title: 2017 Kenyan general election

text: Three women, Uasin Gishu's Margaret Kamar, Susan Kihika of Nakuru and Fatuma Dullo of Isiolo became the first women in Kenya's history to be elected to the Senate rather than appointed. Kihika was also elected Senate Majority Whip on 31 August.


title: 2017 Kenyan general election

text: Three women were elected as governors for the first time for their respective counties – Joyce Laboso of Bomet County, Charity Ngilu of Kitui County, and Anne Waiguru of Kirinyaga County. 25 out of 47 governors lost their seats. 29 of the 47 governors are members of the ruling Jubilee Party.


title: 2017 Kenyan general election

text: Opposition leader Raila Odinga, alleged that the results had been tampered with by hackers. At that time, he offered no evidence to justify his claim, which the head of Kenya's electoral commission dismissed. Following the election, there were protests in Kisumu, Kibera and Mathare where Odinga enjoys major political support, some of which turned violent and deadly. Odinga published his own results, which put him ahead, and claimed that the commission's IT system had been hacked and that Kenya had seen the worst "voter theft" in its history. The chairman of the electoral commission, Wafula Chebukati, responded that his organisation was the only body allowed to count votes and that while there had been an attempt to hack the commission, it had failed. A week after the vote, Odinga announced he would challenge the results in Kenya's Supreme Court.


title: 2017 Kenyan general election

text: "The Economist" did its own count of a small sample of paper ballots, which tallied with the electronic results.


title: 2017 Kenyan general election

text: Kenyatta's reaction incorporated invitations of several world leaders to his inauguration, including: former US President Barack Obama; German Chancellor Angela Merkel; British Prime Minister Theresa May; Italian Prime Minister Matteo Renzi; Chinese President Xi Jinping; Liberian President Ellen Johnson Sirleaf; Nigerian President Muhammadu Buhari; Rwandan President Paul Kagame; Ugandan President Yoweri Museveni; Tanzanian President John Magufuli; South African President Jacob Zuma; His Royal Highness Aga Khan IV; and Nigerian billionaire tycoon Aliko Dangote.


title: 2017 Kenyan general election

text: On 13 August, police said a total of 16 people have been killed in protests. The post-election violence ultimately resulted in the deaths of up to fifty people and over 100 injuries.


title: 2017 Kenyan general election

text: It was announced on 13 August that the new Parliament would be sworn in on 22 August, with Kenyatta's second inauguration to follow a week later. However, Kenyatta's inauguration was pushed back to at least 12 September after Odinga agreed to challenge the results in court. It was later announced that the reconvening of the Kenyan parliament was delayed to no later than 7 September due to a petition which was filed by groups affiliated with the Federation of Women Lawyers in Kenya (FIDA- Kenya) over the new parliament's lack of women needed to meet the two-thirds gender rule criteria. Despite the FIDA- Kenya lawsuit, the IEBC announced on 22 August that it will publish the full list of elected Members of the National Assembly and Members of County Assembly later that day and that the gender-rule lawsuit will not be heard in court until 20 September; the IEBC had already published the final results and names of the 47 Governors, Woman Representatives and Senators on 14 August.


title: 2017 Kenyan general election

text: The Standard later reported on 22 August that the Kenyan Parliament will reconvene in the next week. On 23 August, Kenyatta issued a decree stating that the Parliament will reconvene on 31 August when they assemble to swear in new members and elect respective Speakers and Deputy Speakers. On 29 August, members-elect of the new Parliament officially underwent the process of registering their political orientation and held their first unofficial meetings in Parliament before being sworn-in. They then met with respective party leaders on 30 August. The 12th Kenyan Parliament was then sworn in on 31 August and various leaders were elected by members of the Kenyan National Assembly and Kenyan Senate to serve their respective houses as well.


title: 2017 Kenyan general election

text: On 28 August, the Kenyan Supreme Court heard Odinga's arguments for the first time. Permission was granted to allow two agents of both the ruling party and Odinga's NASA party to audit the IEBC results. Odinga's lawyer, James Orengo, alleged afterwards that the IEBC was denying his team full access to the servers and other equipment that transmitted results from polling stations to the tallying centre despite the court allowing "read-only" access.


title: 2017 Kenyan general election

text: Closing arguments then concluded on 29 August and it was announced that the court would make a decision regarding the results of the presidential election on 1 September. It was later announced on 30 August that the IEBC had submitted all result forms for scrutiny in order to give the Supreme Court a clear picture on how Kenyans voted during the elections.


title: 2017 Kenyan general election

text: On 1 September, the Supreme Court nullified Kenyatta's election victory and ordered a new presidential election to take place within 60 days.


title: 2017 Kenyan general election

text: On 5 September, the IEBC set the next presidential election to be held on 17 October. Odinga announced that he would not participate in a new presidential election without "legal and constitutional guarantees" against alleged electoral fraud. However, it was later announced on 21 September that the election would be delayed until 26 October after the IEBC sought more time to reform the voting processes. The same day, IEBC Legal Affairs officer, Praxedes Tororey, succumbed to sustained pressure from NASA and resigned from her post.


title: 2017 Kenyan general election

text: Evidence was based on examining the forms that represented the stages of vote collection (41,451 of form 34A, 291 of form 34B and one form 34C). The court requested to inspect the originals of all forms.


title: 2017 Kenyan general election

text: The NASA opposition claimed this jeopardised 7 million votes when the margin of the result was 1.5 million votes.


title: 2017 Kenyan general election

text: On 20 September, Justice Philomena Mwilu issued a court statement saying that the IEBC's refusal to provide access and failure to provide information on the IT system's firewall configuration left the court "no choice but to accept the petitioner's claims that the IEBC's IT system was infiltrated and compromised, and the data therein interfered with, or IEBC's officials themselves interfered with the data." A day before the court delivered its statement, Chief Justice David Maraga said judges on the bench had faced death threats since declaring the election results void and criticized the police for "ignoring calls to act."


title: 2017 Kenyan general election

text: On 22 September, Mathare MP Anthony Olouch, a member of NASA who runs a firm called AT Olouch and Company Advocates, issued a statement to the Director of Public Prosecutions (DPP) Keriako Tobik calling for the prosecution of the following IEBC officials: CEO Ezra Chiloba, Chairman Wafula Chebukati, Betty Nyabuto, Immaculate Kassait, James Muhati, Praxedes Tororey (who has since retired), Moses Kipkogei, Abdi Guliye, Molu Boya and Marjan Hussein Marjan. The letter also stated, "unless investigation leading into criminal charges and prosecution is commenced within 72 hours [by] this office, our instructions are to institute private prosecutions according to Section 28 of the Office of the Director of Public Prosecutions [Act]."


title: 2017 Kenyan general election

text: On 10 October, Odinga quit the second election, citing problems with the IEBC and withdrawals from his coalition. Odinga strongly believes he cannot go into another election with no reforms in the IEBC.


title: 2017 Kenyan general election

text: On 18 October recently resigned IEBC Commissioner, who fled to the United States, issued a statement declaring that the second Kenyan Presidential election would not be a fair election. The same day, IEBC Chairman Wafula Chebukati expressed skepticism about a fair election as well, claiming the IEBC commissioners were partisan-minded and that he resign unless certain conditions are met to reform the IEBC. On 20 October, the IEBC's chief executive officer Ezra Chiloba announced that he will not be monitoring the election and that starting 23 October, he will take a three-week vacation. Chiloba's departure has created more uncertainty over who will monitor the election.


title: 2017 Kenyan general election

text: On 24 October, the IEBC announced that it would now count back-up paper ballots and not rush to announce the official results based only on numbers sent from the polling stations like in the first Presidential election as well. The same day, Chebukati appointed IEBC Vice Chair Consolata N.B. Maina as the IEBC Deputy National Returning Officer.


title: 2017 Kenyan general election

text: Honorable Mwau, Njonjo Mue and Khalef Khalifa filed petitions challenging the declaration at Supreme Court on 8 November.This act triggered political deadlock and uncertainty. President Uhuru Kenyatta launched his 24- page response stating his legally elected and accuses the petitioners for being used as NASA 'agents'. He also stated his acceptance on the verdict made to repeat the elections, and further accused the opposition of frustrating IEBC'S capability of handling the elections and attaching the Jubilee administration of interference in the electoral decisions putting it as propaganda.


title: 2017 Kenyan general election

text: He further denied claims of sing state resources for campaigning and involvement of cabinet ministers in his campaign, voter influence, intimidation and corruption during the repeat polls.


title: 2017 Kenyan general election

text: NASA defended its withdrawal in the second polls through its Chief Principal Raila Odinga. NASA Co- Principal maintained that the election was a 'sham' and IEBC was at all not independent as its decisions were solemnly made by foreign organs acting as relations officers to the public and the Jubilee Administration.


title: 2017 Kenyan general election

text: Despite challenges to his second victory, Kenyatta was officially sworn in for a second and final term on 28 November.


title: 2017 Kenyan general election

text: In 2022, the head of the 2017 Kenya European Union Election Observation Mission Hannah Roberts, explaining the situation at Oxford University, said: “"The court was under a lot of pressure because of the political tensions that there were between the two sides and also they had a huge amount of evidence that they had to wade through in two weeks so they had an enormous political and practical load on their shoulders. As the days were progressing we could see more of the rationale that they were following and could start to see that possibly they were going to anull this election. For us that was a very key thing that any decision by a court should be something that has a logic is a logical consequence of the legal framework in a country and the evidence of what's actually happened but still when the decision came it was a huge shock for us because it never happened before." ”


title: 2017 Kenyan general election

text: For the court to "demonstrate its ability to operate independently by making a decision against the ruling party it was very difficult on a practical level but of course much better than going to the streets and they're being violent on the streets the other aspect that was very apparent to us was the amount of pressure that was being put on the judiciary throughout the election process in 2017 so before during and after the election when they were subject to extremely harsh criticism extensive complaints and intimidation," she said.


