title: Palais-Royal

text: Inspired by the souks of Arabia, the Galerie de Bois, a series of wooden shops linking the ends of the Palais Royal and enclosing the south end of the garden, was first opened in 1786. For Parisians, who lived in the virtual absence of pavements, the streets were dangerous and dirty; the arcade was a welcome addition to the streetscape as it afforded a safe place where Parisians could window shop and socialise. Thus, the Palais-Royal began what architectural historian describes as "l’Ère des passages couverts" (the Arcade Era), which transformed European shopping habits between 1786 and 1935.


title: Palais-Royal

text: During the revolutionary period, Philippe d'Orléans became known as Philippe Égalité and ruled at the Palais de l'Égalité, as it was known during the more radical phase of the Revolution. He had made himself popular in Paris when he opened the gardens of the palace to all Parisians. In one of the shops around the garden Charlotte Corday bought the knife she used to stab Jean-Paul Marat. Along the "galeries", ladies of the night lingered, and smart gambling casinos were lodged in second-floor quarters.


title: Palais-Royal

text: The Marquis de Sade referred to the grounds in front of the palace in his "Philosophy in the Bedroom" (1795) as a place where progressive pamphlets were sold.


title: Palais-Royal

text: Upon the death of the Duke, the palace's ownership lapsed to the state, whence it was called Palais du Tribunat. The Comédie-Française, the state theatre company, was reorganised by Napoleon in the "décret de Moscou" on 15 October 1812, which contains 87 articles.


title: Palais-Royal

text: After the Restoration of the Bourbons, at the Palais-Royal the young Alexandre Dumas obtained employment in the office of the powerful duc d'Orléans, who regained control of the Palace during the Restoration.


title: Palais-Royal

text: The duke had Pierre-François-Léonard Fontaine draw up plans to complete work left unfinished by the duke's father. Fontaine's most significant work included the western wing of the Cour d'Honneur, the Aile Montpensier, and with Charles Percier, what was probably the most famous of Paris's covered arcades, the Galerie d'Orléans, enclosing the Cour d'Honneur on its north side. Both were completed in 1830. The Galerie d'Orléans was demolished in the 1930s, but its flanking rows of columns still stand between the Cour d'Honneur and the Palais-Royal Garden.


title: Palais-Royal

text: In the Revolution of 1848, a Paris mob attacked and looted the royal residence Palais-Royal, particularly the art collection of King Louis-Philippe. During the Second French Republic, the Palais was briefly renamed the "Palais-National".


title: Palais-Royal

text: During the Second French Empire of Napoleon III, the Palais-Royal became home to the cadet branch of the Bonaparte family, represented by Prince Napoleon, Napoleon III's cousin. A lavish dining room was constructed in the Second Empire style, and is now known as the Salle Napoleon of the Council of State.


title: Palais-Royal

text: During the final days of Paris Commune, on May 24 1871, the Palais, seen as a symbol of aristocracy, was set afire by the Communards, but suffered less damage than other government buildings. As a result, it became the temporary (and later permanent) home of several state institutions, including the Conseil d'Etat, or State Council.


title: Palais-Royal

text: Today, the Palais-Royal is the home of the Conseil d'État, the Constitutional Council, and the Ministry of Culture.


title: Palais-Royal

text: The buildings of the Palais-Royal face south to the Place du Palais-Royal and the Louvre across the Rue de Rivoli. The central part of the Palace is occupied by the Conseil-d'État, or State Council. It has three floors, and is topped by a low cupola and a rounded pediment filled with sculpture. Two arched passages under the central building lead to the Courtyard of Honor behind. In the east wing, to the right, are offices of the Ministry of Culture and Communication. The two wings of the building have triangular fronts filled with sculpture, inspired by classical architecture and typical of the Louis XIV style.


title: Palais-Royal

text: On the west side of the Council building is Place Colette, and the Salle Richelieu of the Comédie Française. Behind that are the offices of the Constitutional Council. On the left side of the Salle Richelieu is another small square, Place André Malraux.


title: Palais-Royal

text: The Council of State, created by Napoleon in 1799, inherited many of the functions of the earlier Royal Council, acting both as a consultant to the government and a kind of Supreme Court. It was installed in the Palais-Royal in 1875.


title: Palais-Royal

text: The Conseil has its own courtyard, facing out onto the Place du Palais-Royal and the Rue du Rivoli. Inside is the grand horseshoe stairway of honor, which curves upward along the walls to the landing on the first floor. It is decorated with theatrical effects, including ionic columns, and blind arches giving the illusion of bays. A trompe-l'oeil painting in an archway appears to give a view of a classical statue, above which putti hold wreathes around a bust of Cardinal Richelieu. The stairway was made by Pierre Contant d'Ivry in 1765.


title: Palais-Royal

text: The most lavish room of the Council is the Hall of the Tribunal of Conflicts, a kind of courtroom installed in the former dining room of Duchess of Orleans, built by the architect Contant d'Ivry in 1753. It still preserves much of its original decoration, with pilasters and columns, and decorative medallions of putti representing the four seasons and the four elements. The ceiling has a trompe l'oeil painting from 1852 depicting a balustrade and a view of the sky.


title: Palais-Royal

text: The General Assembly chamber was first a chapel, then, under Price Napoleon, a gallery of paintings. It has been changed more than any of the other rooms in the Council. At one end is a long table, with a seat in the center for the Vice President of the Assembly, who chairs the meetings, and the six presidents of the sections of Council. The decoration of the room is particularly rich and varied, with medallions and cameos and allegorical paintings illustrating the various codes of law and the administrative departments. Below these are four more recent large murals, installed between 1916 and 1926, on the theme of France at Work. They depict agriculture (workers in the fields), commerce (the Port of Marseilles), urban labor (Paris workers maintaining the Plae de la Concorde), and intellectual labor.


title: Palais-Royal

text: The office of the French Minister of Culture is located in the Palais Royale, in an apartment originally built for the Duke and Duchess of Orleans in 1820, and later occupied by King Jerome of Westphalia in the 1820s. The gilded and highly decorated salon of Jerome, the younger brother of Napoleon, features sculpture, torchieres and other decoration originally in the throne room of the Tuileries Palace.


title: Palais-Royal

text: The Constitutional Council occupies an apartment of the Palace that was originally built between 1829 and 1831 for the Duke of Chartres, the younger brother of King Louis-Philippe, though he chose to live instead in the Tuileries Palace. After 1859 it was the home of Prince Napoléon Bonaparte the second son of Jerome, King of Westphalia, youngest brother of Napoleon I, and his wife, Marie Clotilde of Savoy. The decor made by Fontaine comes from that period.


title: Palais-Royal

text: The grand stairway has two flights of stairs, each with a landing, while the first floor is surrounded by Ionic columns and topped with caisson vaults. Light comes from skylights in the vaults, reflected by rows of mirrors. A marble bust representing Rome, which originally was in the collection of Cardinal Richelieu, decorates the stairway landing. a modern addition is the chandelier made by Claude Lalanne and installed in 1999. The meeting room of the council, the dining room of Prince Napoleon and Marie Clotilde, was made after 1860 by the state architect Prosper Chabrol with murals in the style of ancient Pompei. One unusual feature of the apartment is the small, windowless oratory, a small place for prayer, with a statue of the Virgin, and walls covered with red and gold fabric, made for Marie Clotilde next to the bedroom. It was restored to its original appearance in 1980.


title: Palais-Royal

text: Behind the Council of State, and separated from the gardens by two rows of columns, which once were part of the Gallery of Orleans, is another courtyard, the Courtyard of Honor, which was created in the 18th century on a foundation made by Victor Louis. Three arcades in the center of the Council building mark the passageway to the front side of the building. The facade facing the courtyard has pairs of Ionic columns topped by a balustrade, decorated with four classical statues, each three meters high, representing Mars, Apollo, and allegorical figures of Prudence and Liberality by the sculptor Augustin Pajou, which had been featured at the Paris Salon of 1769. On the other side of the balustrade are later statues of Commerce and Navigation and figures of Science, Agriculture, by Antoine Gerard, made in about 1830.


title: Palais-Royal

text: In 1985-86 the Ministry of Culture sponsored two sculptural works in the courtyard; the first, called "Photo-Souvenir - Les Deux Plateaux", by Daniel Buren, consists of short columns of various sizes arranged across the courtyard. The idea is to create two virtual platforms, without floors; the columns vary in height because of differences in height of the illusionary platforms; some of the column rows are purely horizontal, aligned to the height of the column bases of the gallery of Orleans, while the smaller columns all rise to the elevation of a lower non-existent platform; their variation in height is caused by the difference of elevation in parts of the courtyard. Each column has vertical bands of black and white.


title: Palais-Royal

text: The second work is composed of two fountains by sculptor Pol Bury, located within the roofless Gallery of Orleans, which separates the Courtyard from the gardens. It consists of two square basins each containing seventeen polished metal spheres of different sizes, with water flowing around them. The polished spheres reflect the architecture of the arcades around them.


title: Palais-Royal

text: A third work, commissioned in 1994 is by the Dutch artist Jan Dibbets, passes through the courtyard of the Palais Royale. It is called "Homage to Arago", and is a tribute to the French mathematician François Arago, who first conceived the prime meridian of Paris. the north–south line passing through the center of Paris which marked the prime meridian (rather than Greenwich) on French Maps. The work consists of one hundred thirty-five brass small brass plaques with the name "Arago" fixed on the pavement on a line which passes through the Palais Royal, and extends on the same axis to the north and south across Paris.


title: Palais-Royal

text: The first garden of the Palais was planted by Cardinal Richelieu in 1629, where the Court of Honor is today. In 1633, Richelieu obtained authorisation to extend the garden northeast into the land occupied by the obsolete medieval city walls of Paris. He also received permission to sell forty-five building sites around the garden. The new garden site was 170 meters by 400 meters, making it the third largest garden in Paris, after the Tuileries Garden and Luxembourg Garden. The new garden featured long alleys shaded by trees, elaborate parterres and flower beds, a fountain in the centre, and a circular water basin at the north end. The master hydraulics engineer Jean-Baptiste Le Tellier designed the fountain, which, like the Louvre Palace, took its water from the La Samaritaine pump on the Seine.


