the total population of the province of almost 1.7 million inhabitants had a Polish-speaking minority of less than 1 %.


title: Former eastern territories of Germany

text: The medieval Lubusz Land, on both sides of the Oder River up to the Spree in the west, including Lubusz (Lebus) itself, also formed part of Mieszko's realm. Poland lost Lubusz when the Silesian duke Bolesław II Rogatka sold it to the Ascanian margraves of Brandenburg in 1249. Brandenburg also acquired the castellany of Santok from Duke Przemysł I of Greater Poland and made it the nucleus of its Neumark ("New March") region. The Bishopric of Lebus remained a suffragan of the Archdiocese of Gniezno until 1424, when it passed under the jurisdiction of the Archbishopric of Magdeburg. The Lubusz Land was part of the Lands of the Bohemian (Czech) Crown from 1373 to 1415.


title: Former eastern territories of Germany

text: After Germanic tribes had left the area in the Migration Period, Lechitic tribes began to settle Silesia, while Lusatia was settled by the Milceni and the Polabian Slavs, and the Kłodzko Land by Bohemians. In the 10th century Mieszko I of Poland made Silesia part of his realm. From the 10th century to the 12th century, Silesia, Lusatia, as well as the Kłodzko Land, were contested between Bohemia and Poland. Several independent duchies formed, and eventually some attached themselves to the Kingdom of Bohemia, an Electorate of the Holy Roman Empire, while the Kłodzko Land became a constituent part of the Kingdom itself. In the 14th century, the Treaty of Namysłów had King Casimir III the Great give up all Polish claims to Silesia and ceded the Duchies of Silesia to the Lands of the Bohemian Crown. Ecclesiastically, the Diocese of Wrocław covering Silesia remained, however, a suffragan of the Polish Archdiocese of Gniezno until becoming exempt in 1821.


title: Former eastern territories of Germany

text: The first German colonists arrived in he late 12th century, and large-scale German settlement started in the early 13th century during the reign of Henry I. New forms of agriculture, technology, and law brought in by the German settlers, took root in the region, also to the profit of the Slavic population. By the late 14th century, 130 towns and 1300 villages had adopted German law. Typical Silesian cities such as Jelenia Góra (Hirschberg), Lwówek Śląski(Löwenberg), Złotoryja (Goldberg), introduced new laws to attract German settlers, had a typical architecture of being centered around a central square, the Ring, which became known in Polish as Rynek. German craftsmen and miners also started settling mountainous areas.


title: Former eastern territories of Germany

text: Briefly under the rule of the House of Jagiellon in personal union with the Kingdom of Hungary until the Battle of Mohacs, the Bohemian Lands were afterwards ruled in personal union with the Kingdom of Hungary and the Archduchy of Austria by the Habsburg Holy Roman Emperors, finally ceasing "de facto" (but not "de jure") to exist as a separate realm and becoming a part of the Habsburg monarchy, in the aftermath of crushing the Bohemian Revolt in the Battle of White Mountain. After another century, the bulk of the region was severed from the rest of the Lands of the Bohemian Crown, when the Habsburg monarchy lost the Silesian Wars to the Kingdom of Prussia under Frederick the Great, thus being forced to cede most of it (excluding Austrian Silesia) in the Treaties of Breslau and Berlin. The ceded lands also included the (sometimes considered Moravian) territories of the Duchies of Troppau and Krnov north of the Opava river, as well as the strategically important Kłodzko Land, a part of the core territory of the Kingdom of Bohemia. Until 1972, the former area continued, however, to form a part of the Archdiocese of Olomouc, while the latter area continued to be part of Diocese of Hradec Králové.


title: Former eastern territories of Germany

text: As the result of the peaceful influx of German-speakers, most of Silesia became German-speaking upon the consecutive extinction of various branches of Silesian Piasts, as earlier did Lusatia and later did most of the Kłodzko Land following the Silesian Wars, but Czech continued to be spoken in parts of Austrian Silesia, in Hlučín Region of the Upper Silesia and in the western part of Kłodzko Land (Czech Corner), Sorbian in parts of Lusatia, while Polish prevailed in Middle Silesia north of the Oder River, in parts of Austrian Silesia and in Upper Silesia. In the latter case, the Germans who arrived during the Middle Ages became mostly Polonized, in particular with the advent of the industrial revolution which created employment and business opportunities, attracting numerous Poles to the area. The Polish-speaking parts of Lower and Middle Silesia, commonly described until the late 19th century as the "Polish side", were mostly Germanised in the 18th and 19th centuries, except for a few patches and a larger area along the northeastern frontier.