title: 2017 Kenyan general election

text: Ugochukwu Ezeh, researcher at Oxford University, called the ruling an "absolutely radical intervention ... but also justifiable based on a plausible reading of the applicable constitutional and statutory frameworks." He also said that the decision did "reverberate beyond Kenya's borders" and that what he "most admired about the decision was the court's emphasis on the need to conceptualize elections as a process not just as a one day event but to assess, evaluate the quality of an electoral contest we need to look at the process leading up to our voting day."


title: 2011 San Fernando massacre

text: The 2011 San Fernando massacre, also known as the second massacre of San Fernando, was the mass murder of 193 people by Los Zetas drug cartel at La Joya ranch in the municipality of San Fernando, Tamaulipas, Mexico in March 2011. Authorities investigating the massacre reported numerous hijackings of passenger buses on Mexican Federal Highway 101 in San Fernando, and the kidnapped victims were later killed and buried in 47 clandestine mass graves. The investigations began immediately after several suitcases and other baggage went unclaimed in Reynosa and Matamoros, Tamaulipas. On 6 April 2011, Mexican authorities exhumed 59 corpses from eight mass graves. By 7 June 2011, after a series of multiple excavations, a total of 193 bodies were exhumed from mass graves in San Fernando.


title: 2011 San Fernando massacre

text: Reports mentioned that female kidnapping victims were raped and able-bodied male kidnapping victims were forced to fight to the death with other hostages, where they were given knives, hammers, machetes and clubs to find recruits who were willing to kill for their lives. In the blood sport, the survivor was recruited as a hitman for Los Zetas; those who did not survive were buried in a clandestine gravesite. After the massacre, thousands of citizens from San Fernando fled to other parts of Mexico and to the US. The Mexican government responded by sending 650 soldiers to San Fernando and establishing a military base in the municipality. The troops took over the duties of the police force in the city and worked on social programs. In addition, a total of 82 Zeta members were arrested by 23 August 2011. In 2012 tranquility slowly returned to the city, along with the inhabitants who fled because of the violence.


title: 2011 San Fernando massacre

text: Mexican authorities are not certain why Los Zetas decided to abduct people from buses, and then torture, murder and bury them. They speculate that the Zetas may have forcibly recruited the passengers as foot soldiers for the organization, intending to hold them for ransom or extort them before they crossed into the US. Some killers, however, confessed that they abducted and killed the passengers because they feared their rivals, the Gulf Cartel, were getting reinforcements from other states. One of the leaders confessed that Heriberto Lazcano, the supreme leader of Los Zetas, had ordered the investigation of all buses coming in through San Fernando; those "who had nothing to do with it were freed. But those that did, they were killed." In addition, the killers claimed to have investigated passengers' cellphones and text messages to determine if they were involved with the Gulf Cartel or not, and that they were particularly worried about buses coming in from the states of Durango and Michoacán, two strongholds of the rival La Familia and the Sinaloa Cartels.


title: 2011 San Fernando massacre

text: In early 2010, Los Zetas broke apart from the Gulf Cartel and both organizations turned their weapons against each other. The first clash between the groups happened in Reynosa, then expanded to Nuevo Laredo and Matamoros. The war spread throughout 11 of Tamaulipas' municipalities, 9 of which border Texas, and soon thereafter spread to Tamaulipas' neighboring states: Nuevo León and Veracruz. In the midst of violence and panic, authorities and media initially attempted to downplay the situation.


title: 2011 San Fernando massacre

text: In San Fernando, Gulf Cartel forces led by Antonio Cárdenas Guillén "strung the bodies of fallen Zetas and their associates from light poles." The Gulf Cartel lashed out to attack Los Zetas at their stronghold in San Fernando. According to "The Monitor", the municipality of San Fernando is a "virtual spiderweb" of dirt roads that connect with Monterrey, Nuevo Laredo, Reynosa, and Matamoros—making it a prized territory for drug traffickers.


title: 2011 San Fernando massacre

text: In August 2010, Mexican Naval Infantry found 72 dead illegal immigrants—58 men and 14 women—in San Fernando, killed by Los Zetas for their failure to pay their ransom and their refusal to work for the cartel. An Ecuadorian survivor faked his death and made it up to a military checkpoint, and subsequently led authorities to the 72 dead inside a warehouse on a ranch. The massacre was internationally condemned.


title: 2011 San Fernando massacre

text: Between 24 and 29 March 2011, several public transportation buses that were heading to Reynosa, Tamaulipas, were hijacked in San Fernando.


title: 2011 San Fernando massacre

text: On 6 April 2011 Mexican authorities found 59 bodies in eight clandestine mass graves in San Fernando, Tamaulipas. This discovery led officials to acknowledge that the Mexican drug cartels had begun to inflict fear through a new modus operandi: "stopping buses and removing passengers, some never to be seen again." Two weeks before the bodies were found, there were reports of buses being hijacked by the cartels near San Fernando, where cartel members would "stop the bus, select passengers, take them hostage." Fourteen cartel members were arrested too. By 8 April 2011, the secretary general of Tamaulipas, Morelos Jaime Canseco, confirmed the finding of 13 more bodies, increasing the body count to 72. When the death toll reached 72, bus lines in Tamaulipas refused to take people to San Fernando until the situation was resolved. Investigators began to mention that those killed were not migrants (like the previous massacre of the 72 migrants in 2010), but "fellow Mexican citizens."


title: 2011 San Fernando massacre

text: On 10 April 2011, in four other mass graves, 16 more bodies were exhumed, increasing the death toll to 88. Witnesses then reported that cartel members had stopped the bus at a fake military checkpoint, and that they had ordered the passengers to "pay up to $300 US dollars" for them to continue on their route. The investigation continued, and on 12 April 2011 the Mexican military confirmed the finding of 28 more bodies, upping the death toll to 116 and the mass graves up to 15. It was then proven by the PGR that the massacre was carried out by Los Zetas, a drug trafficking organization formed originally by former military soldiers in Mexico. By 13 April the authorities found six more bodies, making the death toll 122. The next day, on 14 April, 12 more mass graves were found with 23 bodies, and the body count reached 145. Investigators mentioned that the bodies had been deceased for between "one and two months." Also, 16 police officers from San Fernando were arrested for allegedly serving as accomplices to members of Los Zetas in the slayings.


title: 2011 San Fernando massacre

text: On 21 April 2011 authorities found 32 more bodies in eight other mass graves; the death toll went up to 177. Five days later, on 26 April, the body count reached 183, and the mass graves found now numbered over 40. Seventy-four suspected killers had been captured too. By this date only two of the 183 bodies found had been "fully identified" by authorities, and around 120 bodies were sent to Mexico City for identification. Finally, on 7 June 2011, the bodies found in clandestine mass graves in the municipality of San Fernando, Tamaulipas, stopped at 193 corpses. One US citizen was killed in the massacre.


title: 2011 San Fernando massacre

text: "Houston Chronicle" journalist Dane Schiller interviewed an alleged cartel member, who explained Los Zetas had been using an "ancient Roman gladiator blood sport" to groom new assassins and to find recruits for their organization.


title: 2011 San Fernando massacre

text: The kidnapped victims were forced to fight to the death with other victims. Men were given knives, hammers and machetes, and were ordered at gunpoint to fight for their lives like a "gladiator-style contest." The winners were ordered to go on suicide missions and shoot at rival drug cartel members elsewhere. The dead were buried in mass graves. Almost all the corpses found in the mass graves had evidence of "blunt force trauma."


title: 2011 San Fernando massacre

text: A cartel member on trial in Laredo, Texas testified that the fighting contests between the kidnapped victims were ordered by Miguel Treviño Morales, a high-ranking Zeta lieutenant, and that they were used to make the killers "lose their fear." In addition, he mentioned that 100 Zeta recruits were being trained in Ciudad Victoria, and 300 more in San Fernando in January 2012.


title: 2011 San Fernando massacre

text: Mexican Federal Highway 101, which extends from the border city of Matamoros, to the capital of the state, Ciudad Victoria, is known by local residents as the "Highway of Death." Those who traveled through this highway in 2010 and 2011 used to see "burned vehicles, bullet-shot trucks on the side of the road, and dead bodies, often decapitated, that the cartels would leave behind."


title: 2011 San Fernando massacre

text: Others who have traveled through this highway and have survived car hijackings and checkpoints the organized crime groups have installed from Padilla to San Fernando have reported what happens on the highway. A survivor saw "four SUVs, all grey and with tinted windows," adding that "everyone was armed."


title: 2011 San Fernando massacre

text: The violence and constant car hijackings were so bad that bus lines avoided Highway 101 by driving miles out of their way. Another survivor stated that heavily armed men would stop buses at roadblocks, and then force women and young girls at gunpoint, "strip them naked, rape them," and then drive away in trucks, leaving the passengers traumatized. One bus driver, "who said he had avoided being stopped thus far," claimed that another bus driver at the station had said that 12 people were pulled off the bus just 30 minutes before him. Other witnesses claim that once the buses were stopped, gunmen would storm the bus and point at certain passengers and say "you, you're coming down," and take them at gunpoint. The buses were then ordered to leave.


title: 2011 San Fernando massacre

text: Highway 101 is the biggest and most important transportation system in the state of Tamaulipas, and it connects the state with Matamoros and Texas with the rest of Tamaulipas. Local residents mention that there is only traffic on this highway during daylight. , they mention that the cartels "still kill people in San Fernando." The US has issued travel warnings south of the border.


title: 2011 San Fernando massacre

text: On 17 June 2011, federal police captured Édgar Huerta Montiel, a high-ranking boss in Los Zetas and the man responsible for the killing of 72 migrants in 2010. He confessed during interrogation that "more than 600 bodies" were buried in clandestine mass graves near San Fernando, unconfirmed by Mexican authorities. Isabel Miranda de Wallace of "Stop the Kidnappings" suspects that the mass graves in San Fernando contain more than 500 dead, but that the government of Tamaulipas has not released such information because of the political troubles it may instigate.