title: Palais-Royal

text: The garden was redesigned several times, notably in 1674 by Andre Le Notre, and his nephew Claude Desgots in 1730. In 1817, under Charles X of France, the main water basin was enlarged to twenty-five meters in diameter, and the longitudinal parterres were remade in 1824. In 1992 the landscape gardener Mark Rudkin created new lawns and flower beds, termed "Salons of greenery", with seasonal flowers enclosed by grills covered with climbing plants. The garden was classified as a French historical monument in 1920, followed by the rest of the Palais-Royal in 1994.


title: Palais-Royal

text: A small cannon was installed in the middle of the bowling green at the north end of the garden in 1786. It fired a shot each day at noon, regulated by an ingenious mechanism that used a magnifying lens pointed at the sun's noontime position to light the match which fired the gunpowder. Between 1891 and 1911, the official noontime in France was defined by the cannon shot. It was stolen in 1998, but recovered and returned to its place in 2002.


title: Palais-Royal

text: The two major alleys of the gardens are named for two of the famous 20th-century residents of the neighbouring buildings, the writers Colette and Jean Cocteau.


title: Palais-Royal

text: Near the end of the 18th century the architect Victor Louis designed rows of town houses on three sides of the garden, which extend 275 meters on the east and west and about one hundred meters on the north. Each has a gallery and boutiques on the ground floor, topped by an entresol, then residential floors. The entrances are on the streets outside the Palais. Louis artfully merged the facades of the houses facing the garden together, giving each wing the appearance of a single long building. The unified sculptural decoration of the facades features classical pilasters, balustrades and bas-relief sculpture.


title: Palais-Royal

text: At first the town houses were rented, but between 1787 and 1790, as the Revolution began, their owner, the Duke of Chartres, sold sixty-seven houses. Colette occupied the entresol of the house at number 9 rue de Beaujolais in 1927, then moved to the first floor from 1938 until 1954. Her friend, the film-maker and writer Jean Cocteau lived on the other side, at 36 rue de Montpensier. They regularly had breakfast together at the Le Grand Vefour restaurant in the arcades. The two alleys in the garden are now named after them.


title: Palais-Royal

text: The six-story buildings that surround the gardens on three sides have galleries on the ground floor containing shops and restaurants The garden galleries were constructed 1781–1784 to the designs of the Victor Louis. On the west side is the Montpensier Gallery, on the north, the Beaujolais Gallery, and to the east, the Valois Gallery. Traversing the south side of the garden are two parallel colonnades, remnants of the former covered Galerie d'Orléans (demolished in 1930). They stand between the court of honor and the garden.


title: Palais-Royal

text: The Palais Royale was famous for its restaurants, particularly following the French Revolution, when chefs of aristocratic families who had fled France opened their own restaurants. One surviving restaurant from this period is Le Grand Véfour, It opened in 1784 as the Café de Chartres. In the 20th century it was a favorite dining spot for Colette and Jean Cocteau, and preserves much of its original decor.


title: Palais-Royal

text: The Salle Richelieu, now the principal theater of the Comédie Française, was designed by Victor Louis and completed in 1786. It was inaugurated on 15 May 1790. The theater was extensively remodelled over the years; only the exterior walls and columns of the peristyle of the original theater survive, but the reconstructions have preserved the original plan and style.


title: Palais-Royal

text: The site was quite small for such a large theater, 44 by 32 metres, so Louis was compelled to stack the seven levels of the theater directly on top of the vestibule on the ground floor. The auditorium of the theater is in the form of an oval. Four stairways serve the seven levels. Balconies, loges and galleries fill the different levels. Four massive columns frame the stage. The hall is covered by a large cupola supported by pendentives and decorated with frescoes, The interior is lavishly decorated in blue and green ornamented with gold, colors traditionally associated in the 18th century with classical theatres. Louis built the cupola with a metallic framework, which saved the structure when a fire struck the theater in 1900. The theater today can hold 2,000 spectators.


title: Palais-Royal

text: The Théâtre du Palais-Royal is located on the northwest corner of the Palais-Royal, in the Galerie de Montpensier at its intersection with the Galerie de Beaujolais. It has 750 seats. The first theatre was built in 1784 by Victor Louis for the marionette theater of the Count of Beaujolais on its first floor. This was purchased in 1789 by the theatrical producer Mademoiselle Montansier, who had Louis rebuild it in 1791 into a larger variety theater, called the Montpensier-Variétés. The scandalous varieties of entertainment, and frequentation by prostitutes, who sought clients in the galleries of the Palais Royal, led to the theater being closed down in 1806. In 1831, under the new regime of King Louis-Philippe, it was rebuilt and reopened as a legitimate theater, staging the plays of Victorien Sardou and Eugene Labiche among others. Concerns about theater fires caused the reconstruction in 1887 of the facade, with elaborate tiers of cast-iron fire escapes and polychrome ceramics. The architect of the facade was Paul Sédille, who also designed the interior of the Printemps department store (1881-89). The theatre is now classified as a French historical monument.


title: Kuznets curve

text: The Kuznets curve () expresses a hypothesis advanced by economist Simon Kuznets in the 1950s and 1960s. According to this hypothesis, as an economy develops, market forces first increase and then decrease economic inequality.


title: Kuznets curve

text: The Kuznets curve appeared to be consistent with experience at the time it was proposed. However, since the 1960s, inequality has risen in the US and other developed countries.


title: Kuznets curve

text: The Kuznets ratio is a measurement of the ratio of income going to the highest-earning households (usually defined by the upper 20%) to income going to the lowest-earning households, which is commonly measured by either the lowest 20% or lowest 40% of income. Comparing 20% to 20%, a completely even distribution is expressed as 1; 20% to 40% changes this value to 0.5.


title: Kuznets curve

text: Kuznets curve diagrams show an inverted U curve, although variables along the axes are often mixed and matched, with inequality or the Gini coefficient on the Y axis and economic development, time or per-capita incomes on the X axis.


title: Kuznets curve

text: One explanation of such a progression suggests that early in development, investment opportunities for those who have money multiply, while an influx of cheap rural labor to the cities holds down wages. Whereas in mature economies, human capital accrual (an estimate of income that has been achieved but not yet consumed) takes the place of physical capital accrual as the main source of growth; and inequality slows growth by lowering education levels because poorer, disadvantaged people lack finance for their education in imperfect credit-markets.


title: Kuznets curve

text: The Kuznets curve implies that as a nation undergoes industrialization – and especially the mechanization of agriculture – the center of the nation's economy will shift to the cities. As internal migration by farmers looking for better-paying jobs in urban hubs causes a significant rural-urban inequality gap (the owners of firms would be profiting, while laborers from those industries would see their incomes rise at a much slower rate and agricultural workers would possibly see their incomes decrease), rural populations decrease as urban populations increase. Inequality is then expected to decrease when a certain level of average income is reached and the processes of industrialization – democratization and the rise of the welfare state – allow for the benefits from rapid growth, and increase the per-capita income. Kuznets believed that inequality would follow an inverted "U" shape as it rises and then falls again with the increase of income per-capita.


title: Kuznets curve

text: In both explanations, inequality will decrease after 50% of the shift force switches over to the higher paying sector.


title: Kuznets curve

text: Inequality has risen in most developed countries since the 1960s, so that graphs of inequality over time no longer display a Kuznets curve. Piketty has argued that the decline in inequality over the first half of the 20th century was a once-off effect due to the destruction of large concentrations of wealth by war and economic depression.


title: Kuznets curve

text: Critics of the Kuznets curve theory argue that its U-shape comes not from progression in the development of individual countries, but rather from historical differences between countries. For instance, many of the middle income countries used in Kuznets' data set were in Latin America, a region with historically high levels of inequality. When controlling for this variable, the U-shape of the curve tends to disappear (e.g. Deininger and Squire, 1998). Regarding the empirical evidence, based on large panels of countries or time series approaches, Fields (2001) considers the Kuznets hypothesis refuted.


title: Kuznets curve

text: The East Asian miracle (EAM) has been used to criticize the validity of the Kuznets curve theory. The rapid economic growth of eight East Asian countries—Japan; the Four Asian Tigers South Korea, Taiwan, Singapore, Hong Kong; Indonesia, Thailand, and Malaysia—between 1965 and 1990, was called the East Asian miracle. The EAM defies the Kuznets curve, which insists growth produces inequality, and that inequality is a necessity for overall growth. Manufacturing and export grew quickly and powerfully. Yet, contrary to Kuznets' historical examples, the EAM saw continual increases in life expectancy and decreasing rates of severe poverty. Scholars have sought to understand how the EAM saw the benefits of rapid economic growth distributed broadly among the population. Joseph Stiglitz explains this by the immediate re-investment of initial benefits into land reform (increasing rural productivity, income, and savings), universal education (providing greater equality and what Stiglitz calls an "intellectual infrastructure" for productivity), and industrial policies that distributed income more equally through high and increasing wages and limited the price increases of commodities. These factors increased the average citizen's ability to consume and invest within the economy, further contributing to economic growth. Stiglitz highlights that the high rates of growth provided the resources to promote equality, which acted as a positive-feedback loop to support the high rates of growth.


title: Kuznets curve

text: Cambridge University Lecturer Gabriel Palma recently found no evidence for a 'Kuznets curve' in inequality:


title: Kuznets curve

text: "[T]he statistical evidence for the 'upwards' side of the 'Inverted-U' between inequality and income per capita seems to have vanished, as many low and low-middle income countries now have a distribution of income similar to that of most middle-income countries (other than those of Latin America and Southern Africa). That is, half of Sub-Saharan Africa and many countries in Asian, including India, China and Vietnam, now have an income distribution similar to that found in North Africa, the Caribbean and the second-tier NICs. And this level is also similar to that of half of the first-tier NICs, the Mediterranean EU and the Anglophone OECD (excluding the US). As a result, about 80% of the world population now live in countries with a Gini around 40."