title: Former eastern territories of Germany

text: Originally inhabited mainly by the pagan Old Prussians, the regions were conquered and incorporated into the state of the Teutonic Knights in the 13th and 14th centuries. Under the Teutonic Order, the region's towns were founded, woodlands were cleared and marshlands made arable to be settled by colonists, predominantly from German-speaking areas but also from neighboring Polish and Lithuanian lands. The area became predominantly German during the Ostsiedlung, either almost exclusively (Sambia, Natangia, and Bartia together forming the central part of the region), mixed German-Lithuanian (the North-Eastern part called Lithuania Minor including Sudovia, Nadrovia and Scalovia), or mixed German-Polish (Masurians, Warmiacy) comprising the southern (Sasna and Galindia, together forming Masuria) and western (Warmia, Pomesania, and Pogesania, the latter two together forming Powiśle) rim of the region. By the Second Peace of Thorn (1466), Warmia and the Malbork Land (comprising northern parts of Pomesania and Pogesania) became subject to the Polish Crown as a part of Royal Prussia, a region initially holding considerable autonomy and continuing to use the German language as official, but ultimately becoming fully integrated with the Crown of Poland upon conclusion of the Union of Lublin. Masuria and the southern part of Pomesania and Pogesania stayed part of the rump Teutonic state (called thereafter "Monastic Prussia" or "Teutonic Prussia") which became a German fief of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, finally secularised in 1525 to become the Ducal Prussia. The latter later emancipated, taking advantage of the Russo-Swedish Deluge, and merged with the Electorate of Brandenburg to form Brandenburg-Prussia, shortly thereafter becoming a kingdom. Subsequently, it entered into an alliance with Austria and Russia, invading Polish territories of Royal Prussia in the First Partition of Poland (1772), with Warmia being made part of the newly formed province of East Prussia in 1773. As a result of the Treaty of Versailles, a minor part around Soldau was transferred to Poland, the Klaipėda Region formed a free city supervised by the League of Nations, annexed following the Klaipėda Revolt by Lithuania but reclaimed by Germany in 1938, while the bulk (including entire Warmia and Masuria) remained a part of Germany, following the East Prussian plebiscite, and became enlarged by the addition of the formerly West Prussian Malbork Land.


title: Former eastern territories of Germany

text: In the Potsdam Agreement the description of the territories transferred is "The former German territories east of the Oder–Neisse line", and permutations on this description are the most commonly used to describe any former territories of interwar Germany east of the Oder–Neisse line.


title: Former eastern territories of Germany

text: The term has sometimes been confused with the name East Germany, a political term, used to be the common colloquial English name for the German Democratic Republic (GDR), and mirrored the common colloquial English term for the other German state of West Germany. When focusing on the period before World War II, "eastern Germany" is used to describe all the territories east of the Elbe (East Elbia), as reflected in the works of sociologist Max Weber and political theorist Carl Schmitt, but because of the border changes in the 20th century, after World War II the term "East Germany" and eastern Germany in English has meant the territory of the German Democratic Republic.


title: Former eastern territories of Germany

text: In German, only one corresponding term "Ostdeutschland" exists, meaning both East Germany and Eastern Germany. The rather ambiguous German term never gained as widespread use for the GDR during its existence, as did the English designation, or the derived demonym "Ossi" (Eastie), and only following the German reunification has it started to be commonly used to denote both the historic post-war German Democratic Republic, and its counterpart five successor states in the current reunited Germany. However, because people and institutions in the states traditionally considered as Middle Germany, like the three southern new states Saxony-Anhalt, the Free State of Saxony and the Free State of Thuringia, still use the term Middle Germany when referring to their area and its institutions, the term "Ostdeutschland" is still ambiguous.


title: Former eastern territories of Germany

text: As various Germanic tribes had moved to Central Europe, West Slavic tribes moved to most of present-day Poland from the 6th century onward. Duke Mieszko I of the Polans, from his stronghold in the Gniezno area, united various neighboring tribes in the second half of the 10th century, formed the first Polish state and became the first historically recorded Piast duke. His realm bordered the German state, and control over the borderlands would shift back and forth between the two polities over the centuries to come.


title: Former eastern territories of Germany

text: Mieszko's son and successor, king Bolesław I Chrobry, upon the 1018 Peace of Bautzen expanded the southern part of the realm but lost control over the lands of Western Pomerania on the Baltic coast. After pagan revolts and a Bohemian invasion in the 1030s, Duke Casimir I the Restorer (reigned 1040–1058) again united most of the former Piast realm, including Silesia and Lubusz Land, on both sides of the middle Oder River but without Western Pomerania, which returned to of the Polish state only under Bolesław III Wrymouth from 1116 to 1121, when the noble House of Griffins established the Duchy of Pomerania. On Bolesław's death in 1138, Poland was for almost 200 years was subjected to fragmentation and ruled by Bolesław's sons and by their successors, who were often in conflict with one another. Władysław I the Elbow-high, who was crowned king of Poland in 1320, achieved a partial reunification, but the Silesian and Masovian duchies remained independent Piast holdings.


