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Which position did Sir John Harmood-Banner, 1st Baronet hold in 01/07/1911?	July 01, 1911	{ "text": [ "Member of the 30th Parliament of the United Kingdom" ] }	L2_Q16030599_P39_4	Sir John Harmood-Banner, 1st Baronet holds the position of Member of the 31st Parliament of the United Kingdom from Dec, 1918 to Oct, 1922. Sir John Harmood-Banner, 1st Baronet holds the position of Lord Mayor of Liverpool from Jan, 1912 to Jan, 1913. Sir John Harmood-Banner, 1st Baronet holds the position of High Sheriff of Cheshire from Jan, 1902 to Jan, 1903. Sir John Harmood-Banner, 1st Baronet holds the position of Member of the 32nd Parliament of the United Kingdom from Nov, 1922 to Nov, 1923. Sir John Harmood-Banner, 1st Baronet holds the position of Member of the 28th Parliament of the United Kingdom from Jan, 1906 to Jan, 1910. Sir John Harmood-Banner, 1st Baronet holds the position of Member of the 33rd Parliament of the United Kingdom from Dec, 1923 to Oct, 1924. Sir John Harmood-Banner, 1st Baronet holds the position of Member of the 27th Parliament of the United Kingdom from Feb, 1905 to Jan, 1906. Sir John Harmood-Banner, 1st Baronet holds the position of Member of the 30th Parliament of the United Kingdom from Dec, 1910 to Nov, 1918. Sir John Harmood-Banner, 1st Baronet holds the position of Member of the 29th Parliament of the United Kingdom from Jan, 1910 to Nov, 1910.	John Harmood-BannerSir John Sutherland Harmood-Banner, 1st Baronet (8 September 1847 – 24 February 1927) was an English accountant from Liverpool. His interests spread across Lancashire and Cheshire, and extended to the British colonies and South America.He was also prominent in the civic affairs of Liverpool, where he was a long-serving City Councillor. A Conservative, he was Lord Mayor of Liverpool, and was one of the city's Members of Parliament (MPs) for nearly 20 years.Harmood-Banner was born in Toxteth Park, Liverpool, the second son of accountant Harmood Walter Banner from Bebington in Cheshire. He was educated at Radley College.He entered the family accountancy firm of Harmood Banner & Son in Liverpool, becoming a partner in 1870. In 1883 he assumed the position of deputy chairman of Pearson and Knowles, a coal and iron conglomerate based in Warrington. For the next 20 years he specialised in accounting work acting as a financial advisor and auditor of a number of major companies.He was elected MP for Liverpool Everton in a by-election in 1905, sitting until 1924. He was a justice of the peace and deputy lieutenant for Cheshire and was appointed High Sheriff of Cheshire for 1902. He also served as Lord Mayor of the City of Liverpool for 1912, was knighted in July 1913 and created a baronet in 1924.In later life he served on the boards of a number of companies and on several government committees. He retired in 1925 and died on 24 February 1927 at his home, Ingmire Hall, in Sedbergh, Yorkshire. He was buried in Toxteth Park Cemetery in Liverpool.He married twice, firstly Elizabeth, the daughter and coheir of Thomas Knowles, MP of Wigan, with whom he had four sons and two daughters and secondly in 1908 the widow Ella Wilstone, daughter of John Ernest Herbert Linford of Thorpe, Norfolk. He was succeeded by his son Harmood Harmood-Banner.	[ "High Sheriff of Cheshire", "Member of the 27th Parliament of the United Kingdom", "Member of the 32nd Parliament of the United Kingdom", "Member of the 33rd Parliament of the United Kingdom", "Member of the 31st Parliament of the United Kingdom", "Member of the 28th Parliament of the United Kingdom", "Lord Mayor of Liverpool", "Member of the 29th Parliament of the United Kingdom" ]
Which position did Sir John Harmood-Banner, 1st Baronet hold in Jul 01, 1911?	July 01, 1911	{ "text": [ "Member of the 30th Parliament of the United Kingdom" ] }	L2_Q16030599_P39_4	Sir John Harmood-Banner, 1st Baronet holds the position of Member of the 31st Parliament of the United Kingdom from Dec, 1918 to Oct, 1922. Sir John Harmood-Banner, 1st Baronet holds the position of Lord Mayor of Liverpool from Jan, 1912 to Jan, 1913. Sir John Harmood-Banner, 1st Baronet holds the position of High Sheriff of Cheshire from Jan, 1902 to Jan, 1903. Sir John Harmood-Banner, 1st Baronet holds the position of Member of the 32nd Parliament of the United Kingdom from Nov, 1922 to Nov, 1923. Sir John Harmood-Banner, 1st Baronet holds the position of Member of the 28th Parliament of the United Kingdom from Jan, 1906 to Jan, 1910. Sir John Harmood-Banner, 1st Baronet holds the position of Member of the 33rd Parliament of the United Kingdom from Dec, 1923 to Oct, 1924. Sir John Harmood-Banner, 1st Baronet holds the position of Member of the 27th Parliament of the United Kingdom from Feb, 1905 to Jan, 1906. Sir John Harmood-Banner, 1st Baronet holds the position of Member of the 30th Parliament of the United Kingdom from Dec, 1910 to Nov, 1918. Sir John Harmood-Banner, 1st Baronet holds the position of Member of the 29th Parliament of the United Kingdom from Jan, 1910 to Nov, 1910.	John Harmood-BannerSir John Sutherland Harmood-Banner, 1st Baronet (8 September 1847 – 24 February 1927) was an English accountant from Liverpool. His interests spread across Lancashire and Cheshire, and extended to the British colonies and South America.He was also prominent in the civic affairs of Liverpool, where he was a long-serving City Councillor. A Conservative, he was Lord Mayor of Liverpool, and was one of the city's Members of Parliament (MPs) for nearly 20 years.Harmood-Banner was born in Toxteth Park, Liverpool, the second son of accountant Harmood Walter Banner from Bebington in Cheshire. He was educated at Radley College.He entered the family accountancy firm of Harmood Banner & Son in Liverpool, becoming a partner in 1870. In 1883 he assumed the position of deputy chairman of Pearson and Knowles, a coal and iron conglomerate based in Warrington. For the next 20 years he specialised in accounting work acting as a financial advisor and auditor of a number of major companies.He was elected MP for Liverpool Everton in a by-election in 1905, sitting until 1924. He was a justice of the peace and deputy lieutenant for Cheshire and was appointed High Sheriff of Cheshire for 1902. He also served as Lord Mayor of the City of Liverpool for 1912, was knighted in July 1913 and created a baronet in 1924.In later life he served on the boards of a number of companies and on several government committees. He retired in 1925 and died on 24 February 1927 at his home, Ingmire Hall, in Sedbergh, Yorkshire. He was buried in Toxteth Park Cemetery in Liverpool.He married twice, firstly Elizabeth, the daughter and coheir of Thomas Knowles, MP of Wigan, with whom he had four sons and two daughters and secondly in 1908 the widow Ella Wilstone, daughter of John Ernest Herbert Linford of Thorpe, Norfolk. He was succeeded by his son Harmood Harmood-Banner.	[ "High Sheriff of Cheshire", "Member of the 27th Parliament of the United Kingdom", "Member of the 32nd Parliament of the United Kingdom", "Member of the 33rd Parliament of the United Kingdom", "Member of the 31st Parliament of the United Kingdom", "Member of the 28th Parliament of the United Kingdom", "Lord Mayor of Liverpool", "Member of the 29th Parliament of the United Kingdom" ]
Which position did Sir John Harmood-Banner, 1st Baronet hold in 07/01/1911?	July 01, 1911	{ "text": [ "Member of the 30th Parliament of the United Kingdom" ] }	L2_Q16030599_P39_4	Sir John Harmood-Banner, 1st Baronet holds the position of Member of the 31st Parliament of the United Kingdom from Dec, 1918 to Oct, 1922. Sir John Harmood-Banner, 1st Baronet holds the position of Lord Mayor of Liverpool from Jan, 1912 to Jan, 1913. Sir John Harmood-Banner, 1st Baronet holds the position of High Sheriff of Cheshire from Jan, 1902 to Jan, 1903. Sir John Harmood-Banner, 1st Baronet holds the position of Member of the 32nd Parliament of the United Kingdom from Nov, 1922 to Nov, 1923. Sir John Harmood-Banner, 1st Baronet holds the position of Member of the 28th Parliament of the United Kingdom from Jan, 1906 to Jan, 1910. Sir John Harmood-Banner, 1st Baronet holds the position of Member of the 33rd Parliament of the United Kingdom from Dec, 1923 to Oct, 1924. Sir John Harmood-Banner, 1st Baronet holds the position of Member of the 27th Parliament of the United Kingdom from Feb, 1905 to Jan, 1906. Sir John Harmood-Banner, 1st Baronet holds the position of Member of the 30th Parliament of the United Kingdom from Dec, 1910 to Nov, 1918. Sir John Harmood-Banner, 1st Baronet holds the position of Member of the 29th Parliament of the United Kingdom from Jan, 1910 to Nov, 1910.	John Harmood-BannerSir John Sutherland Harmood-Banner, 1st Baronet (8 September 1847 – 24 February 1927) was an English accountant from Liverpool. His interests spread across Lancashire and Cheshire, and extended to the British colonies and South America.He was also prominent in the civic affairs of Liverpool, where he was a long-serving City Councillor. A Conservative, he was Lord Mayor of Liverpool, and was one of the city's Members of Parliament (MPs) for nearly 20 years.Harmood-Banner was born in Toxteth Park, Liverpool, the second son of accountant Harmood Walter Banner from Bebington in Cheshire. He was educated at Radley College.He entered the family accountancy firm of Harmood Banner & Son in Liverpool, becoming a partner in 1870. In 1883 he assumed the position of deputy chairman of Pearson and Knowles, a coal and iron conglomerate based in Warrington. For the next 20 years he specialised in accounting work acting as a financial advisor and auditor of a number of major companies.He was elected MP for Liverpool Everton in a by-election in 1905, sitting until 1924. He was a justice of the peace and deputy lieutenant for Cheshire and was appointed High Sheriff of Cheshire for 1902. He also served as Lord Mayor of the City of Liverpool for 1912, was knighted in July 1913 and created a baronet in 1924.In later life he served on the boards of a number of companies and on several government committees. He retired in 1925 and died on 24 February 1927 at his home, Ingmire Hall, in Sedbergh, Yorkshire. He was buried in Toxteth Park Cemetery in Liverpool.He married twice, firstly Elizabeth, the daughter and coheir of Thomas Knowles, MP of Wigan, with whom he had four sons and two daughters and secondly in 1908 the widow Ella Wilstone, daughter of John Ernest Herbert Linford of Thorpe, Norfolk. He was succeeded by his son Harmood Harmood-Banner.	[ "High Sheriff of Cheshire", "Member of the 27th Parliament of the United Kingdom", "Member of the 32nd Parliament of the United Kingdom", "Member of the 33rd Parliament of the United Kingdom", "Member of the 31st Parliament of the United Kingdom", "Member of the 28th Parliament of the United Kingdom", "Lord Mayor of Liverpool", "Member of the 29th Parliament of the United Kingdom" ]
Which position did Sir John Harmood-Banner, 1st Baronet hold in 01-Jul-191101-July-1911?	July 01, 1911	{ "text": [ "Member of the 30th Parliament of the United Kingdom" ] }	L2_Q16030599_P39_4	Sir John Harmood-Banner, 1st Baronet holds the position of Member of the 31st Parliament of the United Kingdom from Dec, 1918 to Oct, 1922. Sir John Harmood-Banner, 1st Baronet holds the position of Lord Mayor of Liverpool from Jan, 1912 to Jan, 1913. Sir John Harmood-Banner, 1st Baronet holds the position of High Sheriff of Cheshire from Jan, 1902 to Jan, 1903. Sir John Harmood-Banner, 1st Baronet holds the position of Member of the 32nd Parliament of the United Kingdom from Nov, 1922 to Nov, 1923. Sir John Harmood-Banner, 1st Baronet holds the position of Member of the 28th Parliament of the United Kingdom from Jan, 1906 to Jan, 1910. Sir John Harmood-Banner, 1st Baronet holds the position of Member of the 33rd Parliament of the United Kingdom from Dec, 1923 to Oct, 1924. Sir John Harmood-Banner, 1st Baronet holds the position of Member of the 27th Parliament of the United Kingdom from Feb, 1905 to Jan, 1906. Sir John Harmood-Banner, 1st Baronet holds the position of Member of the 30th Parliament of the United Kingdom from Dec, 1910 to Nov, 1918. Sir John Harmood-Banner, 1st Baronet holds the position of Member of the 29th Parliament of the United Kingdom from Jan, 1910 to Nov, 1910.	John Harmood-BannerSir John Sutherland Harmood-Banner, 1st Baronet (8 September 1847 – 24 February 1927) was an English accountant from Liverpool. His interests spread across Lancashire and Cheshire, and extended to the British colonies and South America.He was also prominent in the civic affairs of Liverpool, where he was a long-serving City Councillor. A Conservative, he was Lord Mayor of Liverpool, and was one of the city's Members of Parliament (MPs) for nearly 20 years.Harmood-Banner was born in Toxteth Park, Liverpool, the second son of accountant Harmood Walter Banner from Bebington in Cheshire. He was educated at Radley College.He entered the family accountancy firm of Harmood Banner & Son in Liverpool, becoming a partner in 1870. In 1883 he assumed the position of deputy chairman of Pearson and Knowles, a coal and iron conglomerate based in Warrington. For the next 20 years he specialised in accounting work acting as a financial advisor and auditor of a number of major companies.He was elected MP for Liverpool Everton in a by-election in 1905, sitting until 1924. He was a justice of the peace and deputy lieutenant for Cheshire and was appointed High Sheriff of Cheshire for 1902. He also served as Lord Mayor of the City of Liverpool for 1912, was knighted in July 1913 and created a baronet in 1924.In later life he served on the boards of a number of companies and on several government committees. He retired in 1925 and died on 24 February 1927 at his home, Ingmire Hall, in Sedbergh, Yorkshire. He was buried in Toxteth Park Cemetery in Liverpool.He married twice, firstly Elizabeth, the daughter and coheir of Thomas Knowles, MP of Wigan, with whom he had four sons and two daughters and secondly in 1908 the widow Ella Wilstone, daughter of John Ernest Herbert Linford of Thorpe, Norfolk. He was succeeded by his son Harmood Harmood-Banner.	[ "High Sheriff of Cheshire", "Member of the 27th Parliament of the United Kingdom", "Member of the 32nd Parliament of the United Kingdom", "Member of the 33rd Parliament of the United Kingdom", "Member of the 31st Parliament of the United Kingdom", "Member of the 28th Parliament of the United Kingdom", "Lord Mayor of Liverpool", "Member of the 29th Parliament of the United Kingdom" ]
Who was the head of Pakistan in Apr, 2013?	April 01, 2013	{ "text": [ "Mir Hazar Khan Khoso" ] }	L2_Q843_P6_0	Imran Khan is the head of the government of Pakistan from Aug, 2018 to Apr, 2022. Mir Hazar Khan Khoso is the head of the government of Pakistan from Mar, 2013 to Jun, 2013. Shehbaz Sharif is the head of the government of Pakistan from Apr, 2022 to Dec, 2022. Shahid Khaqan Abbasi is the head of the government of Pakistan from Aug, 2017 to May, 2018. Nawaz Sharif is the head of the government of Pakistan from Jun, 2013 to Jul, 2017. Nasir-ul-Mulk is the head of the government of Pakistan from Jun, 2018 to Aug, 2018.	PakistanPakistan, officially the Islamic Republic of Pakistan, is a country in South Asia. It is the world's fifth-most populous country, with a population exceeding 225.2 million, and has the world's second-largest Muslim population. Pakistan is the 33rd-largest country by area, spanning . It has a coastline along the Arabian Sea and Gulf of Oman in the south, and is bordered by India to the east, Afghanistan to the west, Iran to the southwest, and China to the northeast. It is separated narrowly from Tajikistan by Afghanistan's Wakhan Corridor in the north, and also shares a maritime border with Oman.Pakistan is the site of several ancient cultures, including the 8,500-year-old Neolithic site of Mehrgarh in Balochistan, and the Indus Valley Civilisation of the Bronze Age, the most extensive of the civilisations of the Old World. The region that comprises the modern state of Pakistan was the realm of multiple empires and dynasties, including the Achaemenid; briefly that of Alexander the Great; the Seleucid, the Maurya, the Kushan, the Gupta; the Umayyad Caliphate in its southern regions, the Hindu Shahi, the Ghaznavids, the Delhi Sultanate, the Mughals, the Durranis, the Sikh Empire, British East India Company rule, and most recently, the British Indian Empire from 1858 to 1947.Spurred by the Pakistan Movement, which sought a homeland for the Muslims of British India, and election victories in 1946 by the All-India Muslim League, Pakistan gained independence in 1947 after the Partition of the British Indian Empire, which awarded separate statehood to its Muslim-majority regions and was accompanied by an unparalleled mass migration and loss of life. Initially a Dominion of the British Commonwealth, Pakistan officially drafted its constitution in 1956, and emerged as a declared Islamic republic. In 1971, the exclave of East Pakistan seceded as the new country of Bangladesh after a nine-month-long civil war. In the following four decades, Pakistan has been ruled by governments whose descriptions, although complex, commonly alternated between civilian and military, democratic and authoritarian, relatively secular and Islamist. Pakistan elected a civilian government in 2008, and in 2010 adopted a parliamentary system with periodic elections.Pakistan is a middle power, and has the world's sixth-largest standing armed forces. It is a declared nuclear-weapons state, and is ranked amongst the emerging and growth-leading economies, with a large and rapidly-growing middle class. Pakistan's political history since independence has been characterized by periods of significant economic and military growth as well those of political and economic instability. It is an ethnically and linguistically diverse country, with similarly diverse geography and wildlife. However, the country continues to face challenges, including poverty, illiteracy, corruption and terrorism. Pakistan is a member of the United Nations, the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation, the Organisation of Islamic Cooperation, the British Commonwealth of Nations, the South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation, the Islamic Military Counter-Terrorism Coalition, and is designated as a major non-NATO ally by the United States.The name "Pakistan" means literally "a land abounding in the pure" or "a land in which the pure abound", in Urdu and Persian. It references the word ("pāk"), meaning "pure" in Persian and Pashto. The suffix (transliterated in English as stân after stem word ending in a vowel; estân or istân after a stem ending in a consonant) is from Persian, and means "a place abounding in" or "a place where anything abounds".The name of the country was coined in 1933 by Choudhry Rahmat Ali, a Pakistan Movement activist, who published it in a pamphlet "Now or Never", using it as an acronym ("thirty million Muslim brethren who live in PAKISTAN"), and referring to the names of the five northern regions of the British Raj: "P"unjab, "A"fghania, "K"ashmir, "S"indh, and Baluchis"tan".Some of the earliest ancient human civilisations in South Asia originated from areas encompassing present-day Pakistan. The earliest known inhabitants in the region were Soanian during the Lower Paleolithic, of whom stone tools have been found in the Soan Valley of Punjab. The Indus region, which covers most of present day Pakistan, was the site of several successive ancient cultures including the Neolithic Mehrgarh and the Bronze Age Indus Valley Civilisation (2,800–1,800 BCE) at Harappa and Mohenjo-Daro.The Vedic period (1500–500 BCE) was characterised by an Indo-Aryan culture; during this period the Vedas, the oldest scriptures associated with Hinduism, were composed, and this culture later became well established in the region. Multan was an important Hindu pilgrimage centre. The Vedic civilisation flourished in the ancient Gandhāran city of Takṣaśilā, now Taxila in the Punjab, which was founded around 1000 BCE. Successive ancient empires and kingdoms ruled the region: the Persian Achaemenid Empire (around 519 BCE), Alexander the Great's empire in 326 BCE and the Maurya Empire, founded by Chandragupta Maurya and extended by Ashoka the Great, until 185 BCE. The Indo-Greek Kingdom founded by Demetrius of Bactria (180–165 BCE) included Gandhara and Punjab and reached its greatest extent under Menander (165–150 BCE), prospering the Greco-Buddhist culture in the region. Taxila had one of the earliest universities and centres of higher education in the world, which was established during the late Vedic period in 6th century BCE. The school consisted of several monasteries without large dormitories or lecture halls where the religious instruction was provided on an individualistic basis. The ancient university was documented by the invading forces of Alexander the Great and was also recorded by Chinese pilgrims in the 4th or 5th century CE.At its zenith, the Rai Dynasty (489–632 CE) of Sindh ruled this region and the surrounding territories. The Pala Dynasty was the last Buddhist empire, which, under Dharmapala and Devapala, stretched across South Asia from what is now Bangladesh through Northern India to Pakistan.The Arab conqueror Muhammad bin Qasim conquered Sindh in 711 CE. The Pakistan government's official chronology claims this as the time when the foundation of Pakistan was laid but the concept of "Pakistan" arrived in the 19th century. The Early Medieval period (642–1219 CE) witnessed the spread of Islam in the region. During this period, Sufi missionaries played a pivotal role in converting a majority of the regional Buddhist and Hindu population to Islam. Upon the defeat of the Turk and Hindu Shahi dynasties which governed the Kabul Valley, Gandhara (present-day Khyber Pakhtunkwa), and western Punjab in the 7th to 11th centuries CE, several successive Muslim empires ruled over the region, including the Ghaznavid Empire (975–1187 CE), the Ghorid Kingdom, and the Delhi Sultanate (1206–1526 CE). The Lodi dynasty, the last of the Delhi Sultanate, was replaced by the Mughal Empire (1526–1857 CE).The Mughals introduced Persian literature and high culture, establishing the roots of Indo-Persian culture in the region. In the region of modern-day Pakistan, key cities during the Mughal period were Lahore and Thatta, both of which were chosen as the site of impressive Mughal buildings. In the early 16th century, the region remained under the Mughal Empire ruled by Muslim emperors. By the early 18th century, increasing European influence contributed to the slow disintegration of the Mughal Empire as the lines between commercial and political dominance became increasingly blurred.During this time, the English East India Company had established coastal outposts. Control over the seas, greater resources, technology, and British military protection led the Company to increasingly flex its military muscle, allowing the Company to gain control over the subcontinent by 1765 and sideline European competitors. Expanding access beyond Bengal and the subsequent increased strength and size of its army enabled it to annex or subdue most of region by the 1820s. Many historians see this as the start of the region's colonial period. By this time, with its economic power severely curtailed by the British parliament and itself effectively made an arm of British administration, the Company began more deliberately to enter non-economic arenas such as education, social reform, and culture. Such reforms included the enforcement of the English Education Act in 1835 and the introduction of the Indian Civil Service (ICS). Traditional "madrasahs"—primary institutions of higher learning for Muslims in the subcontinent—were no longer supported by the English Crown, and nearly all of the "madrasahs" lost their financial endowment.The gradual decline of the Mughal Empire in the early 18th century enabled the Sikh Empire to control larger areas until the British East India Company gained ascendancy over South Asia. A rebellion in 1857 called the Sepoy mutiny of Bengal was the region's major armed struggle against the British Empire and Queen Victoria. Divergence in the relationship between Hinduism and Islam created a major rift in British India that led to motivated religious violence in British India. The language controversy further escalated the tensions between Hindus and Muslims. The Hindu renaissance witnessed an awakening of intellectualism in traditional Hinduism and saw the emergence of more assertive influence in the social and political spheres in British India. A Muslim intellectual movement, founded by Sir Syed Ahmed Khan to counter the Hindu renaissance, envisioned, as well as advocated for the two-nation theory, and led to the creation of the All-India Muslim League in 1906. In contrast to the Indian National Congress's anti-British efforts, the Muslim League was a pro-British movement whose political program inherited the British values that would shape Pakistan's future civil society. In events during World War I, British Intelligence foiled an anti-English conspiracy involving the nexus of Congress and the German Empire. The largely non-violent independence struggle led by the Indian Congress engaged millions of protesters in mass campaigns of civil disobedience in the 1920s and 1930s against the British Empire.The Muslim League slowly rose to mass popularity in the 1930s amid fears of under-representation and neglect of British Muslims in politics. In his presidential address of 29 December 1930, Allama Iqbal called for "the amalgamation of North-West Muslim-majority Indian states" consisting of Punjab, North-West Frontier Province, Sind, and Baluchistan. The perceived neglect of Muslim interests by Congress led British provincial governments during the period of 1937–39 convinced Muhammad Ali Jinnah, the founder of Pakistan to espouse the two-nation theory and led the Muslim League to adopt the Lahore Resolution of 1940 presented by Sher-e-Bangla A.K. Fazlul Haque, popularly known as the Pakistan Resolution. In World War II, Jinnah and British-educated founding fathers in the Muslim League supported the United Kingdom's war efforts, countering opposition against it whilst working towards Sir Syed's vision.The 1946 elections resulted in the Muslim League winning 90 percent of the seats reserved for Muslims. Thus, the 1946 election was effectively a plebiscite in which the Indian Muslims were to vote on the creation of Pakistan, a plebiscite won by the Muslim League. This victory was assisted by the support given to the Muslim League by the support of the landowners of Sindh and Punjab. The Congress, which initially denied the Muslim League's claim of being the sole representative of Indian Muslims, was now forced to recognise the fact. The British had no alternative except to take Jinnah's views into account as he had emerged as the sole spokesperson of the entirety of British India's Muslims. However, the British did not want colonial India to be partitioned, and in one last effort to prevent it, they devised the Cabinet Mission plan.As the cabinet mission failed, the British government announced its intention to end the British Rule in 1946–47. Nationalists in British India—including Jawaharlal Nehru and Abul Kalam Azad of Congress, Jinnah of the All-India Muslim League, and Master Tara Singh representing the Sikhs—agreed to the proposed terms of transfer of power and independence in June 1947 with the Viceroy of India, Lord Mountbatten of Burma. As the United Kingdom agreed to the partitioning of India in 1947, the modern state of Pakistan was established on 14 August 1947 , amalgamating the Muslim-majority eastern and northwestern regions of British India. It comprised the provinces of Balochistan, East Bengal, the North-West Frontier Province, West Punjab, and Sindh.In the riots that accompanied the partition in Punjab Province, it is believed that between 200,000 and 2,000,000 people were killed in what some have described as a retributive genocide between the religions while 50,000 Muslim women were abducted and raped by Hindu and Sikh men, 33,000 Hindu and Sikh women also experienced the same fate at the hands of Muslims. Around 6.5 million Muslims moved from India to West Pakistan and 4.7 million Hindus and Sikhs moved from West Pakistan to India. It was the largest mass migration in human history. A subsequent dispute over the princely state of Jammu and Kashmir eventually sparked the Indo-Pakistani War of 1947–1948.After independence in 1947, Jinnah, the President of the Muslim League, became the nation's first Governor-General as well as the first President-Speaker of the Parliament, but he died of tuberculosis on 11 September 1948. Meanwhile, Pakistan's founding fathers agreed to appoint Liaquat Ali Khan, the secretary-general of the party, the nation's first Prime Minister. With dominion status in the Commonwealth of Nations, independent Pakistan had two British monarchs before it became a republic.The creation of Pakistan was never fully accepted by many British leaders, among them Lord Mountbatten. Mountbatten clearly expressed his lack of support and faith in the Muslim League's idea of Pakistan. Jinnah refused Mountbatten's offer to serve as Governor-General of Pakistan. When Mountbatten was asked by Collins and Lapierre if he would have sabotaged Pakistan had he known that Jinnah was dying of tuberculosis, he replied 'most probably'.Maulana Shabbir Ahmad Usmani, a respected Deobandi "alim" (scholar) who occupied the position of Shaykh al-Islam in Pakistan in 1949, and Maulana Mawdudi of Jamaat-i-Islami played a pivotal role in the demand for an Islamic constitution. Mawdudi demanded that the Constituent Assembly make an explicit declaration affirming the "supreme sovereignty of God" and the supremacy of the "shariah" in Pakistan.A significant result of the efforts of the Jamaat-i-Islami and the "ulama" was the passage of the Objectives Resolution in March 1949. The Objectives Resolution, which Liaquat Ali Khan called the second most important step in Pakistan's history, declared that "sovereignty over the entire universe belongs to God Almighty alone and the authority which He has delegated to the State of Pakistan through its people for being exercised within the limits prescribed by Him is a sacred trust". The Objectives Resolution has been incorporated as a preamble to the constitutions of 1956, 1962, and 1973.Democracy was stalled by the martial law that had been enforced by President Iskander Mirza, who was replaced by the army chief, General Ayub Khan. After adopting a presidential system in 1962, the country experienced exceptional growth until a second war with India in 1965 that led to an economic downturn and wide-scale public disapproval in 1967. Consolidating control from Ayub Khan in 1969, President Yahya Khan had to deal with a devastating cyclone that caused 500,000 deaths in East Pakistan.In 1970 Pakistan held its first democratic elections since independence, meant to mark a transition from military rule to democracy, but after the East Pakistani Awami League won against the Pakistan Peoples Party (PPP), Yahya Khan and the military establishment refused to hand over power. Operation Searchlight, a military crackdown on the Bengali nationalist movement, led to a declaration of independence and the waging of a war of liberation by the Bengali Mukti Bahini forces in East Pakistan, which in West Pakistan was described as a civil war as opposed to a war of liberation.Independent researchers estimate that between 300,000 and 500,000 civilians died during this period while the Bangladesh government puts the number of dead at three million, a figure that is now nearly universally regarded as excessively inflated. Some academics such as Rudolph Rummel and Rounaq Jahan say both sides committed genocide; others such as Richard Sisson and Leo E. Rose believe there was no genocide. In response to India's support for the insurgency in East Pakistan, preemptive strikes on India by Pakistan's air force, navy, and marines sparked a conventional war in 1971 that resulted in an Indian victory and East Pakistan gaining independence as Bangladesh.With Pakistan surrendering in the war, Yahya Khan was replaced by Zulfikar Ali Bhutto as president; the country worked towards promulgating its constitution and putting the country on the road to democracy. Democratic rule resumed from 1972 to 1977—an era of self-consciousness, intellectual leftism, nationalism, and nationwide reconstruction. In 1972 Pakistan embarked on an ambitious plan to develop its nuclear deterrence capability with the goal of preventing any foreign invasion; the country's first nuclear power plant was inaugurated in that same year. Accelerated in response to India's first nuclear test in 1974, this crash program was completed in 1979.Democracy ended with a military coup in 1977 against the