title: 2011 San Fernando massacre

text: On 17 April 2011, in the capital city of Ciudad Victoria, Mexican authorities captured Martín Omar Estrada Luna, alias "El Kilo", lieutenant boss of Los Zetas in San Fernando, Tamaulipas, and responsible for at least 217 killings in that locality. Along with "El Kilo", 11 additional Zeta gunmen were apprehended. They were linked to the killing of a policeman and an investigator who were covering the massacres. In addition, Estrada Luna was one of the masterminds of the massacre of the 72 migrants and of the mass graves found. He was regarded by the DEA as "one of the most aggressive leaders in Los Zetas organization." Federal Police captured Édgar Huerta Montiel, alias "El Wache", a high-ranking lieutenant of Los Zetas and the man responsible for the killings of the 72 immigrants, on 17 June 2011 in Fresnillo, Zacatecas. Huerta Montiel was an army deserter before joining Los Zetas. Other Zeta lieutenants, like Abraham Barrios Caporal, alias "El Erasmo", were captured on 30 June 2011.


title: 2011 San Fernando massacre

text: The PGR offered up to $15 million for information leading to the capture of those responsible. In addition, the PGR led the investigation and as of August 2011, 82 people had been arrested. Some of those arrested were minors under the age of 18. Top-Zeta leaders responsible for the attacks have also been arrested: Salvador Alfonso Martínez Escobedo, alias "La Ardilla", was captured in late 2012 and Miguel Treviño Morales, "Commander 40", was arrested on 15 July 2013. One Zeta leader accused of involvement was still on the run as of July 2013: Román Ricardo Palomo Rincones, alias "El Coyote".


title: 2011 San Fernando massacre

text: Marisela Morales, the former Attorney General of Mexico, mentioned in a communiqué on 13 April 2011 that 16 of those arrested were municipal police officers in San Fernando. According to the investigations, the policemen offered Los Zetas "protection and help[ed] them cover up the killings." Former president of Mexico, Felipe Calderón, criticized the governors of the Mexican states for failing to certify and regulate their police forces, who often aid criminal groups in their activities. Calderón condemned the fact that policemen kidnap civilians and then take them in their own police vehicles to the place where they are to be killed. The President then mentioned that although the government at a federal level is working to "clean up" the police forces, at state and municipal levels the improvements "have not been parallel." A judge ordered the imprisonment of all police officers implicated in the massacre on 18 April 2011.


title: 2011 San Fernando massacre

text: After the massacre of the 72 migrants, the discovery of the mass graves and the continuing violence between the Gulf Cartel and Los Zetas, fear so overwhelmed the citizens of San Fernando that more than 10,000 of them left the city. The city's mayor, Tomás Gloria Requena, estimates that "around 10% of the population" left to "other towns and cities in Tamaulipas, and possibly to other parts of Mexico and the United States." A priest of San Fernando, however, noted that those who left the city were directly "threaten[ed] by the organized crime groups," and that the arrival of the military has brought some of the tranquility the inhabitants of San Fernando wanted. The priest related that when he drove around the city to go to other parishes, "heavily armed men with ski-masks ordered [him] to stop and identify [himself]." They would let him go after he said he was a priest at a local church, but mentioned that "these risks happened to the whole population."


title: 2011 San Fernando massacre

text: Newspapers mention that San Fernando, Tamaulipas, "stayed without policemen," and the ones who were from that municipality were either arrested or assigned different functions. The government of Tamaulipas believes that the "exodus of the citizens of San Fernando is transitory, and once order is re-established, the families will be back again." On 1 January 2012 the SEDENA thanked the soldiers in San Fernando for bringing order and for "reverting the exodus of San Fernando, an unfortunate phenomenon that occurred due to the violence and the criminal groups that operated in the region."


title: 2011 San Fernando massacre

text: In May 2011 the federal government sent more than 500 troops to Tamaulipas to combat the drug cartels in the area and work together with the state forces. In addition, retired soldiers were also called to voluntarily join in the fight against the organized crime groups. A military base was established in the municipality of San Fernando on 18 January 2012. The headquarters were inaugurated by Egidio Torre Cantú, the current governor of Tamaulipas. The base hosts more than 650 military personnel. Below is the welcoming speech Torre Cantú gave to the soldiers on their arrival at Tamaulipas:


title: 2011 San Fernando massacre

text: On another note, the troops also worked on "social projects" throughout San Fernando; they provided medical care to the citizens, helped in the infrastructure of the city, provided free haircuts, helped repaint buildings and picked up trash. In November 2011 the military took over the responsibilities of the police in San Fernando, and now patrols the city, answers emergency calls of civilians, mans military checkpoints on highways, guards the municipal palace, investigates passenger buses and cars for drugs and other illegal goods and directs traffic.


title: 2011 San Fernando massacre

text: Little by little, the people who left San Fernando, Tamaulipas, are slowly coming back to the city. However, the citizens still find themselves "scared," and they reportedly "mistrust foreigners." With the arrival of Mexican federal troops and the creation of the military base, San Fernando's social fabric and normality have been recovering. In the city square, one can now see "a pair of lovers, bootblacks at work, people walking in the streets, and kids having fun." Candy stores, restaurants, shoe stores, and other establishments have reopened.


title: 2011 San Fernando massacre

text: As of 2012 life in San Fernando appears to be calm, but once nightfall comes around, people are no longer in the streets. After 10:00 p.m. "San Fernando is a ghost town." The last bus departure from Ciudad Victoria or Matamoros to San Fernando is at 6:10 p.m.; before the violence, buses drove to San Fernando throughout the night. Taxi drivers used to wait for people arriving at San Fernando throughout all hours of the night, and now the last bus arrives at around 9:30 p.m., and everyone then closes their doors and goes home. In 2012 it had been more than three years since the city of San Fernando had a carnival dance; the Ramón Ayala pub used to be the get-together place every weekend, and now it is closed. Other bars have also closed too, as well as the cinemas. According to Alberto Torres from "El Universal", the people of San Fernando are resentful toward the government, from the federal level to the state and local ones. For more than two years "they were abandoned and forgotten, left at their own luck, in the middle of a raging drug war." A resident recalls what he feels when people from other parts of Mexico hear he's from San Fernando:


title: 2011 San Fernando massacre

text: In addition, although the highways and dirt roads in Tamaulipas are sometimes the scenes of armed confrontations, as of February 2012 there have been "advancements" in the security situation of highways in the state. The PGR has not identified 159 of the 193 corpses exhumed as of April 2012.


title: 2011 San Fernando massacre

text: The massacre of the 72 migrants, the mass graves with nearly 200 bodies, the assassination of the PRI candidate for state governor, Rodolfo Torre Cantú, the murder of two city mayors, the numerous prison breaks and killings, the escalating violence in Tamaulipas and the lack of media coverage, along with the political and police corruption, have brought analysts to conclude that Tamaulipas may in fact be or become a failed state.


title: 2011 San Fernando massacre

text: Manuel Suárez-Mier, economist and drug war expert, believes that Mexico and Tamaulipas are "not failed states," since their economies are projected to grow starting in 2010, and the security measures stand in "a phase of reconstruction."


title: American Pastoral (film)

text: American Pastoral is a 2016 American crime-drama film directed by Ewan McGregor (in his feature directorial debut) and with a screenplay by John Romano, based on the 1997 novel of the same name by Philip Roth. The film stars McGregor, Jennifer Connelly, Dakota Fanning, Peter Riegert, Rupert Evans, Uzo Aduba, Molly Parker and David Strathairn. Principal photography began on September 21, 2015, in Pittsburgh.


title: American Pastoral (film)

text: The film had its world premiere on September 9, 2016, at the 2016 Toronto International Film Festival and was theatrically released in the United States on October 21, 2016, by Lionsgate.


title: American Pastoral (film)

text: In 1996, at the 45th-year reunion of the class of '51 at Weequahic High School in Newark, New Jersey, writer Nathan Zuckerman meets one of his old friends, Jerry Levov. They talk about Jerry's older brother, former all-state star athlete Seymour "Swede" Levov, class of '44, who recently died after a long illness.


title: American Pastoral (film)

text: The story moves back to a young Swede persuading his father, glovemaking magnate Lou Levov, to let him marry his high school sweetheart, New Jersey's 1947 Miss America contestant Dawn Dwyer. Lou is skeptical because Swede is Jewish and Dawn is a devout Roman Catholic, but her strength and honesty sways him. They have a daughter, Meredith ("Merry"), and settle in the town of Old Rimrock, where they acquire a farm, with Swede commuting the 30 miles to the Newark glove factory. Smart and quirky Merry struggles with a stuttering problem, and is deeply affected as a 12-year-old by the self-immolation of Thích Quảng Đức in 1963. By the time Merry reaches high school, she has become increasingly radicalized towards Anarchism, as the Vietnam War rages, and frequently goes to New York City to take part in antiwar protests. When Merry lashes out during the 1967 Newark riots, Swede urges her to channel her energy into protesting against the war from closer to home. A few days later, the town's little post office and store is destroyed by a bomb, killing the owner.


title: American Pastoral (film)

text: Merry disappears, and is the FBI's prime suspect, though Swede and Dawn believe she is innocent or, if involved, being forced to act by older radicals she met in New York. Swede and Dawn visit Penny Hamlin, the wife of the store owner who was killed, to apologize. After Swede unsuccessfully hounds the FBI for information on Merry's whereabouts, 22-year-old Wharton Business School student Rita Cohen visits the factory, ostensibly working on a report for business class. Rita tips off Swede with credible information about Merry, hints that she knows Merry's whereabouts, then asks him to meet her at a hotel with $10,000 cash. Swede meets Rita in the hotel room, but spurns her mean-spirited attempts to seduce him. Rita runs off with the money and leaves no further information regarding Merry. The strain of Merry's disappearance eventually causes Dawn to have a nervous breakdown. After treatment, Dawn seeks a facelift and starts an affair with a neighbour. She tells Swede that Merry has destroyed their former life, and tries to get Swede to forget about Merry so that they can start a new life.


title: American Pastoral (film)

text: In 1970, Swede spots Rita on a New York City street. Rita takes him to a skid-row area of Newark where Merry now lives. During two brief visits, Merry confesses to Swede that she made and planted a total of 3 bombs, killing 4 people. She tells of how she later slid into the underground, where she was robbed and raped. She has withdrawn from society, and is practicing extreme asceticism within the Indian Jain religion, which Swede attributes to her penance. In the quiet of her unkempt and simple life style her stutter has ceased. She has no desire to return home, and says that if he loves her, he will let her be. The years pass as Swede returns occasionally to stand outside the abandoned house where he last found Merry without ever seeing her again.