title: Former eastern territories of Germany

text: In the 12th to the 14th centuries, German settlers, most of whom spoke Low German, moved into Central and Eastern Europe in a migration process known as the "Ostsiedlung", and the Hanseatic League dominated the shores of the Baltic Sea. In Pomerania, Brandenburg, East Prussia, Lusatia, Kłodzko Land and Lower Silesia, the former West Slav (Bohemians, Polabian Slavs and Poles) or Baltic population became minorities in the course of the following centuries, but substantial numbers of them remained in areas such as Upper Silesia. In Greater Poland and in Eastern Pomerania (Pomerelia), German settlers always remained a minority. Some of the territories, such as Pomerelia and Masovia, reunited with Poland during the 15th and 16th centuries. Silesia, Lubusz Land and Lusatia (as parts of the Lands of the Bohemian Crown) and the Duchy of Pomerania became more firmly incorporated into the Holy Roman Empire.


title: Former eastern territories of Germany

text: In the course of the Partitions of Poland, the Kingdom of Prussia and the Austrian Empire acquired vast territorial shares of the demised Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. During the Napoleonic era the Greater Polish territories and the Chełmno Land formed part of the Duchy of Warsaw following the Treaties of Tilsit, and Danzig was granted a status of a Free City. However, after the Congress of Vienna, the Polish duchy was again partitioned between Russia and Prussia. The Congress of Vienna established as a replacement for the dissolved Holy Roman Empire the German Confederation (German: Deutscher Bund), an association of 39 German-speaking states in Central Europe under the nominal leadership of the Austrian Empire. Its boundaries largely followed the ones of its predecessor, the Holy Roman Empire, defining the territory of Germany for much of the 19th century and confirming Pomerania, East Brandenburg and Silesia as its parts. On the other hand, the remaining parts of the lands ruled by the House of Hohenzollern which were not included in the Holy Roman Empire, namely the German-speaking Prussian nucleus (East Prussia), and the newly acquired predominantly Polish- or Kashubian-speaking territorial share of the collapsed and dismembered Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth (Grand Duchy of Posen and West Prussia), continued as external to the Confederation (a failed attempt to include these lands in the German Empire (1848–49) was undertaken by the Frankfurt Parliament), as did the Austrian-held partition of Poland (the Kingdom of Galicia and Lodomeria), Transleithania, as well as the German-speaking cantons of Switzerland and the French region of Alsace.


title: Former eastern territories of Germany

text: In the following years, Prussia superseded Austria in the role of the primary driving force of the restoration of German unity and secured this position by abolishing the German Confederation in the Peace of Prague. Austria was in turn transformed into poly-ethnic Austria-Hungary, abstained from further German unification efforts and abandoned forced Germanization.


title: Former eastern territories of Germany

text: Thus, the planned German unification was to be accomplished in the Lesser German solution version. With rise of nationalism, the eastern Hohenzollern-ruled territories with a predominantly Polish population (especially the formerly Polish territories of Posen and West Prussia) increasingly became a target of aggressive Germanisation efforts, German settlement, anti-Catholic campaigns (Kulturkampf), as well as disfranchisement and expropriations of Poles, and finally annexed following the North German Confederation Treaty (1866). At the time of German Unification in 1871, the Kingdom of Prussia was the largest and dominant part of the North German Confederation, the predecessor of the newly formed German Empire.


title: Former eastern territories of Germany

text: The Treaty of Versailles of 1919, which ended the war, restored the independence of Poland, known as the Second Polish Republic, and Germany was compelled to cede territories to it, most of which were taken by Prussia in the three Partitions of Poland and had been part of the Kingdom of Prussia and later the German Empire for the 100 years of the non-existence of Polish state. The territories retroceded to Poland in 1919 were those with a Polish majority, such as Greater Poland, as well as Pomerelia, historically the part of Poland providing its access to the sea. Restoration of Pomerelia to Poland meant the loss of Germany's territorial contiguousness to East Prussia making it an exclave.


title: Former eastern territories of Germany

text: Most of the eastern territories with a predominantly or almost exclusively German population (East Brandenburg, East Prussia, Hither and Farther Pomerania, and the bulk of Silesia) remained with Germany. The historically Polish and strategically vital for Poland but predominantly German-speaking city of Danzig formed henceforth with its surrounding areas the Free City of Danzig, a self-governing territory supervised by the League of Nations, albeit bound in some aspects by an imposed union with Poland.