leftist PPP, which saw General Zia-ul-Haq become the president in 1978. From 1977 to 1988, President Zia's corporatisation and economic Islamisation initiatives led to Pakistan becoming one of the fastest-growing economies in South Asia. While building up the country's nuclear program, increasing Islamisation, and the rise of a homegrown conservative philosophy, Pakistan helped subsidise and distribute US resources to factions of the mujahideen against the USSR's intervention in communist Afghanistan. Pakistan's North-West Frontier Province became a base for the anti-Soviet Afghan fighters, with the province's influential Deobandi ulama playing a significant role in encouraging and organising the 'jihad'.President Zia died in a plane crash in 1988, and Benazir Bhutto, daughter of Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, was elected as the country's first female Prime Minister. The PPP was followed by conservative Pakistan Muslim League (N), and over the next decade the leaders of the two parties fought for power, alternating in office while the country's situation worsened; economic indicators fell sharply, in contrast to the 1980s. This period is marked by prolonged stagflation, instability, corruption, nationalism, geopolitical rivalry with India, and the clash of left wing-right wing ideologies. As PML (N) secured a supermajority in elections in 1997, Sharif authorised nuclear testings (See:"Chagai-I" and "Chagai-II"), as a retaliation to the second nuclear tests ordered by India, led by Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee in May 1998.Military tension between the two countries in the Kargil district led to the Kargil War of 1999, and turmoil in civic-military relations allowed General Pervez Musharraf to take over through a bloodless coup d'état. Musharraf governed Pakistan as chief executive from 1999 to 2001 and as President from 2001 to 2008—a period of enlightenment, social liberalism, extensive economic reforms, and direct involvement in the US-led war on terrorism. When the National Assembly historically completed its first full five-year term on 15 November 2007, the new elections were called by the Election Commission.After the assassination of Benazir Bhutto in 2007, the PPP secured the most votes in the elections of 2008, appointing party member Yousaf Raza Gillani as Prime Minister. Threatened with impeachment, President Musharraf resigned on 18 August 2008, and was succeeded by Asif Ali Zardari. Clashes with the judicature prompted Gillani's disqualification from the Parliament and as the Prime Minister in June 2012. By its own financial calculations, Pakistan's involvement in the war on terrorism has cost up to $118 billion, sixty thousand casualties and more than 1.8 million displaced civilians. The general election held in 2013 saw the PML (N) almost achieve a supermajority, following which Nawaz Sharif was elected as the Prime Minister, returning to the post for the third time in fourteen years, in a democratic transition. In 2018, Imran Khan (the chairman of PTI) won the 2018 Pakistan general election with 116 general seats and became the 22nd Prime Minister of Pakistan in election of National Assembly of Pakistan for Prime Minister by getting 176 votes against Shehbaz Sharif (the chairman of PML (N)) who got 96 votes.Pakistan is the only country to have been created in the name of Islam. The idea of Pakistan, which had received overwhelming popular support among Indian Muslims, especially those in the provinces of British India where Muslims were in a minority such as the United Provinces, was articulated in terms of an Islamic state by the Muslim League leadership, the ulama (Islamic clergy) and Jinnah. Jinnah had developed a close association with the "ulama" and upon his death was described by one such "alim", Maulana Shabbir Ahmad Usmani, as the greatest Muslim after Aurangzeb and as someone who desired to unite the Muslims of the world under the banner of Islam.The Objectives Resolution in March 1949, which declared God as the sole sovereign over the entire universe, represented the first formal step to transform Pakistan into an Islamic state. Muslim League leader Chaudhry Khaliquzzaman asserted that Pakistan could only truly become an Islamic state after bringing all believers of Islam into a single political unit. Keith Callard, one of the earliest scholars on Pakistani politics, observed that Pakistanis believed in the essential unity of purpose and outlook in the Muslim world and assumed that Muslim from other countries would share their views on the relationship between religion and nationality.However, Pakistan's pan-Islamist sentiments for a united Islamic bloc called Islamistan were not shared by other Muslim governments, although Islamists such as the Grand Mufti of Palestine, Al-Haj Amin al-Husseini, and leaders of the Muslim Brotherhood, became drawn to the country. Pakistan's desire for an international organization of Muslim countries was fulfilled in the 1970s when the Organization of Islamic Conference (OIC) was formed.The strongest opposition to the Islamist ideological paradigm being imposed on the state came from the Bengali Muslims of East Pakistan whose educated class, according to a survey by social scientist Nasim Ahmad Jawed, preferred secularism and focused on ethnic identity unlike educated West Pakistanis who tended to prefer an Islamic identity. The Islamist party Jamaat-e-Islami considered Pakistan to be an Islamic state and believed Bengali nationalism to be unacceptable. In the 1971 conflict over East Pakistan, the Jamaat-e-Islami fought the Bengali nationalists on the Pakistan Army's side.After Pakistan's first ever general elections, the 1973 Constitution was created by an elected Parliament. The Constitution declared Pakistan an Islamic Republic and Islam as the state religion. It also stated that all laws would have to be brought into accordance with the injunctions of Islam as laid down in the Quran and Sunnah and that no law repugnant to such injunctions could be enacted. The 1973 Constitution also created certain institutions such as the Shariat Court and the Council of Islamic Ideology to channel the interpretation and application of Islam.Pakistan's leftist Prime Minister Zulfikar Ali Bhutto faced vigorous opposition which coalesced into a movement united under the revivalist banner of "Nizam-e-Mustafa" ("Rule of the Prophet") which aimed to establish an Islamic state based on Sharia laws. Bhutto agreed to some Islamist demands before being overthrown in a coup.In 1977, after taking power from Bhutto in a coup d'état, General Zia-ul-Haq, who came from a religious background, committed himself to establishing an Islamic state and enforcing "sharia" law. Zia established separate Shariat judicial courts and court benches to judge legal cases using Islamic doctrine. Zia bolstered the influence of the "ulama" (Islamic clergy) and the Islamic parties. Zia-ul-Haq forged a strong alliance between the military and Deobandi institutions and even though most Barelvi ulama and only a few Deobandi scholars had supported Pakistan's creation, Islamic state politics came to be mostly in favour of Deobandi (and later Ahl-e-Hadith/Salafi) institutions instead of Barelvi. Sectarian tensions increased with Zia's anti-Shia policies.According to a Pew Research Center (PEW) opinion poll, a majority of Pakistanis support making Sharia the official law of the land. In a survey of several Muslim countries, PEW also found that Pakistanis tend to identify with their religion more than their nationality in contrast to Muslims in other nations such as Egypt, Indonesia and Jordan.The geography and climate of Pakistan are extremely diverse, and the country is home to a wide variety of wildlife. Pakistan covers an area of , approximately equal to the combined land areas of France and the United Kingdom. It is the 33rd-largest nation by total area, although this ranking varies depending on how the disputed territory of Kashmir is counted. Pakistan has a coastline along the Arabian Sea and the Gulf of Oman in the south and land borders of in total: with Afghanistan, with China, with India and with Iran. It shares a marine border with Oman, and is separated from Tajikistan by the cold, narrow Wakhan Corridor. Pakistan occupies a geopolitically important location at the crossroads of South Asia, the Middle East, and Central Asia.Geologically, Pakistan is located in the Indus–Tsangpo Suture Zone and overlaps the Indian tectonic plate in its Sindh and Punjab provinces; Balochistan and most of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa are within the Eurasian plate, mainly on the Iranian plateau. Gilgit–Baltistan and Azad Kashmir lie along the edge of the Indian plate and hence are prone to violent earthquakes. This region has the highest rates of seismicity and the largest earthquakes in the Himalaya region. Ranging from the coastal areas of the south to the glaciated mountains of the north, Pakistan's landscapes vary from plains to deserts, forests, hills, and plateaus.Pakistan is divided into three major geographic areas: the northern highlands, the Indus River plain, and the Balochistan Plateau. The northern highlands contain the Karakoram, Hindu Kush, and Pamir mountain ranges (see mountains of Pakistan), which contain some of the world's highest peaks, including five of the fourteen eight-thousanders (mountain peaks over ), which attract adventurers and mountaineers from all over the world, notably K2 () and Nanga Parbat (). The Balochistan Plateau lies in the west and the Thar Desert in the east. The Indus River and its tributaries flow through the country from the Kashmir region to the Arabian Sea. There is an expanse of alluvial plains along it in the Punjab and Sindh.The climate varies from tropical to temperate, with arid conditions in the coastal south. There is a monsoon season with frequent flooding due to heavy rainfall, and a dry season with significantly less rainfall or none at all. There are four distinct seasons in Pakistan: a cool, dry winter from December through February; a hot, dry spring from March through May; the summer rainy season, or southwest monsoon period, from June through September; and the retreating monsoon period of October and November. Rainfall varies greatly from year to year, and patterns of alternate flooding and drought are common.The diversity of the landscape and climate in Pakistan allows a wide variety of trees and plants to flourish. The forests range from coniferous alpine and subalpine trees such as spruce, pine, and deodar cedar in the extreme northern mountains to deciduous trees in most of the country (for example, the mulberry-like shisham found in the Sulaiman Mountains), to palms such as coconut and date in the southern Punjab, southern Balochistan, and all of Sindh. The western hills are home to juniper, tamarisk, coarse grasses, and scrub plants. Mangrove forests form much of the coastal wetlands along the coast in the south.Coniferous forests are found at altitudes ranging from in most of the northern and northwestern highlands. In the xeric regions of Balochistan, date palm and "Ephedra" are common. In most of the Punjab and Sindh, the Indus plains support tropical and subtropical dry and moist broadleaf forest as well as tropical and xeric shrublands. These forests are mostly of mulberry, acacia, and eucalyptus. About 2.2% or of Pakistan was forested in 2010.The fauna of Pakistan also reflects the country's varied climate. Around 668 bird species are found there, including crows, sparrows, mynas, hawks, falcons, and eagles. Palas, Kohistan, has a significant population of western tragopan. Many birds sighted in Pakistan are migratory, coming from Europe, Central Asia, and India.The southern plains are home to mongooses, small Indian civet, hares, the Asiatic jackal, the Indian pangolin, the jungle cat, and the desert cat. There are mugger crocodiles in the Indus, and wild boar, deer, porcupines, and small rodents in the surrounding areas. The sandy scrublands of central Pakistan are home to Asiatic jackals, striped hyenas, wildcats, and leopards. The lack of vegetative cover, the severe climate, and the impact of grazing on the deserts have left wild animals in a precarious position. The chinkara is the only animal that can still be found in significant numbers in Cholistan. A small number of nilgai are found along the Pakistan–India border and in some parts of Cholistan. A wide variety of animals live in the mountainous north, including the Marco Polo sheep, the urial (a subspecies of wild sheep), the markhor goat, the ibex goat, the Asian black bear, and the Himalayan brown bear. Among the rare animals found in the area are the snow leopard and the blind Indus river dolphin, of which there are believed to be about 1,100 remaining, protected at the Indus River Dolphin Reserve in Sindh. In total, 174 mammals, 177 reptiles, 22 amphibians, 198 freshwater fish species and 5,000 species of invertebrates (including insects) have been recorded in Pakistan.The flora and fauna of Pakistan suffer from a number of problems. Pakistan has the second-highest rate of deforestation in the world, which, along with hunting and pollution, has had adverse effects on the ecosystem. It had a 2019 Forest Landscape Integrity Index mean score of 7.42/10, ranking it 41st globally out of 172 countries. The government has established a large number of protected areas, wildlife sanctuaries, and game reserves to address these issues.Pakistan's political experience is essentially related to the struggle of Indian Muslims to regain the power they lost to British colonisation. Pakistan is a democratic parliamentary federal republic, with Islam as the state religion. The first constitution was adopted in 1956 but suspended by Ayub Khan in 1958, who replaced it with the second constitution in 1962. A complete and comprehensive constitution was adopted in 1973, it was suspended by Zia-ul-Haq in 1977 but reinstated in 1985. This constitution is the country's most important document, laying the foundations of the current government. The Pakistani military establishment has played an influential role in mainstream politics throughout Pakistan's political history. The periods 1958–1971, 1977–1988, and 1999–2008 saw military coups that resulted in the imposition of martial law and military commanders who governed as de facto presidents. Today Pakistan has a multi-party parliamentary system with clear division of powers and checks and balances among the branches of government. The first successful democratic transition occurred in May 2013. Politics in Pakistan is centred on, and dominated by, a homegrown social philosophy comprising a blend of ideas from socialism, conservatism, and the third way. As of the general elections held in 2013, the three main political parties in the country are: the centre-right conservative Pakistan Muslim League-N; the centre-left socialist PPP; and the centrist and third-way Pakistan Movement for Justice (PTI).Since Independence, Pakistan has attempted to balance its relations with foreign nations. Pakistan is a strong ally of China, with both countries placing considerable importance on the maintenance of an extremely close and supportive special relationship. It is also a major non-NATO ally of the United States in the war against terrorism—a status achieved in 2004. Pakistan's foreign policy and geostrategy mainly focus on the economy and security against threats to its national identity and territorial integrity, and on the cultivation of close relations with other Muslim countries.The Kashmir conflict remains the major point of contention between Pakistan and India; three of their four wars were fought over this territory. Due partly to difficulties in relations with its geopolitical rival India, Pakistan maintains close political relations with Turkey and Iran, and both countries have been a focal point in Pakistan's foreign policy. Saudi Arabia also maintains a respected position in Pakistan's foreign policy.A non-signatory party of the Treaty on Nuclear Non-Proliferation, Pakistan is an influential member of the IAEA. In recent events, Pakistan has blocked an international treaty to limit fissile material, arguing that the "treaty would target Pakistan specifically". In the 20th century, Pakistan's nuclear deterrence program focused on countering India's nuclear ambitions in the region, and nuclear tests by India eventually led Pakistan to reciprocate to maintain a geopolitical balance as becoming a nuclear power. Currently, Pakistan maintains a policy of credible minimum deterrence, calling its program vital nuclear deterrence against foreign aggression.Located in the strategic and geopolitical corridor of the world's major maritime oil supply lines and communication fibre optics, Pakistan has proximity to the natural resources of Central Asian countries. Briefing on the country's foreign policy in 2004, a Pakistani senator reportedly explained: "Pakistan highlights sovereign equality of states, bilateralism, mutuality of interests, and non-interference in each other's domestic affairs as the cardinal features of its foreign policy." Pakistan is an active member of the United Nations and has a Permanent Representative to represent Pakistan's positions in international politics. Pakistan has lobbied for the concept of "enlightened moderation" in the Muslim world. Pakistan is also a member of Commonwealth of Nations, the South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation (SAARC), the Economic Cooperation Organization (ECO), and the G20 developing nations.Due to ideological differences, Pakistan opposed the Soviet Union in the 1950s. During the Soviet–Afghan War in the 1980s, Pakistan was one of the closest allies of the United States. Relations between Pakistan and Russia have greatly improved since 1999, and co-operation in various sectors has increased. Pakistan has had an "on-and-off" relationship with the United States. A close ally of the United States during the Cold war, Pakistan's relationship with the United States soured in the 1990s when the US imposed sanctions because of Pakistan's secretive nuclear development. Since 9/11, Pakistan has been a close ally of the United States on the issue of counter-terrorism in the regions of the Middle East and South Asia, with the US supporting Pakistan with aid money and weapons. Initially, the United States-led war on terrorism led to an improvement in the relationship, but it was strained by a divergence of interests and resulting mistrust during the war in Afghanistan and by issues related to terrorism.Pakistan does not have diplomatic relations with Israel; nonetheless, some Israeli citizens have visited the country on tourist visas. However, an exchange took place between the two countries using Turkey as a communication conduit. Despite Pakistan being the only country in the world that has not established diplomatic relations with Armenia, an Armenian community still resides in Pakistan. Pakistan had warm relations with Bangladesh, despite some initial strains in their relationship.Pakistan was one of the first countries to establish formal diplomatic relations with the People's Republic of China, and the relationship continues to be strong since China's war with India in 1962, forming a special relationship. From the 1960s to 1980s, Pakistan greatly helped China in reaching out to the world's major countries and helped facilitate US President Nixon's state visit to China. Despite the change of governments in Pakistan and fluctuations in the regional and global situation, China's policy in Pakistan continues to be a dominant factor at all times. In return, China is Pakistan's largest trading partner, and economic co-operation has flourished, with substantial Chinese investment in Pakistan's infrastructural expansion such as the Pakistani deep-water port at Gwadar. Friendly Sino-Pakistani relations reached new heights as both countries signed 51 agreements and Memorandums of Understanding (MoUs) in 2015 for co-operation in different areas. Both countries signed a Free Trade Agreement in the 2000s, and Pakistan continues to serve as China's communication bridge to the Muslim world. In 2016, China announced that it will set up an anti-terrorism alliance with Pakistan, Afghanistan, and Tajikistan. In December 2018, Pakistan's government defended China's re-education camps for a million Uyghur Muslims.After Independence, Pakistan vigorously pursued bilateral relations with other Muslim countries and made an active bid for leadership of the Muslim world, or at least for leadership in efforts to achieve unity. The Ali brothers had sought to project Pakistan as the natural leader of the Islamic world, in part due to its large manpower and military strength. A top-ranking Muslim League leader, Khaliquzzaman, declared that Pakistan would bring together all Muslim countries into Islamistan—a pan-Islamic entity.Such developments (along with Pakistan's creation) did not get American approval, and British Prime Minister Clement Attlee voiced international opinion at the time by stating that he wished that India and Pakistan would re-unite. Since most of the Arab world was undergoing a nationalist awakening at the time, there was little attraction to Pakistan's Pan-Islamic aspirations. Some of the Arab countries saw the 'Islamistan' project as a Pakistani attempt to dominate other Muslim states.Pakistan vigorously championed the right of self-determination for Muslims around the world. Pakistan's efforts for the independence movements of Indonesia, Algeria, Tunisia, Morocco, and Eritrea were significant and initially led to close ties between these countries and Pakistan. However, Pakistan also masterminded an attack on the Afghan city of Jalalabad during the Afghan Civil War to establish an Islamic government there. Pakistan had wished to foment an 'Islamic Revolution' that would transcend national borders, covering Pakistan, Afghanistan, and Central Asia.On the other hand, Pakistan's relations with Iran have been strained at times due to sectarian tensions. Iran and Saudi Arabia used Pakistan as a battleground for their proxy sectarian war, and by the 1990s Pakistan's support for the Sunni Taliban organisation in Afghanistan became a problem for Shia Iran, which opposed a Taliban-controlled Afghanistan. Tensions between Iran and Pakistan intensified in 1998 when Iran accused Pakistan of war crimes after Pakistani warplanes had bombarded Afghanistan's last Shia stronghold in support of the Taliban.Pakistan is an influential and founding member of the Organisation of Islamic Cooperation (OIC). Maintaining cultural, political, social, and economic relations with the Arab world and other countries in the Muslim world is a vital factor in Pakistan's foreign policy.A federal parliamentary republic state, Pakistan is a federation that comprises four provinces: Punjab, Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, Sindh and Balochistan, and three territories: Islamabad Capital Territory, Gilgit–Baltistan and Azad Kashmir. The Government of Pakistan exercises the "de facto" jurisdiction over the Frontier Regions and the western parts of the Kashmir Regions, which are organised into the separate political entities Azad Kashmir and Gilgit–Baltistan (formerly Northern Areas). In 2009, the constitutional assignment () awarded the Gilgit–Baltistan a semi-provincial status, giving it self-government.The local government system consists of a three-tier system of districts, tehsils, and union councils, with an elected body at each tier. There are about 130 districts altogether, of which Azad Kashmir has ten and Gilgit–Baltistan seven.Law enforcement is carried out by a joint network of the intelligence community with jurisdiction limited to the relevant province or territory. The National Intelligence Directorate coordinates the information intelligence at both federal and provincial levels; including the FIA, IB, Motorway Police, and paramilitary forces such as the Pakistan Rangers and the Frontier Corps.Pakistan's "premier" intelligence agency, the Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI), was formed just within a year after the Independence of Pakistan in 1947. ABC News Point in 2014 reported that the ISI was ranked as the top intelligence agency in the world while Zee News reported the ISI as ranking fifth among the world's most powerful intelligence agencies.The court system is organised as a hierarchy, with the Supreme Court at the apex, below which are High Courts, Federal Shariat Courts (one in each province and one in the federal capital), District Courts (one in each district), Judicial Magistrate Courts (in every town and city), Executive Magistrate Courts, and civil courts. The Penal code has limited jurisdiction in the Tribal Areas, where law is largely derived from tribal customs.The Kashmir—the most northwesterly region of South Asia—is a major territorial dispute that has hindered relations between India and Pakistan. The two nations have fought at least three large-scale conventional wars in successive years in 1947, 1965, and 1971. The conflict in 1971 witnessed Pakistan's unconditional surrender and a treaty that subsequently led to the independence of Bangladesh. Other serious military engagements and skirmishes have included the armed contacts in Siachen Glacier (1984) and Kargil (1999). Approximately 45.1% of the Kashmir region is controlled by India, which also claims the entire state of Jammu and Kashmir, including most of Jammu, the Kashmir Valley, Ladakh, and the Siachen. The claim is contested by Pakistan, which controls approximately 38.2% of the Kashmir region, an area known as the Azad Kashmir and Gilgit–Baltistan.India claims the Kashmir on the basis of the Instrument of Accession—a legal agreement with Kashmir's leaders executed by "Maharaja" Hari Singh, who agreed to cede the area to India. Pakistan claims Kashmir on the basis of a Muslim majority and of geography, the same principles that were applied for the creation of the two independent states. India referred the dispute to the United Nations on 1 January 1948. In a resolution passed in 1948, the UN's General Assembly asked Pakistan to remove most of its troops as a "plebiscite" would then be held. However, Pakistan failed to vacate the region and a ceasefire was reached in 1949 establishing a Line of Control (LoC) that divided Kashmir between the two nations. India, fearful that the Muslim majority populace of Kashmir would secede from India, did not allow a plebiscite to take place in the region. This was confirmed in a statement by India's Defense Minister, Krishna Menon, who said: "Kashmir would vote to join Pakistan and no Indian Government responsible for agreeing to plebiscite would survive."Pakistan claims that its position is for the right of the people of Jammu and Kashmir to determine their future through impartial elections as mandated by the United Nations, while India has stated that Kashmir is an integral part of India, referring to the Simla Agreement (1972) and to the fact that elections take place regularly. In recent developments, certain Kashmiri independence groups believe that Kashmir should be independent of both India and Pakistan.The law enforcement in Pakistan is carried out by joint network of several federal and provincial police agencies. The four provinces and the Islamabad Capital Territory (ICT) each have a civilian police force with jurisdiction extending only to the relevant province or territory. At the federal level, there are a number of civilian intelligence agencies with nationwide jurisdictions including the Federal Investigation Agency (FIA), Intelligence Bureau (IB), and the Motorway Patrol, as well as several paramilitary forces such as the National Guards (Northern Areas), the Rangers (Punjab and Sindh), and the Frontier Corps (Khyber Pakhtunkhwa and Balochistan).The most senior officers of all the civilian police forces also form part of the Police Service, which is a component of the civil service of Pakistan. Namely, there is four provincial police service including the Punjab Police, Sindh Police, Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa Police, and the Balochistan Police; all headed by the appointed senior Inspector-Generals. The ICT has its own police component, the Capital Police, to maintain law and order in the capital. The CID bureaus are the crime investigation unit and form a vital part in each provincial police service.The law enforcement in Pakistan also has a Motorway Patrol which is responsible for enforcement of traffic and safety laws, security and recovery on Pakistan's inter-provincial motorway network. In each of provincial Police Service, it also maintains a respective Elite Police units led by the NACTA—a counter-terrorism police unit as well as providing VIP escorts. In the Punjab and Sindh, the Pakistan Rangers are an internal security force with the prime objective to provide and maintain security in war zones and areas of conflict as well as maintaining law and order which includes providing assistance to the police. The Frontier Corps serves the similar purpose in Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa, and the Balochistan.Male homosexuality is illegal in Pakistan and punishable with up to life in prison. In its 2018 Press Freedom Index, Reporters Without Borders ranked Pakistan number 139 out of 180 countries based on freedom of the press. Television stations and newspapers are routinely shut down for publishing any reports critical of the government or the military.The armed forces of Pakistan are the sixth largest in the world in terms of numbers in full-time service, with about 651,800 personnel on active duty and 291,000 paramilitary personnel, as of tentative estimates in 2021. They came into existence after independence in 1947, and the military establishment has frequently influenced the national politics ever since. Chain of command of the military is kept under the control of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Committee; all of the branches joint works, co-ordination, military logistics, and joint missions are under the Joint Staff HQ. The Joint Staff HQ is composed of the Air HQ, Navy HQ, and Army GHQ in the vicinity of the Rawalpindi Military District.The Chairman Joint Chiefs of Staff Committee is the highest principle staff officer in the armed forces, and the chief military adviser to the civilian government though the chairman has no authority over the three branches of armed forces. The Chairman joint chiefs controls the military from the JS HQ and maintains strategic communications between the military and the civilian government. , the CJCSC is General Nadeem Raza alongside chief of army staff General Qamar Javed Bajwa, chief of naval staff Admiral Muhammad Amjad Khan Niazi, and chief of air staff Air Chief Marshal Zaheer Ahmad Babar. The main branches are the Army, the Air Force and the Navy, which are supported by a large number of paramilitary forces in the country. Control over the strategic arsenals, deployment, employment, development, military computers and command and control is a responsibility vested under the National Command Authority which oversaw the work on the nuclear policy as part of the credible minimum deterrence.The United States, Turkey, and China maintain close military relations and regularly export military equipment and technology transfer to Pakistan. Joint logistics and major war games are occasionally carried out by the militaries of China and Turkey. Philosophical basis for the military draft is introduced by the Constitution in times of emergency, but it has never been imposed.Since 1947 Pakistan has been involved in four conventional wars, the first war occurred in Kashmir with Pakistan gaining control of Western Kashmir, (Azad Kashmir and Gilgit–Baltistan), and India retaining Eastern Kashmir (Jammu and Kashmir and Ladakh). Territorial problems eventually led to another conventional war in 1965; over the issue of Bengali refugees that led to another war in 1971 which resulted in Pakistan's unconditional surrender in East Pakistan. Tensions in Kargil brought the two countries at the brink of war. Since 1947 the unresolved territorial problems with Afghanistan saw border skirmishes which were kept mostly at the mountainous border. In 1961, the military and intelligence community repelled the Afghan incursion in the Bajaur Agency near the Durand Line border.Rising tensions with neighbouring USSR in their involvement in Afghanistan, Pakistani intelligence community, mostly the ISI, systematically coordinated the US resources to the Afghan mujahideen and foreign fighters against the Soviet Union's presence in the region. Military reports indicated that the PAF was in engagement with the Soviet Air Force, supported by the Afghan Air Force during the course of the conflict; one of which belonged to Alexander Rutskoy. Apart from its own conflicts, Pakistan has been an active participant in United Nations peacekeeping missions. It played a major role in rescuing trapped American soldiers from Mogadishu, Somalia, in 1993 in Operation Gothic Serpent. According to UN reports, the Pakistani military is the third largest troop contributor to UN peacekeeping missions after Ethiopia and India.Pakistan has deployed its military in some Arab countries, providing defence, training, and playing advisory roles. The PAF and Navy's fighter pilots have voluntarily served in Arab nations' militaries against Israel in the Six-Day War (1967) and in the Yom Kippur War (1973). Pakistan's fighter pilots shot down ten Israeli planes in the Six-Day War. In the 1973 war one of the PAF pilots, Flt. Lt. Sattar Alvi (flying a MiG-21), shot down an Israeli Air Force Mirage and was honoured by the Syrian government. Requested by the Saudi monarchy in 1979, Pakistan's special forces units, operatives, and commandos were rushed to assist Saudi forces in Mecca to lead the operation of the Grand Mosque. For almost two weeks Saudi Special Forces and Pakistani commandos fought the insurgents who had occupied the Grand Mosque's compound. In 1991 Pakistan got involved with the Gulf War and sent 5,000 troops as part of a US-led coalition, specifically for the defence of Saudi Arabia.Despite the UN arms embargo on Bosnia, General Javed Nasir of the ISI airlifted anti-tank weapons and missiles to Bosnian mujahideen which turned the tide in favour of Bosnian Muslims and forced the Serbs to lift the siege. Under Nasir's leadership the ISI was also involved in supporting Chinese Muslims in Xinjiang Province, rebel Muslim groups in the Philippines, and some religious groups in Central Asia.Since 2004, the military has been engaged in an insurgency in the Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province, mainly against the Tehrik-i-Taliban factions. Major operations undertaken by the army include Operation Black Thunderstorm, Operation Rah-e-Nijat and Operation Zarb-e-Azb.According to SIPRI, Pakistan was the 9th-largest recipient and importer of arms between 2012–2016.The Economy of Pakistan is the 23rd-largest in the world in terms of purchasing power parity (PPP), and 42nd-largest in terms of nominal gross domestic product. Economists estimate that Pakistan was part of the wealthiest region of the world throughout the first millennium CE, with the largest economy by GDP. This advantage was lost in the 18th century as other regions such as China and Western Europe edged forward. Pakistan is considered a developing country and is one of the Next Eleven, a group of eleven countries that, along with the BRICs, have a high potential to become the world's largest economies in the 21st century.In recent years, after decades of social instability, , serious deficiencies in macromanagement and unbalanced macroeconomics in basic services such as rail transportation and electrical energy generation have developed. The economy is considered to be semi-industrialized, with centres of growth along the Indus River. The diversified economies of Karachi and Punjab's urban centres coexist with less-developed areas in other parts of the country, particularly in Balochistan. According to the Economic complexity index, Pakistan is the 67th-largest export economy in the world and the 106th most complex economy. During the fiscal year 2015–16, Pakistan's exports stood at US$20.81 billion and imports at US$44.76 billion, resulting in a negative trade balance of US$23.96 billion., Pakistan's estimated nominal GDP is US$284.2 billion. The GDP by PPP is US$1.254 trillion. The estimated nominal per capita GDP is US$1,388, the GDP (PPP)/capita is US$6,016 (international dollars), According to the World Bank, Pakistan has important strategic endowments and development potential. The increasing proportion of Pakistan's youth provides the country with both a potential demographic dividend and a challenge to provide adequate services and employment. 