title: Kuznets curve

text: Palma goes on to note that, among middle-income countries, only those in Latin America and Southern Africa live in an inequality league of their own. Instead of a Kuznets curve, he breaks the population into deciles and examines the relationship between their respective incomes and income inequality. Palma then shows that there are two distributional trends taking place in inequality within a country:


title: Kuznets curve

text: "One is 'centrifugal', and takes place at the two tails of the distribution—leading to an increased diversity across countries in the shares appropriated by the top 10 percent and bottom forty percent. The other is 'centripetal', and takes place in the middle—leading to a remarkable uniformity across countries in the share of income going to the half of the population located between deciles 5 to 9."


title: Kuznets curve

text: Therefore, it is the share of the richest 10% of the population that affects the share of the poorest 40% of the population with the middle to upper-middle staying the same across all countries.


title: Kuznets curve

text: In "Capital in the Twenty-First Century", Thomas Piketty denies the effectiveness of the Kuznets curve. He points out that in some rich countries, the level of income inequality in 21st century has exceeded that in the second decades of 20th century, proposing the explanation that when the rate of return on capital is greater than the rate of economic growth over the long term, the result is the concentration of wealth.


title: Kuznets curve

text: In a biography about Simon Kuznets's scientific methods, economist Robert Fogel noted Kuznets's own reservations about the "fragility of the data" which underpinned the hypothesis. Fogel notes that most of Kuznets's paper was devoted to explicating the conflicting factors at play. Fogel emphasized Kuznets's opinion that "even if the data turned out to be valid, they pertained to an extremely limited period of time and to exceptional historical experiences." Fogel noted that despite these "repeated warnings", Kuznets's caveats were overlooked, and the Kuznets curve was "raised to the level of law" by other economists.


title: Kuznets curve

text: Dobson and Ramlogan's research looked to identify the relationship between inequality and trade liberalization. There have been mixed findings with this idea – some developing countries have experienced greater inequality, less inequality, or no difference at all, due to trade liberalization. Because of this, Dobson and Ramlogan suggest that perhaps trade openness can be related to inequality through a Kuznets curve framework. A trade liberalization-versus-inequality graph measures trade openness along the x-axis and inequality along the y-axis. Dobson and Ramlogan determine trade openness by the ratio of exports and imports (the total trade) and the average tariff rate; inequality is determined by gross primary school enrolment rates, the share of agriculture in total output, the rate of inflation, and cumulative privatization. By studying data from several Latin American countries that have implemented trade liberalization policies in the past 30 years, the Kuznets curve seems to apply to the relationship between trade liberalization and inequality (measured by the GINI coefficient). However, many of these nations saw a shift from low-skill labour production to natural resource intensive activities. This shift would not benefit low-skill workers as much. So although their evidence seems to support the Kuznets theory in relation to trade liberalization, Dobson and Ramlogan assert that policies for redistribution must be simultaneously implemented in order to mitigate the initial increase in inequality.


title: Kuznets curve

text: The environmental Kuznets curve (EKC) is a hypothesized relationship between environmental quality and economic development: various indicators of environmental degradation tend to get worse as modern economic growth occurs until average income reaches a certain point over the course of development. The EKC suggests, in sum, that "the solution to pollution is economic growth."


title: Kuznets curve

text: Although subject to continuing debate, there is considerable evidence to support the application of environmental Kuznets curve for various environmental health indicators, such as water, air pollution and ecological footprint which show the inverted U-shaped curve as per capita income and/or GDP rise. It has been argued that this trend occurs in the level of many of the environmental pollutants, such as sulfur dioxide, nitrogen oxide, lead, DDT, chlorofluorocarbons, sewage, and other chemicals previously released directly into the air or water. For example, between 1970 and 2006, the United States' inflation-adjusted GDP grew by 195%, the number of cars and trucks in the country more than doubled, and the total number of miles driven increased by 178%. However, during that same period certain regulatory changes and technological innovations led to decreases in annual emissions of carbon monoxide from 197 million tons to 89 million, nitrogen oxides emissions from 27 million tons to 19 million, sulfur dioxide emissions from 31 million tons to 15 million, particulate emissions by 80%, and lead emissions by more than 98%.


title: Kuznets curve

text: Deforestation may follow a Kuznets curve (cf. forest transition curve). Among countries with a per capita GDP of at least $4,600, net deforestation has ceased. Yet it has been argued that wealthier countries are able to maintain forests along with high consumption by 'exporting' deforestation, leading to continuing deforestation on a worldwide scale.


title: Kuznets curve

text: However, the EKC model is debatable when applied to other pollutants, some natural resource use, and biodiversity conservation. For example, energy, land and resource use (sometimes called the "ecological footprint") may not fall with rising income. While the ratio of energy "per real GDP" has fallen, "total" energy use is still rising in most developed countries as are "total" emission of many greenhouse gases. Additionally, the status of many key "ecosystem services" provided by ecosystems, such as freshwater provision (Perman, "et al"., 2003), soil fertility, and fisheries, have continued to decline in developed countries. Proponents of the EKC argue that this varied relationship does not necessarily invalidate the hypothesis, but instead that the applicability of the Kuznets curves to various environmental indicators may differ when considering different ecosystems, economics, regulatory schemes, and technologies.


title: Kuznets curve

text: At least one critic argues that the US is still struggling to attain the income level necessary to prioritize certain environmental pollutants such as carbon emissions, which have yet to follow the EKC. Yandle "et al." argue that the EKC has not been found to apply to carbon because most pollutants create localized problems like lead and sulfur, so there are a greater urgency and response to cleaning up such pollutants. As a country develops, the marginal value of cleaning up such pollutants makes a large direct improvement to the quality of citizens' lives. Conversely, reducing carbon dioxide emissions does not have a dramatic impact at a local level, so the impetus to clean them up is only for the altruistic reason of improving the global environment. This becomes a tragedy of the commons where it is most efficient for everyone to pollute and for no one to clean up, and everyone is worse as a result (Hardin, 1968). Thus, even in a country like the US with a high level of income, carbon emissions are not decreasing in accordance with the EKC. However, there seems to be little consensus about whether EKC is formed with regard to CO emissions, as CO is a global pollutant that has yet to prove its validity within Kuznet's Curve. That said, Yandle "et al." also concluded that "policies that stimulate growth (trade liberalization, economic restructuring, and price reform) should be good for the environment".


title: Kuznets curve

text: Other critics point out that researchers also disagree about the shape of the curve when longer-term time scales are evaluated. For example, Millimet and Stengos regard the traditional "inverse U" shape as actually being an "N" shape, indicating that pollution increases as a country develops, decreases once the threshold GDP is reached, and then begins increasing as national income continues to increase. While such findings are still being debated, it could prove to be important because it poses the concerning question of whether pollution actually begins to decline for good when an economic threshold is reached or whether the decrease is only in local pollutants and pollution is simply exported to poorer developing countries. Levinson concludes that the environmental Kuznets curve is insufficient to support a pollution policy regardless whether it is laissez-faire or interventionist, although the literature has been used this way by the press.


title: Kuznets curve

text: Arrow "et al." argue pollution-income progression of agrarian communities (clean) to industrial economies (pollution intensive) to service economies (cleaner) would appear to be false if pollution increases again at the end due to higher levels of income and consumption of the population at large. A difficulty with this model is that it lacks predictive power because it is highly uncertain how the next phase of economic development will be characterized.


title: Kuznets curve

text: Suri and Chapman argue that the EKC is not applicable on the global scale, as a net pollution reduction may not actually be occurring globally. Wealthy nations have a trend of exporting the activities that create the most pollution, like manufacturing of clothing and furniture, to poorer nations that are still in the process of industrial development (Suri and Chapman, 1998). This could mean that as the world's poor nations develop, they will have nowhere to export their pollution. Thus, this progression of environmental clean-up occurring in conjunction with economic growth cannot be replicated indefinitely because there may be nowhere to export waste and pollution-intensive processes. However, Gene Grossman and Alan B. Krueger, the authors who initially made the correlation between economic growth, environmental clean-up, and the Kuznets curve, conclude that there is "no evidence that environmental quality deteriorates steadily with economic growth."


title: Kuznets curve

text: Stern warns "it is very easy to do bad econometrics", and says "the history of the EKC exemplifies what can go wrong". He finds that "little or no attention has been paid to the statistical properties of the data used such as serial dependence or stochastic trends in time series and few tests of model adequacy have been carried out or presented. However, one of the main purposes of doing econometrics is to test which apparent relationships ... are valid and which are spurious correlations". He states his unequivocal finding: "When we do take such statistics into account and use appropriate techniques we find that the EKC does not exist (Perman and Stern 2003). Instead, we get a more realistic view of the effect of economic growth and technological changes on environmental quality. It seems that most indicators of environmental degradation are monotonically rising in income though the 'income elasticity' is less than one and is not a simple function of income alone. Time-related effects reduce environmental impacts in countries at all levels of income. However, in rapidly growing middle income countries the scale effect, which increases pollution and other degradation, overwhelms the time effect. For example, Armenia, after gaining its independence from the Soviet Union, has become the country with the least income elasticity in Eastern Europe and Centra Asia. In wealthy countries, growth is slower, and pollution reduction efforts can overcome the scale effect. This is the origin of the apparent EKC effect".


title: Kuznets curve

text: Steel production has been shown to follow a Kuznets-type curve in the national development cycles of a range of economies, including the United States, Japan, Republic of Korea and China. This discovery, and the first usage of the term "Kuznets Curve for Steel" and "Metal intensity Kuznets Curve" were by Huw McKay in a 2008 working paper (McKay 2008). This was subsequently developed in McKay (2012). A body of work on "Material Kuznets Curves" focused on non-ferrous metals has also emerged as academic and policy interest in resource intensity increased during the first two decades of the 21st century.


title: Action Point

text: Action Point is a 2018 American comedy film directed by Tim Kirkby and starring Johnny Knoxville and Chris Pontius, both of whom had worked together on "Jackass". Knoxville was inspired to make the film after seeing Matt Robertson's 2013 short documentary "The Most Insane Amusement Park Ever", about Action Park, a theme park in New Jersey which was notorious for its poorly designed, unsafe rides, in addition to employing underaged, undertrained and often intoxicated staff.