title: American Pastoral (film)

text: In the present, at Swede's funeral, Nathan muses that we know we are alive when we realize that "all the time... we are wrong" about our assumptions "about everyone". As the mourners are leaving, a cleaned up middle-aged Merry arrives, silently passing her uncle and mother as she walks to Swede's grave.


title: American Pastoral (film)

text: In 2003, Lakeshore Entertainment started the development of the film, with Phillip Noyce attached to direct, and the film title shortened to "Pastoral". Later, Paramount Pictures acquired the rights, and in May 2012, Fisher Stevens was hired to direct John Romano's adapted script, with Sidney Kimmel Entertainment attached as financier and producer along with Lakeshore. Jennifer Connelly and Paul Bettany were attached for the lead roles, along with Evan Rachel Wood as their characters' daughter. Tom Rosenberg and Gary Lucchesi were set as producers. Mandy Patinkin was attached to play one of the film's roles, and filming was set to take place in Pittsburgh.


title: American Pastoral (film)

text: On June 23, 2014, Ewan McGregor signed on to play the lead role of Seymour "Swede" Levov, a former high school star athlete and successful Jewish American businessman, replacing Bettany in the role. Phillip Noyce was again set to direct the film. On August 4, Connelly was confirmed to be playing Dawn Dwyer Levov, the former beauty queen and wife of Levov. On August 6, Dakota Fanning was added to the cast of the film to play the daughter, Merry Levov, the role once set for Wood.


title: American Pastoral (film)

text: On February 18, 2015, it was announced that McGregor would also direct the film, making his debut after Noyce left the project. On July 9, 2015, Valorie Curry joined the cast of the film to play Rita Cohen, a mysterious young woman from the group of radicals whom Merry has joined in protest against the government in general and the Vietnam War in particular, preceding her committing a bombing. On September 2, 2015, David Strathairn, Uzo Aduba, and Peter Riegert were added to the cast to play Swede's former classmate Nathan Zuckerman, Vicky, and Swede's father Lou Levov, respectively. Corey Stoll also joined the film for an unspecified role, though he did not appear in the finished film. On October 15, Rupert Evans signed on to play Seymour's younger brother, Jerry Levov. Molly Parker also joined the film.


title: American Pastoral (film)

text: Principal photography on the film commenced on September 21, 2015, in Harmony, Pennsylvania. Filming continued on location around Pittsburgh through November, including at the North Side, Downtown, Liberty Avenue, Wilkinsburg, Lawrenceville, and the grounds of the Pittsburgh Theological Seminary.


title: American Pastoral (film)

text: On April 28, 2016, it was announced that "American Pastoral" would be given a limited theatrical release on October 21, 2016, from Lionsgate, followed by a wider release on October 28.


title: American Pastoral (film)

text: "American Pastoral" has grossed $544,098 in the U.S. and Canada and $1,171,630 in other countries for a worldwide total of $1,715,728.


title: American Pastoral (film)

text: On review aggregator website Rotten Tomatoes, the film has an approval rating of 23%, based on 123 reviews, with an average rating of 4.9/10. The site's critical consensus reads, ""American Pastoral" finds debuting director Ewan McGregor's reach exceeding its grasp with a well-intentioned Philip Roth adaptation that retains the form, but little of the function, of its source material." On Metacritic, the film has a score 43 out of 100, based on 30 critics, indicating "mixed or average reviews".


title: Atheroma

text: An atheroma, or atheromatous plaque, is an abnormal and reversible accumulation of material in the inner layer of an arterial wall.


title: Atheroma

text: The material consists of mostly macrophage cells, or debris, containing lipids, calcium and a variable amount of fibrous connective tissue. The accumulated material forms a swelling in the artery wall, which may intrude into the lumen of the artery, narrowing it and restricting blood flow. Atheroma is the pathological basis for the disease entity atherosclerosis, a subtype of arteriosclerosis.


title: Atheroma

text: For most people, the first symptoms result from atheroma progression within the heart arteries, most commonly resulting in a heart attack and ensuing debility. The heart arteries are difficult to track because they are small (from about 5 mm down to microscopic), they are hidden deep within the chest and they never stop moving. Additionally, all mass-applied clinical strategies focus on both minimal cost and the overall safety of the procedure. Therefore, existing diagnostic strategies for detecting atheroma and tracking response to treatment have been extremely limited. The methods most commonly relied upon, patient symptoms and cardiac stress testing, do not detect any symptoms of the problem until atheromatous disease is very advanced because arteries enlarge, not constrict, in response to increasing atheroma. It is plaque ruptures, producing debris and clots which obstruct blood flow downstream, sometimes also locally (as seen on angiograms), which reduce/stop blood flow. Yet these events occur suddenly and are not revealed in advance by either stress tests or angiograms.


title: Atheroma

text: The healthy epicardial coronary artery consists of three layers, the tunica intima, media, and adventitia. Atheroma and changes in the artery wall usually result in small aneurysms (enlargements) just large enough to compensate for the extra wall thickness with no change in the lumen diameter. However, eventually, typically as a result of rupture of vulnerable plaques and clots within the lumen over the plaque, stenosis (narrowing) of the vessel develops in some areas. Less frequently, the artery enlarges so much that a gross aneurysmal enlargement of the artery results. All three results are often observed, at different locations, within the same individual.


title: Atheroma

text: Over time, atheromata usually progress in size and thickness and induce the surrounding muscular central region (the media) of the artery to stretch out, which is termed "remodeling". Typically, remodeling occurs just enough to compensate for the atheroma's size such that the calibre of the artery opening (lumen) remains unchanged, until about 50% of the artery wall cross-sectional area consists of atheromatous tissue.


title: Atheroma

text: If the muscular wall enlargement eventually fails to keep up with the enlargement of the atheroma volume, or a clot forms and organizes over the plaque, then the lumen of the artery becomes narrowed as a result of repeated ruptures, clots and fibrosis over the tissues separating the atheroma from the blood stream. This narrowing becomes more common after decades of living, increasingly more common after people are in their 30s to 40s.


title: Atheroma

text: The endothelium (the cell monolayer on the inside of the vessel) and covering tissue, termed fibrous cap, separate atheroma from the blood in the lumen. If a rupture (see vulnerable plaque) of the endothelium and fibrous cap occurs, then both a shower of debris from the plaque (debris larger than 5 micrometres are too large to pass through capillaries)) combined with a platelet and clotting response (an injury/repair response to both the debris and at the rupture site) begins within fractions of a second, eventually resulting in narrowing or sometimes closure of the lumen. Eventually downstream tissue damage occurs due to closure or obstruction of downstream microvessels and/or closure of the lumen at the rupture, both resulting in loss of blood flow to downstream tissues. This is the principal mechanism of myocardial infarction, stroke or other related cardiovascular disease problems.


title: Atheroma

text: While clots at the rupture site typically shrink in volume over time, some of the clot may become organized into fibrotic tissue resulting in narrowing of the artery lumen; the narrowings sometimes seen on angiography examinations, if severe enough. Since angiography methods can only reveal larger lumens, typically larger than 200 micrometres, angiography after a cardiovascular event commonly does not reveal what happened.


title: Atheroma

text: If the muscular wall enlargement is overdone over time, then a gross enlargement of the artery results, usually over decades of living. This is a less common outcome. Atheroma within aneurysmal enlargement (vessel bulging) can also rupture and shower debris of atheroma and clot downstream. If the arterial enlargement continues to 2 to 3 times the usual diameter, the walls often become weak enough that with just the stress of the pulse, a loss of wall integrity may occur leading to sudden hemorrhage (bleeding), major symptoms and debility; often rapid death. The main stimulus for aneurysm formation is pressure atrophy of the structural support of the muscle layers. The main structural proteins are collagen and elastin. This causes thinning and the wall balloons allowing gross enlargement to occur, as is common in the abdominal region of the aorta.


title: Atheroma

text: The accumulation (swelling) is always in the tunica intima, between the endothelium lining and the smooth muscle middle layer of the artery wall. While the early stages, based on gross appearance, have traditionally been termed fatty streaks by pathologists, they are not composed of fat cells but of accumulations of white blood cells, especially macrophages, that have taken up oxidized low-density lipoprotein (LDL).


title: Atheroma

text: After they accumulate large amounts of cytoplasmic membranes (with associated high cholesterol content) they are called foam cells. When foam cells die, their contents are released, which attracts more macrophages and creates an extracellular lipid core near the centre to inner surface of each atherosclerotic plaque.


title: Atheroma

text: Conversely, the outer, older portions of the plaque become more calcified, less metabolically active and more physically stiff over time.


title: Atheroma

text: Veins do not develop atheromata, because they are not subjected to the same haemodynamic pressure that arteries are, unless surgically moved to function as an artery, as in bypass surgery.


title: Atheroma

text: Because artery walls enlarge at locations with atheroma, detecting atheroma before death and autopsy has long been problematic at best. Most methods have focused on the openings of arteries; while these methods are highly relevant, they totally miss the atheroma within the arterial lumen.


title: Atheroma

text: Historically, arterial wall fixation, staining and thin section has been the gold standard for detection and description of atheroma, after death and autopsy. With special stains and examination, micro calcifications can be detected, typically within smooth muscle cells of the arterial media near the fatty streaks within a year or two of fatty streaks forming.


title: Atheroma

text: Interventional and non-interventional methods to detect atherosclerosis, specifically vulnerable plaque (non-occlusive or soft plaque), are widely used in research and clinical practice today.


title: Atheroma

text: Carotid Intima-media thickness Scan (CIMT can be measured by B-mode ultrasonography) measurement has been recommended by the American Heart Association as the most useful method to identify atherosclerosis and may now very well be the gold standard for detection.


title: Atheroma

text: Intravascular ultrasound is the current most sensitive method detecting and measuring more advanced atheroma within living individuals, but has had limited applications due to cost and body invasiveness.