21.04% of the population live below the international poverty line of US$1.25 a day. The unemployment rate among the aged 15 and over population is 5.5%. Pakistan has an estimated 40 million middle class citizens, projected to increase to 100 million by 2050. A 2015 report published by the World Bank ranked Pakistan's economy at 24th-largest in the world by purchasing power and 41st-largest in absolute terms. It is South Asia's second-largest economy, representing about 15.0% of regional GDP.Pakistan's economic growth since its inception has been varied. It has been slow during periods of democratic transition, but robust during the three periods of martial law, although the foundation for sustainable and equitable growth was not formed. The early to middle 2000s was a period of rapid economic reforms; the government raised development spending, which reduced poverty levels by 10% and increased GDP by 3%. The economy cooled again from 2007. Inflation reached 25.0% in 2008, and Pakistan had to depend on a fiscal policy backed by the International Monetary Fund to avoid possible bankruptcy. A year later, the Asian Development Bank reported that Pakistan's economic crisis was easing. The inflation rate for the fiscal year was 14.1%. Since 2013, as part of an International Monetary Fund program, Pakistan's economic growth has picked up. In 2014 Goldman Sachs predicted that Pakistan's economy would grow 15 times in the next 35 years to become the 18th-largest economy in the world by 2050. In his 2016 book, "The Rise and Fall of Nations", Ruchir Sharma termed Pakistan's economy as at a 'take-off' stage and the future outlook until 2020 has been termed 'Very Good'. Sharma termed it possible to transform Pakistan from a "low-income to a middle-income country during the next five years".Pakistan is one of the largest producers of natural commodities, and its labour market is the 10th-largest in the world. The 7-million–strong Pakistani diaspora contributed US$19.9 billion to the economy in 2015–16. The major source countries of remittances to Pakistan are: the UAE; the United States; Saudi Arabia; the Gulf states (Bahrain, Kuwait, Qatar, and Oman); Australia; Canada; Japan; the United Kingdom; Norway; and Switzerland. According to the World Trade Organization, Pakistan's share of overall world exports is declining; it contributed only 0.13% in 2007.The structure of the Pakistani economy has changed from a mainly agricultural to a strong service base. Agriculture accounts for only 20.9% of the GDP. Even so, according to the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization, Pakistan produced 21,591,400 metric tons of wheat in 2005, more than all of Africa (20,304,585 metric tons) and nearly as much as all of South America (24,557,784 metric tons). Majority of the population, directly or indirectly, is dependent on this sector. It accounts for 43.5% of employed labour force and is the largest source of foreign exchange earnings.A large portion of the country's manufactured exports is dependent on raw materials such as cotton and hides that are part of the agriculture sector, while supply shortages and market disruptions in farm products do push up inflationary pressures. The country is also the fifth-largest producer of cotton, with cotton production of 14 million bales from a modest beginning of 1.7 million bales in the early 1950s; is self-sufficient in sugarcane; and is the fourth-largest producer in the world of milk. Land and water resources have not risen proportionately, but the increases have taken place mainly due to gains in labour and agriculture productivity. The major breakthrough in crop production took place in the late 1960s and 1970s due to the Green Revolution that made a significant contribution to land and yield increases of wheat and rice. Private tube wells led to a 50 percent increase in the cropping intensity which was augmented by tractor cultivation. While the tube wells raised crop yields by 50 percent, the High Yielding Varieties (HYVs) of wheat and rice led to a 50–60 percent higher yield. Meat industry accounts for 1.4 percent of overall GDP.Industry is the second-largest sector of the economy, accounting for 19.74% of gross domestic product (GDP), and 24 percent of total employment. Large-scale manufacturing (LSM), at 12.2% of GDP, dominates the overall sector, accounting for 66% of the sectoral share, followed by small-scale manufacturing, which accounts for 4.9% of total GDP. Pakistan's cement industry is also fast growing mainly because of demand from Afghanistan and from the domestic real estate sector. In 2013 Pakistan exported 7,708,557 metric tons of cement. Pakistan has an installed capacity of 44,768,250 metric tons of cement and 42,636,428 metric tons of clinker. In 2012 and 2013, the cement industry in Pakistan became the most profitable sector of the economy.The textile industry has a pivotal position in the manufacturing sector of Pakistan. In Asia, Pakistan is the eighth-largest exporter of textile products, contributing 9.5% to the GDP and providing employment to around 15 million people (some 30% of the 49 million people in the workforce). Pakistan is the fourth-largest producer of cotton with the third-largest spinning capacity in Asia after China and India, contributing 5% to the global spinning capacity. China is the second largest buyer of Pakistani textiles, importing US$1.527 billion of textiles last fiscal. Unlike the US, where mostly value-added textiles are imported, China buys only cotton yarn and cotton fabric from Pakistan. In 2012, Pakistani textile products accounted for 3.3% or US$1.07bn of all UK textile imports, 12.4% or $4.61bn of total Chinese textile imports, 3.0% of all US textile imports ($2,980 million), 1.6% of total German textile imports ($880 million) and 0.7% of total Indian textile imports ($888 million).The services sector makes up 58.8% of GDP and has emerged as the main driver of economic growth. Pakistani society like other developing countries is a consumption oriented society, having a high marginal propensity to consume. The growth rate of services sector is higher than the growth rate of agriculture and industrial sector. Services sector accounts for 54 percent of GDP in 2014 and little over one-third of total employment. Services sector has strong linkages with other sectors of economy; it provides essential inputs to agriculture sector and manufacturing sector. Pakistan's I.T sector is regarded as among the fastest growing sector's in Pakistan. The World Economic Forum, assessing the development of Information and Communication Technology in the country ranked Pakistan 110th among 139 countries on the 'Networked Readiness Index 2016'., Pakistan has about 82 million internet users, making it the 9th-largest population of Internet users in the world. The current growth rate and employment trend indicate that Pakistan's Information Communication Technology (ICT) industry will exceed the $10-billion mark by 2020. The sector employees 12,000 and count's among top five freelancing nations. The country has also improved its export performance in telecom, computer and information services, as the share of their exports surged from 8.2pc in 2005–06 to 12.6pc in 2012–13. This growth is much better than that of China, whose share in services exports was 3pc and 7.7pc for the same period respectively.With its diverse cultures, people, and landscapes, Pakistan attracted around 6.6 million foreign tourists in 2018, which represented a significant decline since the 1970s when the country received unprecedented numbers of foreign tourists due to the popular Hippie trail. The trail attracted thousands of Europeans and Americans in the 1960s and 1970s who travelled via land through Turkey and Iran into India through Pakistan. The main destinations of choice for these tourists were the Khyber Pass, Peshawar, Karachi, Lahore, Swat and Rawalpindi. The numbers following the trail declined after the Iranian Revolution and the Soviet–Afghan War.Pakistan's tourist attractions range from the mangroves in the south to the Himalayan hill stations in the north-east. The country's tourist destinations range from the Buddhist ruins of Takht-i-Bahi and Taxila, to the 5,000-year-old cities of the Indus Valley Civilization such as Mohenjo-daro and Harappa. Pakistan is home to several mountain peaks over . The northern part of Pakistan has many old fortresses, examples of ancient architecture, and the Hunza and Chitral valleys, home to the small pre-Islamic Kalasha community claiming descent from Alexander the Great. Pakistan's cultural capital, Lahore, contains many examples of Mughal architecture such as the Badshahi Masjid, the Shalimar Gardens, the Tomb of Jahangir, and the Lahore Fort.In October 2006, just one year after the 2005 Kashmir earthquake, "The Guardian" released what it described as "The top five tourist sites in Pakistan" in order to help the country's tourism industry. The five sites included Taxila, Lahore, the Karakoram Highway, Karimabad, and Lake Saiful Muluk. To promote Pakistan's unique cultural heritage, the government organizes various festivals throughout the year. In 2015 the World Economic Forum's Travel & Tourism Competitiveness Report ranked Pakistan 125 out of 141 countries.Pakistan was recognised as the best country for infrastructure development in South Asia during the IWF and World Bank annual meetings in 2016.As of May 2021, nuclear power is provided by six licensed commercial nuclear power plants. The Pakistan Atomic Energy Commission (PAEC) is solely responsible for operating these power plants, while the Pakistan Nuclear Regulatory Authority regulates safe usage of the nuclear energy. The electricity generated by commercial nuclear power plants constitutes roughly 5.8% of Pakistan's electrical energy, compared to 64.2% from fossil fuels (crude oil and natural gas), 29.9% from hydroelectric power, and 0.1% from coal. Pakistan is one of the four nuclear armed states (along with India, Israel, and North Korea) that is not a party to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, but it is a member in good standing of the International Atomic Energy Agency.The KANUPP-I, a Candu-type nuclear reactor, was supplied by Canada in 1971—the country's first commercial nuclear power plant. The Sino-Pakistani nuclear cooperation began in the early 1980s. After a Sino-Pakistani nuclear cooperation agreement in 1986, China provided Pakistan with a nuclear reactor dubbed CHASNUPP-I for energy and the industrial growth of the country. In 2005 both countries proposed working on a joint energy security plan, calling for a huge increase in generation capacity to more than 160,000 MWe by 2030. Under its Nuclear Energy Vision 2050, the Pakistani government plans to increase nuclear power generation capacity to 40,000 MWe, 8,900 MWe of it by 2030. In June 2008 the nuclear commercial complex was expanded with the ground work of installing and operationalising the Chashma-III and Chashma–IV reactors at Chashma, Punjab Province, each with 325–340 MWe and costing ₨ 129 billion; from which the ₨ 80 billion came from international sources, principally China. A further agreement for China's help with the project was signed in October 2008, and given prominence as a counter to the US–India agreement that shortly preceded it. The cost quoted then was US$1.7 billion, with a foreign loan component of US$1.07 billion. In 2013 Pakistan established a second commercial nuclear complex in Karachi with plans of additional reactors, similar to the one in Chashma. The electrical energy is generated by various energy corporations and evenly distributed by the National Electric Power Regulatory Authority (NEPRA) among the four provinces. However, the Karachi-based K-Electric and the Water and Power Development Authority (WAPDA) generates much of the electrical energy used in Pakistan in addition to gathering revenue nationwide. , Pakistan has an installed electricity generation capacity of ~22,797.The transport industry accounts for ~10.5% of the nation's GDP.Motorways of Pakistan are a network of multiple-lane, high-speed, controlled-access highways in Pakistan, which are owned, maintained, and operated federally by Pakistan's National Highway Authority. As of 20 February 2020, 1882 km of motorways are operational, while an additional 1854 km are under construction or planned. All motorways in Pakistan are pre-fixed with the letter 'M' (for "Motorway") followed by the unique numerical designation of the specific highway (with a hyphen in the middle), e.g. "M-1".Pakistan's motorways are an important part of Pakistan's "National Trade Corridor Project", which aims to link Pakistan's three Arabian Sea ports (Karachi Port, Port Bin Qasim and Gwadar Port) to the rest of the country through its national highways and motorways network and further north with Afghanistan, Central Asia and China. The project was planned in 1990. The China Pakistan Economic Corridor project aims to link Gwadar Port and Kashgar (China) using Pakistani motorways, national highways, and expressways.Highways form the backbone of Pakistan's transport system; a total road length of accounts for 92% of passengers and 96% of inland freight traffic. Road transport services are largely in the hands of the private sector. The National Highway Authority is responsible for the maintenance of national highways and motorways. The highway and motorway system depends mainly on north–south links connecting the southern ports to the populous provinces of Punjab and Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa. Although this network only accounts for 4.6% of total road length, it carries 85% of the country's traffic.The Pakistan Railways, under the Ministry of Railways (MoR), operates the railroad system. From 1947 until the 1970s the train system was the primary means of transport until the nationwide constructions of the national highways and the economic boom of the automotive industry. Beginning in the 1990s there was a marked shift in traffic from rail to highways; dependence grew on roads after the introduction of vehicles in the country. Now the railway's share of inland traffic is below 8% for passengers and 4% for freight traffic. As personal transportation began to be dominated by the automobile, total rail track decreased from in 1990–91 to in 2011. Pakistan expects to use the rail service to boost foreign trade with China, Iran, and Turkey.There are an estimated 151 airports and airfields in Pakistan as of 2013—including both the military and the mostly publicly owned civilian airports. Although Jinnah International Airport is the principal international gateway to Pakistan, the international airports in Lahore, Islamabad, Peshawar, Quetta, Faisalabad, Sialkot, and Multan also handle significant amounts of traffic.The civil aviation industry is mixed with public and private sectors, which was deregulated in 1993. While the state-owned Pakistan International Airlines (PIA) is the major and dominant air carrier that carries about 73% of domestic passengers and all domestic freight, the private airlines such as airBlue and Air Indus, also provide similar services at a low cost.Major seaports are in Karachi, Sindh (the Karachi port, Port Qasim). Since the 1990s some seaport operations have been moved to Balochistan with the construction of Gwadar Port, Port of Pasni and Gadani Port. Gwadar Port is the deepest sea port of the world. According to the WEF's Global Competitiveness Report, quality ratings of Pakistan's port infrastructure increased from 3.7 to 4.1 between 2007 and 2016.Many flyovers and underpasses are located in major urban areas of the country to regulate the flow of traffic. The highest number of flyovers and under passes are located in Karachi, followed by Lahore. Other cities having flyovers and underpasses for the regulation of flow of traffic includes Islamabad-Rawalpindi, Faisalabad, Gujranwala, Multan, Peshawar, Hyderabad, Quetta, Sargodha, Bahawalpur, Sukkur, Larkana, Rahim Yar Khan and Sahiwal etc.Beijing Underpass, Lahore is the longest underpass of Pakistan with a length of about . Muslim Town Flyover, Lahore is the longest flyover of the country with a length of about .Developments in science and technology have played an important role in Pakistan's infrastructure and helped the country connect to the rest of the world. Every year, scientists from around the world are invited by the Pakistan Academy of Sciences and the Pakistan Government to participate in the International Nathiagali Summer College on Physics. Pakistan hosted an international seminar on "Physics in Developing Countries" for the International Year of Physics 2005. Pakistani theoretical physicist Abdus Salam won a Nobel Prize in Physics for his work on the electroweak interaction. Influential publications and critical scientific work in the advancement of mathematics, biology, economics, computer science, and genetics have been produced by Pakistani scientists at both the domestic and international levels.In chemistry, Salimuzzaman Siddiqui was the first Pakistani scientist to bring the therapeutic constituents of the neem tree to the attention of natural products chemists. Pakistani neurosurgeon Ayub Ommaya invented the Ommaya reservoir, a system for treatment of brain tumours and other brain conditions. Scientific research and development play a pivotal role in Pakistani universities, government- sponsored national laboratories, science parks, and the industry. Abdul Qadeer Khan, regarded as the founder of the HEU-based gas-centrifuge uranium enrichment program for Pakistan's integrated atomic bomb project. He founded and established the Kahuta Research Laboratories (KRL) in 1976, serving as both its senior scientist and the Director-General until his retirement in 2001, and he was an early and vital figure in other science projects. Apart from participating in Pakistan's atomic bomb project, he made major contributions in molecular morphology, physical martensite, and its integrated applications in condensed and material physics.In 2010 Pakistan was ranked 43rd in the world in terms of published scientific papers. The Pakistan Academy of Sciences, a strong scientific community, plays an influential and vital role in formulating recommendations regarding science policies for the government.The 1960s saw the emergence of an active space program led by SUPARCO that produced advances in domestic rocketry, electronics, and aeronomy. The space program recorded a few notable feats and achievements. The successful launch of its first rocket into space made Pakistan the first South Asian country to have achieved such a task. Successfully producing and launching the nation's first space satellite in 1990, Pakistan became the first Muslim country and second South Asian country to put a satellite into space.As an aftermath of the 1971 war with India, the clandestine crash program developed atomic weapons partly motivated by fear and to prevent any foreign intervention, while ushering in the atomic age in the post cold war era. Competition with India and tensions eventually led to Pakistan's decision to conduct underground nuclear tests in 1998, thus becoming the seventh country in the world to successfully develop nuclear weapons.Pakistan is the first and only Muslim country that maintains an active research presence in Antarctica. Since 1991 Pakistan has maintained two summer research stations and one weather observatory on the continent and plans to open another full-fledged permanent base in Antarctica.Energy consumption by computers and usage has grown since the 1990s when PCs were introduced; Pakistan has about 82 million Internet users and is ranked as one of the top countries that have registered a high growth rate in Internet penetration . Key publications have been produced by Pakistan, and domestic software development has gained considerable international praise.As of May 2020, Pakistan has about 82 million internet users, making it the 9th-largest population of Internet users in the world. Since the 2000s Pakistan has made a significant amount of progress in supercomputing, and various institutions offer research opportunities in parallel computing. The Pakistan government reportedly spends ₨ 4.6 billion on information technology projects, with emphasis on e-government, human resources, and infrastructure development.The constitution of Pakistan requires the state to provide free primary and secondary education.At the time of the establishment of Pakistan as a state, the country had only one university, Punjab University in Lahore. Very soon the Pakistan government established public universities in each of the four provinces, including Sindh University (1949), Peshawar University (1950), Karachi University (1953), and Balochistan University (1970). Pakistan has a large network of both public and private universities, which includes collaboration between the universities aimed at providing research and higher education opportunities in the country, although there is concern about the low quality of teaching in many of the newer schools. It is estimated that there are 3,193 technical and vocational institutions in Pakistan, and there are also "madrassahs" that provide free Islamic education and offer free board and lodging to students, who come mainly from the poorer strata of society. Strong public pressure and popular criticism over extremists' usage of "madrassahs" for recruitment, the Pakistan government has made repeated efforts to regulate and monitor the quality of education in the "madrassahs".Education in Pakistan is divided into six main levels: nursery (preparatory classes); primary (grades one through five); middle (grades six through eight); matriculation (grades nine and ten, leading to the secondary certificate); intermediate (grades eleven and twelve, leading to a higher secondary certificate); and university programmes leading to graduate and postgraduate degrees. There is a network of private schools that constitutes a parallel secondary education system based on a curriculum set and administered by the Cambridge International Examinations of the United Kingdom. Some students choose to take the O-level and A level exams conducted by the British Council. According to the International Schools Consultancy, Pakistan has 439 international schools.As a result of initiatives taken in 2007, the English medium education has been made compulsory in all schools across the country. In 2012, Malala Yousafzai, a campaigner for female education, was shot by a Taliban gunman in retaliation for her activism. Yousafzai went on to become the youngest ever Nobel laureate for her global education-related advocacy. Additional reforms enacted in 2013 required all educational institutions in Sindh to begin offering Chinese language courses, reflecting China's growing role as a superpower and its increasing influence in Pakistan. The literacy rate of the population is 62.3% as of 2018. The rate of male literacy is 72.5% while the rate of female literacy is 51.8%. Literacy rates vary by region and particularly by sex; as one example, in tribal areas female literacy is 9.5%, while Azad Jammu & Kashmir has a literacy rate of 74%. With the advent of computer literacy in 1995, the government launched a nationwide initiative in 1998 with the aim of eradicating illiteracy and providing a basic education to all children. Through various educational reforms, by 2015 the Ministry of Education expected to attain 100% enrollment levels among children of primary school age and a literacy rate of ~86% among people aged over 10. Pakistan is currently spending 2.3 percent of its GDP on education; which according to the Institute of Social and Policy Sciences is one of the lowest in South Asia.As of 2020, Pakistan is the fifth most populous country in the world and accounts for about 2.8% of the world population. The 2017 Census of Pakistan provisionally estimated the population to be 207.8 million. This figure excludes data from Gilgit-Baltistan and Azad Kashmir, which is likely to be included in the final report.The population in 2017 represents a 57% increase from 1998. The annual growth rate in 2016 was reported to be 1.45%, which is the highest of the SAARC nations, though the growth rate has been decreasing in recent years. The population is projected to reach 263 million by 2030.At the time of the partition in 1947, Pakistan had a population of 32.5 million; the population increased by ~57.2% between the years 1990 and 2009. By 2030 Pakistan is expected to surpass Indonesia as the largest Muslim-majority country in the world. Pakistan is classified as a "young nation", with a median age of 23.4 in 2016; about 104 million people were under the age of 30 in 2010. In 2016 Pakistan's fertility rate was estimated to be 2.68, higher than its neighbour India (2.45). Around 35% of the people are under 15. The vast majority of those residing in southern Pakistan live along the Indus River, with Karachi being the most populous commercial city in the south. In eastern, western, and northern Pakistan, most of the population lives in an arc formed by the cities of Lahore, Faisalabad, Rawalpindi, Sargodha, Islamabad, Gujranwala, Sialkot, Gujrat, Jhelum, Sheikhupura, Nowshera, Mardan, and Peshawar. During 1990–2008, city dwellers made up 36% of Pakistan's population, making it the most urbanised nation in South Asia, which increased to 38% by 2013. Furthermore, 50% of Pakistanis live in towns of 5,000 people or more.Expenditure on healthcare was ~2.8% of GDP in 2013. Life expectancy at birth was 67 years for females and 65 years for males in 2013. The private sector accounts for about 80% of outpatient visits. Approximately 19% of the population and 30% of children under five are malnourished. Mortality of the under-fives was 86 per 1,000 live births in 2012.More than sixty languages are spoken in Pakistan, including a number of provincial languages. Urdu—the "lingua franca" and a symbol of Muslim identity and national unity—is the national language understood by over 75% of Pakistanis. It is the main medium of communication in the country but the primary language of only 7% of Pakistan's population. Urdu and English are the official languages of Pakistan, with English primarily used in official business and government, and in legal contracts; the local variety is known as Pakistani English. The Punjabi language, the most common in Pakistan and the first language of 38.78% of Pakistan's population, is mostly spoken in the Punjab. Saraiki is mainly spoken in South Punjab, and Hindko is predominant in the Hazara region of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa. Pashto is the provincial language of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa. The Sindhi language is commonly spoken in Sindh, while the Balochi language is dominant in Balochistan. Brahui, a Dravidian language, is spoken by the Brahui people who live in Balochistan. There are also speakers of Gujarati in Karachi. Marwari, a Rajasthani language, is also spoken in parts of Sindh. Various languages such as Shina, Balti, and Burushaski are spoken in Gilgit-Baltistan, whilst languages such as Pahari, Gojri, and Kashmiri are spoken by many in Azad Kashmir.The Arabic language is officially recognised by the constitution of Pakistan. It declares in article 31 No. 2 that ""The State shall endeavour, as respects the Muslims of Pakistan (a) to make the teaching of the Holy Quran and Islamiat compulsory, to encourage and facilitate the learning of Arabic language ...""Constitution of Pakistan: "Constitution of Pakistan, 1973 – Article: 31 Islamic way of life" , Article 31 No. 2, 1973, Retrieved 22 August 2018.Even after partition in 1947, Indian Muslims continued to migrate to Pakistan throughout the 1950s and 1960s, and these migrants settled mainly in Karachi and other towns of Sindh province. The wars in neighboring Afghanistan during the 1980s and 1990s also forced millions of Afghan refugees into Pakistan. The Pakistan Census excludes the 1.41 million registered refugees from Afghanistan, who are found mainly in the Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa and tribal belt, with small numbers residing in Karachi and Quetta. Pakistan is home to one of the world's largest refugee populations. In addition to Afghans, around 2 million Bangladeshis and half a million other undocumented people live in Pakistan. They are claimed to be from other areas such as Myanmar, Iran, Iraq, and Africa.Experts say that the migration of both Bengalis and Burmese (Rohingya) to Pakistan started in the 1980s and continued until 1998. Shaikh Muhammad Feroze, the chairman of the Pakistani Bengali Action Committee, claims that there are 200 settlements of Bengali-speaking people in Pakistan, of which 132 are in Karachi. They are also found in various other areas of Pakistan such as Thatta, Badin, Hyderabad, Tando Adam, and Lahore. Large-scale Rohingya migration to Karachi made that city one of the largest population centres of Rohingyas in the world after