title: Former eastern territories of Germany

text: However, in areas such as Upper Silesia, no clear division between the mostly bilingual population was possible. After a first plebiscite, Upper Silesia was to stay part of Germany's territory. However, after the Silesian Uprisings, the area was divided in accord with the German–Polish Convention regarding Upper Silesia.


title: Former eastern territories of Germany

text: The parts of the former Province of Posen and of West Prussia that were not restored as part of the Second Polish Republic were administered as Grenzmark Posen-Westpreußen (the German Province of Posen–West Prussia) until 1939.


title: Former eastern territories of Germany

text: The defeat of Germany and the imposed terms of peace left a sense of injustice among the population. The subsequent interwar economic crisis acted as a fertile ground for irredentist claims that the territory ceded to Poland, Czechoslovakia and Lithuania in 1919–1922 should be returned to Germany, which paved the way for the Nazi takeover of the government.


title: Former eastern territories of Germany

text: In October 1938 Hlučín Area ("Hlučínsko" in Czech, "Hultschiner Ländchen" in German) of Moravian-Silesian Region, which had been ceded to Czechoslovakia under the Treaty of Versailles, was annexed by the Third Reich as a part of areas lost by Czechoslovakia under the Munich agreement. However, as distinct from other lost Czechoslovakian domains, it was not attached to Sudetengau (the administrative region covering the Sudetenland) but to Prussia (Upper Silesia).


title: Former eastern territories of Germany

text: By late 1938, Lithuania had lost control over the situation in the Memel Territory, which had been annexed by Lithuania in the Klaipėda putsch. In the early hours of 23 March 1939, after a political ultimatum caused a Lithuanian delegation to travel to Berlin, Lithuanian Foreign Minister Juozas Urbšys and German Foreign Minister Joachim von Ribbentrop signed the "Treaty of the Cession of the Memel Territory to Germany" in exchange for a Lithuanian Free Zone in the port of Memel that used the facilities erected in the previous years.


title: Former eastern territories of Germany

text: In the interwar period, the German administration, both Weimar and Nazi, conducted a massive campaign of renaming of thousands of placenames, to remove traces of Polish, Lithuanian and Old Prussian origin.


title: Former eastern territories of Germany

text: Germany invaded Poland without a declaration of war on 1 September 1939, heralding the start of the Second World War. The Third Reich annexed the Polish lands included the former Prussian Partition, comprising Pomerelia (the "Polish Corridor"), Chełmno Land, Greater Poland proper, Kuyavia, Łęczyca Land, Sieradz Land, Northern Masovia, as well as the parts of Upper Silesia located in Poland, including the former Czechoslovak part of Cieszyn Silesia annexed by Poland in 1938. The Senate of the Free City of Danzig, elected by the Volkstag already also dominated by the Nazi Party at that time, voted to become a part of Germany again, but Poles and Jews were deprived of their voting rights and all non-Nazi political parties were banned.


title: Former eastern territories of Germany

text: Two decrees by Adolf Hitler (8 and 12 October 1939) divided the annexed areas of Poland into administrative units:


title: Former eastern territories of Germany

text: The territories had an area of 94,000 km and a population of 10,000,000. Throughout the war, the annexed Polish territories were subject to German colonisation. Because of the lack of settlers from Germany itself, the colonists were primarily ethnic Germans relocated from other parts of Eastern Europe. The ethnic Germans were then resettled in homes from which the Poles had been expelled.


title: Former eastern territories of Germany

text: The remainder of Polish territory was annexed by the Soviet Union (see Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact) or made into the German-controlled General Government occupation zone.


title: Former eastern territories of Germany

text: After the German attack on the Soviet Union in June 1941, the district of Białystok, which included the Białystok, Bielsk Podlaski, Grajewo, Łomża, Sokółka, Volkovysk and Grodno counties, was "attached to" but not incorporated into East Prussia, and Eastern Galicia (District of Galicia), which included the cities of Lwów, Stanislawów and Tarnopol, was made part of the General Government.


title: Former eastern territories of Germany

text: The final decision to move Poland's boundary westward was made by the United States, the United Kingdom and the Soviet Union at the Yalta Conference in February 1945, shortly before the end of the war. The precise location of the border was left open, and the western Allies also accepted in general the principles of the Oder River being the future western border of Poland and of population transfer being the way to prevent future border disputes. The open questions were whether the border should follow the Eastern or Lusatian Neisse rivers and whether Stettin, the traditional seaport of Berlin, should remain in Germany or be included in Poland.