title: Action Point

text: As with "", a previous film by Knoxville, "Action Point" features traditional Jackass-style stunts connected by a fictional narrative. It was released in the United States on June 1, 2018 by Paramount Pictures. It underperformed at the box office, grossing $5.1 million against its $19 million budget and received mostly negative reviews from critics, who called the film "boring, by-the-numbers and deflated."


title: Action Point

text: Several years ago, D.C. was the owner of Action Point, a low-rent amusement park with numerous safety hazards; regardless, the park was popular with the youth due to it being the only amusement park in the area. However, a new amusement park named 7 Parks opens up one day and begins to draw customers away from Action Point. D.C. is also pressured by his loan officer Knoblach into selling his land due to his failure to pay off a $100,000 loan. Meanwhile, his estranged teenage daughter Boogie comes to visit and begins to help around the park as a summer job.


title: Action Point

text: One night, D.C. and his staff break into 7 Parks to observe and sabotage the park, but are nearly caught. D.C. realizes that he needs to come up with something big to compete, eventually deciding that they need to start promoting Action Point as a park about what patrons "can" do, whereas 7 Parks is about what they "can't" do. He then decides to remove all the safety measures from the rides in an attempt to make the park stand out, causing several people - including himself - to be seriously injured. Boogie also confesses to park lifeguard Benny that the true purpose of her visit is to get D.C. to sign papers that would allow her mother's boyfriend to become her legal guardian.


title: Action Point

text: As a publicity stunt, D.C. and the staff interrupt a local TV broadcast promoting the park which draws in customers, but sends the park into chaos due to the lack of proper rules and regulations. At Boogie's advice, D.C opens up a section for kids, but it is poorly designed causing her to inform legal authorities who then shut the park down.


title: Action Point

text: D.C. and the staff repair the park and reopen it, but are told that the bank has foreclosed on the park. Furthermore, Boogie becomes upset after D.C. breaks his promise to take her to a concert, and gets drunk with the staff before they are all arrested. After D.C. bails her out, she snaps at him and reveals her intention for him to sign the papers. The next day, he finds her gone and learns that she may have left for Las Vegas on a bus. Desperate, he and Benny chase down the bus with their car but lose it after it collides with them.


title: Action Point

text: D.C. then realizes that she was not on the bus and tracks her to a restaurant where he explains that the park has become his new family after losing his first one, and the reason he obsesses over it was because he did not want to lose it as well. Unable to pay off his loan, D.C. decides to blow up the park and sell off the land to Knoblach. To get back at him however, D.C. opens the park gates one last time and gives away free beer as he is no longer liable for any damages that will occur, and the drunk patrons go wild and cause massive damage to the park. Later that night, the staff gather one last time and shoot fireworks to commemorate their time in the park.


title: Action Point

text: The next day, as Boogie prepares to leave, D.C. proposes that the two of them instead take a road trip and make a stop in Austin to attend the concert. Boogie is overjoyed and the former park staff offer to come along.


title: Action Point

text: Present day, a much older D.C. finishes his story to his granddaughter as Boogie arrives home and before he leaves, he pretends to have a heart attack in the yard, which Boogie calls out as the two of them share a laugh.


title: Action Point

text: Knoxville, in an interview with "Vanity Fair", said that during filming, he was injured more times than his past films throughout his entire career: "four concussions, broke my hand, busted my meniscus, whiplash, stitches over my right eye which required stitches, lost a couple teeth." While filming the Alpine Slide sequence, he landed on his face, feet, and shoulder. After filming, he was sent to the emergency room, checked out, and went home. When he blew his nose to get rid of the blood, his left eye popped out of his socket. Freaked out, he immediately called his executive producer and advised him that he needed to return to the hospital. The doctors told him that he could not sneeze or blow his nose for six weeks. In the last days of filming, they filmed only the right side of his face, because he looked like "a Picasso painting."


title: Action Point

text: Originally titled "Action Park", the film was released in the United States on June 1, 2018, having previously been slated for March 23 and May 11, 2018 releases.


title: Action Point

text: In the United States and Canada, "Action Point" was released alongside "Adrift" and "Upgrade", and was originally projected to gross around $10 million from 2,032 theaters in its opening weekend. However, after making $790,000 on its first day, estimates were lowered to $2–3 million. It ended up debuting to $2.3 million and finishing ninth, the worst opening of Knoxville's career and 23rd lowest-ever for a wide release. "Deadline Hollywood" attribute the low figure to the lack of "Jackass" stars in the film sans Knoxville and Chris Pontius, poor critical reviews and the difficulty of promoting an original R-rated comedy.


title: Action Point

text: On Rotten Tomatoes, the film has an approval rating of based on reviews, and an average rating of . The site's critical consensus simply reads, "Ouch." On Metacritic, the film has a weighted average score of 36 out of 100, based on 19 critics, indicating "generally unfavorable reviews". Audiences polled by CinemaScore gave the film an average grade of "C+" on an A+ to F scale.


title: HAL HF-24 Marut

text: The HAL HF-24 Marut ("Spirit of the Tempest") was an Indian fighter-bomber aircraft of the 1960s. Developed by Hindustan Aeronautics Limited (HAL), with Kurt Tank as lead designer. The Project Engineer from HAL was George William Benjamin. It is the first Indian-developed jet aircraft, and the first Asian jet fighter (outside Russia/Soviet Union) to go beyond the test phase and into successful production and active service. On 17 June 1961, the type conducted its maiden flight; on 1 April 1967, the first production Marut was officially delivered to the IAF.


title: HAL HF-24 Marut

text: While the Marut had been envisioned as a supersonic-capable combat aircraft, it would never manage to exceed Mach 1. This limitation was principally due to the engines used, which in turn had been limited by various political and economic factors; multiple attempts to develop improved engines or to source alternative powerplants were fruitless. The Marut's cost and lack of capability in comparison to contemporary aircraft were often criticised.


title: HAL HF-24 Marut

text: A total of 147 Maruts were manufactured, the majority for the Indian Air Force (IAF). While initially envisioned as a capable interceptor aircraft, it was primarily used for ground attack missions. In this role, the Marut saw combat during the Indo-Pakistani War of 1971, notably participating in the Battle of Longewala. By 1982, the Marut was increasingly obsolescent, and was gradually phased out during the late 1980s.


title: HAL HF-24 Marut

text: During the 1950s, Hindustan Aircraft Limited (HAL) had developed and produced several types of trainer aircraft, such as the HAL HT-2. However, elements within the firm were eager to expand into the then-new realm of supersonic fighter aircraft. Around the same time, the Indian government was in the process of formulating a new Air Staff Requirement for a Mach 2-capable combat aircraft to equip the Indian Air Force (IAF). However, as HAL lacked the necessary experience in both developing and manufacturing frontline combat fighters, it was clear that external guidance would be invaluable; this assistance was embodied by Kurt Tank.


title: HAL HF-24 Marut

text: In 1956, HAL formally began design work on the supersonic fighter project. The Indian government, led by Jawaharlal Nehru, authorised the development of the aircraft, stating that it would aid in the development of a modern aircraft industry in India. The first phase of the project sought to develop an airframe suitable for travelling at supersonic speeds, and able to effectively perform combat missions as a fighter aircraft, while the second phase sought to domestically design and produce an engine capable of propelling the aircraft. Early on, there was an explicit adherence to satisfying the IAF's requirements for a capable fighter bomber; attributes such as a twin-engine configuration and a speed of Mach 1.4 to 1.5 were quickly emphasised.


title: HAL HF-24 Marut

text: During development, HAL designed and constructed a full-scale two-seat wooden glider to act as a flying demonstrator. Designated "HAL X-241", this replicated production aircraft in terms of dimensions, control configuration, and aerofoil sections. The wheel brakes, air brakes, flaps, and retractable undercarriage were all actuated using compressed gas, with sufficient gas storage aboard for multiple actuations per flight. On 3 April 1959, the X-241 flew for the first time, having been launched by aero-tow behind a Douglas Dakota Mk.IV BJ 449. A total of 86 flights were conducted prior to the X-241 receiving considerable damage as the result of a landing accident, after the nose undercarriage failed to extend.


title: HAL HF-24 Marut

text: On 24 June 1961, the first prototype Marut conducted its maiden flight. It was powered by the same Bristol Siddeley Orpheus 703 turbojets that had powered the Folland Gnat, also being manufactured by HAL at that time. On 1 April 1967, the first production Marut was delivered to the IAF. While originally intended only as an interim measure during testing, HAL decided to power production Maruts with a pair of unreheated Orpheus 703s, meaning the aircraft could not attain supersonic speed. Although originally conceived to operate around Mach 2, the Marut in fact was barely capable of reaching Mach 1 due to the lack of suitably powerful engines.


title: HAL HF-24 Marut

text: The IAF were reluctant to procure a fighter aircraft only marginally superior to its existing fleet of British-built Hawker Hunters; however, in 1961, the Indian Government decided to procure 16 pre-production and 60 production Maruts. Only 147 aircraft, including 18 two-seat trainers, were completed out of a planned 214. After the Indian Government conducted its first nuclear tests at Pokhran, international pressure prevented the import of better engines, or at times, even spares for the Orpheus engines; this situation was one of the main reasons for the aircraft's early demise. The Marut never realised its full potential due to insufficient power. The Marut "was technically obsolete by the time it was first delivered in 1964". Other authors have also commented on the Marut's relative obsolescence by the time it reached production.


title: HAL HF-24 Marut

text: The Marut was described as "essentially a very long-drawn-out failure", and the aircraft's shortcomings were considered to be due to multiple factors. Among these were the difficulties experienced in securing a suitable engine, which was principally a political issue; while arrangements were successfully established with the United Kingdom and Bristol Siddeley for HAL to domestically produce the Orpheus, it was only suitable as an interim measure as it lacked the power to enable the Marut to achieve supersonic speed. The Indian Government refused a proposal made by Rolls-Royce to finance further development of the Orpheus, which had been specifically aimed at producing a more suitable engine for the Marut.


title: HAL HF-24 Marut

text: Other envisioned alternative engines that might have been sourced from the Soviet Union, Egypt, or various European nations did not result in anything of substance. The Gas Turbine Research Establishment also pursued their own development program to improve the Orpheus without external aid, which proceeded to the testing phase with some favourable results, but proved incompatible with the Marut. As the particularities of a given airframe are typically heavily dependent on the engine used, the inability to improve the Marut's powerplant damaged its performance. Despite experimentation with various engines, the Marut was never able to achieve supersonic speeds, which was viewed as a major failure. IAF had anticipated the Marut being fitted with a considerably superior engine.