Myanmar. The Burmese community of Karachi is spread out over 60 of the city's slums such as the Burmi Colony in Korangi, Arakanabad, Machchar colony, Bilal colony, Ziaul Haq Colony, and Godhra Camp.Thousands of Uyghur Muslims have also migrated to the Gilgit-Baltistan region of Pakistan, fleeing religious and cultural persecution in Xinjiang, China. Since 1989 thousands of Kashmiri Muslim refugees have sought refuge in Pakistan, complaining that many of the refugee women had been raped by Indian soldiers and that they were forced out of their homes by the soldiers.The major ethnic groups are Punjabis (44.7% of the country's population), Pashtuns, also known as Pathans (15.4%), Sindhis (14.1%), Saraikis (8.4%), Muhajirs (the Indian emigrants, mostly Urdu-speaking), who make up 7.6% of the population, and the Baloch with 3.6%. The remaining 6.3% consist of a number of ethnic minorities such as the Brahuis, the Hindkowans, the various peoples of Gilgit-Baltistan, the Kashmiris, the Sheedis (who are of African descent), and the Hazaras. There is also a large Pakistani diaspora worldwide, numbering over seven million, which has been recorded as the sixth largest diaspora in the world.Since achieving independence as a result of the partition of India, the urbanisation has increased exponentially, with several different causes. The majority of the population in the south resides along the Indus River, with Karachi the most populous commercial city. In the east, west, and north, most of the population lives in an arc formed by the cities of Lahore, Faisalabad, Rawalpindi, Islamabad, Sargodha, Gujranwala, Sialkot, Gujrat, Jhelum, Sheikhupura, Nowshera, Mardan, and Peshawar. During the period 1990–2008, city dwellers made up 36% of Pakistan's population, making it the most urbanised nation in South Asia. Furthermore, more than 50% of Pakistanis live in towns of 5,000 people or more. Immigration, from both within and outside the country, is regarded as one of the main factors contributing to urbanisation in Pakistan. One analysis of the 1998 national census highlighted the significance of the partition of India in the 1940s as it relates to urban change in Pakistan.During and after the independence period, Urdu speaking Muslims from India migrated in large numbers to Pakistan, especially to the port city of Karachi, which is today the largest metropolis in Pakistan. Migration from other countries, mainly from those nearby, has further accelerated the process of urbanisation in Pakistani cities. Inevitably, the rapid urbanisation caused by these large population movements has also created new political and socio-economic challenges. In addition to immigration, economic trends such as the green revolution and political developments, among a host of other factors, are also important causes of urbanisation. The state religion in Pakistan is Islam. Freedom of religion is guaranteed by the Constitution of Pakistan, which provides all its citizens the right to profess, practice and propagate their religion subject to law, public order, and morality.The population of Pakistan follow different religions. Most of Pakistanis are Muslims (96.47%) followed by Hindus (2.14%) and Christians (1.27%). There are also people in Pakistan who follow other religions, such as Sikhism, Buddhism, Jainism and the minority of Parsi (who follow Zoroastrianism). The Kalash people maintain a unique identity and religion within Pakistan.Hinduism is mostly associated with Sindhis, and Pakistan hosts major events such as the Hinglaj Yatra pilgrimage. Hindu temples may be found throughout Sindh, where the dharma features prominently. Many Hindus in Pakistan complain about the prospect of religious violence against them and being treated like second-class citizens, and many have emigrated to India or further abroad.In addition, some Pakistanis also do not profess any faith (such as atheists and agnostics) in Pakistan. According to the 1998 census, people who did not state their religion accounted for 0.5% of the population. Secularism and criticism of over-religiosity is not uncommon in well-educated civil society, although in general Pakistan is a highly religious society, and the irreligious generally hide their beliefs due to fear of persecution.Islam is the dominant religion. About 96.47% of Pakistanis are Muslim, according to the 2017 Census. Pakistan has the second-largest number of Muslims in the world after Indonesia. and home for (10.5%) of the world's Muslim population. The majority of them are Sunni and mostly follow Sufism (estimated between 75 and 95%) while Shias represent between 5–25%. As of 2019, Shia population in Pakistan was estimated to be 42 million out of total population of 210 million. Pakistan also has the largest Muslim city in the world (Karachi).The Ahmadis, a small minority representing 0.22–2% of Pakistan's population, are officially considered non-Muslims by virtue of the constitutional amendment. The Ahmadis are particularly persecuted, especially since 1974 when they were banned from calling themselves Muslims. In 1984, Ahmadiyya places of worship were banned from being called "mosques". , 12% of Pakistani Muslims self-identify as non-denominational Muslims. There are also several Quraniyoon communities.Sufism, a mystical Islamic tradition, has a long history and a large following among the Sunni Muslims in Pakistan, at both the academic and popular levels. Popular Sufi culture is centered around gatherings and celebrations at the shrines of saints and annual festivals that feature Sufi music and dance. Two Sufis whose shrines receive much national attention are Ali Hajweri in Lahore (c. 12th century) and Shahbaz Qalander in Sehwan, Sindh (c. 12th century).There are two levels of Sufism in Pakistan. The first is the 'populist' Sufism of the rural population. This level of Sufism involves belief in intercession through saints, veneration of their shrines, and forming bonds (Mureed) with a "pir" (saint). Many rural Pakistani Muslims associate with "pirs" and seek their intercession. The second level of Sufism in Pakistan is 'intellectual Sufism', which is growing among the urban and educated population. They are influenced by the writings of Sufis such as the medieval theologian al-Ghazali, the Sufi reformer Shaykh Aḥmad Sirhindi, and Shah Wali Allah. Contemporary Islamic fundamentalists criticise Sufism's popular character, which in their view does not accurately reflect the teachings and practice of Muhammad and his companions.Hinduism is the second-largest religion in Pakistan after Islam, according to the 2017 census. Hindus are found in all provinces of Pakistan but are mostly concentrated in Sindh, where they account for 8.73% of the population. , Pakistan had the fifth-largest Hindu population in the world. In the 2017 census, the Hindu (jati) population was found to be 4,444,437 while the Hindu (scheduled castes) numbered an additional 851,504. At the time of Pakistan's creation, the 'hostage theory' gained currency. According to this theory, the Hindu minority in Pakistan was to be given a fair deal in Pakistan in order to ensure the protection of the Muslim minority in India. However, Khawaja Nazimuddin, the second Prime Minister of Pakistan, stated: Some Hindus in Pakistan feel that they are treated as second-class citizens and many have continued to migrate to India. Pakistani Hindus faced riots after the Babri Masjid demolition, endured a massacre (in 2005) by security forces in Balochistan, and have experienced other attacks, forced conversions, and abductions.Christians formed the next largest religious minority, after Hindus, with 1.27% of the population following it. They were followed by the Bahá'í Faith, which had a following of 30,000, then Sikhism, Buddhism, and Zoroastrianism, each back then claiming 20,000 adherents, and a very small community of Jains. There is a Roman Catholic community in Karachi that was established by Goan and Tamil migrants when Karachi's infrastructure was being developed by the British during the colonial administration between World War I and World War II. The influence of atheism is very small, with 1.0% of the population identifying as atheist in 2005. However, the figure rose to 2.0% in 2012 according to Gallup.Civil society in Pakistan is largely hierarchical, emphasising local cultural etiquette and traditional Islamic values that govern personal and political life. The basic family unit is the extended family, although for socio-economic reasons there has been a growing trend towards nuclear families. The traditional dress for both men and women is the "Shalwar Kameez"; trousers, jeans, and shirts are also popular among men. In recent decades, the middle class has increased to around 35 million and the upper and upper-middle classes to around 17 million, and power is shifting from rural landowners to the urbanised elites. Pakistani festivals, including "Eid-ul-Fitr", "Eid-ul-Azha", "Ramazan", Christmas, Easter, Holi, and Diwali, are mostly religious in origin. Increasing globalisation has resulted in Pakistan ranking 56th on the A.T. Kearney/FP Globalization Index.The "Shalwar Kameez" is the national dress of Pakistan and is worn by both men and women in all four provinces: Punjab, Sindh, Balochistan, and Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa, and Azad Kashmir. Each province has its own style of "Shalwar Kameez". Pakistanis wear clothes in a range of exquisite colours and designs and in type of fabric (silk, chiffon, cotton, etc.). Besides the national dress, domestically tailored suits and neckties are often worn by men, and are customary in offices, schools, and social gatherings.The fashion industry has flourished in the changing environment of the fashion world. Since Pakistan came into being, its fashion has evolved in different phases and developed a unique identity. Today, Pakistani fashion is a combination of traditional and modern dress and has become a mark of Pakistani culture. Despite modern trends, regional and traditional forms of dress have developed their own significance as a symbol of native tradition. This regional fashion continues to evolve into both more modern and purer forms. The Pakistan Fashion Design Council based in Lahore organizes PFDC Fashion Week and the Fashion Pakistan Council based in Karachi organizes Fashion Pakistan Week. Pakistan's first fashion week was held in November 2009.The private print media, state-owned Pakistan Television Corporation (PTV), and Pakistan Broadcasting Corporation (PBC) for radio were the dominant media outlets until the beginning of the 21st century. Pakistan now has a large network of domestic, privately owned 24-hour news media and television channels. A 2016 report by the Reporters Without Borders ranked Pakistan 147th on the Press Freedom Index, while at the same time terming the Pakistani media "among the freest in Asia when it comes to covering the squabbling among politicians." The BBC terms the Pakistani media "among the most outspoken in South Asia". Pakistani media has also played a vital role in exposing corruption.The Lollywood, Kariwood, Punjabi, and Pashto film industry is based in Karachi, Lahore, and Peshawar. While Bollywood films were banned from public cinemas from 1965 until 2008, they have remained an important part of popular culture. In contrast to the ailing Pakistani film industry, Urdu televised dramas and theatrical performances continue to be popular, as many entertainment media outlets air them regularly. Urdu dramas dominate the television entertainment industry, which has launched critically acclaimed miniseries and featured popular actors and actresses since the 1990s. In the 1960s–1970s, pop music and disco (1970s) dominated the country's music industry. In the 1980s–1990s, British influenced rock music appeared and jolted the country's entertainment industry. In the 2000s, heavy metal music gained popular and critical acclaim.Pakistani music ranges from diverse forms of provincial folk music and traditional styles such as Qawwali and Ghazal Gayaki to modern musical forms that fuse traditional and western music. Pakistan has many famous folk singers. The arrival of Afghan refugees in the western provinces has stimulated interest in Pashto music, although there has been intolerance of it in some places.According to the UN Department of Economic and Social Affairs, Pakistan has the sixth-largest diaspora in the world. Statistics gathered by the Pakistani government show that there are around 7 million Pakistanis residing abroad, with the vast majority living in the Middle East, Europe, and North America. Pakistan ranks 10th in the world for remittances sent home. The largest inflow of remittances, , is from Saudi Arabia, amounting to $5.9 billion. The term "Overseas Pakistani" is officially recognised by the Government of Pakistan. The Ministry of Overseas Pakistanis was established in 2008 to deal exclusively with all matters of overseas Pakistanis such as attending to their needs and problems, developing projects for their welfare, and working for resolution of their problems and issues. Overseas Pakistanis are the second-largest source of foreign exchange remittances to Pakistan after exports. Over the last several years, home remittances have maintained a steadily rising trend, with a more than 100% increase from US$8.9 billion in 2009–10 to US$19.9 billion in 2015–16.The Overseas Pakistani Division (OPD) was created in September 2004 within the Ministry of Labour (MoL). It has since recognised the importance of overseas Pakistanis and their contribution to the nation's economy. Together with Community Welfare Attaches (CWAs) and the Overseas Pakistanis Foundation (OPF), the OPD is making efforts to improve the welfare of Pakistanis who reside abroad. The division aims to provide better services through improved facilities at airports, and suitable schemes for housing, education, and health care. It also facilitates the reintegration into society of returning overseas Pakistanis. Notable members of the Pakistani diaspora include London Mayor Sadiq Khan, UK Cabinet Member Sajid Javid, former UK Conservative Party Chair Baroness Warsi, singers Zayn Malik and Nadia Ali, MIT Physics Professor Dr. Nergis Mavalvala, actors Riz Ahmed and Kumail Nanjiani, businessmen Shahid Khan and Sir Anwar Pervez, Boston University professors Adil Najam and Hamid Nawab, Texas A&M Professor Muhammad Suhail Zubairy, Yale Professor Sara Suleri, UC San Diego Professor Farooq Azam, and historian Ayesha Jalal.Pakistan has literature in Urdu, Sindhi, Punjabi, Pashto, Baluchi, Persian, English, and many other languages. The Pakistan Academy of Letters is a large literary community that promotes literature and poetry in Pakistan and abroad. The National Library publishes and promotes literature in the country. Before the 19th century, Pakistani literature consisted mainly of lyric and religious poetry and mystical and folkloric works. During the colonial period, native literary figures were influenced by western literary realism and took up increasingly varied topics and narrative forms. Prose fiction is now very popular.The national poet of Pakistan, Muhammad Iqbal, wrote poetry in Urdu and Persian. He was a strong proponent of the political and spiritual revival of Islamic civilisation and encouraged Muslims all over the world to bring about a successful revolution. Well-known figures in contemporary Pakistani Urdu literature include Josh Malihabadi Faiz Ahmed Faiz and Saadat Hasan Manto. Sadequain and Gulgee are known for their calligraphy and paintings. The Sufi poets Shah Abdul Latif, Bulleh Shah, Mian Muhammad Bakhsh, and Khawaja Farid enjoy considerable popularity in Pakistan. Mirza Kalich Beg has been termed the father of modern Sindhi prose. Historically, philosophical development in the country was dominated by Muhammad Iqbal, Sir Syed Ahmad Khan, Muhammad Asad, Maududi, and Mohammad Ali Johar.Ideas from British and American philosophy greatly shaped philosophical development in Pakistan. Analysts such as M. M. Sharif and Zafar Hassan established the first major Pakistani philosophical movement in 1947. After the 1971 war, philosophers such as Jalaludin Abdur Rahim, Gianchandani, and Malik Khalid incorporated Marxism into Pakistan's philosophical thinking. Influential work by Manzoor Ahmad, Jon Elia, Hasan Askari Rizvi, and Abdul Khaliq brought mainstream social, political, and analytical philosophy to the fore in academia. Works by Noam Chomsky have influenced philosophical ideas in various fields of social and political philosophy.Four periods are recognised in Pakistani architecture: pre-Islamic, Islamic, colonial, and post-colonial. With the beginning of the Indus civilization around the middle of the 3rd millennium BCE, an advanced urban culture developed for the first time in the region, with large buildings, some of which survive to this day. Mohenjo Daro, Harappa, and Kot Diji are among the pre-Islamic settlements that are now tourist attractions. The rise of Buddhism and the influence of Greek civilisation led to the development of a Greco-Buddhist style, starting from the 1st century CE. The high point of this era was the Gandhara style. An example of Buddhist architecture is the ruins of the Buddhist monastery Takht-i-Bahi in Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa.The arrival of Islam in what is today Pakistan meant the sudden end of Buddhist architecture in the area and a smooth transition to the predominantly pictureless Islamic architecture. The most important Indo-Islamic-style building still standing is the tomb of the Shah Rukn-i-Alam in Multan. During the Mughal era, design elements of Persian-Islamic architecture were fused with and often produced playful forms of Hindustani art. Lahore, as the occasional residence of Mughal rulers, contains many important buildings from the empire. Most prominent among them are the Badshahi Mosque, the fortress of Lahore with the famous Alamgiri Gate, the colourful, Mughal-style Wazir Khan Mosque, the Shalimar Gardens in Lahore, and the Shahjahan Mosque in Thatta. In the British colonial period, predominantly functional buildings of the Indo-European representative style developed from a mixture of European and Indian-Islamic components. Post-colonial national identity is expressed in modern structures such as the Faisal Mosque, the Minar-e-Pakistan, and the Mazar-e-Quaid. Several examples of architectural infrastructure demonstrating the influence of British design can be found in Lahore, Peshawar, and Karachi.Pakistani cuisine is similar to that of other regions of South Asia, with some of it being originated from the royal kitchens of 16th-century Mughal emperors. Most of those dishes have their roots in British, Indian, Central Asian and Middle Eastern cuisine. Unlike Middle Eastern cuisine, Pakistani cooking uses large quantities of spices, herbs, and seasoning. Garlic, ginger, turmeric, red chili, and garam masala are used in most dishes, and home cooking regularly includes curry, "roti", a thin flatbread made from wheat, is a staple food, usually served with curry, meat, vegetables, and lentils. Rice is also common; it is served plain, fried with spices, and in sweet dishes.Lassi is a traditional drink in the Punjab region. Black tea with milk and sugar is popular throughout Pakistan and is consumed daily by most of the population. Sohan halwa is a popular sweet dish from the southern region of Punjab province and is enjoyed all over Pakistan.Most sports played in Pakistan originated and were substantially developed by athletes and sports fans from the United Kingdom who introduced them during the British Raj. Field hockey is the national sport of Pakistan; it has won three gold medals in the Olympic Games held in 1960, 1968, and 1984. Pakistan has also won the Hockey World Cup a record four times, held in 1971, 1978, 1982, and 1994.Cricket, however, is the most popular game across the country. The country has had an array of success in the sport over the years, and has the distinct achievement of having won each of the major ICC international cricket tournaments: ICC Cricket World Cup, ICC World Twenty20, and ICC Champions Trophy; as well as the ICC Test Championship. The cricket team (known as "Shaheen") won the Cricket World Cup held in 1992; it was runner-up once, in 1999. Pakistan was runner-up in the inaugural World Twenty20 (2007) in South Africa and won the World Twenty20 in England in 2009. In March 2009, militants attacked the touring Sri Lankan cricket team, after which no international cricket was played in Pakistan until May 2015, when the Zimbabwean team agreed to a tour. Pakistan also won the 2017 ICC Champions Trophy by defeating arch-rivals India in the final.Pakistan Super League is one of the largest cricket leagues of the world with a brand value of about .Association Football is the second most played sports in Pakistan and it is organised and regulated by the Pakistan Football Federation. Football in Pakistan is as old as the country itself. Shortly after the creation of Pakistan in 1947, the Pakistan Football Federation (PFF) was created, and Muhammad Ali Jinnah became its first Patron-in-Chief. The highest football division in Pakistan is the Pakistan Premier League. Pakistan is known as one of the best manufacturer of the official FIFA World Cup ball. The best football players to play for Pakistan are Kaleemullah, Zesh Rehman, Muhammad Essa, Haroon Yousaf, and Muhammad Adil.Pakistan has hosted or co-hosted several international sporting events: the 1989 and 2004 South Asian Games; the 1984, 1993, 1996 and 2003 World Squash Championships; the 1987 and 1996 Cricket World Cup; and the 1990 Hockey World Cup.Pakistan is set to host the 2021 South Asian Games.	[ "Nawaz Sharif", "Nasir-ul-Mulk", "Shahid Khaqan Abbasi", "Shehbaz Sharif", "Imran Khan" ]
Who was the head of Pakistan in 2013-04-01?	April 01, 2013	{ "text": [ "Mir Hazar Khan Khoso" ] }	L2_Q843_P6_0	Imran Khan is the head of the government of Pakistan from Aug, 2018 to Apr, 2022. Mir Hazar Khan Khoso is the head of the government of Pakistan from Mar, 2013 to Jun, 2013. Shehbaz Sharif is the head of the government of Pakistan from Apr, 2022 to Dec, 2022. Shahid Khaqan Abbasi is the head of the government of Pakistan from Aug, 2017 to May, 2018. Nawaz Sharif is the head of the government of Pakistan from Jun, 2013 to Jul, 2017. Nasir-ul-Mulk is the head of the government of Pakistan from Jun, 2018 to Aug, 2018.	PakistanPakistan, officially the Islamic Republic of Pakistan, is a country in South Asia. It is the world's fifth-most populous country, with a population exceeding 225.2 million, and has the world's second-largest Muslim population. Pakistan is the 33rd-largest country by area, spanning . It has a coastline along the Arabian Sea and Gulf of Oman in the south, and is bordered by India to the east, Afghanistan to the west, Iran to the southwest, and China to the northeast. It is separated narrowly from Tajikistan by Afghanistan's Wakhan Corridor in the north, and also shares a maritime border with Oman.Pakistan is the site of several ancient cultures, including the 8,500-year-old Neolithic site of Mehrgarh in Balochistan, and the Indus Valley Civilisation of the Bronze Age, the most extensive of the civilisations of the Old World. The region that comprises the modern state of Pakistan was the realm of multiple empires and dynasties, including the Achaemenid; briefly that of Alexander the Great; the Seleucid, the Maurya, the Kushan, the Gupta; the Umayyad Caliphate in its southern regions, the Hindu Shahi, the Ghaznavids, the Delhi Sultanate, the Mughals, the Durranis, the Sikh Empire, British East India Company rule, and most recently, the British Indian Empire from 1858 to 1947.Spurred by the Pakistan Movement, which sought a homeland for the Muslims of British India, and election victories in 1946 by the All-India Muslim League, Pakistan gained independence in 1947 after the Partition of the British Indian Empire, which awarded separate statehood to its Muslim-majority regions and was accompanied by an unparalleled mass migration and loss of life. Initially a Dominion of the British Commonwealth, Pakistan officially drafted its constitution in 1956, and emerged as a declared Islamic republic. In 1971, the exclave of East Pakistan seceded as the new country of Bangladesh after a nine-month-long civil war. In the following four decades, Pakistan has been ruled by governments whose descriptions, although complex, commonly alternated between civilian and military, democratic and authoritarian, relatively secular and Islamist. Pakistan elected a civilian government in 2008, and in 2010 adopted a parliamentary system with periodic elections.Pakistan is a middle power, and has the world's sixth-largest standing armed forces. It is a declared nuclear-weapons state, and is ranked amongst the emerging and growth-leading economies, with a large and rapidly-growing middle class. Pakistan's political history since independence has been characterized by periods of significant economic and military growth as well those of political and economic instability. It is an ethnically and linguistically diverse country, with similarly diverse geography and wildlife. However, the country continues to face challenges, including poverty, illiteracy, corruption and terrorism. Pakistan is a member of the United Nations, the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation, the Organisation of Islamic Cooperation, the British Commonwealth of Nations, the South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation, the Islamic Military Counter-Terrorism Coalition, and is designated as a major non-NATO ally by the United States.The name "Pakistan" means literally "a land abounding in the pure" or "a land in which the pure abound", in Urdu and Persian. It references the word ("pāk"), meaning "pure" in Persian and Pashto. The suffix (transliterated in English as stân after stem word ending in a vowel; estân or istân after a stem ending in a consonant) is from Persian, and means "a place abounding in" or "a place where anything abounds".The name of the country was coined in 1933 by Choudhry Rahmat Ali, a Pakistan Movement activist, who published it in a pamphlet "Now or Never", using it as an acronym ("thirty million Muslim brethren who live in PAKISTAN"), and referring to the names of the five northern regions of the British Raj: "P"unjab, "A"fghania, "K"ashmir, "S"indh, and Baluchis"tan".Some of the earliest ancient human civilisations in South Asia originated from areas encompassing present-day Pakistan. The earliest known inhabitants in the region were Soanian during the Lower Paleolithic, of whom stone tools have been found in the Soan Valley of Punjab. The Indus region, which covers most of present day Pakistan, was the site of several successive ancient cultures including the Neolithic Mehrgarh and the Bronze Age Indus Valley Civilisation (2,800–1,800 BCE) at Harappa and Mohenjo-Daro.The Vedic period (1500–500 BCE) was characterised by an Indo-Aryan culture; during this period the Vedas, the oldest scriptures associated with Hinduism, were composed, and this culture later became well established in the region. Multan was an important Hindu pilgrimage centre. The Vedic civilisation flourished in the ancient Gandhāran city of Takṣaśilā, now Taxila in the Punjab, which was founded around 1000 BCE. Successive ancient empires and kingdoms ruled the region: the Persian Achaemenid Empire (around 519 BCE), Alexander the Great's empire in 326 BCE and the Maurya Empire, founded by Chandragupta Maurya and extended by Ashoka the Great, until 185 BCE. The Indo-Greek Kingdom founded by Demetrius of Bactria (180–165 BCE) included Gandhara and Punjab and reached its greatest extent under Menander (165–150 BCE), prospering the Greco-Buddhist culture in the region. Taxila had one of the earliest universities and centres of higher education in the world, which was established during the late Vedic period in 6th century BCE. The school consisted of several monasteries without large dormitories or lecture halls where the religious instruction was provided on an individualistic basis. The ancient university was documented by the invading forces of Alexander the Great and was also recorded by Chinese pilgrims in the 4th or 5th century CE.At its zenith, the Rai Dynasty (489–632 CE) of Sindh ruled this region and the surrounding territories. The Pala Dynasty was the last Buddhist empire, which, under Dharmapala and Devapala, stretched across South Asia from what is now Bangladesh through Northern India to Pakistan.The Arab conqueror Muhammad bin Qasim conquered Sindh in 711 CE. The Pakistan government's official chronology claims this as the time when the foundation of Pakistan was laid but the concept of "Pakistan" arrived in the 19th century. The Early Medieval period (642–1219 CE) witnessed the spread of Islam in the region. During this period, Sufi missionaries played a pivotal role in converting a majority of the regional Buddhist and Hindu population to Islam. Upon the defeat of the Turk and Hindu Shahi dynasties which governed the Kabul Valley, Gandhara (present-day Khyber Pakhtunkwa), and western Punjab in the 7th to 11th centuries CE, several successive Muslim empires ruled over the region, including the Ghaznavid Empire (975–1187 CE), the Ghorid Kingdom, and the Delhi Sultanate (1206–1526 CE). The Lodi dynasty, the last of the Delhi Sultanate, was replaced by the Mughal Empire (1526–1857 CE).The Mughals introduced Persian literature and high culture, establishing the roots of Indo-Persian culture in the region. In the region of modern-day Pakistan, key cities during the Mughal period were Lahore and Thatta, both of which were chosen as the site of impressive Mughal buildings. In the early 16th century, the region remained under the Mughal Empire ruled by Muslim emperors. By the early 18th century, increasing European influence contributed to the slow disintegration of the Mughal Empire as the lines between commercial and political dominance became increasingly blurred.During this time, the English East India Company had established coastal outposts. Control over the seas, greater resources, technology, and British military protection led the Company to increasingly flex its military muscle, allowing the Company to gain control over the subcontinent by 1765 and sideline European competitors. Expanding access beyond Bengal and the subsequent increased strength and size of its army enabled it to annex or subdue most of region by the 1820s. Many historians see this as the start of the region's colonial period. By this time, with its economic power severely curtailed by the British parliament and itself effectively made an arm of British administration, the Company began more deliberately to enter non-economic arenas such as education, social reform, and culture. Such reforms included the enforcement of the English Education Act in 1835 and the introduction of the Indian Civil Service (ICS). Traditional "madrasahs"—primary institutions of higher learning for Muslims in the subcontinent—were no longer supported by the English Crown, and nearly all of the "madrasahs" lost their financial endowment.The gradual decline of the Mughal Empire in the early 18th century enabled the Sikh Empire to control larger areas until the British East India Company gained ascendancy over South Asia. A rebellion in 1857 called the Sepoy mutiny of Bengal was the region's major armed struggle against the British Empire and Queen Victoria. Divergence in the relationship between Hinduism and Islam created a major rift in British India that led to motivated religious violence in British India. The language controversy further escalated the tensions between Hindus and Muslims. The Hindu renaissance witnessed an awakening of intellectualism in traditional Hinduism and saw the emergence of more assertive influence in the social and political spheres in British India. A Muslim intellectual movement, founded by Sir Syed Ahmed Khan to counter the Hindu renaissance, envisioned, as well as advocated for the two-nation theory, and led to the creation of the All-India Muslim League in 1906. In contrast to the Indian National Congress's anti-British efforts, the Muslim League was a pro-British movement whose political program inherited the British values that would shape Pakistan's future civil society. In events during World War I, British Intelligence foiled an anti-English conspiracy involving the nexus of Congress and the German Empire. The largely non-violent independence struggle led by the Indian Congress engaged millions of protesters in mass campaigns of civil disobedience in the 1920s and 1930s against the British Empire.The Muslim League slowly rose to mass popularity in the 1930s amid fears of under-representation and neglect of British Muslims in politics. In his presidential address of 29 December 1930, Allama Iqbal called for "the amalgamation of North-West Muslim-majority