title: Former eastern territories of Germany

text: Originally, Germany was to retain Stettin, and the Poles were to annex East Prussia with Königsberg. Eventually, however, Stalin decided that he wanted Königsberg as a year-round warm water port for the Soviet Navy and argued that the Poles should receive Stettin instead. The wartime Polish government-in-exile had little say in the decisions.


title: Former eastern territories of Germany

text: The Yalta Conference agreed to split Germany into four occupation zones after the war, with a quadripartite occupation of Berlin as well, prior to the reunification of Germany. The status of Poland was discussed but this was complicated by the fact that Poland was then controlled by the Red Army. The conference agreed to reorganise the Provisionary Polish Government, which had been set up by the Red Army, by the inclusion of some politicians of the Polish government-in-exile, and to transform it into the Provisional Government of National Unity, with an unfulfilled promise to hold democratic and fair elections. That effectively ended the international recognition of the Polish government-in-exile, which had been evacuated in 1939. The conference agreed that the Polish eastern border would follow the Curzon Line and that Poland would receive substantial territorial compensation in the west from Germany, but the exact border was to be determined later. A "Committee on Dismemberment of Germany" was to be set up to decide whether Germany was to be divided into six nations and, if so, what borders and interrelations the new German states would have.


title: Former eastern territories of Germany

text: To pressurize the Western Allies regarding the verbal commitments of Tehran and Yalta, the Soviets began transferring regions east of the Oder-Neisse line to Polish control, although these areas were still officially part of the Soviet occupation zone of Germany. The US government strongly protested to the unilateral implementation of a Polish government in these areas.


title: Former eastern territories of Germany

text: After World War II, several memoranda of the US State Department warned against awarding Poland such extensive lands, apprehensive of creation of new long-standing tension in the area. In particular, the State Department acknowledged that Polish claims to Lower Silesia had no ethnic or historic justification.


title: Former eastern territories of Germany

text: Under Stalin's pressure, the Potsdam Conference, held from 17 July until 2 August 1945, placed all of the areas east of the Oder–Neisse line, whether recognised by the international community as part of Germany until 1939 or occupied by Germany during World War II, under the jurisdiction of other countries, pending a final Peace Conference.


title: Former eastern territories of Germany

text: The problem with the status of these territories was that the Potsdam Agreement was not a legally binding treaty, but a memorandum between the USSR, the US and the UK (to which neither France, nor Germany or Poland were party). It regulated the issue of the eastern German border, which was confirmed as being along the Oder–Neisse line, but the final article of the memorandum said that the final decisions concerning Germany, and hence the detailed alignment of Germany's eastern boundaries, would be subject to a separate peace treaty; at which the three Allied signatories committed themselves to respect the terms of the Potsdam memorandum. Hence, so long as these Allied Powers remained committed to the Potsdam protocols, without German agreement to an Oder–Neisse line boundary there could be no Peace Treaty and no German Reunification. The debate affected Cold War politics and diplomacy and played an important role in the negotiations leading up to the reunification of Germany in 1990.


title: Former eastern territories of Germany

text: With the rapid advance of the Red Army in the winter of 1944–1945, German authorities desperately evacuated many Germans westwards. The majority of the remaining German-speaking population in the territory of former Czechoslovakia and east of the Oder–Neisse line (roughly 10 million in the Ostgebiete alone), that had not already been evacuated, was expelled by the new Czech and Polish administrations. Although in the post-war period earlier German sources often cited the number of evacuated and expelled Germans as 16 million and the death toll as between 1.7 and 2.5 million, those numbers are today considered by some historians to be exaggerated and the death toll more likely in a range between 400,000 and 600,000. Some present-day estimates place the numbers of German refugees at 14 million, of whom about half a million died during the evacuations and expulsions.


title: Former eastern territories of Germany

text: At the same time, Poles from central Poland, expelled Poles from former eastern Poland, Polish returnees from internment and forced labour, Ukrainians forcibly resettled in Operation Vistula, and Jewish Holocaust survivors were settled in German territories gained by Poland, whereas the north of former East Prussia (Kaliningrad Oblast gained by the USSR) was turned into a military zone and subsequently settled with Russians. The first Polish settlers in contrast experienced complete alienation from their new surroundings, perceived as fully foreign and German.


title: Former eastern territories of Germany

text: However, contrary to the official declaration that the former German inhabitants of the Recovered Territories had to be removed quickly to house Poles displaced by the Soviet annexation, the new Polish lands initially faced a severe population shortage.


title: Former eastern territories of Germany

text: Polish population transfers from the Soviet Union only amounted for 1.5 million people, while more than 8 million Germans lost their homes in the German Eastern Territories.