title: Atheroma

text: CT scans using state of the art higher resolution spiral, or the higher speed EBT, machines have been the most effective method for detecting calcification present in plaque. However, the atheroma have to be advanced enough to have relatively large areas of calcification within them to create large enough regions of ~130 Hounsfield units which a CT scanner's software can recognize as distinct from the other surrounding tissues. Typically, such regions start occurring within the heart arteries about 2–3 decades after atheroma start developing. The presence of smaller, spotty plaques may actually be more dangerous for progressing to acute myocardial infarction.


title: Atheroma

text: Arterial ultrasound, especially of the carotid arteries, with measurement of the thickness of the artery wall, offers a way to partially track the disease progression. As of 2006, the thickness, commonly referred to as IMT for intimal-medial thickness, is not measured clinically though it has been used by some researchers since the mid-1990s to track changes in arterial walls. Traditionally, clinical carotid ultrasounds have only estimated the degree of blood lumen restriction, stenosis, a result of very advanced disease. The National Institute of Health did a five-year $5 million study, headed by medical researcher Kenneth Ouriel, to study intravascular ultrasound techniques regarding atherosclerotic plaque. More progressive clinicians have begun using IMT measurement as a way to quantify and track disease progression or stability within individual patients.


title: Atheroma

text: Angiography, since the 1960s, has been the traditional way of evaluating for atheroma. However, angiography is only motion or still images of dye mixed with the blood within the arterial lumen and never show atheroma; the wall of arteries, including atheroma within the arterial wall remain invisible. The limited exception to this rule is that with very advanced atheroma, with extensive calcification within the wall, a halo-like ring of radiodensity can be seen in most older humans, especially when arterial lumens are visualized end-on. On cine-floro, cardiologists and radiologists typically look for these calcification shadows to recognize arteries before they inject any contrast agent during angiograms.


title: Atheroma

text: In developed countries, with improved public health, infection control and increasing life spans, atheroma processes have become an increasingly important problem and burden for society.


title: Atheroma

text: Atheromata continue to be the primary underlying basis for disability and death, despite a trend for gradual improvement since the early 1960s (adjusted for patient age). Thus, increasing efforts towards better understanding, treating and preventing the problem are continuing to evolve.


title: Atheroma

text: According to United States data, 2004, for about 65% of men and 47% of women, the first symptom of cardiovascular disease is myocardial infarction (heart attack) or sudden death (death within one hour of symptom onset).


title: Atheroma

text: A significant proportion of artery flow-disrupting events occur at locations with less than 50% lumenal narrowing. Cardiac stress testing, traditionally the most commonly performed non-invasive testing method for blood flow limitations, generally only detects lumen narrowing greater than about 75%, although some physicians advocate nuclear stress tests that can sometimes detect as little as 50%.


title: Atheroma

text: The sudden nature of the complications of pre-existing atheroma, vulnerable plaque (non-occlusive or soft plaque), have led, since the 1950s, to the development of intensive care units and complex medical and surgical interventions. Angiography and later cardiac stress testing was begun to either visualize or indirectly detect stenosis. Next came bypass surgery, to plumb transplanted veins, sometimes arteries, around the stenoses and more recently angioplasty, now including stents, most recently drug coated stents, to stretch the stenoses more open.


title: Atheroma

text: Yet despite these medical advances, with success in reducing the symptoms of angina and reduced blood flow, atheroma rupture events remain the major problem and still sometimes result in sudden disability and death despite even the most rapid, massive and skilled medical and surgical intervention available anywhere today. According to some clinical trials, bypass surgery and angioplasty procedures have had at best a minimal effect, if any, on improving overall survival. Typically mortality of bypass operations is between 1 and 4%, of angioplasty between 1 and 1.5%.


title: Atheroma

text: Additionally, these vascular interventions are often done only after an individual is symptomatic, often already partially disabled, as a result of the disease. It is also clear that both angioplasty and bypass interventions do not prevent future heart attack.


title: Atheroma

text: The older methods for understanding atheroma, dating to before World War II, relied on autopsy data. Autopsy data has long shown initiation of fatty streaks in later childhood with slow asymptomatic progression over decades.


title: Atheroma

text: One way to see atheroma is the very invasive and costly IVUS ultrasound technology; it gives us the precise volume of the inside intima plus the central media layers of about of artery length. Unfortunately, it gives no information about the structural strength of the artery. Angiography does not visualize atheroma; it only makes the blood flow within blood vessels visible. Alternative methods that are non or less physically invasive and less expensive per individual test have been used and are continuing to be developed, such as those using computed tomography (CT; led by the electron beam tomography form, given its greater speed) and magnetic resonance imaging (MRI). The most promising since the early 1990s has been EBT, detecting calcification within the atheroma before most individuals start having clinically recognized symptoms and debility. Statin therapy (to lower cholesterol) does not slow the speed of calcification as determined by CT scan. MRI coronary vessel wall imaging, although currently limited to research studies, has demonstrated the ability to detect vessel wall thickening in asymptomatic high risk individuals. As a non-invasive, ionising radiation free technique, MRI based techniques could have future uses in monitoring disease progression and regression. Most visualization techniques are used in research, they are not widely available to most patients, have significant technical limitations, have not been widely accepted and generally are not covered by medical insurance carriers.


title: Atheroma

text: From human clinical trials, it has become increasingly evident that a more effective focus of treatment is slowing, stopping and even partially reversing the atheroma growth process. There are several prospective epidemiologic studies including the Atherosclerosis Risk in Communities (ARIC) Study and the Cardiovascular Health Study (CHS), which have supported a direct correlation of Carotid Intima-media thickness (CIMT) with myocardial infarction and stroke risk in patients without cardiovascular disease history. The ARIC Study was conducted in 15,792 individuals between 5 and 65 years of age in four different regions of the US between 1987 and 1989. The baseline CIMT was measured and measurements were repeated at 4- to 7-year intervals by carotid B mode ultrasonography in this study. An increase in CIMT was correlated with an increased risk for CAD. The CHS was initiated in 1988, and the relationship of CIMT with risk of myocardial infarction and stroke was investigated in 4,476 subjects 65 years of age and below. At the end of approximately six years of follow-up, CIMT measurements were correlated with cardiovascular events.


title: Atheroma

text: Paroi artérielle et Risque Cardiovasculaire in Asia Africa/Middle East and Latin America (PARC-AALA) is another important large-scale study, in which 79 centres from countries in Asia, Africa, the Middle East, and Latin America participated, and the distribution of CIMT according to different ethnic groups and its association with the Framingham cardiovascular score was investigated. Multi-linear regression analysis revealed that an increased Framingham cardiovascular score was associated with CIMT, and carotid plaque independent of geographic differences.


title: Atheroma

text: Cahn et al. prospectively followed-up 152 patients with coronary artery disease for 6–11 months by carotid artery ultrasonography and noted 22 vascular events (myocardial infarction, transient ischemic attack, stroke, and coronary angioplasty) within this time period. They concluded that carotid atherosclerosis measured by this non-interventional method has prognostic significance in coronary artery patients.


title: Atheroma

text: In the Rotterdam Study, Bots et al. followed 7,983 patients >55 years of age for a mean period of 4.6 years, and reported 194 incident myocardial infarctions within this period. CIMT was significantly higher in the myocardial infarction group compared to the other group. Demircan et al. found that the CIMT of patients with acute coronary syndrome were significantly increased compared to patients with stable angina pectoris.


title: Atheroma

text: It has been reported in another study that a maximal CIMT value of 0.956 mm had 85.7% sensitivity and 85.1% specificity to predict angiographic CAD. The study group consisted of patients admitted to the cardiology outpatient clinic with symptoms of stable angina pectoris. The study showed CIMT was higher in patients with significant CAD than in patients with non-critical coronary lesions. Regression analysis revealed that thickening of the mean intima-media complex more than 1.0 was predictive of significant CAD our patients. There was incremental significant increase in CIMT with the number coronary vessel involved. In accordance with the literature, it was found that CIMT was significantly higher in the presence of CAD. Furthermore, CIMT was increased as the number of involved vessels increased and the highest CIMT values were noted in patients with left main coronary involvement. However, human clinical trials have been slow to provide clinical & medical evidence, partly because the asymptomatic nature of atheromata make them especially difficult to study. Promising results are found using carotid intima-media thickness scanning (CIMT can be measured by B-mode ultrasonography), B-vitamins that reduce a protein corrosive, homocysteine and that reduce neck carotid artery plaque volume and thickness, and stroke, even in late-stage disease.


title: Atheroma

text: Additionally, understanding what drives atheroma development is complex with multiple factors involved, only some of which, such as lipoproteins, more importantly lipoprotein subclass analysis, blood sugar levels and hypertension are best known and researched. More recently, some of the complex immune system patterns that promote, or inhibit, the inherent inflammatory macrophage triggering processes involved in atheroma progression are slowly being better elucidated in animal models of atherosclerosis.


title: Tape recorder

text: An audio tape recorder, also known as a tape deck, tape player or tape machine or simply a tape recorder, is a sound recording and reproduction device that records and plays back sounds usually using magnetic tape for storage. In its present-day form, it records a fluctuating signal by moving the tape across a tape head that polarizes the magnetic domains in the tape in proportion to the audio signal. Tape-recording devices include the reel-to-reel tape deck and the cassette deck, which uses a cassette for storage.


title: Tape recorder

text: The use of magnetic tape for sound recording originated around 1930 in Germany as paper tape with oxide lacquered to it. Prior to the development of magnetic tape, magnetic wire recorders had successfully demonstrated the concept of magnetic recording, but they never offered audio quality comparable to the other recording and broadcast standards of the time. This German invention was the start of a long string of innovations that have led to present-day magnetic tape recordings.


title: Tape recorder

text: Magnetic tape revolutionized both the radio broadcast and music recording industries. It gave artists and producers the power to record and re-record audio with minimal loss in quality as well as edit and rearrange recordings with ease. The alternative recording technologies of the era, transcription discs and wire recorders, could not provide anywhere near this level of quality and functionality.


title: Tape recorder

text: Since some early refinements improved the fidelity of the reproduced sound, magnetic tape has been the highest quality analog recording medium available. As of the first decade of the 21st century, analog magnetic tape has been largely replaced by digital recording technologies.