Indian states" consisting of Punjab, North-West Frontier Province, Sind, and Baluchistan. The perceived neglect of Muslim interests by Congress led British provincial governments during the period of 1937–39 convinced Muhammad Ali Jinnah, the founder of Pakistan to espouse the two-nation theory and led the Muslim League to adopt the Lahore Resolution of 1940 presented by Sher-e-Bangla A.K. Fazlul Haque, popularly known as the Pakistan Resolution. In World War II, Jinnah and British-educated founding fathers in the Muslim League supported the United Kingdom's war efforts, countering opposition against it whilst working towards Sir Syed's vision.The 1946 elections resulted in the Muslim League winning 90 percent of the seats reserved for Muslims. Thus, the 1946 election was effectively a plebiscite in which the Indian Muslims were to vote on the creation of Pakistan, a plebiscite won by the Muslim League. This victory was assisted by the support given to the Muslim League by the support of the landowners of Sindh and Punjab. The Congress, which initially denied the Muslim League's claim of being the sole representative of Indian Muslims, was now forced to recognise the fact. The British had no alternative except to take Jinnah's views into account as he had emerged as the sole spokesperson of the entirety of British India's Muslims. However, the British did not want colonial India to be partitioned, and in one last effort to prevent it, they devised the Cabinet Mission plan.As the cabinet mission failed, the British government announced its intention to end the British Rule in 1946–47. Nationalists in British India—including Jawaharlal Nehru and Abul Kalam Azad of Congress, Jinnah of the All-India Muslim League, and Master Tara Singh representing the Sikhs—agreed to the proposed terms of transfer of power and independence in June 1947 with the Viceroy of India, Lord Mountbatten of Burma. As the United Kingdom agreed to the partitioning of India in 1947, the modern state of Pakistan was established on 14 August 1947 , amalgamating the Muslim-majority eastern and northwestern regions of British India. It comprised the provinces of Balochistan, East Bengal, the North-West Frontier Province, West Punjab, and Sindh.In the riots that accompanied the partition in Punjab Province, it is believed that between 200,000 and 2,000,000 people were killed in what some have described as a retributive genocide between the religions while 50,000 Muslim women were abducted and raped by Hindu and Sikh men, 33,000 Hindu and Sikh women also experienced the same fate at the hands of Muslims. Around 6.5 million Muslims moved from India to West Pakistan and 4.7 million Hindus and Sikhs moved from West Pakistan to India. It was the largest mass migration in human history. A subsequent dispute over the princely state of Jammu and Kashmir eventually sparked the Indo-Pakistani War of 1947–1948.After independence in 1947, Jinnah, the President of the Muslim League, became the nation's first Governor-General as well as the first President-Speaker of the Parliament, but he died of tuberculosis on 11 September 1948. Meanwhile, Pakistan's founding fathers agreed to appoint Liaquat Ali Khan, the secretary-general of the party, the nation's first Prime Minister. With dominion status in the Commonwealth of Nations, independent Pakistan had two British monarchs before it became a republic.The creation of Pakistan was never fully accepted by many British leaders, among them Lord Mountbatten. Mountbatten clearly expressed his lack of support and faith in the Muslim League's idea of Pakistan. Jinnah refused Mountbatten's offer to serve as Governor-General of Pakistan. When Mountbatten was asked by Collins and Lapierre if he would have sabotaged Pakistan had he known that Jinnah was dying of tuberculosis, he replied 'most probably'.Maulana Shabbir Ahmad Usmani, a respected Deobandi "alim" (scholar) who occupied the position of Shaykh al-Islam in Pakistan in 1949, and Maulana Mawdudi of Jamaat-i-Islami played a pivotal role in the demand for an Islamic constitution. Mawdudi demanded that the Constituent Assembly make an explicit declaration affirming the "supreme sovereignty of God" and the supremacy of the "shariah" in Pakistan.A significant result of the efforts of the Jamaat-i-Islami and the "ulama" was the passage of the Objectives Resolution in March 1949. The Objectives Resolution, which Liaquat Ali Khan called the second most important step in Pakistan's history, declared that "sovereignty over the entire universe belongs to God Almighty alone and the authority which He has delegated to the State of Pakistan through its people for being exercised within the limits prescribed by Him is a sacred trust". The Objectives Resolution has been incorporated as a preamble to the constitutions of 1956, 1962, and 1973.Democracy was stalled by the martial law that had been enforced by President Iskander Mirza, who was replaced by the army chief, General Ayub Khan. After adopting a presidential system in 1962, the country experienced exceptional growth until a second war with India in 1965 that led to an economic downturn and wide-scale public disapproval in 1967. Consolidating control from Ayub Khan in 1969, President Yahya Khan had to deal with a devastating cyclone that caused 500,000 deaths in East Pakistan.In 1970 Pakistan held its first democratic elections since independence, meant to mark a transition from military rule to democracy, but after the East Pakistani Awami League won against the Pakistan Peoples Party (PPP), Yahya Khan and the military establishment refused to hand over power. Operation Searchlight, a military crackdown on the Bengali nationalist movement, led to a declaration of independence and the waging of a war of liberation by the Bengali Mukti Bahini forces in East Pakistan, which in West Pakistan was described as a civil war as opposed to a war of liberation.Independent researchers estimate that between 300,000 and 500,000 civilians died during this period while the Bangladesh government puts the number of dead at three million, a figure that is now nearly universally regarded as excessively inflated. Some academics such as Rudolph Rummel and Rounaq Jahan say both sides committed genocide; others such as Richard Sisson and Leo E. Rose believe there was no genocide. In response to India's support for the insurgency in East Pakistan, preemptive strikes on India by Pakistan's air force, navy, and marines sparked a conventional war in 1971 that resulted in an Indian victory and East Pakistan gaining independence as Bangladesh.With Pakistan surrendering in the war, Yahya Khan was replaced by Zulfikar Ali Bhutto as president; the country worked towards promulgating its constitution and putting the country on the road to democracy. Democratic rule resumed from 1972 to 1977—an era of self-consciousness, intellectual leftism, nationalism, and nationwide reconstruction. In 1972 Pakistan embarked on an ambitious plan to develop its nuclear deterrence capability with the goal of preventing any foreign invasion; the country's first nuclear power plant was inaugurated in that same year. Accelerated in response to India's first nuclear test in 1974, this crash program was completed in 1979.Democracy ended with a military coup in 1977 against the leftist PPP, which saw General Zia-ul-Haq become the president in 1978. From 1977 to 1988, President Zia's corporatisation and economic Islamisation initiatives led to Pakistan becoming one of the fastest-growing economies in South Asia. While building up the country's nuclear program, increasing Islamisation, and the rise of a homegrown conservative philosophy, Pakistan helped subsidise and distribute US resources to factions of the mujahideen against the USSR's intervention in communist Afghanistan. Pakistan's North-West Frontier Province became a base for the anti-Soviet Afghan fighters, with the province's influential Deobandi ulama playing a significant role in encouraging and organising the 'jihad'.President Zia died in a plane crash in 1988, and Benazir Bhutto, daughter of Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, was elected as the country's first female Prime Minister. The PPP was followed by conservative Pakistan Muslim League (N), and over the next decade the leaders of the two parties fought for power, alternating in office while the country's situation worsened; economic indicators fell sharply, in contrast to the 1980s. This period is marked by prolonged stagflation, instability, corruption, nationalism, geopolitical rivalry with India, and the clash of left wing-right wing ideologies. As PML (N) secured a supermajority in elections in 1997, Sharif authorised nuclear testings (See:"Chagai-I" and "Chagai-II"), as a retaliation to the second nuclear tests ordered by India, led by Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee in May 1998.Military tension between the two countries in the Kargil district led to the Kargil War of 1999, and turmoil in civic-military relations allowed General Pervez Musharraf to take over through a bloodless coup d'état. Musharraf governed Pakistan as chief executive from 1999 to 2001 and as President from 2001 to 2008—a period of enlightenment, social liberalism, extensive economic reforms, and direct involvement in the US-led war on terrorism. When the National Assembly historically completed its first full five-year term on 15 November 2007, the new elections were called by the Election Commission.After the assassination of Benazir Bhutto in 2007, the PPP secured the most votes in the elections of 2008, appointing party member Yousaf Raza Gillani as Prime Minister. Threatened with impeachment, President Musharraf resigned on 18 August 2008, and was succeeded by Asif Ali Zardari. Clashes with the judicature prompted Gillani's disqualification from the Parliament and as the Prime Minister in June 2012. By its own financial calculations, Pakistan's involvement in the war on terrorism has cost up to $118 billion, sixty thousand casualties and more than 1.8 million displaced civilians. The general election held in 2013 saw the PML (N) almost achieve a supermajority, following which Nawaz Sharif was elected as the Prime Minister, returning to the post for the third time in fourteen years, in a democratic transition. In 2018, Imran Khan (the chairman of PTI) won the 2018 Pakistan general election with 116 general seats and became the 22nd Prime Minister of Pakistan in election of National Assembly of Pakistan for Prime Minister by getting 176 votes against Shehbaz Sharif (the chairman of PML (N)) who got 96 votes.Pakistan is the only country to have been created in the name of Islam. The idea of Pakistan, which had received overwhelming popular support among Indian Muslims, especially those in the provinces of British India where Muslims were in a minority such as the United Provinces, was articulated in terms of an Islamic state by the Muslim League leadership, the ulama (Islamic clergy) and Jinnah. Jinnah had developed a close association with the "ulama" and upon his death was described by one such "alim", Maulana Shabbir Ahmad Usmani, as the greatest Muslim after Aurangzeb and as someone who desired to unite the Muslims of the world under the banner of Islam.The Objectives Resolution in March 1949, which declared God as the sole sovereign over the entire universe, represented the first formal step to transform Pakistan into an Islamic state. Muslim League leader Chaudhry Khaliquzzaman asserted that Pakistan could only truly become an Islamic state after bringing all believers of Islam into a single political unit. Keith Callard, one of the earliest scholars on Pakistani politics, observed that Pakistanis believed in the essential unity of purpose and outlook in the Muslim world and assumed that Muslim from other countries would share their views on the relationship between religion and nationality.However, Pakistan's pan-Islamist sentiments for a united Islamic bloc called Islamistan were not shared by other Muslim governments, although Islamists such as the Grand Mufti of Palestine, Al-Haj Amin al-Husseini, and leaders of the Muslim Brotherhood, became drawn to the country. Pakistan's desire for an international organization of Muslim countries was fulfilled in the 1970s when the Organization of Islamic Conference (OIC) was formed.The strongest opposition to the Islamist ideological paradigm being imposed on the state came from the Bengali Muslims of East Pakistan whose educated class, according to a survey by social scientist Nasim Ahmad Jawed, preferred secularism and focused on ethnic identity unlike educated West Pakistanis who tended to prefer an Islamic identity. The Islamist party Jamaat-e-Islami considered Pakistan to be an Islamic state and believed Bengali nationalism to be unacceptable. In the 1971 conflict over East Pakistan, the Jamaat-e-Islami fought the Bengali nationalists on the Pakistan Army's side.After Pakistan's first ever general elections, the 1973 Constitution was created by an elected Parliament. The Constitution declared Pakistan an Islamic Republic and Islam as the state religion. It also stated that all laws would have to be brought into accordance with the injunctions of Islam as laid down in the Quran and Sunnah and that no law repugnant to such injunctions could be enacted. The 1973 Constitution also created certain institutions such as the Shariat Court and the Council of Islamic Ideology to channel the interpretation and application of Islam.Pakistan's leftist Prime Minister Zulfikar Ali Bhutto faced vigorous opposition which coalesced into a movement united under the revivalist banner of "Nizam-e-Mustafa" ("Rule of the Prophet") which aimed to establish an Islamic state based on Sharia laws. Bhutto agreed to some Islamist demands before being overthrown in a coup.In 1977, after taking power from Bhutto in a coup d'état, General Zia-ul-Haq, who came from a religious background, committed himself to establishing an Islamic state and enforcing "sharia" law. Zia established separate Shariat judicial courts and court benches to judge legal cases using Islamic doctrine. Zia bolstered the influence of the "ulama" (Islamic clergy) and the Islamic parties. Zia-ul-Haq forged a strong alliance between the military and Deobandi institutions and even though most Barelvi ulama and only a few Deobandi scholars had supported Pakistan's creation, Islamic state politics came to be mostly in favour of Deobandi (and later Ahl-e-Hadith/Salafi) institutions instead of Barelvi. Sectarian tensions increased with Zia's anti-Shia policies.According to a Pew Research Center (PEW) opinion poll, a majority of Pakistanis support making Sharia the official law of the land. In a survey of several Muslim countries, PEW also found that Pakistanis tend to identify with their religion more than their nationality in contrast to Muslims in other nations such as Egypt, Indonesia and Jordan.The geography and climate of Pakistan are extremely diverse, and the country is home to a wide variety of wildlife. Pakistan covers an area of , approximately equal to the combined land areas of France and the United Kingdom. It is the 33rd-largest nation by total area, although this ranking varies depending on how the disputed territory of Kashmir is counted. Pakistan has a coastline along the Arabian Sea and the Gulf of Oman in the south and land borders of in total: with Afghanistan, with China, with India and with Iran. It shares a marine border with Oman, and is separated from Tajikistan by the cold, narrow Wakhan Corridor. Pakistan occupies a geopolitically important location at the crossroads of South Asia, the Middle East, and Central Asia.Geologically, Pakistan is located in the Indus–Tsangpo Suture Zone and overlaps the Indian tectonic plate in its Sindh and Punjab provinces; Balochistan and most of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa are within the Eurasian plate, mainly on the Iranian plateau. Gilgit–Baltistan and Azad Kashmir lie along the edge of the Indian plate and hence are prone to violent earthquakes. This region has the highest rates of seismicity and the largest earthquakes in the Himalaya region. Ranging from the coastal areas of the south to the glaciated mountains of the north, Pakistan's landscapes vary from plains to deserts, forests, hills, and plateaus.Pakistan is divided into three major geographic areas: the northern highlands, the Indus River plain, and the Balochistan Plateau. The northern highlands contain the Karakoram, Hindu Kush, and Pamir mountain ranges (see mountains of Pakistan), which contain some of the world's highest peaks, including five of the fourteen eight-thousanders (mountain peaks over ), which attract adventurers and mountaineers from all over the world, notably K2 () and Nanga Parbat (). The Balochistan Plateau lies in the west and the Thar Desert in the east. The Indus River and its tributaries flow through the country from the Kashmir region to the Arabian Sea. There is an expanse of alluvial plains along it in the Punjab and Sindh.The climate varies from tropical to temperate, with arid conditions in the coastal south. There is a monsoon season with frequent flooding due to heavy rainfall, and a dry season with significantly less rainfall or none at all. There are four distinct seasons in Pakistan: a cool, dry winter from December through February; a hot, dry spring from March through May; the summer rainy season, or southwest monsoon period, from June through September; and the retreating monsoon period of October and November. Rainfall varies greatly from year to year, and patterns of alternate flooding and drought are common.The diversity of the landscape and climate in Pakistan allows a wide variety of trees and plants to flourish. The forests range from coniferous alpine and subalpine trees such as spruce, pine, and deodar cedar in the extreme northern mountains to deciduous trees in most of the country (for example, the mulberry-like shisham found in the Sulaiman Mountains), to palms such as coconut and date in the southern Punjab, southern Balochistan, and all of Sindh. The western hills are home to juniper, tamarisk, coarse grasses, and scrub plants. Mangrove forests form much of the coastal wetlands along the coast in the south.Coniferous forests are found at altitudes ranging from in most of the northern and northwestern highlands. In the xeric regions of Balochistan, date palm and "Ephedra" are common. In most of the Punjab and Sindh, the Indus plains support tropical and subtropical dry and moist broadleaf forest as well as tropical and xeric shrublands. These forests are mostly of mulberry, acacia, and eucalyptus. About 2.2% or of Pakistan was forested in 2010.The fauna of Pakistan also reflects the country's varied climate. Around 668 bird species are found there, including crows, sparrows, mynas, hawks, falcons, and eagles. Palas, Kohistan, has a significant population of western tragopan. Many birds sighted in Pakistan are migratory, coming from Europe, Central Asia, and India.The southern plains are home to mongooses, small Indian civet, hares, the Asiatic jackal, the Indian pangolin, the jungle cat, and the desert cat. There are mugger crocodiles in the Indus, and wild boar, deer, porcupines, and small rodents in the surrounding areas. The sandy scrublands of central Pakistan are home to Asiatic jackals, striped hyenas, wildcats, and leopards. The lack of vegetative cover, the severe climate, and the impact of grazing on the deserts have left wild animals in a precarious position. The chinkara is the only animal that can still be found in significant numbers in Cholistan. A small number of nilgai are found along the Pakistan–India border and in some parts of Cholistan. A wide variety of animals live in the mountainous north, including the Marco Polo sheep, the urial (a subspecies of wild sheep), the markhor goat, the ibex goat, the Asian black bear, and the Himalayan brown bear. Among the rare animals found in the area are the snow leopard and the blind Indus river dolphin, of which there are believed to be about 1,100 remaining, protected at the Indus River Dolphin Reserve in Sindh. In total, 174 mammals, 177 reptiles, 22 amphibians, 198 freshwater fish species and 5,000 species of invertebrates (including insects) have been recorded in Pakistan.The flora and fauna of Pakistan suffer from a number of problems. Pakistan has the second-highest rate of deforestation in the world, which, along with hunting and pollution, has had adverse effects on the ecosystem. It had a 2019 Forest Landscape Integrity Index mean score of 7.42/10, ranking it 41st globally out of 172 countries. The government has established a large number of protected areas, wildlife sanctuaries, and game reserves to address these issues.Pakistan's political experience is essentially related to the struggle of Indian Muslims to regain the power they lost to British colonisation. Pakistan is a democratic parliamentary federal republic, with Islam as the state religion. The first constitution was adopted in 1956 but suspended by Ayub Khan in 1958, who replaced it with the second constitution in 1962. A complete and comprehensive constitution was adopted in 1973, it was suspended by Zia-ul-Haq in 1977 but reinstated in 1985. This constitution is the country's most important document, laying the foundations of the current government. The Pakistani military establishment has played an influential role in mainstream politics throughout Pakistan's political history. The periods 1958–1971, 1977–1988, and 1999–2008 saw military coups that resulted in the imposition of martial law and military commanders who governed as de facto presidents. Today Pakistan has a multi-party parliamentary system with clear division of powers and checks and balances among the branches of government. The first successful democratic transition occurred in May 2013. Politics in Pakistan is centred on, and dominated by, a homegrown social philosophy comprising a blend of ideas from socialism, conservatism, and the third way. As of the general elections held in 2013, the three main political parties in the country are: the centre-right conservative Pakistan Muslim League-N; the centre-left socialist PPP; and the centrist and third-way Pakistan Movement for Justice (PTI).Since Independence, Pakistan has attempted to balance its relations with foreign nations. Pakistan is a strong ally of China, with both countries placing considerable importance on the maintenance of an extremely close and supportive special relationship. It is also a major non-NATO ally of the United States in the war against terrorism—a status achieved in 2004. Pakistan's foreign policy and geostrategy mainly focus on the economy and security against threats to its national identity and territorial integrity, and on the cultivation of close relations with other Muslim countries.The Kashmir conflict remains the major point of contention between Pakistan and India; three of their four wars were fought over this territory. Due partly to difficulties in relations with its geopolitical rival India, Pakistan maintains close political relations with Turkey and Iran, and both countries have been a focal point in Pakistan's foreign policy. Saudi Arabia also maintains a respected position in Pakistan's foreign policy.A non-signatory party of the Treaty on Nuclear Non-Proliferation, Pakistan is an influential member of the IAEA. In recent events, Pakistan has blocked an international treaty to limit fissile material, arguing that the "treaty would target Pakistan specifically". In the 20th century, Pakistan's nuclear deterrence program focused on countering India's nuclear ambitions in the region, and nuclear tests by India eventually led Pakistan to reciprocate to maintain a geopolitical balance as becoming a nuclear power. Currently, Pakistan maintains a policy of credible minimum deterrence, calling its program vital nuclear deterrence against foreign aggression.Located in the strategic and geopolitical corridor of the world's major maritime oil supply lines and communication fibre optics, Pakistan has proximity to the natural resources of Central Asian countries. Briefing on the country's foreign policy in 2004, a Pakistani senator reportedly explained: "Pakistan highlights sovereign equality of states, bilateralism, mutuality of interests, and non-interference in each other's domestic affairs as the cardinal features of its foreign policy." Pakistan is an active member of the United Nations and has a Permanent Representative to represent Pakistan's positions in international politics. Pakistan has lobbied for the concept of "enlightened moderation" in the Muslim world. Pakistan is also a member of Commonwealth of Nations, the South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation (SAARC), the Economic Cooperation Organization (ECO), and the G20 developing nations.Due to ideological differences, Pakistan opposed the Soviet Union in the 1950s. During the Soviet–Afghan War in the 1980s, Pakistan was one of the closest allies of the United States. Relations between Pakistan and Russia have greatly improved since 1999, and co-operation in various sectors has increased. Pakistan has had an "on-and-off" relationship with the United States. A close ally of the United States during the Cold war, Pakistan's relationship with the United States soured in the 1990s when the US imposed sanctions because of Pakistan's secretive nuclear development. Since 9/11, Pakistan has been a close ally of the United States on the issue of counter-terrorism in the regions of the Middle East and South Asia, with the US supporting Pakistan with aid money and weapons. Initially, the United States-led war on terrorism led to an improvement in the relationship, but it was strained by a divergence of interests and resulting mistrust during the war in Afghanistan and by issues related to terrorism.Pakistan does not have diplomatic relations with Israel; nonetheless, some Israeli citizens have visited the country on tourist visas. However, an exchange took place between the two countries using Turkey as a communication conduit. Despite Pakistan being the only country in the world that has not established diplomatic relations with Armenia, an Armenian community still resides in Pakistan. Pakistan had warm relations with Bangladesh, despite some initial strains in their relationship.Pakistan was one of the first countries to establish formal diplomatic relations with the People's Republic of China, and the relationship continues to be strong since China's war with India in 1962, forming a special relationship. From the 1960s to 1980s, Pakistan greatly helped China in reaching out to the world's major countries and helped facilitate US President Nixon's state visit to China. Despite the change of governments in Pakistan and fluctuations in the regional and global situation, China's policy in Pakistan continues to be a dominant factor at all times. In return, China is Pakistan's largest trading partner, and economic co-operation has flourished, with substantial Chinese investment in Pakistan's infrastructural expansion such as the Pakistani deep-water port at Gwadar. Friendly Sino-Pakistani relations reached new heights as both countries signed 51 agreements and Memorandums of Understanding (MoUs) in 2015 for co-operation in different areas. Both countries signed a Free Trade Agreement in the 2000s, and Pakistan continues to serve as China's communication bridge to the Muslim world. In 2016, China announced that it will set up an anti-terrorism alliance with Pakistan, Afghanistan, and Tajikistan. In December 2018, Pakistan's government defended China's re-education camps for a million Uyghur Muslims.After Independence, Pakistan vigorously pursued bilateral relations with other Muslim countries and made an active bid for leadership of the Muslim world, or at least for leadership in efforts to achieve unity. The Ali brothers had sought to project Pakistan as the natural leader of the Islamic world, in part due to its large manpower and military strength. A top-ranking Muslim League leader, Khaliquzzaman, declared that Pakistan would bring together all Muslim countries into Islamistan—a pan-Islamic entity.Such developments (along with Pakistan's creation) did not get American approval, and British Prime Minister Clement Attlee voiced international opinion at the time by stating that he wished that India and Pakistan would re-unite. Since most of the Arab world was undergoing a nationalist awakening at the time, there was little attraction to Pakistan's Pan-Islamic aspirations. Some of the Arab countries saw the 'Islamistan' project as a Pakistani attempt to dominate other Muslim states.Pakistan vigorously championed the right of self-determination for Muslims around the world. Pakistan's efforts for the independence movements of Indonesia, Algeria, Tunisia, Morocco, and Eritrea were significant and initially led to close ties between these countries and Pakistan. However, Pakistan also masterminded an attack on the Afghan city of Jalalabad during the Afghan Civil War to establish an Islamic government there. Pakistan had wished to foment an 'Islamic Revolution' that would transcend national borders, covering Pakistan, Afghanistan, and Central Asia.On the other hand, Pakistan's relations with Iran have been strained at times due to sectarian tensions. Iran and Saudi Arabia used Pakistan as a battleground for their proxy sectarian war, and by the 1990s Pakistan's support for the Sunni Taliban organisation in Afghanistan became a problem for Shia Iran, which opposed a Taliban-controlled Afghanistan. Tensions between Iran and Pakistan intensified in 1998 when Iran accused Pakistan of war crimes after Pakistani warplanes had bombarded Afghanistan's last Shia stronghold in support of the Taliban.Pakistan is an influential and founding member of the Organisation of Islamic Cooperation (OIC). Maintaining cultural, political, social, and economic relations with the Arab world and other countries in the Muslim world is a vital factor in Pakistan's foreign policy.A federal parliamentary republic state, Pakistan is a federation that comprises four provinces: Punjab, Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, Sindh and Balochistan, and three territories: Islamabad Capital Territory, Gilgit–Baltistan and Azad Kashmir. The Government of Pakistan exercises the "de facto" jurisdiction over the Frontier Regions and the western parts of the Kashmir Regions, which are organised into the separate political entities Azad Kashmir and Gilgit–Baltistan (formerly Northern Areas). In 2009, the constitutional assignment () awarded the Gilgit–Baltistan a semi-provincial status, giving it self-government.The local government system consists of a three-tier system of districts, tehsils, and union councils, with an elected body at each tier. There are about 130 districts altogether, of which Azad Kashmir has ten and Gilgit–Baltistan seven.Law enforcement is carried out by a joint network of the intelligence community with jurisdiction limited to the relevant province or territory. The National Intelligence Directorate coordinates the information intelligence at both federal and provincial levels; including the FIA, IB, Motorway Police, and paramilitary forces such as the Pakistan Rangers and the Frontier Corps.Pakistan's "premier" intelligence agency, the Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI), was formed just within a year after the Independence of Pakistan in 1947. ABC News Point in 2014 reported that the ISI was ranked as the top intelligence agency in the world while Zee News reported the ISI as ranking fifth among the world's most powerful intelligence agencies.The court system is organised as a hierarchy, with the Supreme Court at the apex, below which are High Courts, Federal Shariat Courts (one in each province and one in the federal capital), District Courts (one in each district), Judicial Magistrate Courts (in every town and city), Executive Magistrate Courts, and civil courts. The Penal code has limited jurisdiction in the Tribal Areas, where law is largely derived from tribal customs.The Kashmir—the most northwesterly region of South Asia—is a major territorial dispute that has hindered relations between India and Pakistan. The two nations have fought at least three large-scale conventional wars in successive years in 1947, 1965, and 1971. The conflict in 1971 witnessed Pakistan's unconditional surrender and a treaty that subsequently led to the independence of Bangladesh. Other serious military engagements and skirmishes have included the armed contacts in Siachen Glacier (1984) and Kargil (1999). Approximately 45.1% of the Kashmir region is controlled by India, which also claims the entire state of Jammu and Kashmir, including most of Jammu, the Kashmir Valley, Ladakh, and the Siachen. The claim is contested by Pakistan, which controls approximately 38.2% of the Kashmir region, an area known as the Azad