title: HAL HF-24 Marut

text: The project was negatively affected by a lack of direction and management from the Indian Ministry of Defence. A lack of coordination between the military, politicians, and industry is alleged to have been typical throughout the entirety of the programme, leaving many issues down to industry alone without guidance. Specifically, the government never sanctioned the development of an engine design team, nor were there assessments of HAL's capability to reverse engineer or to apply technologies from other projects, such as the work performed for the Folland Gnat. HAL is claimed to have struggled to convince both the IAF and MoD that the design of the Marut was acceptable; much attention was given to the unacceptably high level of trail drag the airframe produced, as well as dissatisfaction with the Marut's speed and manoeuvrability, both of which were below IAF specification upon the aircraft's introduction.


title: HAL HF-24 Marut

text: Tank had a major influence on the project, and accordingly of its shortcomings. While working on the Marut, he was criticized for a rigid stance on aspects of the design, and he typically had little interest in lobbying the Indian government for funding to refine the design. In addition, however, elements of the IAF have been alleged to have held dismissive attitudes toward Tank and of his abilities, rarely coordinated with him on issues with the aircraft, which in turn exacerbated the type's performance issues. The level of technological transfer between Germany and India on the project was subject to criticism as well.


title: HAL HF-24 Marut

text: Limitations within the Indian aerospace industry, which lacked the infrastructure and scientific base to successfully produce an effective indigenous combat aircraft at that time, forced a heavy reliance on foreign technologies and imported components. HAL's willingness to undertake overly-ambitious defence projects may also be partially responsible for the project's outcome. The Marut was not only heavily dependent on foreign-sourced materials, but was more expensive to manufacture the type in India than to have imported completed aircraft. The level of indigenous components increased over time, reportedly reaching 70 per cent by December 1973. The allocation of scarce resources to reproducing components that could have been readily imported represented a high level of opportunity cost to India.


title: HAL HF-24 Marut

text: The IAF reportedly showed little confidence or interest in indigenous fighter technology, having openly expressed its preference for the French-built Dassault Ouragan as an alternative. By the time the Marut entered mass production, the IAF had already purchased foreign-built fighters such as the Hawker Hunter and Sukhoi Su-7. Following on from the Marut, HAL proceeded to produce larger quantities of both European and Soviet combat aircraft under license, such as the SEPECAT Jaguar, Mikoyan-Gurevich MiG-21, and Mikoyan MiG-27.


title: HAL HF-24 Marut

text: The Marut was used in combat in a ground attack role, where its safety features such as manual controls whenever the hydraulic systems failed, and twin engines, increased survivability. According to aviation author Pushpindar Singh, the Marut had excellent low-level flying characteristics, but its maneuverability suffered due to the lack of engine power; maintenance issues also resulted in the type being problematic in service.


title: HAL HF-24 Marut

text: In 1967, a single Marut was used as a testbed for the Egyptian indigenously-developed Brandner E-300 engine. The Indian team was recalled in July 1969, while the Egypt-based Marut was abandoned.


title: HAL HF-24 Marut

text: Given the limited number of Marut units, most Marut squadrons were considerably over-strength for the duration of their lives. According to Brian de Magray, at peak strength No.10 Squadron had on charge 32 Maruts, although the squadron probably did not hold a unit-establishment of more than 16. The Marut squadrons participated in the 1971 war and none were lost in air-to-air combat, although three were lost to ground fire, and one was destroyed on the ground. Three Marut pilots were awarded the Vir Chakra commendation.


title: HAL HF-24 Marut

text: Maruts constantly found themselves under heavy and concentrated fire from the ground during their low-level attack missions. On at least three occasions, Maruts regained their base after one engine had been lost to ground fire. On one of these, a Marut returned to base without escort on one engine, from about inside hostile territory. On another occasion, a pilot flying his Marut through debris that erupted into the air as he strafed a convoy felt a heavy blow to the rear fuselage of the aircraft, the engine damage warning lights immediately illuminated, and one engine cut out. Fortunately, the Marut attained a safe and reasonable recovery speed on one engine. Consequently, the pilot had no difficulty in flying his crippled fighter back to base. Another safety factor was the automatic reversion to manual control in the event of a failure in the hydraulic flying control system, and there were several instances of Maruts being flown back from a sortie manually. The Marut had a good survivability record in enemy airspace.


title: HAL HF-24 Marut

text: In the Indo-Pakistani War of 1971, some Maruts and Hawker Hunter aircraft were used to give close support to an Indian border post in the decisive Battle of Longewala, on the morning of 5 December 1971. The aerial attack was credited with destroying a large number of tanks that had been deployed by Pakistani ground forces. More than 300 combat sorties were flown by the Maruts during a two-week period in the war.


title: HAL HF-24 Marut

text: According to Indian reports, one aerial kill was recorded as having been achieved by a Marut. On 7 December 1971, Squadron Leader KK Bakshi of No. 220 Squadron shot down a PAF F-86 Sabre (reportedly flown by Flying Officer Hamid Khwaja of No. 15 Squadron of the Pakistan Air Force), however according to Pakistani reports, the F-86F Sabre (Serial No. 4030) had suffered an Engine flameout while chasing an Indian Hawker Hunter over Khushalgarh.


title: HAL HF-24 Marut

text: By 1982, the IAF was proposing that the Marut fleet be phased out on the basis that the type was "no longer operationally viable". Supporters such as Air Commodore Jasjit Singh pointed out that the type had performed well in the 1971 combat, and had enjoyed superior safety records to other IAF aircraft such as the Gnat. Some aircraft had less than 100 recorded flight hours when the retirement of the Marut was being mooted.


title: Plague of Athens

text: The Plague of Athens (, ) was an epidemic that devastated the city-state of Athens in ancient Greece during the second year (430 BC) of the Peloponnesian War when an Athenian victory still seemed within reach. The plague killed an estimated 75,000 to 100,000 people, around one quarter of the population, and is believed to have entered Athens through Piraeus, the city's port and sole source of food and supplies. Much of the eastern Mediterranean also saw an outbreak of the disease, albeit with less impact.


title: Plague of Athens

text: The war along with the plague had serious effects on Athens' society, resulting in a lack of adherence to laws and religious belief; in response laws became stricter, resulting in the punishment of non-citizens claiming to be Athenian. Among the victims of the plague was Pericles, the leader of Athens. The plague returned twice more, in 429 BC and in the winter of 427/426 BC. Some 30 pathogens have been suggested as having caused the plague.


title: Plague of Athens

text: Sparta and its allies, with the exception of Corinth, were almost exclusively land-based powers, able to summon large land armies that were very nearly unbeatable. In the face of a combined campaign on land from Sparta and its allies beginning in 431 BC, the Athenians, under the direction of Pericles, pursued a policy of retreat within the city walls of Athens, relying on Athenian maritime supremacy for supply while the superior Athenian navy harassed Spartan troop movements. Unfortunately, the strategy also resulted in massive migration from the Attic countryside into an already highly populated city, generating overpopulation and resource shortage. Due to the close quarters and poor hygiene exhibited at that time, Athens became a breeding ground for disease, and many citizens died. In the history of epidemics in war time, the 'Plague' of Athens is remarkable for the limitation of the affliction to one side as well as for its influence on the ultimate outcome of the war. The Athenians thought that the Spartans could have poisoned their water supply to kill them in order to win the Peloponnesian War. The Spartans somehow were unaffected by the plague, which may have been a reason for the Athenians' suspicion. It has been noted that the Plague of Athens was the worst sickness of Classical Greece.


title: Plague of Athens

text: In his "History of the Peloponnesian War", the historian Thucydides, who was present and contracted the disease himself and survived, describes the epidemic. He writes of a disease coming from Ethiopia and passing through Egypt and Libya into the Greek world and spreading throughout the wider Mediterranean; a plague so severe and deadly that no one could recall anywhere its like, and physicians ignorant of its nature not only were helpless but themselves died the fastest, having had the most contact with the sick. In overcrowded Athens, the disease killed an estimated 25% of the population. The sight of the burning funeral pyres of Athens caused the Spartans to withdraw their troops, being unwilling to risk contact with the diseased enemy. Many of Athens' infantry and expert seamen died. According to Thucydides, not until 415 BC had Athens recovered sufficiently to mount a major offensive, the disastrous Sicilian Expedition.


title: Plague of Athens

text: The first corroboration of the plague was not revealed until 1994-95 where excavation revealed the first mass grave. Upon this discovery, Thucydides' accounts of the event as well as analysis of the remains had been used to try and identify the cause of the epidemic.


title: Plague of Athens

text: Accounts of the Athenian plague graphically describe the social consequences of an epidemic. Thucydides' account clearly details the complete disappearance of social morals during the time of the plague:


title: Plague of Athens

text: The perceived impact of the Athenian plague on collective social and religious behavior echoes accounts of the medieval pandemic best known as the Black Death, although scholars have disputed its objective veracity in both instances, citing a historical link between epidemic disease and unsubstantiated moral panic that bordered on hysteria.


title: Plague of Athens

text: Thucydides states that people ceased fearing the law since they felt they were already living under a death sentence. Likewise, people started spending money indiscriminately. Many felt they would not live long enough to enjoy the fruits of wise investment, while some of the poor unexpectedly became wealthy by inheriting the property of their relatives. It is also recorded that people refused to behave honorably because most did not expect to live long enough to enjoy a good reputation for it.


title: Plague of Athens

text: Another reason for the lack of honorable behavior was the sheer contagiousness of the illness. Those who tended to the ill were most vulnerable to catching the disease. This meant that many people died alone because no one was willing to risk caring for them. The dead were heaped on top of each other, left to rot, or shoved into mass graves. Sometimes those carrying the dead would come across an already burning funeral pyre, dump a new body on it, and walk away. Others appropriated prepared pyres so as to have enough fuel to cremate their own dead. Those lucky enough to survive the plague developed an immunity and so became the main caretakers of those who later fell ill.