title: Former eastern territories of Germany

text: Drawing from interwar demands by Polish nationalists (albeit far more limited), Poland's sweeping territorial gains of German land were presented as inspired by the Piast vision of an ethnically homogeneous state within the borders of medieval Piast Poland. Fully German-speaking areas such as Lower Silesia and Farther Pomerania suffered expulsion of its entire indigenous population in 1945–46. Polonization proceeded rapidly, despite the still uncertain border.


title: Former eastern territories of Germany

text: Rather than taking over German place names, new Polish place names were determined by decree, reverting to a Slavic name or inventing a new name for places founded by German speakers. In order to establish the Piast vision in the consciousness of the population and to convince them of the historical justice of the annexation of the former German territories, the 'Recovered Territories' were covered with a network of designations connected with the Piast dynasty, even if the buildings themselves had no reference to the Piast rulers.


title: Former eastern territories of Germany

text: The Polish Communists mobilized for cleansing and acculturation to de-Germanize their new home. German words were removed from buildings and even from art works, dishes, and gravesites. Meanwhile, a blatantly fraudulent referendum was held on three different questions; the third of these was whether the Polish people were in favor of he new western border. According to the official results, over 90% voted "yes" despite Poland having lost substantial territories in the east as well.


title: Former eastern territories of Germany

text: The process was finalized in 1950 by the Treaty of Zgorzelec, an agreement signed under Soviet pressure by Otto Grotewohl, prime minister of the provisional government of the GDR (East Germany) and Polish premier Józef Cyrankiewicz. It recognized the Oder-Neisse line specified by the 1945 Potsdam Agreement as the border between the two states. The terms referred to the "defined and existing border" from the Baltic Sea west of Świnoujście - however without mentioning Szczecin - along the Oder and Lusatian Neisse rivers to the Czechoslovak border.


title: Former eastern territories of Germany

text: After the war, the so-called "German question" was an important factor of post-war German and European history and politics.


title: Former eastern territories of Germany

text: Between 1949 and 1970 the government of West Germany referred to these territories as "former German territories temporarily under Polish and Soviet administration". This terminology was used in relation to territories of eastern Germany within the 1937 Germany border, and was based on the terminology used in the Potsdam Agreement. It was used only by the Federal Republic of Germany; but the Polish and Soviet governments objected to the obvious implication that these territories should someday revert to Germany. The Polish government preferred to use the phrase Recovered Territories, asserting a sort of continuity because parts of these territories had centuries previously been ruled by ethnic Poles.


title: Former eastern territories of Germany

text: Until 1973, the Federal Republic took a strict line in claiming an exclusive mandate for all of Germany. Under the Hallstein Doctrine, the Federal Republic broke diplomatic relations with states that maintained diplomatic relations with the GDR, except for the Soviet Union. Therefore, the government of West Germany and the Bundestag declared in 1950 the Treaty of Zgorzelec ″null and void″.


title: Former eastern territories of Germany

text: In the early history of West Germany, refugee organizations were an important political factor, demanding that Germany never renounce the land that was deemed still part of Germany. However, contrary to the official claims, the bulk of the expelleés would likely have no real intention of returning to their homeland.


title: Former eastern territories of Germany

text: In the 1970s, West Germany adopted "Ostpolitik" in foreign relations, which strove to normalise relations with its neighbours by recognising the realities of the European order of the time, and abandoning elements of the Hallstein Doctrine. West Germany also abandoned for the time being its claims with respect to German reunification, recognising the existence of the German Democratic Republic (GDR); and the validity of the Oder–Neisse line in international law." As part of this new approach, West Germany concluded friendship treaties with the Soviet Union (Treaty of Moscow (1970)), Poland (Treaty of Warsaw (1970)), East Germany (Basic Treaty (1972)) and Czechoslovakia (Treaty of Prague (1973)); and participated in the Helsinki Final Act (1975). The validity of the Treaty of Zgorzelec was explicitly confirmed in a judgement of the Federal Constitutional Court of 1973 on the Basic Treaty between East and West Germany. Nevertheless, West Germany continued its long-term objective of achieving a reunification of East Germany, West Germany and Berlin; and maintained that its formal recognition of the post-war boundaries of Germany would need to be confirmed by a united Germany in the context of a Final Settlement of the Second World War. Some West German commentators continued to maintain that neither the Treaty of Zgorzelec nor the Treaty of Warsaw should be considered as binding on a future united Germany; albeit that these reservations were intended for domestic political consumption, and the arguments advanced in support of them had no substance in international law.


title: Former eastern territories of Germany

text: The Holy See immediately acknowledged the new reality following the Treaty of Warsaw and created new Polish dioceses in the territories with the papal bulls "Episcoporum Poloniae coetus" and "Vratislaviensis — Berolinensis et aliarium".