Kashmir and Gilgit–Baltistan.India claims the Kashmir on the basis of the Instrument of Accession—a legal agreement with Kashmir's leaders executed by "Maharaja" Hari Singh, who agreed to cede the area to India. Pakistan claims Kashmir on the basis of a Muslim majority and of geography, the same principles that were applied for the creation of the two independent states. India referred the dispute to the United Nations on 1 January 1948. In a resolution passed in 1948, the UN's General Assembly asked Pakistan to remove most of its troops as a "plebiscite" would then be held. However, Pakistan failed to vacate the region and a ceasefire was reached in 1949 establishing a Line of Control (LoC) that divided Kashmir between the two nations. India, fearful that the Muslim majority populace of Kashmir would secede from India, did not allow a plebiscite to take place in the region. This was confirmed in a statement by India's Defense Minister, Krishna Menon, who said: "Kashmir would vote to join Pakistan and no Indian Government responsible for agreeing to plebiscite would survive."Pakistan claims that its position is for the right of the people of Jammu and Kashmir to determine their future through impartial elections as mandated by the United Nations, while India has stated that Kashmir is an integral part of India, referring to the Simla Agreement (1972) and to the fact that elections take place regularly. In recent developments, certain Kashmiri independence groups believe that Kashmir should be independent of both India and Pakistan.The law enforcement in Pakistan is carried out by joint network of several federal and provincial police agencies. The four provinces and the Islamabad Capital Territory (ICT) each have a civilian police force with jurisdiction extending only to the relevant province or territory. At the federal level, there are a number of civilian intelligence agencies with nationwide jurisdictions including the Federal Investigation Agency (FIA), Intelligence Bureau (IB), and the Motorway Patrol, as well as several paramilitary forces such as the National Guards (Northern Areas), the Rangers (Punjab and Sindh), and the Frontier Corps (Khyber Pakhtunkhwa and Balochistan).The most senior officers of all the civilian police forces also form part of the Police Service, which is a component of the civil service of Pakistan. Namely, there is four provincial police service including the Punjab Police, Sindh Police, Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa Police, and the Balochistan Police; all headed by the appointed senior Inspector-Generals. The ICT has its own police component, the Capital Police, to maintain law and order in the capital. The CID bureaus are the crime investigation unit and form a vital part in each provincial police service.The law enforcement in Pakistan also has a Motorway Patrol which is responsible for enforcement of traffic and safety laws, security and recovery on Pakistan's inter-provincial motorway network. In each of provincial Police Service, it also maintains a respective Elite Police units led by the NACTA—a counter-terrorism police unit as well as providing VIP escorts. In the Punjab and Sindh, the Pakistan Rangers are an internal security force with the prime objective to provide and maintain security in war zones and areas of conflict as well as maintaining law and order which includes providing assistance to the police. The Frontier Corps serves the similar purpose in Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa, and the Balochistan.Male homosexuality is illegal in Pakistan and punishable with up to life in prison. In its 2018 Press Freedom Index, Reporters Without Borders ranked Pakistan number 139 out of 180 countries based on freedom of the press. Television stations and newspapers are routinely shut down for publishing any reports critical of the government or the military.The armed forces of Pakistan are the sixth largest in the world in terms of numbers in full-time service, with about 651,800 personnel on active duty and 291,000 paramilitary personnel, as of tentative estimates in 2021. They came into existence after independence in 1947, and the military establishment has frequently influenced the national politics ever since. Chain of command of the military is kept under the control of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Committee; all of the branches joint works, co-ordination, military logistics, and joint missions are under the Joint Staff HQ. The Joint Staff HQ is composed of the Air HQ, Navy HQ, and Army GHQ in the vicinity of the Rawalpindi Military District.The Chairman Joint Chiefs of Staff Committee is the highest principle staff officer in the armed forces, and the chief military adviser to the civilian government though the chairman has no authority over the three branches of armed forces. The Chairman joint chiefs controls the military from the JS HQ and maintains strategic communications between the military and the civilian government. , the CJCSC is General Nadeem Raza alongside chief of army staff General Qamar Javed Bajwa, chief of naval staff Admiral Muhammad Amjad Khan Niazi, and chief of air staff Air Chief Marshal Zaheer Ahmad Babar. The main branches are the Army, the Air Force and the Navy, which are supported by a large number of paramilitary forces in the country. Control over the strategic arsenals, deployment, employment, development, military computers and command and control is a responsibility vested under the National Command Authority which oversaw the work on the nuclear policy as part of the credible minimum deterrence.The United States, Turkey, and China maintain close military relations and regularly export military equipment and technology transfer to Pakistan. Joint logistics and major war games are occasionally carried out by the militaries of China and Turkey. Philosophical basis for the military draft is introduced by the Constitution in times of emergency, but it has never been imposed.Since 1947 Pakistan has been involved in four conventional wars, the first war occurred in Kashmir with Pakistan gaining control of Western Kashmir, (Azad Kashmir and Gilgit–Baltistan), and India retaining Eastern Kashmir (Jammu and Kashmir and Ladakh). Territorial problems eventually led to another conventional war in 1965; over the issue of Bengali refugees that led to another war in 1971 which resulted in Pakistan's unconditional surrender in East Pakistan. Tensions in Kargil brought the two countries at the brink of war. Since 1947 the unresolved territorial problems with Afghanistan saw border skirmishes which were kept mostly at the mountainous border. In 1961, the military and intelligence community repelled the Afghan incursion in the Bajaur Agency near the Durand Line border.Rising tensions with neighbouring USSR in their involvement in Afghanistan, Pakistani intelligence community, mostly the ISI, systematically coordinated the US resources to the Afghan mujahideen and foreign fighters against the Soviet Union's presence in the region. Military reports indicated that the PAF was in engagement with the Soviet Air Force, supported by the Afghan Air Force during the course of the conflict; one of which belonged to Alexander Rutskoy. Apart from its own conflicts, Pakistan has been an active participant in United Nations peacekeeping missions. It played a major role in rescuing trapped American soldiers from Mogadishu, Somalia, in 1993 in Operation Gothic Serpent. According to UN reports, the Pakistani military is the third largest troop contributor to UN peacekeeping missions after Ethiopia and India.Pakistan has deployed its military in some Arab countries, providing defence, training, and playing advisory roles. The PAF and Navy's fighter pilots have voluntarily served in Arab nations' militaries against Israel in the Six-Day War (1967) and in the Yom Kippur War (1973). Pakistan's fighter pilots shot down ten Israeli planes in the Six-Day War. In the 1973 war one of the PAF pilots, Flt. Lt. Sattar Alvi (flying a MiG-21), shot down an Israeli Air Force Mirage and was honoured by the Syrian government. Requested by the Saudi monarchy in 1979, Pakistan's special forces units, operatives, and commandos were rushed to assist Saudi forces in Mecca to lead the operation of the Grand Mosque. For almost two weeks Saudi Special Forces and Pakistani commandos fought the insurgents who had occupied the Grand Mosque's compound. In 1991 Pakistan got involved with the Gulf War and sent 5,000 troops as part of a US-led coalition, specifically for the defence of Saudi Arabia.Despite the UN arms embargo on Bosnia, General Javed Nasir of the ISI airlifted anti-tank weapons and missiles to Bosnian mujahideen which turned the tide in favour of Bosnian Muslims and forced the Serbs to lift the siege. Under Nasir's leadership the ISI was also involved in supporting Chinese Muslims in Xinjiang Province, rebel Muslim groups in the Philippines, and some religious groups in Central Asia.Since 2004, the military has been engaged in an insurgency in the Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province, mainly against the Tehrik-i-Taliban factions. Major operations undertaken by the army include Operation Black Thunderstorm, Operation Rah-e-Nijat and Operation Zarb-e-Azb.According to SIPRI, Pakistan was the 9th-largest recipient and importer of arms between 2012–2016.The Economy of Pakistan is the 23rd-largest in the world in terms of purchasing power parity (PPP), and 42nd-largest in terms of nominal gross domestic product. Economists estimate that Pakistan was part of the wealthiest region of the world throughout the first millennium CE, with the largest economy by GDP. This advantage was lost in the 18th century as other regions such as China and Western Europe edged forward. Pakistan is considered a developing country and is one of the Next Eleven, a group of eleven countries that, along with the BRICs, have a high potential to become the world's largest economies in the 21st century.In recent years, after decades of social instability, , serious deficiencies in macromanagement and unbalanced macroeconomics in basic services such as rail transportation and electrical energy generation have developed. The economy is considered to be semi-industrialized, with centres of growth along the Indus River. The diversified economies of Karachi and Punjab's urban centres coexist with less-developed areas in other parts of the country, particularly in Balochistan. According to the Economic complexity index, Pakistan is the 67th-largest export economy in the world and the 106th most complex economy. During the fiscal year 2015–16, Pakistan's exports stood at US$20.81 billion and imports at US$44.76 billion, resulting in a negative trade balance of US$23.96 billion., Pakistan's estimated nominal GDP is US$284.2 billion. The GDP by PPP is US$1.254 trillion. The estimated nominal per capita GDP is US$1,388, the GDP (PPP)/capita is US$6,016 (international dollars), According to the World Bank, Pakistan has important strategic endowments and development potential. The increasing proportion of Pakistan's youth provides the country with both a potential demographic dividend and a challenge to provide adequate services and employment. 21.04% of the population live below the international poverty line of US$1.25 a day. The unemployment rate among the aged 15 and over population is 5.5%. Pakistan has an estimated 40 million middle class citizens, projected to increase to 100 million by 2050. A 2015 report published by the World Bank ranked Pakistan's economy at 24th-largest in the world by purchasing power and 41st-largest in absolute terms. It is South Asia's second-largest economy, representing about 15.0% of regional GDP.Pakistan's economic growth since its inception has been varied. It has been slow during periods of democratic transition, but robust during the three periods of martial law, although the foundation for sustainable and equitable growth was not formed. The early to middle 2000s was a period of rapid economic reforms; the government raised development spending, which reduced poverty levels by 10% and increased GDP by 3%. The economy cooled again from 2007. Inflation reached 25.0% in 2008, and Pakistan had to depend on a fiscal policy backed by the International Monetary Fund to avoid possible bankruptcy. A year later, the Asian Development Bank reported that Pakistan's economic crisis was easing. The inflation rate for the fiscal year was 14.1%. Since 2013, as part of an International Monetary Fund program, Pakistan's economic growth has picked up. In 2014 Goldman Sachs predicted that Pakistan's economy would grow 15 times in the next 35 years to become the 18th-largest economy in the world by 2050. In his 2016 book, "The Rise and Fall of Nations", Ruchir Sharma termed Pakistan's economy as at a 'take-off' stage and the future outlook until 2020 has been termed 'Very Good'. Sharma termed it possible to transform Pakistan from a "low-income to a middle-income country during the next five years".Pakistan is one of the largest producers of natural commodities, and its labour market is the 10th-largest in the world. The 7-million–strong Pakistani diaspora contributed US$19.9 billion to the economy in 2015–16. The major source countries of remittances to Pakistan are: the UAE; the United States; Saudi Arabia; the Gulf states (Bahrain, Kuwait, Qatar, and Oman); Australia; Canada; Japan; the United Kingdom; Norway; and Switzerland. According to the World Trade Organization, Pakistan's share of overall world exports is declining; it contributed only 0.13% in 2007.The structure of the Pakistani economy has changed from a mainly agricultural to a strong service base. Agriculture accounts for only 20.9% of the GDP. Even so, according to the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization, Pakistan produced 21,591,400 metric tons of wheat in 2005, more than all of Africa (20,304,585 metric tons) and nearly as much as all of South America (24,557,784 metric tons). Majority of the population, directly or indirectly, is dependent on this sector. It accounts for 43.5% of employed labour force and is the largest source of foreign exchange earnings.A large portion of the country's manufactured exports is dependent on raw materials such as cotton and hides that are part of the agriculture sector, while supply shortages and market disruptions in farm products do push up inflationary pressures. The country is also the fifth-largest producer of cotton, with cotton production of 14 million bales from a modest beginning of 1.7 million bales in the early 1950s; is self-sufficient in sugarcane; and is the fourth-largest producer in the world of milk. Land and water resources have not risen proportionately, but the increases have taken place mainly due to gains in labour and agriculture productivity. The major breakthrough in crop production took place in the late 1960s and 1970s due to the Green Revolution that made a significant contribution to land and yield increases of wheat and rice. Private tube wells led to a 50 percent increase in the cropping intensity which was augmented by tractor cultivation. While the tube wells raised crop yields by 50 percent, the High Yielding Varieties (HYVs) of wheat and rice led to a 50–60 percent higher yield. Meat industry accounts for 1.4 percent of overall GDP.Industry is the second-largest sector of the economy, accounting for 19.74% of gross domestic product (GDP), and 24 percent of total employment. Large-scale manufacturing (LSM), at 12.2% of GDP, dominates the overall sector, accounting for 66% of the sectoral share, followed by small-scale manufacturing, which accounts for 4.9% of total GDP. Pakistan's cement industry is also fast growing mainly because of demand from Afghanistan and from the domestic real estate sector. In 2013 Pakistan exported 7,708,557 metric tons of cement. Pakistan has an installed capacity of 44,768,250 metric tons of cement and 42,636,428 metric tons of clinker. In 2012 and 2013, the cement industry in Pakistan became the most profitable sector of the economy.The textile industry has a pivotal position in the manufacturing sector of Pakistan. In Asia, Pakistan is the eighth-largest exporter of textile products, contributing 9.5% to the GDP and providing employment to around 15 million people (some 30% of the 49 million people in the workforce). Pakistan is the fourth-largest producer of cotton with the third-largest spinning capacity in Asia after China and India, contributing 5% to the global spinning capacity. China is the second largest buyer of Pakistani textiles, importing US$1.527 billion of textiles last fiscal. Unlike the US, where mostly value-added textiles are imported, China buys only cotton yarn and cotton fabric from Pakistan. In 2012, Pakistani textile products accounted for 3.3% or US$1.07bn of all UK textile imports, 12.4% or $4.61bn of total Chinese textile imports, 3.0% of all US textile imports ($2,980 million), 1.6% of total German textile imports ($880 million) and 0.7% of total Indian textile imports ($888 million).The services sector makes up 58.8% of GDP and has emerged as the main driver of economic growth. Pakistani society like other developing countries is a consumption oriented society, having a high marginal propensity to consume. The growth rate of services sector is higher than the growth rate of agriculture and industrial sector. Services sector accounts for 54 percent of GDP in 2014 and little over one-third of total employment. Services sector has strong linkages with other sectors of economy; it provides essential inputs to agriculture sector and manufacturing sector. Pakistan's I.T sector is regarded as among the fastest growing sector's in Pakistan. The World Economic Forum, assessing the development of Information and Communication Technology in the country ranked Pakistan 110th among 139 countries on the 'Networked Readiness Index 2016'., Pakistan has about 82 million internet users, making it the 9th-largest population of Internet users in the world. The current growth rate and employment trend indicate that Pakistan's Information Communication Technology (ICT) industry will exceed the $10-billion mark by 2020. The sector employees 12,000 and count's among top five freelancing nations. The country has also improved its export performance in telecom, computer and information services, as the share of their exports surged from 8.2pc in 2005–06 to 12.6pc in 2012–13. This growth is much better than that of China, whose share in services exports was 3pc and 7.7pc for the same period respectively.With its diverse cultures, people, and landscapes, Pakistan attracted around 6.6 million foreign tourists in 2018, which represented a significant decline since the 1970s when the country received unprecedented numbers of foreign tourists due to the popular Hippie trail. The trail attracted thousands of Europeans and Americans in the 1960s and 1970s who travelled via land through Turkey and Iran into India through Pakistan. The main destinations of choice for these tourists were the Khyber Pass, Peshawar, Karachi, Lahore, Swat and Rawalpindi. The numbers following the trail declined after the Iranian Revolution and the Soviet–Afghan War.Pakistan's tourist attractions range from the mangroves in the south to the Himalayan hill stations in the north-east. The country's tourist destinations range from the Buddhist ruins of Takht-i-Bahi and Taxila, to the 5,000-year-old cities of the Indus Valley Civilization such as Mohenjo-daro and Harappa. Pakistan is home to several mountain peaks over . The northern part of Pakistan has many old fortresses, examples of ancient architecture, and the Hunza and Chitral valleys, home to the small pre-Islamic Kalasha community claiming descent from Alexander the Great. Pakistan's cultural capital, Lahore, contains many examples of Mughal architecture such as the Badshahi Masjid, the Shalimar Gardens, the Tomb of Jahangir, and the Lahore Fort.In October 2006, just one year after the 2005 Kashmir earthquake, "The Guardian" released what it described as "The top five tourist sites in Pakistan" in order to help the country's tourism industry. The five sites included Taxila, Lahore, the Karakoram Highway, Karimabad, and Lake Saiful Muluk. To promote Pakistan's unique cultural heritage, the government organizes various festivals throughout the year. In 2015 the World Economic Forum's Travel & Tourism Competitiveness Report ranked Pakistan 125 out of 141 countries.Pakistan was recognised as the best country for infrastructure development in South Asia during the IWF and World Bank annual meetings in 2016.As of May 2021, nuclear power is provided by six licensed commercial nuclear power plants. The Pakistan Atomic Energy Commission (PAEC) is solely responsible for operating these power plants, while the Pakistan Nuclear Regulatory Authority regulates safe usage of the nuclear energy. The electricity generated by commercial nuclear power plants constitutes roughly 5.8% of Pakistan's electrical energy, compared to 64.2% from fossil fuels (crude oil and natural gas), 29.9% from hydroelectric power, and 0.1% from coal. Pakistan is one of the four nuclear armed states (along with India, Israel, and North Korea) that is not a party to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, but it is a member in good standing of the International Atomic Energy Agency.The KANUPP-I, a Candu-type nuclear reactor, was supplied by Canada in 1971—the country's first commercial nuclear power plant. The Sino-Pakistani nuclear cooperation began in the early 1980s. After a Sino-Pakistani nuclear cooperation agreement in 1986, China provided Pakistan with a nuclear reactor dubbed CHASNUPP-I for energy and the industrial growth of the country. In 2005 both countries proposed working on a joint energy security plan, calling for a huge increase in generation capacity to more than 160,000 MWe by 2030. Under its Nuclear Energy Vision 2050, the Pakistani government plans to increase nuclear power generation capacity to 40,000 MWe, 8,900 MWe of it by 2030. In June 2008 the nuclear commercial complex was expanded with the ground work of installing and operationalising the Chashma-III and Chashma–IV reactors at Chashma, Punjab Province, each with 325–340 MWe and costing ₨ 129 billion; from which the ₨ 80 billion came from international sources, principally China. A further agreement for China's help with the project was signed in October 2008, and given prominence as a counter to the US–India agreement that shortly preceded it. The cost quoted then was US$1.7 billion, with a foreign loan component of US$1.07 billion. In 2013 Pakistan established a second commercial nuclear complex in Karachi with plans of additional reactors, similar to the one in Chashma. The electrical energy is generated by various energy corporations and evenly distributed by the National Electric Power Regulatory Authority (NEPRA) among the four provinces. However, the Karachi-based K-Electric and the Water and Power Development Authority (WAPDA) generates much of the electrical energy used in Pakistan in addition to gathering revenue nationwide. , Pakistan has an installed electricity generation capacity of ~22,797.The transport industry accounts for ~10.5% of the nation's GDP.Motorways of Pakistan are a network of multiple-lane, high-speed, controlled-access highways in Pakistan, which are owned, maintained, and operated federally by Pakistan's National Highway Authority. As of 20 February 2020, 1882 km of motorways are operational, while an additional 1854 km are under construction or planned. All motorways in Pakistan are pre-fixed with the letter 'M' (for "Motorway") followed by the unique numerical designation of the specific highway (with a hyphen in the middle), e.g. "M-1".Pakistan's motorways are an important part of Pakistan's "National Trade Corridor Project", which aims to link Pakistan's three Arabian Sea ports (Karachi Port, Port Bin Qasim and Gwadar Port) to the rest of the country through its national highways and motorways network and further north with Afghanistan, Central Asia and China. The project was planned in 1990. The China Pakistan Economic Corridor project aims to link Gwadar Port and Kashgar (China) using Pakistani motorways, national highways, and expressways.Highways form the backbone of Pakistan's transport system; a total road length of accounts for 92% of passengers and 96% of inland freight traffic. Road transport services are largely in the hands of the private sector. The National Highway Authority is responsible for the maintenance of national highways and motorways. The highway and motorway system depends mainly on north–south links connecting the southern ports to the populous provinces of Punjab and Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa. Although this network only accounts for 4.6% of total road length, it carries 85% of the country's traffic.The Pakistan Railways, under the Ministry of Railways (MoR), operates the railroad system. From 1947 until the 1970s the train system was the primary means of transport until the nationwide constructions of the national highways and the economic boom of the automotive industry. Beginning in the 1990s there was a marked shift in traffic from rail to highways; dependence grew on roads after the introduction of vehicles in the country. Now the railway's share of inland traffic is below 8% for passengers and 4% for freight traffic. As personal transportation began to be dominated by the automobile, total rail track decreased from in 1990–91 to in 2011. Pakistan expects to use the rail service to boost foreign trade with China, Iran, and Turkey.There are an estimated 151 airports and airfields in Pakistan as of 2013—including both the military and the mostly publicly owned civilian airports. Although Jinnah International Airport is the principal international gateway to Pakistan, the international airports in Lahore, Islamabad, Peshawar, Quetta, Faisalabad, Sialkot, and Multan also handle significant amounts of traffic.The civil aviation industry is mixed with public and private sectors, which was deregulated in 1993. While the state-owned Pakistan International Airlines (PIA) is the major and dominant air carrier that carries about 73% of domestic passengers and all domestic freight, the private airlines such as airBlue and Air Indus, also provide similar services at a low cost.Major seaports are in Karachi, Sindh (the Karachi port, Port Qasim). Since the 1990s some seaport operations have been moved to Balochistan with the construction of Gwadar Port, Port of Pasni and Gadani Port. Gwadar Port is the deepest sea port of the world. According to the WEF's Global Competitiveness Report, quality ratings of Pakistan's port infrastructure increased from 3.7 to 4.1 between 2007 and 2016.Many flyovers and underpasses are located in major urban areas of the country to regulate the flow of traffic. The highest number of flyovers and under passes are located in Karachi, followed by Lahore. Other cities having flyovers and underpasses for the regulation of flow of traffic includes Islamabad-Rawalpindi, Faisalabad, Gujranwala, Multan, Peshawar, Hyderabad, Quetta, Sargodha, Bahawalpur, Sukkur, Larkana, Rahim Yar Khan and Sahiwal etc.Beijing Underpass, Lahore is the longest underpass of Pakistan with a length of about . Muslim Town Flyover, Lahore is the longest flyover of the country with a length of about .Developments in science and technology have played an important role in Pakistan's infrastructure and helped the country connect to the rest of the world. Every year, scientists from around the world are invited by the Pakistan Academy of Sciences and the Pakistan Government to participate in the International Nathiagali Summer College on Physics. Pakistan hosted an international seminar on "Physics in Developing Countries" for the International Year of Physics 2005. Pakistani theoretical physicist Abdus Salam won a Nobel Prize in Physics for his work on the electroweak interaction. Influential publications and critical scientific work in the advancement of mathematics, biology, economics, computer science, and genetics have been produced by Pakistani scientists at both the domestic and international levels.In chemistry, Salimuzzaman Siddiqui was the first Pakistani scientist to bring the therapeutic constituents of the neem tree to the attention of natural products chemists. Pakistani neurosurgeon Ayub Ommaya invented the Ommaya reservoir, a system for treatment of brain tumours and other brain conditions. Scientific research and development play a pivotal role in Pakistani universities, government- sponsored national laboratories, science parks, and the industry. Abdul Qadeer Khan, regarded as the founder of the HEU-based gas-centrifuge uranium enrichment program for Pakistan's integrated atomic bomb project. He founded and established the Kahuta Research Laboratories (KRL) in 1976, serving as both its senior scientist and the Director-General until his retirement in 2001, and he was an early and vital figure in other science projects. Apart from participating in Pakistan's atomic bomb project, he made major contributions in molecular morphology, physical martensite, and its integrated applications in condensed and material physics.In 2010 Pakistan was ranked 43rd in the world in terms of published scientific papers. The Pakistan Academy of Sciences, a strong scientific community, plays an influential and vital role in formulating recommendations regarding science policies for the government.The 1960s saw the emergence of an active space program led by SUPARCO that produced advances in domestic rocketry, electronics, and aeronomy. The space program recorded a few notable feats and achievements. The successful launch of its first rocket into space made Pakistan the first South Asian country to have achieved such a task. Successfully producing and launching the nation's first space satellite in 1990, Pakistan became the first Muslim country and second South Asian country to put a satellite into space.As an aftermath of the 1971 war with India, the clandestine crash program developed atomic weapons partly motivated by fear and to prevent any foreign intervention, while ushering in the atomic age in the post cold war era. Competition with India and tensions eventually led to Pakistan's decision to conduct underground nuclear tests in 1998, thus becoming the seventh country in the world to successfully develop nuclear weapons.Pakistan is the first and only Muslim country that maintains an active research presence in Antarctica. Since 1991 Pakistan has maintained two summer research stations and one weather observatory on the continent and plans to open another full-fledged permanent base in Antarctica.Energy consumption by computers and usage has grown since the 1990s when PCs were introduced; Pakistan has about 82 million Internet users and is ranked as one of the top countries that have registered a high growth rate in Internet penetration . Key publications have been produced by Pakistan, and domestic software development has gained considerable international praise.As of May 2020, Pakistan has about 82 million internet users, making it the 9th-largest population of Internet users in the world. Since the 2000s Pakistan has made a significant amount of progress in supercomputing, and various institutions offer research opportunities in parallel computing. The Pakistan government reportedly spends ₨ 4.6 billion on information technology projects, with emphasis on e-government, human resources, and infrastructure development.The constitution of Pakistan requires the state to provide free primary and secondary education.At the time of the establishment of Pakistan as a state, the country had only one university, Punjab University in Lahore. Very soon the Pakistan government established public universities in each of the four provinces, including Sindh University (1949), Peshawar University (1950), Karachi University (1953), and Balochistan University (1970). Pakistan has a large network of both public and private universities, which includes collaboration between the universities aimed at providing research and higher education opportunities in the country, although there is concern about the low quality of teaching in many of the newer schools. It is estimated that there are 3,193 technical and vocational institutions in Pakistan, and there are also "madrassahs" that provide free Islamic education and offer free board and lodging to students, who come mainly from the poorer strata of society. Strong public pressure and popular criticism over extremists' usage of "madrassahs" for recruitment, the Pakistan government has made repeated efforts to regulate and monitor the quality of education in the "madrassahs".Education in Pakistan is divided into six main levels: nursery (preparatory classes); primary (grades one through five); middle (grades six through eight); matriculation (grades nine