title: Plague of Athens

text: A mass grave and nearly 1,000 tombs, dated between 430 and 426 BC, have been found just outside Athens' ancient Kerameikos cemetery. The mass grave was bordered by a low wall that seems to have protected the cemetery from a wetland. Excavated during 1994–95, the shaft-shaped grave may have contained a total of 240 individuals, at least ten of them children. Skeletons in the graves were randomly placed with no layers of soil between them.


title: Plague of Athens

text: Excavator Efi Baziotopoulou-Valavani, of the Third Ephoreia (Directorate) of Antiquities, reported that "[t]he mass grave did not have a monumental character. The offerings we found consisted of common, even cheap, burial vessels; black-finished ones, some small red-figured, as well as white lekythoi (oil flasks) of the second half of the 5th century BC. The bodies were placed in the pit within a day or two. These [factors] point to a mass burial in a state of panic, quite possibly due to a plague."


title: Plague of Athens

text: During this time refugees from the Peloponnesian war had immigrated within the Long Walls of Athens, inflating the populations of both the polis of Athens and the port of Piraeus. The population had tripled in this time increasing the chance of infection and worsening hygiene.


title: Plague of Athens

text: The plague also caused religious uncertainty and doubt. Since the disease struck without regard to a person's piety toward the gods, people felt abandoned by the gods and there seemed to be no benefit to worshiping them. The temples themselves were sites of great misery, as refugees from the Athenian countryside had been forced to find accommodation in the temples. Soon the sacred buildings were filled with the dead and dying. The Athenians pointed to the plague as evidence that the gods favored Sparta, and this was supported by an oracle that Apollo himself (the god of disease and medicine) would fight for Sparta if they fought with all their might. An earlier oracle had warned that "A Dorian [Spartan] war will come, and bring a pestilence with it".


title: Plague of Athens

text: Thucydides was skeptical of these conclusions and believed that people were simply being superstitious. He relied upon the prevailing medical theory of the day, Hippocratic theory, and strove to gather evidence through direct observation. He observed that carrion-eating birds and animals disappeared, though he left it an open question whether they died after eating the corpses or refused to eat them and were driven away:


title: Plague of Athens

text: The plague was an unforeseen event that resulted in one of the largest recorded loss of life in ancient Greece as well as a breakdown of Athenian society. The balance of power between citizens had changed due to many of the rich dying and their fortunes being inherited by remaining relatives of the lower class. According to Thucydides, those who had become ill and survived were the most sympathetic to others suffering: believing that they could no longer succumb to any illness, a number of survivors offered to assist with the remaining sick. The plague had also contributed to Athens' overall loss of power and ability to expand. Many of the remaining Athenians were found to be metics who had forged their documentation or had bribed officials to hide their original status. A number of these people were reduced to slaves once they were caught. This resulted in the passing of the Citizenship Law of Pericles. This law stated that only those born to two Athenian parents could be considered an Athenian citizen, reducing both their number of potential soldiers and amount of political power, but also a decline in treatment and rights for metics in Athens.


title: Plague of Athens

text: The plague dealt massive damage to Athens two years into the Peloponnesian War, from which it never recovered. Their political strength had weakened, and morale among their armies and citizens had fallen significantly. Athens would then go on to be defeated by Sparta and fall from being a major power in Ancient Greece.


title: Plague of Athens

text: According to Thucydides, the illness began by showing symptoms in the head as it worked its way through the rest of the body. He also described in detail the symptoms that victims of the plague experienced.


title: Plague of Athens

text: Historians have long tried to identify the disease behind the Plague of Athens. The disease has traditionally been considered an outbreak of the bubonic plague in its many forms, but reconsideration of the reported symptoms and epidemiology have led scholars to advance alternative explanations. These include typhus, smallpox, measles, and toxic shock syndrome. Based upon striking descriptive similarities with recent outbreaks in Africa, as well as the fact that the Athenian plague itself apparently came from Africa (as Thucydides recorded), Ebola or a related viral hemorrhagic fever has been considered.


title: Plague of Athens

text: Given the possibility that profiles of a known disease may have changed over time, or that the plague was caused by a disease that no longer exists, the exact nature of the Athenian plague may never be known. In addition, crowding caused by the influx of refugees into the city led to inadequate food and water supplies and a probable proportionate increase in insects, lice, rats, and waste. These conditions would have encouraged more than one epidemic disease during the outbreak.


title: Plague of Athens

text: In January 1999, the University of Maryland devoted their fifth annual medical conference, dedicated to notorious case histories, to the Plague of Athens. They concluded that the disease that killed the Greeks was typhus. "Epidemic typhus fever is the best explanation," said Dr. David Durack, consulting professor of medicine at Duke University. "It hits hardest in times of war and privation, it has about 20 percent mortality, it kills the victim after about seven days, and it sometimes causes a striking complication: gangrene of the tips of the fingers and toes. The Plague of Athens had all these features." In typhus cases, progressive dehydration, debilitation and cardiovascular collapse ultimately cause the patient's death.


title: Plague of Athens

text: This medical opinion is supported by the opinion of A. W. Gomme, who wrote a comprehensive annotated edition of Thucydides and who also believed typhus was the cause of the epidemic. This opinion is expressed in his monumental work "An Historical Commentary on Thucydides", completed after Gomme's death by A. Andrewes and K. J. Dover. Angelos Vlachos (), a member of the Academy of Athens and a diplomat, in his "Remarks on Thucydides" (, [1992] I: 177–178) acknowledges and supports Gomme's opinion: "Today, according to Gomme, it is generally acceptable that it was typhus" (""). The theory has also found recent support in a study of the plague by Greek epidemiologists.


title: Plague of Athens

text: Some characteristics of typhoid are at clear variance from Thucydides' description. Scavenger animals do not die from infection with typhoid, the onset of fever in typhoid is typically slow and subtle, and typhoid generally kills later in the disease course. As typhoid is most commonly transmitted through poor hygiene habits and public sanitation conditions in crowded urban areas, it is an unlikely cause of a plague emerging in the less urbanized Africa, as reported by Thucydides.


title: Plague of Athens

text: A 2005 DNA study of dental pulp from teeth recovered from an ancient Greek burial pit, led by orthodontist Dr. Manolis Papagrigorakis of the University of Athens, found DNA sequences similar to those of "Salmonella enterica" ("S. enterica"), the organism that causes typhoid fever.


title: Plague of Athens

text: A second group of researchers, including American evolutionary molecular biologist Dr. Beth Shapiro of the University of California, Santa Cruz, disputed the Papagrigorakis team's findings, citing what they claim are serious methodological flaws. In a letter to the International Journal of Infectious Diseases, Shapiro et al. stated that "while this DNA analysis confirms that the Athens sequence is possibly "Salmonella", it demonstrates clearly that it is not typhoid."


title: Plague of Athens

text: The technique used by the Papagrigorakis team (PCR) has shown itself to be prone to contamination-induced false-positive results, and the source burial site is known to have been heavily trafficked in antiquity by hogs, carriers of another "Salmonella" serovar that may have been confused with the one that causes typhoid fever. Nonetheless, the Papagrigorakis team assert that the basis of this refutation is flimsy, and that the methodology used by the Shapiro team has historically produced conflicting results.


title: Plague of Athens

text: Thucydides' narrative pointedly refers to increased risk among caregivers, more typical of the person-to-person contact spread of viral hemorrhagic fever (e.g., Ebola virus disease or Marburg virus) than typhus or typhoid. Unusual in the history of plagues during military operations, besieging Spartan troops are described as not having been afflicted by the illness raging near them within the city. Thucydides' description further invites comparison with VHF in the character and sequence of symptoms developed, and of the usual fatal outcome on about the eighth day. Some scientists have interpreted Thucydides' expression "" () as the unusual symptom of hiccups, which is now recognized as a common finding in Ebola virus disease. Outbreaks of VHF in Africa in 2012 and 2014 reinforced observations of the increased hazard to caregivers and the necessity of barrier precautions for preventing disease spread related to grief rituals and funerary rites. The 2015 West African Ebola outbreak noted persistence of effects on genitalia and eyes in some survivors, both described by Thucydides. With an up to 21-day clinical incubation period, and up to 565-day infectious potential recently demonstrated in a semen-transmitted infection, movement of Ebola via Nile commerce into the busy port of Piraeus is plausible. Ancient Greek intimacy with African sources is reflected in accurate renditions of monkeys in art of frescoes and pottery, most notably guenons ("Cercopithecus"), the type of primates responsible for transmitting Marburg virus into Germany and Yugoslavia when that disease was first characterized in 1967. Circumstantially tantalizing is the requirement for the large quantity of ivory used in the Athenian sculptor Phidias’ two monumental ivory and gold statues of Athena and of Zeus (one of the Seven Wonders), which were fabricated in the same decade. Never again in antiquity was ivory used on such a large scale.


title: Plague of Athens

text: A second ancient narrative suggestive of hemorrhagic fever etiology is that of Titus Lucretius Carus. Writing in the 1st century BC, Lucretius characterized the Athenian plague as having bloody discharges from bodily orifices (Book 6.1146–47: "sudabant etiam fauces intrinsecus atrae / sanguine" – the throat sweated within, black with blood). That descriptor may have been derived from direct observation, because Lucretius cited scientific predecessors in Greek Sicily- Empedocles and Acron. While none of the original works of Acron, a physician, are extant, it is reported that he died c. 430 BC after travel from Sicily to Athens to assist against the plague.


title: Plague of Athens

text: Unfortunately, DNA sequence-based identification is limited by the inability of some important pathogens to leave a "footprint" retrievable from archaeological remains after several millennia. The lack of a durable signature by RNA viruses means some etiologies, notably the hemorrhagic fever viruses, are not testable hypotheses using currently available scientific techniques.


title: Historical criticism

text: Historical criticism, also known as the historical-critical method or higher criticism, is a branch of criticism that investigates the origins of ancient texts in order to understand "the world behind the text". While often discussed in terms of Jewish and Christian writings from ancient times, historical criticism has also been applied to other religious and secular writings from various parts of the world and periods of history.