title: Former eastern territories of Germany

text: In 1990 Germany officially recognized its present eastern border at the time of its reunification in the Treaty on the Final Settlement with Respect to Germany, ending any residual claims to sovereignty that Germany may have had over any territory east of the Oder–Neisse line. Over time, the "German question" has been muted by a number of related phenomena:


title: Former eastern territories of Germany

text: Under Article 1 of the Treaty on Final Settlement, the new united Germany committed itself to renouncing any further territorial claims beyond the boundaries of East Germany, West Germany and Berlin; "The united Germany has no territorial claims whatsoever against other states and shall not assert any in the future." Furthermore, the Basic Law of the Federal Republic was required to be amended to state explicitly that full German unification had now been achieved, such that the new German state comprised the entirety of Germany, and that all constitutional mechanisms should be removed by which any territories outside those boundaries could otherwise subsequently be admitted; these new constitutional articles being bound by treaty not to be revoked. Article 23 of the Basic Law was repealed, closing off the possibility for any further states to apply for membership of the Federal Republic; while Article 146 was amended to state explicitly that the territory of the newly unified republic comprised the entirety of the German people; "This Basic Law, which since the achievement of the unity and freedom of Germany applies to the entire German people, shall cease to apply on the day on which a constitution freely adopted by the German people takes effect". This was confirmed in the 1990 rewording of the preamble; "Germans ... have achieved the unity and freedom of Germany in free self-determination. This Basic Law thus applies to the entire German people."


title: Former eastern territories of Germany

text: In the course of the German reunification, Chancellor Helmut Kohl initially caused international outcry by making no reference in his 10 Points to the acceptance of the border as definitive, but later reaffirmed reluctantly the acceptance of the territorial changes made after World War II, creating some outrage among the Federation of Expellees, while some Poles were concerned about a possible revival of their 1939 trauma through a "second German invasion", this time with the Germans buying back their land, which was cheaply available at the time. This happened on a smaller scale than many Poles expected, and the Baltic Sea coast of Poland has become a popular German tourist destination. The so-called "homesickness-tourism" which was often perceived as quite aggressive well into the 1990s now tends to be viewed as a good-natured nostalgia tour rather than an expression of anger and desire for the return of the lost territories.


title: Former eastern territories of Germany

text: Some organisations in Germany continue to claim the territories for Germany or property there for German citizens. The Prussian Trust (or the "Prussian Claims Society"), that probably has less than a hundred members, re-opened the old dispute when in December 2006 it submitted 23 individual claims against the Polish government to the European Court of Human Rights asking for compensation or return of property appropriated from its members at the end of World War II. An expert report jointly commissioned by the German and Polish governments from specialists in international law have confirmed that the proposed complaints by the Prussian Trust had little hope of success. But the German government cannot prevent such requests being made and the Polish government has felt that the submissions warranted a comment by Anna Fotyga, the Polish Minister of the Foreign Affairs to "express [her] deepest concern upon receiving the information about a claim against Poland submitted by the Prussian Trust to the European Court of Human Rights". On 9 October 2008 the European Court of Human Rights declared the case of "Preussische Treuhand v. Poland" inadmissible, because the European Convention on Human Rights does not impose any obligations on the Contracting States to return property which was transferred to them before they ratified the convention.


title: Former eastern territories of Germany

text: After the National Democratic Party of Germany, described as a neo-Nazi organisation, won six seats in the parliament of Mecklenburg-Vorpommern in September 2006, the leader of the party, Udo Voigt, declared that his party demands Germany in "historical borders" and questioned the current border treaties.


title: Amniocentesis

text: Amniocentesis is a medical procedure used primarily in the prenatal diagnosis of genetic conditions. It has other uses such as in the assessment of infection and fetal lung maturity. Prenatal diagnostic testing, which includes amniocentesis, is necessary to conclusively diagnose the majority of genetic disorders, with amniocentesis being the gold-standard procedure after 15 weeks' gestation.


title: Amniocentesis

text: In this procedure, a thin needle is inserted into the abdomen of the pregnant woman. The needle punctures the amnion, which is the membrane that surrounds the developing fetus. The fluid within the amnion is called amniotic fluid, and because this fluid surrounds the developing fetus, it contains fetal cells. The amniotic fluid is sampled and analyzed via methods such as karyotyping and DNA analysis technology for genetic abnormalities.


title: Amniocentesis

text: An amniocentesis is typically performed in the second trimester between the 15th and 20th week of gestation. Women who choose to have this test are primarily those at increased risk for genetic and chromosomal problems, in part because the test is invasive and carries a small risk of pregnancy loss. However, the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists recommend that all women be offered prenatal assessment for aneuploidy, or the presence of an abnormal number of chromosomes, by either genetic screening or diagnostic testing independent of maternal age or risk factors. There are relative contraindications to performing an amniocentesis, however no absolute contraindications have been identified.