and ten, leading to the secondary certificate); intermediate (grades eleven and twelve, leading to a higher secondary certificate); and university programmes leading to graduate and postgraduate degrees. There is a network of private schools that constitutes a parallel secondary education system based on a curriculum set and administered by the Cambridge International Examinations of the United Kingdom. Some students choose to take the O-level and A level exams conducted by the British Council. According to the International Schools Consultancy, Pakistan has 439 international schools.As a result of initiatives taken in 2007, the English medium education has been made compulsory in all schools across the country. In 2012, Malala Yousafzai, a campaigner for female education, was shot by a Taliban gunman in retaliation for her activism. Yousafzai went on to become the youngest ever Nobel laureate for her global education-related advocacy. Additional reforms enacted in 2013 required all educational institutions in Sindh to begin offering Chinese language courses, reflecting China's growing role as a superpower and its increasing influence in Pakistan. The literacy rate of the population is 62.3% as of 2018. The rate of male literacy is 72.5% while the rate of female literacy is 51.8%. Literacy rates vary by region and particularly by sex; as one example, in tribal areas female literacy is 9.5%, while Azad Jammu & Kashmir has a literacy rate of 74%. With the advent of computer literacy in 1995, the government launched a nationwide initiative in 1998 with the aim of eradicating illiteracy and providing a basic education to all children. Through various educational reforms, by 2015 the Ministry of Education expected to attain 100% enrollment levels among children of primary school age and a literacy rate of ~86% among people aged over 10. Pakistan is currently spending 2.3 percent of its GDP on education; which according to the Institute of Social and Policy Sciences is one of the lowest in South Asia.As of 2020, Pakistan is the fifth most populous country in the world and accounts for about 2.8% of the world population. The 2017 Census of Pakistan provisionally estimated the population to be 207.8 million. This figure excludes data from Gilgit-Baltistan and Azad Kashmir, which is likely to be included in the final report.The population in 2017 represents a 57% increase from 1998. The annual growth rate in 2016 was reported to be 1.45%, which is the highest of the SAARC nations, though the growth rate has been decreasing in recent years. The population is projected to reach 263 million by 2030.At the time of the partition in 1947, Pakistan had a population of 32.5 million; the population increased by ~57.2% between the years 1990 and 2009. By 2030 Pakistan is expected to surpass Indonesia as the largest Muslim-majority country in the world. Pakistan is classified as a "young nation", with a median age of 23.4 in 2016; about 104 million people were under the age of 30 in 2010. In 2016 Pakistan's fertility rate was estimated to be 2.68, higher than its neighbour India (2.45). Around 35% of the people are under 15. The vast majority of those residing in southern Pakistan live along the Indus River, with Karachi being the most populous commercial city in the south. In eastern, western, and northern Pakistan, most of the population lives in an arc formed by the cities of Lahore, Faisalabad, Rawalpindi, Sargodha, Islamabad, Gujranwala, Sialkot, Gujrat, Jhelum, Sheikhupura, Nowshera, Mardan, and Peshawar. During 1990–2008, city dwellers made up 36% of Pakistan's population, making it the most urbanised nation in South Asia, which increased to 38% by 2013. Furthermore, 50% of Pakistanis live in towns of 5,000 people or more.Expenditure on healthcare was ~2.8% of GDP in 2013. Life expectancy at birth was 67 years for females and 65 years for males in 2013. The private sector accounts for about 80% of outpatient visits. Approximately 19% of the population and 30% of children under five are malnourished. Mortality of the under-fives was 86 per 1,000 live births in 2012.More than sixty languages are spoken in Pakistan, including a number of provincial languages. Urdu—the "lingua franca" and a symbol of Muslim identity and national unity—is the national language understood by over 75% of Pakistanis. It is the main medium of communication in the country but the primary language of only 7% of Pakistan's population. Urdu and English are the official languages of Pakistan, with English primarily used in official business and government, and in legal contracts; the local variety is known as Pakistani English. The Punjabi language, the most common in Pakistan and the first language of 38.78% of Pakistan's population, is mostly spoken in the Punjab. Saraiki is mainly spoken in South Punjab, and Hindko is predominant in the Hazara region of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa. Pashto is the provincial language of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa. The Sindhi language is commonly spoken in Sindh, while the Balochi language is dominant in Balochistan. Brahui, a Dravidian language, is spoken by the Brahui people who live in Balochistan. There are also speakers of Gujarati in Karachi. Marwari, a Rajasthani language, is also spoken in parts of Sindh. Various languages such as Shina, Balti, and Burushaski are spoken in Gilgit-Baltistan, whilst languages such as Pahari, Gojri, and Kashmiri are spoken by many in Azad Kashmir.The Arabic language is officially recognised by the constitution of Pakistan. It declares in article 31 No. 2 that ""The State shall endeavour, as respects the Muslims of Pakistan (a) to make the teaching of the Holy Quran and Islamiat compulsory, to encourage and facilitate the learning of Arabic language ...""Constitution of Pakistan: "Constitution of Pakistan, 1973 – Article: 31 Islamic way of life" , Article 31 No. 2, 1973, Retrieved 22 August 2018.Even after partition in 1947, Indian Muslims continued to migrate to Pakistan throughout the 1950s and 1960s, and these migrants settled mainly in Karachi and other towns of Sindh province. The wars in neighboring Afghanistan during the 1980s and 1990s also forced millions of Afghan refugees into Pakistan. The Pakistan Census excludes the 1.41 million registered refugees from Afghanistan, who are found mainly in the Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa and tribal belt, with small numbers residing in Karachi and Quetta. Pakistan is home to one of the world's largest refugee populations. In addition to Afghans, around 2 million Bangladeshis and half a million other undocumented people live in Pakistan. They are claimed to be from other areas such as Myanmar, Iran, Iraq, and Africa.Experts say that the migration of both Bengalis and Burmese (Rohingya) to Pakistan started in the 1980s and continued until 1998. Shaikh Muhammad Feroze, the chairman of the Pakistani Bengali Action Committee, claims that there are 200 settlements of Bengali-speaking people in Pakistan, of which 132 are in Karachi. They are also found in various other areas of Pakistan such as Thatta, Badin, Hyderabad, Tando Adam, and Lahore. Large-scale Rohingya migration to Karachi made that city one of the largest population centres of Rohingyas in the world after Myanmar. The Burmese community of Karachi is spread out over 60 of the city's slums such as the Burmi Colony in Korangi, Arakanabad, Machchar colony, Bilal colony, Ziaul Haq Colony, and Godhra Camp.Thousands of Uyghur Muslims have also migrated to the Gilgit-Baltistan region of Pakistan, fleeing religious and cultural persecution in Xinjiang, China. Since 1989 thousands of Kashmiri Muslim refugees have sought refuge in Pakistan, complaining that many of the refugee women had been raped by Indian soldiers and that they were forced out of their homes by the soldiers.The major ethnic groups are Punjabis (44.7% of the country's population), Pashtuns, also known as Pathans (15.4%), Sindhis (14.1%), Saraikis (8.4%), Muhajirs (the Indian emigrants, mostly Urdu-speaking), who make up 7.6% of the population, and the Baloch with 3.6%. The remaining 6.3% consist of a number of ethnic minorities such as the Brahuis, the Hindkowans, the various peoples of Gilgit-Baltistan, the Kashmiris, the Sheedis (who are of African descent), and the Hazaras. There is also a large Pakistani diaspora worldwide, numbering over seven million, which has been recorded as the sixth largest diaspora in the world.Since achieving independence as a result of the partition of India, the urbanisation has increased exponentially, with several different causes. The majority of the population in the south resides along the Indus River, with Karachi the most populous commercial city. In the east, west, and north, most of the population lives in an arc formed by the cities of Lahore, Faisalabad, Rawalpindi, Islamabad, Sargodha, Gujranwala, Sialkot, Gujrat, Jhelum, Sheikhupura, Nowshera, Mardan, and Peshawar. During the period 1990–2008, city dwellers made up 36% of Pakistan's population, making it the most urbanised nation in South Asia. Furthermore, more than 50% of Pakistanis live in towns of 5,000 people or more. Immigration, from both within and outside the country, is regarded as one of the main factors contributing to urbanisation in Pakistan. One analysis of the 1998 national census highlighted the significance of the partition of India in the 1940s as it relates to urban change in Pakistan.During and after the independence period, Urdu speaking Muslims from India migrated in large numbers to Pakistan, especially to the port city of Karachi, which is today the largest metropolis in Pakistan. Migration from other countries, mainly from those nearby, has further accelerated the process of urbanisation in Pakistani cities. Inevitably, the rapid urbanisation caused by these large population movements has also created new political and socio-economic challenges. In addition to immigration, economic trends such as the green revolution and political developments, among a host of other factors, are also important causes of urbanisation. The state religion in Pakistan is Islam. Freedom of religion is guaranteed by the Constitution of Pakistan, which provides all its citizens the right to profess, practice and propagate their religion subject to law, public order, and morality.The population of Pakistan follow different religions. Most of Pakistanis are Muslims (96.47%) followed by Hindus (2.14%) and Christians (1.27%). There are also people in Pakistan who follow other religions, such as Sikhism, Buddhism, Jainism and the minority of Parsi (who follow Zoroastrianism). The Kalash people maintain a unique identity and religion within Pakistan.Hinduism is mostly associated with Sindhis, and Pakistan hosts major events such as the Hinglaj Yatra pilgrimage. Hindu temples may be found throughout Sindh, where the dharma features prominently. Many Hindus in Pakistan complain about the prospect of religious violence against them and being treated like second-class citizens, and many have emigrated to India or further abroad.In addition, some Pakistanis also do not profess any faith (such as atheists and agnostics) in Pakistan. According to the 1998 census, people who did not state their religion accounted for 0.5% of the population. Secularism and criticism of over-religiosity is not uncommon in well-educated civil society, although in general Pakistan is a highly religious society, and the irreligious generally hide their beliefs due to fear of persecution.Islam is the dominant religion. About 96.47% of Pakistanis are Muslim, according to the 2017 Census. Pakistan has the second-largest number of Muslims in the world after Indonesia. and home for (10.5%) of the world's Muslim population. The majority of them are Sunni and mostly follow Sufism (estimated between 75 and 95%) while Shias represent between 5–25%. As of 2019, Shia population in Pakistan was estimated to be 42 million out of total population of 210 million. Pakistan also has the largest Muslim city in the world (Karachi).The Ahmadis, a small minority representing 0.22–2% of Pakistan's population, are officially considered non-Muslims by virtue of the constitutional amendment. The Ahmadis are particularly persecuted, especially since 1974 when they were banned from calling themselves Muslims. In 1984, Ahmadiyya places of worship were banned from being called "mosques". , 12% of Pakistani Muslims self-identify as non-denominational Muslims. There are also several Quraniyoon communities.Sufism, a mystical Islamic tradition, has a long history and a large following among the Sunni Muslims in Pakistan, at both the academic and popular levels. Popular Sufi culture is centered around gatherings and celebrations at the shrines of saints and annual festivals that feature Sufi music and dance. Two Sufis whose shrines receive much national attention are Ali Hajweri in Lahore (c. 12th century) and Shahbaz Qalander in Sehwan, Sindh (c. 12th century).There are two levels of Sufism in Pakistan. The first is the 'populist' Sufism of the rural population. This level of Sufism involves belief in intercession through saints, veneration of their shrines, and forming bonds (Mureed) with a "pir" (saint). Many rural Pakistani Muslims associate with "pirs" and seek their intercession. The second level of Sufism in Pakistan is 'intellectual Sufism', which is growing among the urban and educated population. They are influenced by the writings of Sufis such as the medieval theologian al-Ghazali, the Sufi reformer Shaykh Aḥmad Sirhindi, and Shah Wali Allah. Contemporary Islamic fundamentalists criticise Sufism's popular character, which in their view does not accurately reflect the teachings and practice of Muhammad and his companions.Hinduism is the second-largest religion in Pakistan after Islam, according to the 2017 census. Hindus are found in all provinces of Pakistan but are mostly concentrated in Sindh, where they account for 8.73% of the population. , Pakistan had the fifth-largest Hindu population in the world. In the 2017 census, the Hindu (jati) population was found to be 4,444,437 while the Hindu (scheduled castes) numbered an additional 851,504. At the time of Pakistan's creation, the 'hostage theory' gained currency. According to this theory, the Hindu minority in Pakistan was to be given a fair deal in Pakistan in order to ensure the protection of the Muslim minority in India. However, Khawaja Nazimuddin, the second Prime Minister of Pakistan, stated: Some Hindus in Pakistan feel that they are treated as second-class citizens and many have continued to migrate to India. Pakistani Hindus faced riots after the Babri Masjid demolition, endured a massacre (in 2005) by security forces in Balochistan, and have experienced other attacks, forced conversions, and abductions.Christians formed the next largest religious minority, after Hindus, with 1.27% of the population following it. They were followed by the Bahá'í Faith, which had a following of 30,000, then Sikhism, Buddhism, and Zoroastrianism, each back then claiming 20,000 adherents, and a very small community of Jains. There is a Roman Catholic community in Karachi that was established by Goan and Tamil migrants when Karachi's infrastructure was being developed by the British during the colonial administration between World War I and World War II. The influence of atheism is very small, with 1.0% of the population identifying as atheist in 2005. However, the figure rose to 2.0% in 2012 according to Gallup.Civil society in Pakistan is largely hierarchical, emphasising local cultural etiquette and traditional Islamic values that govern personal and political life. The basic family unit is the extended family, although for socio-economic reasons there has been a growing trend towards nuclear families. The traditional dress for both men and women is the "Shalwar Kameez"; trousers, jeans, and shirts are also popular among men. In recent decades, the middle class has increased to around 35 million and the upper and upper-middle classes to around 17 million, and power is shifting from rural landowners to the urbanised elites. Pakistani festivals, including "Eid-ul-Fitr", "Eid-ul-Azha", "Ramazan", Christmas, Easter, Holi, and Diwali, are mostly religious in origin. Increasing globalisation has resulted in Pakistan ranking 56th on the A.T. Kearney/FP Globalization Index.The "Shalwar Kameez" is the national dress of Pakistan and is worn by both men and women in all four provinces: Punjab, Sindh, Balochistan, and Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa, and Azad Kashmir. Each province has its own style of "Shalwar Kameez". Pakistanis wear clothes in a range of exquisite colours and designs and in type of fabric (silk, chiffon, cotton, etc.). Besides the national dress, domestically tailored suits and neckties are often worn by men, and are customary in offices, schools, and social gatherings.The fashion industry has flourished in the changing environment of the fashion world. Since Pakistan came into being, its fashion has evolved in different phases and developed a unique identity. Today, Pakistani fashion is a combination of traditional and modern dress and has become a mark of Pakistani culture. Despite modern trends, regional and traditional forms of dress have developed their own significance as a symbol of native tradition. This regional fashion continues to evolve into both more modern and purer forms. The Pakistan Fashion Design Council based in Lahore organizes PFDC Fashion Week and the Fashion Pakistan Council based in Karachi organizes Fashion Pakistan Week. Pakistan's first fashion week was held in November 2009.The private print media, state-owned Pakistan Television Corporation (PTV), and Pakistan Broadcasting Corporation (PBC) for radio were the dominant media outlets until the beginning of the 21st century. Pakistan now has a large network of domestic, privately owned 24-hour news media and television channels. A 2016 report by the Reporters Without Borders ranked Pakistan 147th on the Press Freedom Index, while at the same time terming the Pakistani media "among the freest in Asia when it comes to covering the squabbling among politicians." The BBC terms the Pakistani media "among the most outspoken in South Asia". Pakistani media has also played a vital role in exposing corruption.The Lollywood, Kariwood, Punjabi, and Pashto film industry is based in Karachi, Lahore, and Peshawar. While Bollywood films were banned from public cinemas from 1965 until 2008, they have remained an important part of popular culture. In contrast to the ailing Pakistani film industry, Urdu televised dramas and theatrical performances continue to be popular, as many entertainment media outlets air them regularly. Urdu dramas dominate the television entertainment industry, which has launched critically acclaimed miniseries and featured popular actors and actresses since the 1990s. In the 1960s–1970s, pop music and disco (1970s) dominated the country's music industry. In the 1980s–1990s, British influenced rock music appeared and jolted the country's entertainment industry. In the 2000s, heavy metal music gained popular and critical acclaim.Pakistani music ranges from diverse forms of provincial folk music and traditional styles such as Qawwali and Ghazal Gayaki to modern musical forms that fuse traditional and western music. Pakistan has many famous folk singers. The arrival of Afghan refugees in the western provinces has stimulated interest in Pashto music, although there has been intolerance of it in some places.According to the UN Department of Economic and Social Affairs, Pakistan has the sixth-largest diaspora in the world. Statistics gathered by the Pakistani government show that there are around 7 million Pakistanis residing abroad, with the vast majority living in the Middle East, Europe, and North America. Pakistan ranks 10th in the world for remittances sent home. The largest inflow of remittances, , is from Saudi Arabia, amounting to $5.9 billion. The term "Overseas Pakistani" is officially recognised by the Government of Pakistan. The Ministry of Overseas Pakistanis was established in 2008 to deal exclusively with all matters of overseas Pakistanis such as attending to their needs and problems, developing projects for their welfare, and working for resolution of their problems and issues. Overseas Pakistanis are the second-largest source of foreign exchange remittances to Pakistan after exports. Over the last several years, home remittances have maintained a steadily rising trend, with a more than 100% increase from US$8.9 billion in 2009–10 to US$19.9 billion in 2015–16.The Overseas Pakistani Division (OPD) was created in September 2004 within the Ministry of Labour (MoL). It has since recognised the importance of overseas Pakistanis and their contribution to the nation's economy. Together with Community Welfare Attaches (CWAs) and the Overseas Pakistanis Foundation (OPF), the OPD is making efforts to improve the welfare of Pakistanis who reside abroad. The division aims to provide better services through improved facilities at airports, and suitable schemes for housing, education, and health care. It also facilitates the reintegration into society of returning overseas Pakistanis. Notable members of the Pakistani diaspora include London Mayor Sadiq Khan, UK Cabinet Member Sajid Javid, former UK Conservative Party Chair Baroness Warsi, singers Zayn Malik and Nadia Ali, MIT Physics Professor Dr. Nergis Mavalvala, actors Riz Ahmed and Kumail Nanjiani, businessmen Shahid Khan and Sir Anwar Pervez, Boston University professors Adil Najam and Hamid Nawab, Texas A&M Professor Muhammad Suhail Zubairy, Yale Professor Sara Suleri, UC San Diego Professor Farooq Azam, and historian Ayesha Jalal.Pakistan has literature in Urdu, Sindhi, Punjabi, Pashto, Baluchi, Persian, English, and many other languages. The Pakistan Academy of Letters is a large literary community that promotes literature and poetry in Pakistan and abroad. The National Library publishes and promotes literature in the country. Before the 19th century, Pakistani literature consisted mainly of lyric and religious poetry and mystical and folkloric works. During the colonial period, native literary figures were influenced by western literary realism and took up increasingly varied topics and narrative forms. Prose fiction is now very popular.The national poet of Pakistan, Muhammad Iqbal, wrote poetry in Urdu and Persian. He was a strong proponent of the political and spiritual revival of Islamic civilisation and encouraged Muslims all over the world to bring about a successful revolution. Well-known figures in contemporary Pakistani Urdu literature include Josh Malihabadi Faiz Ahmed Faiz and Saadat Hasan Manto. Sadequain and Gulgee are known for their calligraphy and paintings. The Sufi poets Shah Abdul Latif, Bulleh Shah, Mian Muhammad Bakhsh, and Khawaja Farid enjoy considerable popularity in Pakistan. Mirza Kalich Beg has been termed the father of modern Sindhi prose. Historically, philosophical development in the country was dominated by Muhammad Iqbal, Sir Syed Ahmad Khan, Muhammad Asad, Maududi, and Mohammad Ali Johar.Ideas from British and American philosophy greatly shaped philosophical development in Pakistan. Analysts such as M. M. Sharif and Zafar Hassan established the first major Pakistani philosophical movement in 1947. After the 1971 war, philosophers such as Jalaludin Abdur Rahim, Gianchandani, and Malik Khalid incorporated Marxism into Pakistan's philosophical thinking. Influential work by Manzoor Ahmad, Jon Elia, Hasan Askari Rizvi, and Abdul Khaliq brought mainstream social, political, and analytical philosophy to the fore in academia. Works by Noam Chomsky have influenced philosophical ideas in various fields of social and political philosophy.Four periods are recognised in Pakistani architecture: pre-Islamic, Islamic, colonial, and post-colonial. With the beginning of the Indus civilization around the middle of the 3rd millennium BCE, an advanced urban culture developed for the first time in the region, with large buildings, some of which survive to this day. Mohenjo Daro, Harappa, and Kot Diji are among the pre-Islamic settlements that are now tourist attractions. The rise of Buddhism and the influence of Greek civilisation led to the development of a Greco-Buddhist style, starting from the 1st century CE. The high point of this era was the Gandhara style. An example of Buddhist architecture is the ruins of the Buddhist monastery Takht-i-Bahi in Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa.The arrival of Islam in what is today Pakistan meant the sudden end of Buddhist architecture in the area and a smooth transition to the predominantly pictureless Islamic architecture. The most important Indo-Islamic-style building still standing is the tomb of the Shah Rukn-i-Alam in Multan. During the Mughal era, design elements of Persian-Islamic architecture were fused with and often produced playful forms of Hindustani art. Lahore, as the occasional residence of Mughal rulers, contains many important buildings from the empire. Most prominent among them are the Badshahi Mosque, the fortress of Lahore with the famous Alamgiri Gate, the colourful, Mughal-style Wazir Khan Mosque, the Shalimar Gardens in Lahore, and the Shahjahan Mosque in Thatta. In the British colonial period, predominantly functional buildings of the Indo-European representative style developed from a mixture of European and Indian-Islamic components. Post-colonial national identity is expressed in modern structures such as the Faisal Mosque, the Minar-e-Pakistan, and the Mazar-e-Quaid. Several examples of architectural infrastructure demonstrating the influence of British design can be found in Lahore, Peshawar, and Karachi.Pakistani cuisine is similar to that of other regions of South Asia, with some of it being originated from the royal kitchens of 16th-century Mughal emperors. Most of those dishes have their roots in British, Indian, Central Asian and Middle Eastern cuisine. Unlike Middle Eastern cuisine, Pakistani cooking uses large quantities of spices, herbs, and seasoning. Garlic, ginger, turmeric, red chili, and garam masala are used in most dishes, and home cooking regularly includes curry, "roti", a thin flatbread made from wheat, is a staple food, usually served with curry, meat, vegetables, and lentils. Rice is also common; it is served plain, fried with spices, and in sweet dishes.Lassi is a traditional drink in the Punjab region. Black tea with milk and sugar is popular throughout Pakistan and is consumed daily by most of the population. Sohan halwa is a popular sweet dish from the southern region of Punjab province and is enjoyed all over Pakistan.Most sports played in Pakistan originated and were substantially developed by athletes and sports fans from the United Kingdom who introduced them during the British Raj. Field hockey is the national sport of Pakistan; it has won three gold medals in the Olympic Games held in 1960, 1968, and 1984. Pakistan has also won the Hockey World Cup a record four times, held in 1971, 1978, 1982, and 1994.Cricket, however, is the most popular game across the country. The country has had an array of success in the sport over the years, and has the distinct achievement of having won each of the major ICC international cricket tournaments: ICC Cricket World Cup, ICC World Twenty20, and ICC Champions Trophy; as well as the ICC Test Championship. The cricket team (known as "Shaheen") won the Cricket World Cup held in 1992; it was runner-up once, in 1999. Pakistan was runner-up in the inaugural World Twenty20 (2007) in South Africa and won the World Twenty20 in England in 2009. In March 2009, militants attacked the touring Sri Lankan cricket team, after which no international cricket was played in Pakistan until May 2015, when the Zimbabwean team agreed to a tour. Pakistan also won the 2017 ICC Champions Trophy by defeating arch-rivals India in the final.Pakistan Super League is one of the largest cricket leagues of the world with a brand value of about .Association Football is the second most played sports in Pakistan and it is organised and regulated by the Pakistan Football Federation. Football in Pakistan is as old as the country itself. Shortly after the creation of Pakistan in 1947, the Pakistan Football Federation (PFF) was created, and Muhammad Ali Jinnah became its first Patron-in-Chief. The highest football division in Pakistan is the Pakistan Premier League. Pakistan is known as one of the best manufacturer of the official FIFA World Cup ball. The best football players to play for Pakistan are Kaleemullah, Zesh Rehman, Muhammad Essa, Haroon Yousaf, and Muhammad Adil.Pakistan has hosted or co-hosted several international sporting events: the 1989 and 2004 South Asian Games; the 1984, 1993, 1996 and 2003 World Squash Championships; the 1987 and 1996 Cricket World Cup; and the 1990 Hockey World Cup.Pakistan is set to host the 2021 South Asian Games.	[ "Nawaz Sharif", "Nasir-ul-Mulk", "Shahid Khaqan Abbasi", "Shehbaz Sharif", "Imran Khan" ]