title: Tape recorder

text: The earliest known audio tape recorder was a non-magnetic, non-electric version invented by Alexander Graham Bell's Volta Laboratory and patented in 1886 (). It employed a strip of wax-covered paper that was coated by dipping it in a solution of beeswax and paraffin and then had one side scraped clean, with the other side allowed to harden. The machine was of sturdy wood and metal construction, and hand-powered by means of a knob fastened to a flywheel. The wax strip passed from one eight-inch reel around the periphery of a pulley (with guide flanges) mounted above the V-pulleys on the main vertical shaft, where it came in contact with either its recording or playback stylus. The tape was then taken up on the other reel. The sharp recording stylus, actuated by a vibrating mica diaphragm, cut the wax from the strip. In playback mode, a dull, loosely mounted stylus, attached to a rubber diaphragm, carried the reproduced sounds through an ear tube to its listener. Both recording and playback styluses, mounted alternately on the same two posts, could be adjusted vertically so that several recordings could be cut on the same strip.


title: Tape recorder

text: While the machine was never developed commercially, it somewhat resembled the modern magnetic tape recorder in its design. The tapes and machine created by Bell's associates, examined at one of the Smithsonian Institution's museums, became brittle, and the heavy paper reels warped. The machine's playback head was also missing. Otherwise, with some reconditioning, they could be placed into working condition.


title: Tape recorder

text: The waxed tape recording medium was inferior to Edison's wax cylinder medium, and Edison's wax cylinder phonograph became the first widespread sound recording technology, used for both entertainment and office dictation.


title: Tape recorder

text: Franklin C. Goodale adapted movie film for analog audio recording. He received the patent for his invention in 1909. The celluloid film was inscribed and played back with a stylus, in a manner similar to the wax cylinders of Edison's gramophone. The patent description states that the machine could store six records on the same strip of film, side by side, and it was possible to switch between them. In 1912, a similar process was used for the Hiller talking clock.


title: Tape recorder

text: In 1932, after six years of developmental work, including a patent application in 1931, Merle Duston, a Detroit radio engineer, created a tape recorder capable of recording both sounds and voice that used a low-cost chemically treated paper tape. During the recording process, the tape moved through a pair of electrodes which immediately imprinted the modulated sound signals as visible black stripes into the paper tape's surface. The audio signal could be immediately replayed from the same recorder unit, which also contained photoelectric sensors, somewhat similar to the various sound-on-film technologies of the era.


title: Tape recorder

text: Magnetic recording was conceived as early as 1878 by the American engineer Oberlin Smith and demonstrated in practice in 1898 by Danish engineer Valdemar Poulsen. Analog magnetic wire recording, and its successor, magnetic tape recording, involve the use of a magnetizable medium which moves with a constant speed past a recording head. An electrical signal, which is analogous to the sound that is to be recorded, is fed to the recording head, inducing a pattern of magnetization similar to the signal. A playback head can then pick up the changes in magnetic field from the tape and convert it into an electrical signal to be amplified and played back through a loudspeaker.


title: Tape recorder

text: The first wire recorder was the Telegraphone invented by Valdemar Poulsen in the late 1890s. Wire recorders for law and office dictation and telephone recording were made almost continuously by various companies (mainly the American Telegraphone Company) through the 1920s and 1930s. These devices were mostly sold as consumer technologies after World War II.


title: Tape recorder

text: Widespread use of wire recording occurred within the decades spanning from 1940 until 1960, following the development of inexpensive designs licensed internationally by the Brush Development Company of Cleveland, Ohio and the Armour Research Foundation of the Armour Institute of Technology (later Illinois Institute of Technology). These two organizations licensed dozens of manufacturers in the U.S., Japan, and Europe. Wire was also used as a recording medium in black box voice recorders for aviation in the 1950s.


title: Tape recorder

text: Consumer wire recorders were marketed for home entertainment or as an inexpensive substitute for commercial office dictation recorders, but the development of consumer magnetic tape recorders starting in 1946, with the BK 401 Soundmirror, using paper-based tape, gradually drove wire recorders from the market, being "pretty much out of the picture" by 1952.


title: Tape recorder

text: In 1924 a German engineer, Kurt Stille, developed the Poulsen wire recorder as a dictating machine. The following year a fellow German, Louis Blattner, working in Britain, licensed Stille's device and started work on a machine which would instead record on a magnetic steel tape, which he called the Blattnerphone. The tape was 6 mm wide and 0.08 mm thick, travelling at 5 feet per second; the recording time was 20 minutes.


title: Tape recorder

text: The BBC installed a Blattnerphone at Avenue House in September 1930 for tests, and used it to record King George V's speech at the opening of the India Round Table Conference on 12 November 1930. Though not considered suitable for music the machine continued in use and was moved to Broadcasting House in March 1932, a second machine also being installed. In September 1932, a new model was installed, using 3 mm tape with a recording time of 32 minutes.


title: Tape recorder

text: In 1933, the Marconi Company purchased the rights to the Blattnerphone, and newly developed Marconi-Stille recorders were installed in the BBC's Maida Vale Studios in March 1935. The quality and reliability was slightly improved, though it still tended to be obvious that one was listening to a recording. A reservoir system containing a loop of tape helped to stabilize the speed. The tape was 3 mm wide and traveled at 1.5  meters/second. By September there were three recording rooms, each with two machines.


title: Tape recorder

text: They were not easy to handle. The reels were heavy and expensive and the steel tape has been described as being like a traveling razor blade. The tape was liable to snap, particularly at joints, which at 1.5  meters/second could rapidly cover the floor with loops of the sharp-edged tape. Rewinding was done at twice the speed of the recording.


title: Tape recorder

text: Despite these drawbacks, the ability to make replayable recordings proved useful, and even with subsequent methods coming into use (direct-cut discs and Philips-Miller optical film the Marconi-Stilles remained in use until the late 1940s.


title: Tape recorder

text: Magnetic tape recording as we know it today was developed in Germany during the 1930s at BASF (then part of the chemical giant IG Farben) and AEG in cooperation with the state radio RRG. This was based on Fritz Pfleumer's 1928 invention of paper tape with oxide powder lacquered onto it. The first practical tape recorder from AEG was the Magnetophon K1, demonstrated in Germany in 1935. of AEG built the recorders and developed a ring-shaped recording and playback head. It replaced the needle-shaped head which tended to shred the tape. Friedrich Matthias of IG Farben/BASF developed the recording tape, including the oxide, the binder, and the backing material. Walter Weber, working for at the RRG, discovered the AC biasing technique, which radically improved sound quality.


title: Tape recorder

text: During World War II, the Allies noticed that certain German officials were making radio broadcasts from multiple time zones almost simultaneously. Analysts such as Richard H. Ranger believed that the broadcasts had to be transcriptions, but their audio quality was indistinguishable from that of a live broadcast and their duration was far longer than was possible even with 16 rpm transcription discs. In the final stages of the war in Europe, the Allieds' capture of a number of German Magnetophon recorders from Radio Luxembourg aroused great interest. These recorders incorporated all the key technological features of modern analog magnetic recording and were the basis for future developments in the field.


title: Tape recorder

text: Development of magnetic tape recorders in the late 1940s and early 1950s is associated with the Brush Development Company and its licensee, Ampex. The equally important development of the magnetic tape media itself was led by Minnesota Mining and Manufacturing (3M) corporation.


title: Tape recorder

text: In 1938, S.J. Begun left Germany and joined the Brush Development Company in the United States, where work continued but attracted little attention until the late 1940s when the company released the very first consumer tape recorder in 1946: the Soundmirror BK 401. Several other models were quickly released in the following years. Tapes were initially made of paper coated with magnetite powder. In 1947/48 Minnesota Mining & Manufacturing Company (3M) replaced the paper backing with cellulose acetate or polyester, and coated it first with black oxide, and later, to improve signal-to-noise ratio and improve overall superior quality, with red oxide (gamma ferric oxide).


title: Tape recorder

text: American audio engineer John T. Mullin and entertainer Bing Crosby were key players in the commercial development of magnetic tape. Mullin served in the U.S. Army Signal Corps and was posted to Paris in the final months of WWII. His unit was assigned to find out everything they could about German radio and electronics, including the investigation of claims that the Germans had been experimenting with high-energy directed radio beams as a means of disabling the electrical systems of aircraft. Mullin's unit soon amassed a collection of hundreds of low-quality magnetic dictating machines, but it was a chance visit to a studio at Bad Nauheim near Frankfurt while investigating radio beam rumours, that yielded the real prize.


title: Tape recorder

text: Mullin was given two suitcase-sized AEG 'Magnetophon' high-fidelity recorders and fifty reels of recording tape. He had them shipped home and over the next two years he worked on the machines constantly, modifying them and improving their performance. His major aim was to interest Hollywood studios in using magnetic tape for movie soundtrack recording.


title: Tape recorder

text: Mullin gave two public demonstrations of his machines, and they caused a sensation among American audio professionals; many listeners literally could not believe that what they heard was not a live performance. By luck, Mullin's second demonstration was held at MGM studios in Hollywood and in the audience that day was Bing Crosby's technical director, Murdo Mackenzie. He arranged for Mullin to meet Crosby and in June 1947 he gave Crosby a private demonstration of his magnetic tape recorders.


title: Tape recorder

text: Bing Crosby, a top movie and singing star, was stunned by the amazing sound quality and instantly saw the huge commercial potential of the new machines. Live music was the standard for American radio at the time and the major radio networks didn't permit the use of disc recording in many programs because of their comparatively poor sound quality. Crosby disliked the regimentation of live broadcasts 39 weeks a year, preferring the recording studio's relaxed atmosphere and ability to retain the best parts of a performance. He asked NBC to let him pre-record his 1944–45 series on transcription discs, but the network refused, so Crosby withdrew from live radio for a year. ABC agreed to let him use transcription discs for the 1946–47 season, but listeners complained about the sound quality.


title: Tape recorder

text: Crosby realised that Mullin's tape recorder technology would enable him to pre-record his radio show with high sound quality and that these tapes could be replayed many times with no appreciable loss of quality. Mullin was asked to tape one show as a test and was subsequently hired as Crosby's chief engineer to pre-record the rest of the series.