title: Amniocentesis

text: Physicians have used the process of inserting a needle transabdominally into the uterus to extract amniotic fluid for the management of hydramnios, or excess amniotic fluid, as early as the late 1800s.


title: Amniocentesis

text: The American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists recommend that all women be offered prenatal assessment for aneuploidy by either genetic screening or diagnostic testing independent of maternal age or risk factors. Prenatal genetic screening is intended to identify patients who are at increased risk of having a fetus with a genetic condition while prenatal genetic diagnostic testing detects whether a specific genetic condition is present in the fetus with high accuracy. Amniocentesis, along with chorionic villus sampling, are examples of prenatal diagnostic tests. Amniocentesis or chorionic villus sampling are necessary to conclusively diagnose the majority of genetic disorders, with amniocentesis being the gold-standard procedure after 15 weeks' gestation. Transabdominal chorionic villus sampling is an alternative to amniocentesis if genetic diagnostic testing is to be performed in the first trimester between 10 and 15 weeks' gestation. It is important to note that prenatal genetic testing cannot identify all possible fetal genetic abnormalities or their outcomes. When deciding on whether to perform invasive genetic diagnostic testing such as amniocentesis, patients and their physicians should participate in a shared-decision making process that takes into account a patient's individual risk profile and preferences.


title: Amniocentesis

text: Amniocentesis may be offered to certain patients at higher risks of having a fetus with a genetic disorder. Factors that may place patients at increased risk of fetal genetic disorders include older maternal or paternal age, parental carrier of a balanced chromosomal rearrangement, parental aneuploidy or aneuploidy mosaicism, parental carrier of a genetic disorder, prior child with a structural birth defect, previous fetus or child with autosomal trisomy or sex chromosome aneuploidy, ultrasonographic evidence of a fetus with structural abnormalities, and a high-risk genetic screening test result.


title: Amniocentesis

text: Analysis of samples obtained from amniocentesis is accomplished via karyotyping and DNA analysis technology. Examples of conditions that may be detected include chromosomal abnormalities such as common aneuploidies like trisomy 13, trisomy 18, trisomy 21, Turner syndrome, and Klinefelter syndrome. Micro-deletions or micro-duplications, such as DiGeorge syndrome and Cri-du-Chat syndrome, sex-linked disorders, such as hemophilia and Duchenne muscular dystrophy, and specific genetic mutations previously demonstrated to be present in a family or suspected based on fetal ultrasound findings, such as sickle cell disease, Tay–Sachs disease, neurofibromatosis, and cystic fibrosis.


title: Amniocentesis

text: Amniocentesis has traditionally been performed to assess the extent of fetal lung development in the context of medical and obstetrical complications, with the intention of delivering the fetus if fetal lung maturity is demonstrated. Lack of fetal lung maturity increases the risk of infant respiratory distress syndrome.


title: Amniocentesis

text: Fetal lung development can be tested by sampling the amount of surfactant in the amniotic fluid obtained via amniocentesis. Several tests are available, including the lecithin-sphingomyelin ratio ("L/S ratio"), the presence of phosphatidylglycerol (PG), and the surfactant/albumin (S/A) ratio. An L/S ratio of 2.0 is associated with a lower incidence of infant respiratory distress syndrome.


title: Amniocentesis

text: The efficacy of performing amniocentesis for the assessment of fetal lung maturity has been called into question. The Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development and the Society for Maternal-Fetal Medicine's joint statement on the matter states that "if significant maternal or fetal risks exist, delivery should occur regardless of biochemical maturity and if delivery could be deferred owing to absence of pulmonary maturity there is not a stringent indication for prompt delivery." Based on this rationale, the risks associated with amniocentesis, and the limited indications, performing amniocenteses for assessing fetal lung maturity may become obsolete except in instances where gestational age is unknown.


title: Amniocentesis

text: Chorioamnionitis, or intraamniotic infection, is an infection of any combination of the amniotic fluid, placenta, fetus, fetal membranes, or decidua. The gold standard for diagnosing chorioamnionitis is via a gram stain, glucose level, or culture of the amniotic fluid obtained via amniocentesis. However, in clinical practice, performing an amniocentesis for the purpose of diagnosing chorioamnionitis is rare and instead diagnosed based on clinical signs to ensure prompt treatment and avoid invasive prenatal testing.


title: Amniocentesis

text: Amniocentesis can be used to detect other congenital infections such as cytomegalovirus, hepatitis B, parvovirus B19, and toxoplasmosis.