title: Historical criticism

text: The primary goal of historical criticism is to discover the text's primitive or original meaning in its original historical context and its literal sense or "sensus literalis historicus". The secondary goal seeks to establish a reconstruction of the historical situation of the author and recipients of the text. That may be accomplished by reconstructing the true nature of the events that the text describes. An ancient text may also serve as a document, record or source for reconstructing the ancient past, which may also serve as a chief interest to the historical critic. In regard to Semitic biblical interpretation, the historical critic would be able to interpret the literature of Israel as well as the history of Israel. In 18th century Biblical criticism, the term "higher criticism" was commonly used in mainstream scholarship in contrast to "lower criticism". In the 21st century, historical criticism is the more commonly used term for higher criticism, and textual criticism is more common than the loose expression "lower criticism".


title: Historical criticism

text: Historical criticism began in the 17th century and gained popular recognition in the 19th and 20th centuries. The perspective of the early historical critic was rooted in Protestant Reformation ideology since its approach to biblical studies was free from the influence of traditional interpretation. Where historical investigation was unavailable, historical criticism rested on philosophical and theological interpretation. With each passing century, historical criticism became refined into various methodologies used today: source criticism, form criticism, redaction criticism, tradition criticism, canonical criticism, and related methodologies.


title: Historical criticism

text: Historical-critical methods are the specific procedures used to examine the text's historical origins, such as the time and place in which the text was written, its sources, and the events, dates, persons, places, things, and customs that are mentioned or implied in the text.


title: Historical criticism

text: Application of the historical-critical method, in biblical studies, investigates the books of the Hebrew Bible as well as the New Testament. Historical critics compare texts to any extant contemporaneous textual artifacts, i.e., other texts written around the same time. An example is that modern biblical scholarship has attempted to understand the Book of Revelation in its 1st-century historical context by identifying its literary genre with Jewish and Christian apocalyptic literature.


title: Historical criticism

text: In regard to the Gospels, higher criticism deals with the synoptic problem, the relations among Matthew, Mark, and Luke. In some cases, such as with several Pauline epistles, higher criticism can confirm or challenge the traditional or received understanding of authorship. Higher criticism understands the New Testament texts within a historical context: that is, that they are not adamantine but writings that express the "traditio" (what is handed down). The truth lies in the historical context.


title: Historical criticism

text: In classical studies, the 19th century approach to higher criticism set aside "efforts to fill ancient religion with direct meaning and relevance and devoted itself instead to the critical collection and chronological ordering of the source material." Thus, higher criticism, whether biblical, classical, Byzantine or medieval, focuses on the source documents to determine who wrote it and where and when it was written.


title: Historical criticism

text: Historical criticism has also been applied to other religious writings from Hinduism, Buddhism, Confucianism and Islam.


title: Historical criticism

text: Historical criticism comprises several disciplines, including source criticism, form criticism, redaction criticism, tradition criticism, and radical criticism.


title: Historical criticism

text: Source criticism is the search for the original sources which lie behind a given biblical text. It can be traced back to the 17th century French priest Richard Simon, and its most influential product is undoubtedly Julius Wellhausen's "Prolegomena zur Geschichte Israels" (1878), whose "insight and clarity of expression have left their mark indelibly on modern biblical studies."


title: Historical criticism

text: Form criticism breaks the Bible down into sections ("pericopes", stories), which are analyzed and categorized by genres (prose or verse, letters, laws, court archives, war hymns, poems of lament etc.). The form critic then theorizes on the pericope's "Sitz im Leben" ("setting in life"), the setting in which it was composed and, especially, used. Tradition history is a specific aspect of form criticism, which aims at tracing the way in which the pericopes entered the larger units of the biblical canon, especially the way in which they made the transition from oral to written form. The belief in the priority, stability and even detectability, of oral traditions is now recognised to be so deeply questionable as to render tradition history largely useless, but form criticism itself continues to develop as a viable methodology in biblical studies.


title: Historical criticism

text: Redaction criticism studies "the collection, arrangement, editing and modification of sources" and is frequently used to reconstruct the community and purposes of the authors of the text.


title: Historical criticism

text: When it is applied to the Bible, the historical-critical method is distinct from the traditional, devotional approach. In particular, while devotional readers concern themselves with the overall message of the Bible, historians examine the distinct messages of each book in the Bible. Guided by the devotional approach, for example, Christians often combine accounts from different gospels into single accounts, but historians attempt to discern what is unique about each gospel, including how they differ.


title: Historical criticism

text: The phrase "higher criticism" became popular in Europe from the mid-18th century to the early 20th century to describe the work of such scholars as Jean Astruc (1684-1766), Johann Salomo Semler (1725–91), Johann Gottfried Eichhorn (1752–1827), Ferdinand Christian Baur (1792–1860), and Wellhausen (1844–1918). In academic circles, it now is the body of work properly considered "higher criticism", but the phrase is sometimes applied to earlier or later work using similar methods.


title: Historical criticism

text: "Higher criticism" originally referred to the work of German biblical scholars of the Tübingen School. After the groundbreaking work on the New Testament by Friedrich Schleiermacher (1768–1834), the next generation, which included scholars such as David Friedrich Strauss (1808–74) and Ludwig Feuerbach (1804–72), analyzed in the mid-19th century the historical records of the Middle East from biblical times, in search of independent confirmation of events in the Bible. The latter scholars built on the tradition of Enlightenment and Rationalist thinkers such as John Locke (1632–1704), David Hume, Immanuel Kant, Gotthold Lessing, Gottlieb Fichte, G. W. F. Hegel (1770–1831) and the French rationalists.


title: Historical criticism

text: Such ideas influenced thought in England through the work of Samuel Taylor Coleridge and, in particular, through George Eliot's translations of Strauss's "The Life of Jesus" (1846) and Feuerbach's "The Essence of Christianity" (1854). In 1860, seven liberal Anglican theologians began the process of incorporating this historical criticism into Christian doctrine in "Essays and Reviews", causing a five-year storm of controversy, which completely overshadowed the arguments over Charles Darwin's newly-published "On the Origin of Species". Two of the authors were indicted for heresy and lost their jobs by 1862, but in 1864, they had the judgement overturned on appeal. "La Vie de Jésus" (1863), the seminal work by a Frenchman, Ernest Renan (1823–1892), continued in the same tradition as Strauss and Feuerbach. In Catholicism, "L'Evangile et l'Eglise" (1902), the magnum opus by Alfred Loisy against the "Essence of Christianity" of Adolf von Harnack (1851–1930) and "La Vie de Jesus" of Renan, gave birth to the modernist crisis (1902–61). Some scholars, such as Rudolf Bultmann (1884–1976) have used higher criticism of the Bible to "demythologize" it.


title: Historical criticism

text: John Barton argues that the term "historical-critical method" conflates two nonidentical distinctions, and prefers the term "Biblical criticism":


title: Historical criticism

text: Beginning in the nineteenth century, effort on the part of evangelical scholars and writers was expended in opposing theories of historical critical scholars. Evangelicals at the time accused the 'higher critics' of representing their dogmas as indisputable facts. Churchmen such as James Orr, William Henry Green, William M. Ramsay, Edward Garbett, William B. Boyce, John Langtry, D. K. Paton, Charles Spurgeon and Robert D. Wilson pushed back against the judgements of historical critics. Some of these counter-views still have support in the more conservative evangelical circles today. There has never been a centralised stance on historical criticism, and Protestant denominations divided over the issue (e.g. Fundamentalist-Modernist controversy, Downgrade controversy etc.). The historical-grammatical method of biblical interpretation has been preferred by evangelicals, but is not held by the preponderance of contemporary scholars affiliated to major universities.


title: Historical criticism

text: Evangelical Christians have often partly attributed the decline of the Christian faith (i.e. lower church attendance, fewer conversions to faith in Jesus Christ, despiritualisation of the Bible, syncretism of philosophy and Scripture etc.) in the western world to the consequences of historical criticism: acceptance of historical critical dogmas engenders conflicting representations of Protestant Christianity.


title: Historical criticism

text: On the other hand, attempts to revive the extreme historical criticism of the Dutch Radical School by Robert M. Price, Darrell J. Doughty and Hermann Detering have also been met with strong criticism and indifference by mainstream scholars. Such positions are nowadays confined to the minor "Journal of Higher Criticism" and other fringe publications.


title: Tanganyika laughter epidemic

text: The Tanganyika laughter epidemic of 1962 was an outbreak of mass hysteria—or mass psychogenic illness (MPI)—rumored to have occurred in or near the village of Kashasha on the western coast of Lake Victoria in Tanganyika (which, once united with Zanzibar, became the modern nation of Tanzania) near the border with Uganda.


title: Tanganyika laughter epidemic

text: The laughter epidemic began on January 31, 1962, at a mission-run boarding school for girls in Kashasha. It started with three girls and spread throughout the school, affecting 95 of the 159 pupils, aged 12–18. Symptoms lasted from a few hours to 16 days. The teaching staff were unaffected and reported that students were unable to concentrate on their lessons. The school closed on March 18.


title: Tanganyika laughter epidemic

text: The epidemic spread to Nshamba, a village where several of the girls lived. In April and May, 217 mostly young villagers had laughing attacks. The Kashasha school reopened on May 21 and reclosed at the end of June. Earlier that month, the laughing epidemic spread to Ramashenye girls' middle school, near Bukoba, affecting 48 girls.


title: Tanganyika laughter epidemic

text: The Kashasha school was sued for allowing the children and their parents to transmit it to the surrounding area. Other schools, Kashasha itself, and another village were affected to some degree. The phenomenon died off 18 months after it started. The laughter reports were widely accompanied by descriptions of pain, fainting, respiratory problems, rashes, and crying. In all, 14 schools were shut down and 1000 people were affected.


title: Tanganyika laughter epidemic

text: Linguist Christian F. Hempelmann has theorized that the episode was stress-induced. In 1962, Tanganyika had just won its independence, he said, and students had reported feeling stressed because of higher expectations by teachers and parents. MPI, he says, usually occurs in people without a lot of power. "MPI is a last resort for people of a low status. It's an easy way for them to express that something is wrong."