title: Tape recorder

text: Crosby's season premier on 1 October 1947 was the first magnetic tape broadcast in America. He became the first major American music star to use tape to pre-record radio broadcasts, and the first to master commercial recordings on tape. The taped Crosby radio shows were painstakingly edited through tape-splicing to give them a pace and flow that was wholly unprecedented in radio. Soon other radio performers were demanding the ability to prerecord their broadcasts with the high quality of tape, and the recording ban was lifted.


title: Tape recorder

text: Crosby invested $50,000 of his own money into the Californian electronics company Ampex, and the six-man concern (headed by Alexander M. Poniatoff, whose initials became part of the company name) soon became the world leader in the development of tape recording, with its Model 200 tape deck, released in 1948 and developed from Mullin's modified Magnetophons.


title: Tape recorder

text: The BBC acquired some Magnetophon machines in 1946 on an experimental basis, and these were used in the early stages of the new Third Programme to record and play back performances of operas from Germany. Delivery of tape was preferred as live relays over landlines were unreliable in the immediate post-war period. These machines were used until 1952, though most of the work continued to be done using the established media.


title: Tape recorder

text: In 1948 a new British model became available from EMI: the BTR1. Though in many ways clumsy, its quality was good, and as it wasn't possible to obtain any more Magnetophons it was an obvious choice.


title: Tape recorder

text: In the early 1950s the EMI BTR 2 became available; a much-improved machine and generally liked. The machines were responsive, could run up to speed quite quickly, had light-touch operating buttons, forward-facing heads (The BTR 1s had rear-facing heads which made editing difficult), and were quick and easy to do the finest editing on. It became the standard in recording rooms for many years and was in use until the end of the 1960s.


title: Tape recorder

text: In 1963 The Beatles were allowed to enhance their recordings at the BBC by overdubbing. The BBC didn't have any multi-track equipment; Overdubbing was accomplished by copying onto another tape.


title: Tape recorder

text: The tape speed was eventually standardized at 15 ips for almost all work at Broadcasting House, and at 15 ips for music and 7½ ips for speech at Bush House.


title: Tape recorder

text: Broadcasting House also used the EMI TR90 and a Philips machine which was lightweight but very easy and quick to use: Bush House used several Leevers-Rich models.


title: Tape recorder

text: The Studer range of machines had become pretty well the studio recording industry standard by the 1970s, and gradually these replaced the aging BTR2s in recording rooms and studios. By the mid-2000s tape was pretty well out of use and had been replaced by digital playout systems.


title: Tape recorder

text: The typical professional audio tape recorder of the early 1950s used wide tape on reels, with a capacity of . Typical speeds were initially yielding 30 minutes' recording time on a reel. Early professional machines used single-sided reels but double-sided reels soon became popular particularly for domestic use. Tape reels were made from metal or transparent plastic.


title: Tape recorder

text: Standard tape speeds varied by factors of two – 15 and 30 in/s were used for professional audio recording; for home audiophile prerecorded tapes; for audiophile and consumer recordings (typically on reels). and occasionally even were used for voice, dictation, and applications where very long recording times were needed, such as logging police and fire department calls.


title: Tape recorder

text: The 8-track tape standard, developed by Bill Lear in the mid-1960s, popularized consumer audio playback in automobiles. Eventually, this standard was replaced by the smaller and more reliable Compact Cassette.


title: Tape recorder

text: Philips' development of the Compact Cassette in 1963 and Sony's development of the Walkman in 1979 led to widespread consumer use of magnetic audio tape. In 1990, the Compact Cassette was the dominant format in mass-market recorded music. The development of Dolby noise reduction technology in the 1960s brought audiophile quality recording to the Compact Cassette also contributing to its popularity.


title: Tape recorder

text: Since their first introduction, analog tape recorders have experienced a long series of progressive developments resulting in increased sound quality, convenience, and versatility.


title: Tape recorder

text: Due to electromagnetism, electric current flowing in the coils of the tape head creates a fluctuating magnetic field. This causes the magnetic material on the tape, which is moving past and in contact with the head, to align in a manner proportional to the original signal. The signal can be reproduced by running the tape back across the tape head, where the reverse process occurs – the magnetic imprint on the tape induces a small current in the read head which approximates the original signal and is then amplified for playback. Many tape recorders are capable of recording and playing back simultaneously by means of separate record and playback heads.


title: Tape recorder

text: Modern professional recorders usually use a three-motor scheme. One motor with a constant rotational speed drives the capstan. This, usually combined with a rubber pinch roller, ensures that the tape speed does not fluctuate. The other two motors, which are called torque motors, apply equal and opposite torques to the supply and take-up reels during recording and playback functions and maintain the tape's tension. During fast winding operations, the pinch roller is disengaged and the take-up reel motor produces more torque than the supply motor. The cheapest models use a single motor for all required functions; the motor drives the capstan directly and the supply and take-up reels are loosely coupled to the capstan motor with slipping belts, gears or clutches. There are also variants with two motors, in which one motor is used for the capstan and one for driving the reels for playback, rewind and fast forward.


title: Tape recorder

text: The storage of an analog signal on tape works well, but is not perfect. In particular, the granular nature of the magnetic material adds high-frequency noise to the signal, generally referred to as tape hiss. Also, the magnetic characteristics of tape are not linear. They exhibit a characteristic hysteresis curve, which causes unwanted distortion of the signal. Some of this distortion is overcome by using inaudible high-frequency AC bias when recording. The amount of bias needs careful adjustment for best results as different tape material requires differing amounts of bias. Most recorders have a switch to select this. Additionally, systems such as Dolby noise reduction systems have been devised to ameliorate some noise and distortion problems.


title: Tape recorder

text: Variations in tape speed cause wow and flutter. Flutter can be reduced by using dual capstans. The higher the flutter the more noise that can be heard causing the quality of the recording to be worse. Higher tape speeds used in professional recorders are prone to cause "head bumps", which are fluctuations in low-frequency response.


title: Tape recorder

text: There are a wide variety of tape recorders in existence, from small hand-held devices to large multitrack machines. A machine with built-in speakers and audio power amplification to drive them is usually called a "tape recorder" or – if it has no record functionality – a "tape player", while one that requires external amplification for playback is usually called a "tape deck" (regardless of whether it can record).


title: Tape recorder

text: Multitrack technology enabled the development of modern art music and one such artist, Brian Eno, described the tape recorder as "an automatic musical collage device".


title: Tape recorder

text: Magnetic tape brought about sweeping changes in both radio and the recording industry. Sound could be recorded, erased and re-recorded on the same tape many times, sounds could be duplicated from tape to tape with only minor loss of quality, and recordings could now be very precisely edited by physically cutting the tape and rejoining it. In August 1948, Los Angeles-based Capitol Records became the first recording company to use the new process.


title: Tape recorder

text: Within a few years of the introduction of the first commercial tape recorder, the Ampex 200 model, launched in 1948, the invention of the first multitrack tape recorder, brought about another technical revolution in the recording industry. Tape made possible the first sound recordings totally created by electronic means, opening the way for the bold sonic experiments of the Musique Concrète school and avant-garde composers like Karlheinz Stockhausen, which in turn led to the innovative pop music studio-as-an-instrument recordings of artists such as Frank Zappa, The Beatles and The Beach Boys. Philips advertised their reel-to-reel recorders as an audial family album and pushed families to purchase these recorders to capture and relive memories forever. But the use for recording music slowly but steadily rose as the main function for the tape recorder.


title: Tape recorder

text: Tape enabled the radio industry for the first time to pre-record many sections of program content such as advertising, which formerly had to be presented live, and it also enabled the creation and duplication of complex, high-fidelity, long-duration recordings of entire programs. It also, for the first time, allowed broadcasters, regulators and other interested parties to undertake comprehensive logging of radio broadcasts for legislative and commercial purposes, leading to the growth of the modern media monitoring industry.


title: Tape recorder

text: Innovations, like multitrack recording and tape echo, enabled radio programs and advertisements to be pre-produced to a level of complexity and sophistication that was previously unattainable and tape also led to significant changes to the pacing of program content, thanks to the introduction of the endless tape cartridge.


title: Tape recorder

text: While they are primarily used for sound recording, tape machines were also important for data storage before the advent of floppy disks and CDs, and are still used today, although primarily to provide backup.


title: Tape recorder

text: Professional decks will use higher tape speeds, with 15 and 30 inches per second being most common, while lower tape speeds are usually used for smaller recorders and cassette players, in order to save space where fidelity is not as critical as in professional recorders.By providing a range of tape speeds, users can trade-off recording time against recording quality with higher tape speeds providing greater frequency response.


title: Tape recorder

text: There are many tape speeds in use in all sorts of tape recorders. Speed may be expressed in centimeters per second (cm/s) or in inches per second (in/s).


title: Ring name

text: A ring name is a type of stage name used by an athlete such as a professional wrestler, mixed martial artist, or boxer whose real name is considered unattractive, dull, difficult to pronounce or spell, amusing for the wrong reasons, or projecting the wrong image. Since the advent of the Internet, it is relatively easy to discover the real name.


title: Ring name

text: Ring names are much more common in professional wrestling than any other sport; famous examples include Terry Bollea becoming Hulk Hogan, Michael Shawn Hickenbottom becoming Shawn Michaels, Roderick Toombs becoming Roddy Piper, Dwayne Johnson becoming The Rock, Christopher Irvine becoming Chris Jericho, and Phillip Jack Brooks becoming CM Punk. A number of wrestlers adopted their real name or a variation of it, sometimes modifying the spelling to better fit their gimmick, such as Dave Bautista becoming Batista (later reverting to his real name for his Hollywood acting career), Patricia Stratigeas becoming Trish Stratus, Jonathan Good becoming Jon Moxley, Richard Fliehr becoming Ric Flair and Randall Poffo becoming Randy Savage. Others simply use part of their name, such as Bill Goldberg using Goldberg, Nicole Garcia-Colace using Nikki Bella, Mike Mizanin using The Miz, Cody Runnels using Cody Rhodes, and Michael Wardlow using Wardlow. Many female wrestlers go solely by their first name, while many male and female wrestlers also use a nickname in addition to their real name for marketability and other reasons.


title: Ring name

text: Some (mostly independent) wrestlers still go to great lengths to ensure that their real names are not publicly known. It is a highly respected tradition in Mexican lucha libre for performers to hide their true identities, usually wrestling under masks, and revealing a luchador's identity without their permission is considered a serious offence with real-life consequences. Professional wrestlers are often referred to by their contemporaries by their ring name. In interviews, Bret Hart regularly referred to Mark Calaway, Curt Hennig, and Kevin Nash by their ring names (The Undertaker, Mr. Perfect, and Diesel). Ring names are often trademarked by the promotion that creates a character or gimmick for a performer. It is common to see one performer use a variety of ring names throughout their career, even if their overall persona remains similar. This is especially true in WWE, which has largely forced most wrestlers that have debuted since 2006 to use a WWE-owned ring name instead of a ring name that they used on the independent circuit or, such as with Daniel Bryan and a few others, their real name. One notable exception was made for David Otunga because of his real marriage to singer Jennifer Hudson at the time, which gave WWE some mainstream exposure.


title: Ring name

text: Low Ki used a ring name specifically for his second TNA stint so that he would continue to hold on to his original ring name for elsewhere. Another example is the team known as The Dudley Boyz in ECW and WWE and Team 3D elsewhere. WWE trademarked the "Dudley Boyz" name, leading them to have to change their name when they went to TNA. The members' individual names were also trademarked by WWE, forcing them to have to change their names. WWE partially repealed the policy in 2015, allowing wrestlers who were well known in other promotions such as Samoa Joe, A.J. Styles, Shinsuke Nakamura, Austin Aries, Bobby Roode, and Eric Young to use their long-standing ring names (or, in Nakamura and Roode's cases, their real names) as well as wrestlers who sign "Tier 2" NXT brand contracts such as Johnny Gargano and Tommaso Ciampa, who wrestle both on NXT and the independent circuit to keep their ring names (or, in Gargano's case, his real name). Gargano and Ciampa have since signed exclusive WWE contracts. "In-house" WWE wrestlers still use WWE-owned ring names.


title: Ring name

text: In rare cases, the rights to a wrestler's ring name may be owned by a company with little or no connection to professional wrestling, such as Marvel Comics' ownership of the name Hulk Hogan until early 2003, which was due to Hogan being advertised as "The Incredible Hulk Hogan" early in his career, while Marvel owned the trademark for their comic book character. Sometimes, a wrestler will buy the rights to their own ring name; for example, Steve Borden owns the rights to the name Sting and licenses it to the musician of the same name. The wrestler formerly known as Test took this one step further and legally changed his name to "Andrew Test Martin". Jim Hellwig, known as The Ultimate Warrior, had his name legally changed to simply "Warrior".


title: Ring name

text: In many cases, ring names evolve over time as the wrestler's gimmick changes, either subtly or dramatically. After debuting in WWE as the "Connecticut Blueblood" Hunter Hearst Helmsley, Paul Levesque's character later morphed into Triple H. A more drastic change sometimes occurs when a wrestler turns heroic or villainous, such as when Hulk Hogan joined the villainous nWo (New World Order) and became "Hollywood" Hulk Hogan. His new attitude was enhanced by changing his costume color scheme from his famous red and yellow to nWo's black and white. Steve Williams adopted the ring name Steve Austin to avoid confusion with the then-more established performer "Dr. Death" Steve Williams. Austin would wrestle under that name for several years before signing with the WWF and being given the name "the Ringmaster". This gimmick failed to catch on, and Austin reverted to his established name, reaching his greatest level of success with the prefix "Stone Cold" Steve Austin.


title: Ring name

text: Numerous boxers have used ring names or nicknames as their mode of identification during their professional boxing careers, particularly during the late 19th century and the early 20th century. The ring name "Kid" was particularly popular, indicating the boxer's comparative youth. Since the mid 20th century, ring names for boxers have typically been less common, although nicknames have become more popular in recent years. Famous examples of boxers who used ring names include:


title: FBI–Apple encryption dispute

text: The FBI–Apple encryption dispute concerns whether and to what extent courts in the United States can compel manufacturers to assist in unlocking cell phones whose data are cryptographically protected. There is much debate over public access to strong encryption.


title: FBI–Apple encryption dispute

text: In 2015 and 2016, Apple Inc. received and objected to or challenged at least 11 orders issued by United States district courts under the All Writs Act of 1789. Most of these seek to compel Apple "to use its existing capabilities to extract data like contacts, photos and calls from locked iPhones running on operating systems iOS 7 and older" in order to assist in criminal investigations and prosecutions. A few requests, however, involve phones with more extensive security protections, which Apple has no current ability to break. These orders would compel Apple to write new software that would let the government bypass these devices' security and unlock the phones.


title: FBI–Apple encryption dispute

text: The most well-known instance of the latter category was a February 2016 court case in the United States District Court for the Central District of California. The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) wanted Apple to create and electronically sign new software that would enable the FBI to unlock a work-issued iPhone 5C it recovered from one of the shooters who, in a December 2015 terrorist attack in San Bernardino, California, killed 14 people and injured 22. The two attackers later died in a shootout with police, having first destroyed their personal phones. The work phone was recovered intact but was locked with a four-digit password and was set to eliminate all its data after ten failed password attempts (a common anti-theft measure on smartphones). Apple declined to create the software, and a hearing was scheduled for March 22. However, a day before the hearing was supposed to happen, the government obtained a delay, saying it had found a third party able to assist in unlocking the iPhone. On March 28, the government announced that the FBI had unlocked the iPhone and withdrew its request. In March 2018, the "Los Angeles Times" reported that "the FBI eventually found that Farook's phone had information only about work and revealed nothing about the plot."


title: FBI–Apple encryption dispute

text: In another case in Brooklyn, a magistrate judge ruled that the All Writs Act could not be used to compel Apple to unlock an iPhone. The government appealed the ruling, but then dropped the case on April 22, 2016, after it was given the correct passcode.


title: FBI–Apple encryption dispute

text: In 1993, the National Security Agency (NSA) introduced the Clipper chip, an encryption device with an acknowledged backdoor for government access, that NSA proposed be used for phone encryption. The proposal touched off a public debate, known as the Crypto Wars, and the Clipper chip was never adopted.


title: FBI–Apple encryption dispute

text: It was revealed as a part of the 2013 mass surveillance disclosures by Edward Snowden that the NSA and the British Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ) had access to the user data in iPhones, BlackBerry, and Android phones and could read almost all smartphone information, including SMS, location, emails, and notes. Additionally, the leak stated that Apple had been a part of the government's surveillance program since 2012, however, Apple per their spokesman at the time, "had never heard of it".


title: FBI–Apple encryption dispute

text: According to "The New York Times", Apple developed new encryption methods for its iOS operating system, versions 8 and later, "so deep that Apple could no longer comply with government warrants asking for customer information to be extracted from devices." Throughout 2015, prosecutors advocated for the U.S. government to be able to compel decryption of iPhone contents.


title: FBI–Apple encryption dispute

text: In September 2015, Apple released a white paper detailing the security measures in its then-new iOS 9 operating system. The iPhone 5C model can be protected by a four-digit PIN code. After more than ten incorrect attempts to unlock the phone with the wrong PIN, the contents of the phone will be rendered inaccessible by erasing the AES encryption key that protects its stored data. According to the Apple white paper, iOS includes a Device Firmware Upgrade (DFU) mode, and that "[r]estoring a device after it enters DFU mode returns it to a known good state with the certainty that only unmodified Apple-signed code is present."


title: FBI–Apple encryption dispute

text: The FBI recovered an Apple iPhone 5C—owned by the San Bernardino County, California government—that had been issued to its employee, Syed Rizwan Farook, one of the shooters involved in the December 2015 San Bernardino attack. The attack killed 14 people and seriously injured 22. The two attackers died four hours after the attack in a shootout with police, having previously destroyed their personal phones. Authorities were able to recover Farook's work phone, but could not unlock its four-digit passcode, and the phone was programmed to automatically delete all its data after ten failed password attempts.


title: FBI–Apple encryption dispute

text: On February 9, 2016, the FBI announced that it was unable to unlock the county-owned phone it recovered, due to its advanced security features, including encryption of user data. The FBI first asked the National Security Agency to break into the phone, but they were unable to since they only had knowledge of breaking into other devices that are commonly used by criminals, and not iPhones. As a result, the FBI asked Apple Inc. to create a new version of the phone's iOS operating system that could be installed and run in the phone's random access memory to disable certain security features that Apple refers to as "GovtOS". Apple declined due to its policy which required it to never undermine the security features of its products. The FBI responded by successfully applying to a United States magistrate judge, Sheri Pym, to issue a court order, mandating Apple to create and provide the requested software. The order was not a subpoena, but rather was issued under the All Writs Act of 1789. The court order, called "In the Matter of the Search of an Apple iPhone Seized During the Execution of a Search Warrant on a Black Lexus IS300, California License Plate 35KGD203", was filed in the United States District Court for the Central District of California.


title: FBI–Apple encryption dispute

text: The use of the All Writs Act to compel Apple to write new software was unprecedented and, according to legal experts, it was likely to prompt "an epic fight pitting privacy against national security." It was also pointed out that the implications of the legal precedent that would be established by the success of this action against Apple would go far beyond issues of privacy.


title: FBI–Apple encryption dispute

text: The order also specifies that Apple's assistance may include providing software to the FBI that "will be coded by Apple with a unique identifier of the phone so that the [software] would only load and execute on the SUBJECT DEVICE"


title: FBI–Apple encryption dispute

text: There has been much research and analysis of the technical issues presented in the case since the court order was made available to the public.


title: FBI–Apple encryption dispute

text: The February 16, 2016 order issued by Magistrate Judge Pym gave Apple five days to apply for relief if Apple believed the order was "unreasonably burdensome". Apple announced its intent to oppose the order, citing the security risks that the creation of a backdoor would pose towards customers. It also stated that no government had ever asked for similar access. The company was given until February 26 to fully respond to the court order.