title: Tanganyika laughter epidemic

text: Sociologist Robert Bartholomew and psychiatrist Simon Wessely both put forward a culture-specific epidemic hysteria hypothesis, pointing out that the occurrences in 1960s Africa were prevalent in missionary schools and Tanganyikan society was ruled by strict traditional elders, so the likelihood is the hysteria was a manifestation of the cultural dissonance between the "traditional conservatism" at home and the new ideas challenging those beliefs in school, which they termed 'conversion reactions'.


title: The Temper Trap

text: The Temper Trap are an Australian indie rock band formed in 2005 by Dougy Mandagi, Jonathon Aherne, and Toby Dundas. In 2008, the group relocated from Melbourne to London. The band released their debut album "Conditions" in June 2009 to favourable reviews and commercial success; it peaked at No. 9 on the ARIA Albums Chart and into the top 30 on the UK Albums Chart. Its lead single, "Sweet Disposition", peaked in the top 10 on the Belgian, Irish and UK Singles Charts and reached No. 14 on the ARIA Singles Chart. At the ARIA Music Awards of 2010 in November, The Temper Trap won Best Group and Most Popular Australian Single for "Sweet Disposition". Their eponymous second album was released in late May/early June 2012 under Liberation Music (AUS), Infectious Records (UK) and Glassnote Records (US). The album won the band Best Rock Album, and they also won Best Group at the 2012 ARIA Awards. In October 2013 guitarist Lorenzo Sillitto left the band, during the recording of the third album.


title: The Temper Trap

text: The Temper Trap formed as an indie pop band in 2005. Indonesian-born Mandagi, who is originally from Manado and a grand-nephew of Arie Frederik Lasut, was a busker in Melbourne, Australia, in 1999 when he met Aherne, who wanted to learn to play guitar. Six years later, Mandagi met Dundas while the pair worked in a clothing store. In 2005, the three friends decided to form a band, with Mandagi on vocals and guitars, and Dundas on drums, while Aherne was later convinced to join on bass guitar by Mandagi. The group was named "The Temper Trap" after Temper Temper, the trio's first choice, was rejected due to its use by a United States (US) band. The Temper Trap rehearsed with a variety of second guitarists before Dundas recommended his former Geelong Grammar schoolmate, Sillitto, on lead guitar. The group performed at St Jerome's Laneway Festival in March 2006.


title: The Temper Trap

text: The group signed to Michael Gudinski's label, Liberation Music, and released its debut extended play (EP), "The Temper Trap", in November 2006 through the label; the EP was produced by Scott Horscroft (The Sleepy Jackson, Silverchair). According to a live review by "planetclare" of Australian music website FasterLouder, Dundas sometimes abandons the drums and plays guitar, while Mandagi's voice "hits a note and then transcends it, slicing the sound barrier and leaving you with your mouth open and your eyes wide". The review also described Aherne regularly moving around the stage and Sillitto providing guitar solos that "subtlety drove the melody from the side of stage". After finishing an Australian tour, the band then performed at the V Festival in Melbourne, Sydney (March 2007) and the Gold Coast (April).


title: The Temper Trap

text: In late 2008, The Temper Trap started recording their debut album, "Conditions", in Melbourne with engineering by record producer Kalju Tonuma. They travelled to the UK and attracted the attention of the local music industry after playing at the Musexpo in London in October. By January 2009, the band had signed to Infectious Records for European releases. The BBC chose The Temper Trap in its top 15 "Sound of 2009" list. In March, the band finished recording "Conditions" in London with UK music producer Jim Abbiss. Mandagi said his key influences when recording it had included Radiohead, Prince, Massive Attack and U2. In May, after performing at South by Southwest in March, they signed to Glassnote Records for US releases. The album was released in Australia on 19 June and debuted at No. 9 on the Australian ARIA Albums Chart. It was released in the UK in August. The band had returned to London in early May to "spend a bit of time on the continent and try and build a fan base over here", according to Sillitto. He says "it was always our dream to at least come over here and give it a good crack early on".


title: The Temper Trap

text: The album's lead single, "Sweet Disposition", was released in Australia in October 2008. It was re-recorded with Abbiss and re-issued in June 2009. This version peaked in the top 10 on the Belgian, Irish and UK Singles Charts and reached No. 14 on the ARIA Singles Chart. The group played shows in Europe with Silversun Pickups and garnered attention from newfound fans and media. In August, they played the Reading and Leeds Festivals. In September, the band embarked on their first headlining UK tour, including Hare and Hounds in Birmingham and the 300-capacity Arts Centre in Norwich. The tour started and finished in Brighton, with the Goldhawks as their support act.


title: The Temper Trap

text: In August, The Temper Trap played on a balcony over London's Camden Lock to promote the release of their next single "Science of Fear" on the online viral music show "BalconyTV." In late November, the group cancelled sold-out show dates in Germany to return to Australia to perform at the ARIA Awards. They received four nominations in the categories Album of the Year, Breakthrough Album of the Year and Best Rock Album for "Conditions", and Single of the Year for "Sweet Disposition".


title: The Temper Trap

text: During 2010, the group toured the UK as well as appearing at several music festivals such as Oxegen, Glastonbury, Rock Werchter, Roskilde Festival, V Festival as well as Big Day Out and Splendour in the Grass in Australia. In the US, the band embarked on their first headlining tour, with the single "Sweet Disposition" receiving significant airplay and appearances in commercials and television shows. At the APRA Awards of 2010, Mandagi and Sillitto received the Song of the Year award for writing "Sweet Disposition". They followed with a comeback tour of Australia in July, playing to crowds of over 5000 people, their second largest to date with the largest being Mexico City's Corona Fest in October. At the ARIA Music Awards of 2010 in November, The Temper Trap won two awards: Best Group and Most Popular Australian Single for "Sweet Disposition". In February 2011, the group was nominated for a BRIT Award in the Best International Breakthrough Artist category.


title: The Temper Trap

text: In March 2012 the band performed a short run of sold-out shows in North America. They also completed extensive tours in 2012 in the UK, North America and Australia, as well as numerous festival appearances. On 13 April 2012, they released the official video for the single, "Need Your Love", directed by Dugan O'Neal (O'Neal released the video on his personal Vimeo channel in the previous week). It features a "Karate Kid"-like mini-film, with short appearances by the band members as the general public. Shortly after its release, a behind-the-scenes video followed.


title: The Temper Trap

text: The Temper Trap released their self-titled second album on 18 May (Australia/NZ/Germany), 21 May (UK/Europe) and 5 June (US/Canada/Mexico) 2012. On 7 March, they released a new song titled "Rabbit Hole". The first single, "Need Your Love". was released on 23 March 2012. On 1 June, the video for "Trembling Hands" was released online. The Tom Haines-directed video tells the tale of a young trapeze artist discovering herself through the emotions and risks involved with her discipline. Dougy Mandagi is the only member of the band to appear in the video, which shot on location in Cuba. "Trembling Hands" was officially released as a single in May 2012, which was followed by a remix EP in July. The remix EP features mixes by Benny Benassi, Chet Faker and Beni.


title: The Temper Trap

text: On 6 August 2012, the Temper Trap played a live streaming concert for YouTube Presents before a select group of fans in New York City, USA. The concert consisted of six songs: three from the album "Conditions" and three from the self-titled album. They played as one of the opening acts for Coldplay during the Australia/New Zealand leg of their Mylo Xyloto Tour in November and December 2012. On 6 July 2013, they supported The Rolling Stones at Hyde Park in Sydney, Australia, alongside American musician Gary Clark Jr.


title: The Temper Trap

text: In November 2012, The Temper Trap won the Best Rock Album award for their eponymous second album and the Best Group award at the 2012 ARIA Awards. In January 2013, "Trembling Hands" was voted into the number 22 position as part of Triple J's Hottest 100 countdown. A June 2013 media article revealed that the band were continuing to work on their third studio album. In October 2013, an official statement confirmed that lead guitarist Lorenzo Sillitto parted ways with the band. Since then the band have continued to play live while working on their third album with Damian Taylor.


title: The Temper Trap

text: In September 2012, The Temper Trap played in front of approximately 100,000 AFL fans at half time of the AFL Grand Final between Sydney and Hawthorn.


title: The Temper Trap

text: The title track from the band's third studio album, "Thick as Thieves." was released as its lead single in February and peaked at number 92 in Australia. On 11 April 2016, the band released the second single, "Fall Together", the same day the album was officially announced on their Facebook page. The album was released on 10 June 2016, marking their first release in four years.


title: The Temper Trap

text: In May 2018, The Temper Trap supported American rock band Imagine Dragons on the Australian and New Zealand legs of their Evolve World Tour. This included performances in Perth, Melbourne, Brisbane, Sydney, Auckland, and Wellington.


title: Red-light districts in Belgium

text: Prostitution is legal in Belgium, but related activities such as organising prostitution and other forms of pimping are illegal. Enforcement varies, and in some areas brothels are unofficially tolerated.


title: Red-light districts in Belgium

text: Most of the red-light districts (RLDs) in Belgium are made up of windows (where the prostitutes sit, usually scantily dressed, trying to entice customers in) although some street prostitution does occur.


title: Red-light districts in Belgium

text: The main red light district in Brussels is north of the Gare du Nord. In Rue d'Aerschot, Rue de Brabant and the surrounding side-streets there are sex shops and many windows where prostitutes sit. Most of the prostitutes near the Gare du Nord, including Rue d'Aerschot, are Romanian and Bulgarian. Further away from the station the girls are more from Ghana and Nigeria.


title: Red-light districts in Belgium

text: The Alhambra Quarter of Brussels (South-west of the Gare du Nord) has traditionally been an area where street prostitution has occurred. There have been numerous attempts to ban street prostitution from the area. In 2012, new regulations were introduced to restrict the girls and also to punish kerb-crawlers. A new city regulation in 2016 banned the prostitutes from the area and proposed a new tolerance zone nearer the Gare du Nord. This was overturned by the Council of State at the end of 2016.


title: Red-light districts in Belgium

text: A second, smaller area of street prostitution is along Avenue Louise, where street walkers ply their trade at night.


title: Red-light districts in Belgium

text: In Antwerp prostitution is only permitted in the area bounded by Verversrui, Vingerlingstraat and Schippersstraat, locally knows as 'schipperskwartier' (shipper's quarters).