Who was the head of Pakistan in 01/04/2013?	April 01, 2013	{ "text": [ "Mir Hazar Khan Khoso" ] }	L2_Q843_P6_0	Imran Khan is the head of the government of Pakistan from Aug, 2018 to Apr, 2022. Mir Hazar Khan Khoso is the head of the government of Pakistan from Mar, 2013 to Jun, 2013. Shehbaz Sharif is the head of the government of Pakistan from Apr, 2022 to Dec, 2022. Shahid Khaqan Abbasi is the head of the government of Pakistan from Aug, 2017 to May, 2018. Nawaz Sharif is the head of the government of Pakistan from Jun, 2013 to Jul, 2017. Nasir-ul-Mulk is the head of the government of Pakistan from Jun, 2018 to Aug, 2018.	PakistanPakistan, officially the Islamic Republic of Pakistan, is a country in South Asia. It is the world's fifth-most populous country, with a population exceeding 225.2 million, and has the world's second-largest Muslim population. Pakistan is the 33rd-largest country by area, spanning . It has a coastline along the Arabian Sea and Gulf of Oman in the south, and is bordered by India to the east, Afghanistan to the west, Iran to the southwest, and China to the northeast. It is separated narrowly from Tajikistan by Afghanistan's Wakhan Corridor in the north, and also shares a maritime border with Oman.Pakistan is the site of several ancient cultures, including the 8,500-year-old Neolithic site of Mehrgarh in Balochistan, and the Indus Valley Civilisation of the Bronze Age, the most extensive of the civilisations of the Old World. The region that comprises the modern state of Pakistan was the realm of multiple empires and dynasties, including the Achaemenid; briefly that of Alexander the Great; the Seleucid, the Maurya, the Kushan, the Gupta; the Umayyad Caliphate in its southern regions, the Hindu Shahi, the Ghaznavids, the Delhi Sultanate, the Mughals, the Durranis, the Sikh Empire, British East India Company rule, and most recently, the British Indian Empire from 1858 to 1947.Spurred by the Pakistan Movement, which sought a homeland for the Muslims of British India, and election victories in 1946 by the All-India Muslim League, Pakistan gained independence in 1947 after the Partition of the British Indian Empire, which awarded separate statehood to its Muslim-majority regions and was accompanied by an unparalleled mass migration and loss of life. Initially a Dominion of the British Commonwealth, Pakistan officially drafted its constitution in 1956, and emerged as a declared Islamic republic. In 1971, the exclave of East Pakistan seceded as the new country of Bangladesh after a nine-month-long civil war. In the following four decades, Pakistan has been ruled by governments whose descriptions, although complex, commonly alternated between civilian and military, democratic and authoritarian, relatively secular and Islamist. Pakistan elected a civilian government in 2008, and in 2010 adopted a parliamentary system with periodic elections.Pakistan is a middle power, and has the world's sixth-largest standing armed forces. It is a declared nuclear-weapons state, and is ranked amongst the emerging and growth-leading economies, with a large and rapidly-growing middle class. Pakistan's political history since independence has been characterized by periods of significant economic and military growth as well those of political and economic instability. It is an ethnically and linguistically diverse country, with similarly diverse geography and wildlife. However, the country continues to face challenges, including poverty, illiteracy, corruption and terrorism. Pakistan is a member of the United Nations, the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation, the Organisation of Islamic Cooperation, the British Commonwealth of Nations, the South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation, the Islamic Military Counter-Terrorism Coalition, and is designated as a major non-NATO ally by the United States.The name "Pakistan" means literally "a land abounding in the pure" or "a land in which the pure abound", in Urdu and Persian. It references the word ("pāk"), meaning "pure" in Persian and Pashto. The suffix (transliterated in English as stân after stem word ending in a vowel; estân or istân after a stem ending in a consonant) is from Persian, and means "a place abounding in" or "a place where anything abounds".The name of the country was coined in 1933 by Choudhry Rahmat Ali, a Pakistan Movement activist, who published it in a pamphlet "Now or Never", using it as an acronym ("thirty million Muslim brethren who live in PAKISTAN"), and referring to the names of the five northern regions of the British Raj: "P"unjab, "A"fghania, "K"ashmir, "S"indh, and Baluchis"tan".Some of the earliest ancient human civilisations in South Asia originated from areas encompassing present-day Pakistan. The earliest known inhabitants in the region were Soanian during the Lower Paleolithic, of whom stone tools have been found in the Soan Valley of Punjab. The Indus region, which covers most of present day Pakistan, was the site of several successive ancient cultures including the Neolithic Mehrgarh and the Bronze Age Indus Valley Civilisation (2,800–1,800 BCE) at Harappa and Mohenjo-Daro.The Vedic period (1500–500 BCE) was characterised by an Indo-Aryan culture; during this period the Vedas, the oldest scriptures associated with Hinduism, were composed, and this culture later became well established in the region. Multan was an important Hindu pilgrimage centre. The Vedic civilisation flourished in the ancient Gandhāran city of Takṣaśilā, now Taxila in the Punjab, which was founded around 1000 BCE. Successive ancient empires and kingdoms ruled the region: the Persian Achaemenid Empire (around 519 BCE), Alexander the Great's empire in 326 BCE and the Maurya Empire, founded by Chandragupta Maurya and extended by Ashoka the Great, until 185 BCE. The Indo-Greek Kingdom founded by Demetrius of Bactria (180–165 BCE) included Gandhara and Punjab and reached its greatest extent under Menander (165–150 BCE), prospering the Greco-Buddhist culture in the region. Taxila had one of the earliest universities and centres of higher education in the world, which was established during the late Vedic period in 6th century BCE. The school consisted of several monasteries without large dormitories or lecture halls where the religious instruction was provided on an individualistic basis. The ancient university was documented by the invading forces of Alexander the Great and was also recorded by Chinese pilgrims in the 4th or 5th century CE.At its zenith, the Rai Dynasty (489–632 CE) of Sindh ruled this region and the surrounding territories. The Pala Dynasty was the last Buddhist empire, which, under Dharmapala and Devapala, stretched across South Asia from what is now Bangladesh through Northern India to Pakistan.The Arab conqueror Muhammad bin Qasim conquered Sindh in 711 CE. The Pakistan government's official chronology claims this as the time when the foundation of Pakistan was laid but the concept of "Pakistan" arrived in the 19th century. The Early Medieval period (642–1219 CE) witnessed the spread of Islam in the region. During this period, Sufi missionaries played a pivotal role in converting a majority of the regional Buddhist and Hindu population to Islam. Upon the defeat of the Turk and Hindu Shahi dynasties which governed the Kabul Valley, Gandhara (present-day Khyber Pakhtunkwa), and western Punjab in the 7th to 11th centuries CE, several successive Muslim empires ruled over the region, including the Ghaznavid Empire (975–1187 CE), the Ghorid Kingdom, and the Delhi Sultanate (1206–1526 CE). The Lodi dynasty, the last of the Delhi Sultanate, was replaced by the Mughal Empire (1526–1857 CE).The Mughals introduced Persian literature and high culture, establishing the roots of Indo-Persian culture in the region. In the region of modern-day Pakistan, key cities during the Mughal period were Lahore and Thatta, both of which were chosen as the site of impressive Mughal buildings. In the early 16th century, the region remained under the Mughal Empire ruled by Muslim emperors. By the early 18th century, increasing European influence contributed to the slow disintegration of the Mughal Empire as the lines between commercial and political dominance became increasingly blurred.During this time, the English East India Company had established coastal outposts. Control over the seas, greater resources, technology, and British military protection led the Company to increasingly flex its military muscle, allowing the Company to gain control over the subcontinent by 1765 and sideline European competitors. Expanding access beyond Bengal and the subsequent increased strength and size of its army enabled it to annex or subdue most of region by the 1820s. Many historians see this as the start of the region's colonial period. By this time, with its economic power severely curtailed by the British parliament and itself effectively made an arm of British administration, the Company began more deliberately to enter non-economic arenas such as education, social reform, and culture. Such reforms included the enforcement of the English Education Act in 1835 and the introduction of the Indian Civil Service (ICS). Traditional "madrasahs"—primary institutions of higher learning for Muslims in the subcontinent—were no longer supported by the English Crown, and nearly all of the "madrasahs" lost their financial endowment.The gradual decline of the Mughal Empire in the early 18th century enabled the Sikh Empire to control larger areas until the British East India Company gained ascendancy over South Asia. A rebellion in 1857 called the Sepoy mutiny of Bengal was the region's major armed struggle against the British Empire and Queen Victoria. Divergence in the relationship between Hinduism and Islam created a major rift in British India that led to motivated religious violence in British India. The language controversy further escalated the tensions between Hindus and Muslims. The Hindu renaissance witnessed an awakening of intellectualism in traditional Hinduism and saw the emergence of more assertive influence in the social and political spheres in British India. A Muslim intellectual movement, founded by Sir Syed Ahmed Khan to counter the Hindu renaissance, envisioned, as well as advocated for the two-nation theory, and led to the creation of the All-India Muslim League in 1906. In contrast to the Indian National Congress's anti-British efforts, the Muslim League was a pro-British movement whose political program inherited the British values that would shape Pakistan's future civil society. In events during World War I, British Intelligence foiled an anti-English conspiracy involving the nexus of Congress and the German Empire. The largely non-violent independence struggle led by the Indian Congress engaged millions of protesters in mass campaigns of civil disobedience in the 1920s and 1930s against the British Empire.The Muslim League slowly rose to mass popularity in the 1930s amid fears of under-representation and neglect of British Muslims in politics. In his presidential address of 29 December 1930, Allama Iqbal called for "the amalgamation of North-West Muslim-majority Indian states" consisting of Punjab, North-West Frontier Province, Sind, and Baluchistan. The perceived neglect of Muslim interests by Congress led British provincial governments during the period of 1937–39 convinced Muhammad Ali Jinnah, the founder of Pakistan to espouse the two-nation theory and led the Muslim League to adopt the Lahore Resolution of 1940 presented by Sher-e-Bangla A.K. Fazlul Haque, popularly known as the Pakistan Resolution. In World War II, Jinnah and British-educated founding fathers in the Muslim League supported the United Kingdom's war efforts, countering opposition against it whilst working towards Sir Syed's vision.The 1946 elections resulted in the Muslim League winning 90 percent of the seats reserved for Muslims. Thus, the 1946 election was effectively a plebiscite in which the Indian Muslims were to vote on the creation of Pakistan, a plebiscite won by the Muslim League. This victory was assisted by the support given to the Muslim League by the support of the landowners of Sindh and Punjab. The Congress, which initially denied the Muslim League's claim of being the sole representative of Indian Muslims, was now forced to recognise the fact. The British had no alternative except to take Jinnah's views into account as he had emerged as the sole spokesperson of the entirety of British India's Muslims. However, the British did not want colonial India to be partitioned, and in one last effort to prevent it, they devised the Cabinet Mission plan.As the cabinet mission failed, the British government announced its intention to end the British Rule in 1946–47. Nationalists in British India—including Jawaharlal Nehru and Abul Kalam Azad of Congress, Jinnah of the All-India Muslim League, and Master Tara Singh representing the Sikhs—agreed to the proposed terms of transfer of power and independence in June 1947 with the Viceroy of India, Lord Mountbatten of Burma. As the United Kingdom agreed to the partitioning of India in 1947, the modern state of Pakistan was established on 14 August 1947 , amalgamating the Muslim-majority eastern and northwestern regions of British India. It comprised the provinces of Balochistan, East Bengal, the North-West Frontier Province, West Punjab, and Sindh.In the riots that accompanied the partition in Punjab Province, it is believed that between 200,000 and 2,000,000 people were killed in what some have described as a retributive genocide between the religions while 50,000 Muslim women were abducted and raped by Hindu and Sikh men, 33,000 Hindu and Sikh women also experienced the same fate at the hands of Muslims. Around 6.5 million Muslims moved from India to West Pakistan and 4.7 million Hindus and Sikhs moved from West Pakistan to India. It was the largest mass migration in human history. A subsequent dispute over the princely state of Jammu and Kashmir eventually sparked the Indo-Pakistani War of 1947–1948.After independence in 1947, Jinnah, the President of the Muslim League, became the nation's first Governor-General as well as the first President-Speaker of the Parliament, but he died of tuberculosis on 11 September 1948. Meanwhile, Pakistan's founding fathers agreed to appoint Liaquat Ali Khan, the secretary-general of the party, the nation's first Prime Minister. With dominion status in the Commonwealth of Nations, independent Pakistan had two British monarchs before it became a republic.The creation of Pakistan was never fully accepted by many British leaders, among them Lord Mountbatten. Mountbatten clearly expressed his lack of support and faith in the Muslim League's idea of Pakistan. Jinnah refused Mountbatten's offer to serve as Governor-General of Pakistan. When Mountbatten was asked by Collins and Lapierre if he would have sabotaged Pakistan had he known that Jinnah was dying of tuberculosis, he replied 'most probably'.Maulana Shabbir Ahmad Usmani, a respected Deobandi "alim" (scholar) who occupied the position of Shaykh al-Islam in Pakistan in 1949, and Maulana Mawdudi of Jamaat-i-Islami played a pivotal role in the demand for an Islamic constitution. Mawdudi demanded that the Constituent Assembly make an explicit declaration affirming the "supreme sovereignty of God" and the supremacy of the "shariah" in Pakistan.A significant result of the efforts of the Jamaat-i-Islami and the "ulama" was the passage of the Objectives Resolution in March 1949. The Objectives Resolution, which Liaquat Ali Khan called the second most important step in Pakistan's history, declared that "sovereignty over the entire universe belongs to God Almighty alone and the authority which He has delegated to the State of Pakistan through its people for being exercised within the limits prescribed by Him is a sacred trust". The Objectives Resolution has been incorporated as a preamble to the constitutions of 1956, 1962, and 1973.Democracy was stalled by the martial law that had been enforced by President Iskander Mirza, who was replaced by the army chief, General Ayub Khan. After adopting a presidential system in 1962, the country experienced exceptional growth until a second war with India in 1965 that led to an economic downturn and wide-scale public disapproval in 1967. Consolidating control from Ayub Khan in 1969, President Yahya Khan had to deal with a devastating cyclone that caused 500,000 deaths in East Pakistan.In 1970 Pakistan held its first democratic elections since independence, meant to mark a transition from military rule to democracy, but after the East Pakistani Awami League won against the Pakistan Peoples Party (PPP), Yahya Khan and the military establishment refused to hand over power. Operation Searchlight, a military crackdown on the Bengali nationalist movement, led to a declaration of independence and the waging of a war of liberation by the Bengali Mukti Bahini forces in East Pakistan, which in West Pakistan was described as a civil war as opposed to a war of liberation.Independent researchers estimate that between 300,000 and 500,000 civilians died during this period while the Bangladesh government puts the number of dead at three million, a figure that is now nearly universally regarded as excessively inflated. Some academics such as Rudolph Rummel and Rounaq Jahan say both sides committed genocide; others such as Richard Sisson and Leo E. Rose believe there was no genocide. In response to India's support for the insurgency in East Pakistan, preemptive strikes on India by Pakistan's air force, navy, and marines sparked a conventional war in 1971 that resulted in an Indian victory and East Pakistan gaining independence as Bangladesh.With Pakistan surrendering in the war, Yahya Khan was replaced by Zulfikar Ali Bhutto as president; the country worked towards promulgating its constitution and putting the country on the road to democracy. Democratic rule resumed from 1972 to 1977—an era of self-consciousness, intellectual leftism, nationalism, and nationwide reconstruction. In 1972 Pakistan embarked on an ambitious plan to develop its nuclear deterrence capability with the goal of preventing any foreign invasion; the country's first nuclear power plant was inaugurated in that same year. Accelerated in response to India's first nuclear test in 1974, this crash program was completed in 1979.Democracy ended with a military coup in 1977 against the leftist PPP, which saw General Zia-ul-Haq become the president in 1978. From 1977 to 1988, President Zia's corporatisation and economic Islamisation initiatives led to Pakistan becoming one of the fastest-growing economies in South Asia. While building up the country's nuclear program, increasing Islamisation, and the rise of a homegrown conservative philosophy, Pakistan helped subsidise and distribute US resources to factions of the mujahideen against the USSR's intervention in communist Afghanistan. Pakistan's North-West Frontier Province became a base for the anti-Soviet Afghan fighters, with the province's influential Deobandi ulama playing a significant role in encouraging and organising the 'jihad'.President Zia died in a plane crash in 1988, and Benazir Bhutto, daughter of Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, was elected as the country's first female Prime Minister. The PPP was followed by conservative Pakistan Muslim League (N), and over the next decade the leaders of the two parties fought for power, alternating in office while the country's situation worsened; economic indicators fell sharply, in contrast to the 1980s. This period is marked by prolonged stagflation, instability, corruption, nationalism, geopolitical rivalry with India, and the clash of left wing-right wing ideologies. As PML (N) secured a supermajority in elections in 1997, Sharif authorised nuclear testings (See:"Chagai-I" and "Chagai-II"), as a retaliation to the second nuclear tests ordered by India, led by Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee in May 1998.Military tension between the two countries in the Kargil district led to the Kargil War of 1999, and turmoil in civic-military relations allowed General Pervez Musharraf to take over through a bloodless coup d'état. Musharraf governed Pakistan as chief executive from 1999 to 2001 and as President from 2001 to 2008—a period of enlightenment, social liberalism, extensive economic reforms, and direct involvement in the US-led war on terrorism. When the National Assembly historically completed its first full five-year term on 15 November 2007, the new elections were called by the Election Commission.After the assassination of Benazir Bhutto in 2007, the PPP secured the most votes in the elections of 2008, appointing party member Yousaf Raza Gillani as Prime Minister. Threatened with impeachment, President Musharraf resigned on 18 August 2008, and was succeeded by Asif Ali Zardari. Clashes with the judicature prompted Gillani's disqualification from the Parliament and as the Prime Minister in June 2012. By its own financial calculations, Pakistan's involvement in the war on terrorism has cost up to $118 billion, sixty thousand casualties and more than 1.8 million displaced civilians. The general election held in 2013 saw the PML (N) almost achieve a supermajority, following which Nawaz Sharif was elected as the Prime Minister, returning to the post for the third time in fourteen years, in a democratic transition. In 2018, Imran Khan (the chairman of PTI) won the 2018 Pakistan general election with 116 general seats and became the 22nd Prime Minister of Pakistan in election of National Assembly of Pakistan for Prime Minister by getting 176 votes against Shehbaz Sharif (the chairman of PML (N)) who got 96 votes.Pakistan is the only country to have been created in the name of Islam. The idea of Pakistan, which had received overwhelming popular support among Indian Muslims, especially those in the provinces of British India where Muslims were in a minority such as the United Provinces, was articulated in terms of an Islamic state by the Muslim League leadership, the ulama (Islamic clergy) and Jinnah. Jinnah had developed a close association with the "ulama" and upon his death was described by one such "alim", Maulana Shabbir Ahmad Usmani, as the greatest Muslim after Aurangzeb and as someone who desired to unite the Muslims of the world under the banner of Islam.The Objectives Resolution in March 1949, which declared God as the sole sovereign over the entire universe, represented the first formal step to transform Pakistan into an Islamic state. Muslim League leader Chaudhry Khaliquzzaman asserted that Pakistan could only truly become an Islamic state after bringing all believers of Islam into a single political unit. Keith Callard, one of the earliest scholars on Pakistani politics, observed that Pakistanis believed in the essential unity of purpose and outlook in the Muslim world and assumed that Muslim from other countries would share their views on the relationship between religion and nationality.However, Pakistan's pan-Islamist sentiments for a united Islamic bloc called Islamistan were not shared by other Muslim governments, although Islamists such as the Grand Mufti of Palestine, Al-Haj Amin al-Husseini, and leaders of the Muslim Brotherhood, became drawn to the country. Pakistan's desire for an international organization of Muslim countries was fulfilled in the 1970s when the Organization of Islamic Conference (OIC) was formed.The strongest opposition to the Islamist ideological paradigm being imposed on the state came from the Bengali Muslims of East Pakistan whose educated class, according to a survey by social scientist Nasim Ahmad Jawed, preferred secularism and focused on ethnic identity unlike educated West Pakistanis who tended to prefer an Islamic identity. The Islamist party Jamaat-e-Islami considered Pakistan to be an Islamic state and believed Bengali nationalism to be unacceptable. In the 1971 conflict over East Pakistan, the Jamaat-e-Islami fought the Bengali nationalists on the Pakistan Army's side.After Pakistan's first ever general elections, the 1973 Constitution was created by an elected Parliament. The Constitution declared Pakistan an Islamic Republic and Islam as the state religion. It also stated that all laws would have to be brought into accordance with the injunctions of Islam as laid down in the Quran and Sunnah and that no law repugnant to such injunctions could be enacted. The 1973 Constitution also created certain institutions such as the Shariat Court and the Council of Islamic Ideology to channel the interpretation and application of Islam.Pakistan's leftist Prime Minister Zulfikar Ali Bhutto faced vigorous opposition which coalesced into a movement united under the revivalist banner of "Nizam-e-Mustafa" ("Rule of the Prophet") which aimed to establish an Islamic state based on Sharia laws. Bhutto agreed to some Islamist demands before being overthrown in a coup.In 1977, after taking power from Bhutto in a coup d'état, General Zia-ul-Haq, who came from a religious background, committed himself to establishing an Islamic state and enforcing "sharia" law. Zia established separate Shariat judicial courts and court benches to judge legal cases using Islamic doctrine. Zia bolstered the influence of the "ulama" (Islamic clergy) and the Islamic parties. Zia-ul-Haq forged a strong alliance between the military and Deobandi institutions and even though most Barelvi ulama and only a few Deobandi scholars had supported Pakistan's creation, Islamic state politics came to be mostly in favour of Deobandi (and later Ahl-e-Hadith/Salafi) institutions instead of Barelvi. Sectarian tensions increased with Zia's anti-Shia policies.According to a Pew Research Center (PEW) opinion poll, a majority of Pakistanis support making Sharia the official law of the land. In a survey of several Muslim countries, PEW also found that Pakistanis tend to identify with their religion more than their nationality in contrast to Muslims in other nations such as Egypt, Indonesia and Jordan.The geography and climate of Pakistan are extremely diverse, and the country is home to a wide variety of wildlife. Pakistan covers an area of , approximately equal to the combined land areas of France and the United Kingdom. It is the 33rd-largest nation by total area, although this ranking varies depending on how the disputed territory of Kashmir is counted. Pakistan has a coastline along the Arabian Sea and the Gulf of Oman in the south and land borders of in total: with Afghanistan, with China, with India and with Iran. It shares a marine border with Oman, and is separated from Tajikistan by the cold, narrow Wakhan Corridor. Pakistan occupies a geopolitically important location at the crossroads of South Asia, the Middle East, and Central Asia.Geologically, Pakistan is located in the Indus–Tsangpo Suture Zone and overlaps the Indian tectonic plate in its Sindh and Punjab provinces; Balochistan and most of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa are within the Eurasian plate, mainly on the Iranian plateau. Gilgit–Baltistan and Azad Kashmir lie along the edge of the Indian plate and hence are prone to violent earthquakes. This region has the highest rates of seismicity and the largest earthquakes in the Himalaya region. Ranging from the coastal areas of the south to the glaciated mountains of the north, Pakistan's landscapes vary from plains to deserts, forests, hills, and plateaus.Pakistan is divided into three major geographic areas: the northern highlands, the Indus River plain, and the Balochistan Plateau. The northern highlands contain the Karakoram, Hindu Kush, and Pamir mountain ranges (see mountains of Pakistan), which contain some of the world's highest peaks, including five of the fourteen eight-thousanders (mountain peaks over ), which attract adventurers and mountaineers from all over the world, notably K2 () and Nanga Parbat (). The Balochistan Plateau lies in the west and the Thar Desert in the east. The Indus River and its tributaries flow through the country from the Kashmir region to the Arabian Sea. There is an expanse of alluvial plains along it in the Punjab and Sindh.The climate varies from tropical to temperate, with arid conditions in the coastal south. There is a monsoon season with frequent flooding due to heavy rainfall, and a dry season with significantly less rainfall or none at all. There are four distinct seasons in Pakistan: a cool, dry winter from December through February; a hot, dry spring from March through May; the summer rainy season, or southwest monsoon period, from June through September; and the retreating monsoon period of October and November. Rainfall varies greatly from year to year, and patterns of alternate flooding and drought are common.The diversity of the landscape and climate in Pakistan allows a wide variety of trees and plants to flourish. The forests range from coniferous alpine and subalpine trees such as spruce, pine, and deodar cedar in the extreme northern mountains to deciduous trees in most of the country (for example, the mulberry-like shisham found in the Sulaiman Mountains), to palms such as coconut and date in the southern Punjab, southern Balochistan, and all of Sindh. The western hills are home to juniper, tamarisk, coarse grasses, and scrub plants. Mangrove forests form much of the coastal wetlands along the coast in the south.Coniferous forests are found at altitudes ranging from in most of the northern and northwestern highlands. In the xeric regions of Balochistan, date palm and "Ephedra" are common. In most of the Punjab and Sindh, the Indus plains support tropical and subtropical dry and moist broadleaf forest as well as tropical and xeric shrublands. These forests are mostly of mulberry, acacia, and eucalyptus. About 2.2% or of Pakistan was forested in 2010.The fauna of Pakistan also reflects the country's varied climate. Around 668 bird species are found there, including crows, sparrows, mynas, hawks, falcons, and eagles. Palas, Kohistan, has a significant population of western tragopan. Many birds sighted in Pakistan are migratory, coming from Europe, Central Asia, and India.The southern plains are home to mongooses, small Indian civet, hares, the Asiatic jackal, the Indian pangolin, the jungle cat, and the desert cat. There are mugger crocodiles in the Indus, and wild boar, deer, porcupines, and small rodents in the surrounding areas. The sandy scrublands of central Pakistan are home to Asiatic jackals, striped hyenas, wildcats, and leopards. The lack of vegetative cover, the severe climate, and the impact of grazing on the deserts have left wild animals in a precarious position. The chinkara is the only animal that can still be found in significant numbers in Cholistan. A small number of nilgai are found along the Pakistan–India border and in some parts of Cholistan. A wide variety of animals live in the mountainous north, including the Marco Polo sheep, the urial (a subspecies of wild sheep), the markhor goat, the ibex goat, the Asian black bear, and the Himalayan brown bear. Among the rare animals found in the area are the snow leopard and the blind Indus river dolphin, of which there are believed to be about 1,100 remaining, protected at the Indus River Dolphin Reserve in Sindh. In total, 174 mammals, 177 reptiles, 22 amphibians, 198 freshwater fish species and 5,000 species of invertebrates (including insects) have been recorded in Pakistan.The flora and fauna of Pakistan suffer from a number of problems. Pakistan has the second-highest rate of deforestation in the world, which, along with hunting and pollution, has had adverse effects on the ecosystem. It had a 2019 Forest Landscape Integrity Index mean score of 7.42/10, ranking it 41st globally out of 172 countries. The government has established a large number of protected areas, wildlife sanctuaries, and game reserves to address these issues.Pakistan's political experience is essentially related to the struggle of Indian Muslims to regain the power they lost to British colonisation. Pakistan is a democratic parliamentary federal republic, with Islam as the state religion. The first constitution was adopted in 1956 but suspended by Ayub Khan in 1958, who replaced it with the second constitution in 1962. A complete and comprehensive constitution was adopted in 1973, it was suspended by Zia-ul-Haq in 1977 but reinstated in 1985. This constitution is the country's most important document, laying the foundations of the current government. The Pakistani military establishment has played an influential role in mainstream politics throughout Pakistan's political history. The periods 1958–1971, 1977–1988, and 1999–2008 saw military coups that resulted in the imposition of martial law and military commanders who governed as de facto presidents. Today Pakistan has a multi-party parliamentary system with clear division of powers and checks and balances among the branches of government. The first successful democratic transition occurred in May 2013. Politics in Pakistan is centred on, and dominated by, a homegrown social philosophy comprising a blend of ideas from socialism, conservatism, and the third way. As of the general elections held in 2013, the three main political parties in the country are: the centre-right conservative Pakistan Muslim League-N; the centre-left socialist PPP; and the centrist and third-way Pakistan Movement for Justice (PTI).Since Independence, Pakistan has attempted to balance its relations with foreign nations. Pakistan is a strong ally of China, with both countries placing considerable importance on the maintenance of an extremely close and supportive special relationship. It is also a major non-NATO ally of the United States in the war against terrorism—a status achieved in 2004. Pakistan's foreign policy and geostrategy mainly focus on the economy and security against threats to its national identity and territorial integrity, and on the cultivation of close relations with other Muslim countries.The Kashmir conflict remains the major point of contention between Pakistan and India; three of their four wars were fought over this territory. Due partly to difficulties in relations with its geopolitical rival India, Pakistan maintains close political relations with Turkey and Iran, and both countries have been a focal point in Pakistan's foreign policy. Saudi Arabia also maintains a respected position in Pakistan's foreign policy.A non-signatory party of the Treaty on Nuclear Non-Proliferation, Pakistan is an influential member of the IAEA. In recent events, Pakistan has blocked an international treaty to limit fissile material, arguing that the "treaty would target Pakistan specifically". In the 20th century, Pakistan's nuclear deterrence program focused on countering India's nuclear ambitions in the region, and nuclear tests by India eventually led Pakistan to reciprocate to maintain a geopolitical balance as becoming a nuclear power. Currently, Pakistan maintains a policy of credible minimum deterrence, calling its program vital nuclear deterrence against foreign aggression.Located in the strategic and geopolitical corridor of the world's major maritime oil supply lines and communication fibre optics, Pakistan has proximity to the natural resources of Central Asian countries. Briefing on the country's foreign policy in 2004, a Pakistani senator reportedly explained: "Pakistan highlights sovereign equality of states, bilateralism, mutuality of interests, and non-interference in each other's domestic affairs as the cardinal features of its foreign policy." Pakistan is an active member of the United Nations and has a Permanent Representative to represent Pakistan's positions in international politics. Pakistan has lobbied for the concept of "enlightened moderation" in the Muslim world. Pakistan is also a member of Commonwealth of Nations, the South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation (SAARC), the Economic Cooperation Organization (ECO), and the G20 developing nations.Due to ideological differences, Pakistan opposed the Soviet Union in the 1950s. During the Soviet–Afghan War in the 1980s, Pakistan was one of the closest allies of the United States. Relations between Pakistan and Russia have greatly improved since 1999, and co-operation in various sectors has increased. Pakistan has had an "on-and-off" relationship with the United States. A close ally of the United States during the Cold war, Pakistan's relationship with the United States soured in the 1990s when the US imposed sanctions because of Pakistan's secretive nuclear development. Since 9/11, Pakistan has been a close ally of the United States on the issue of counter-terrorism in the regions of the Middle East and South Asia, with the US supporting Pakistan with aid money and weapons. Initially, the United States-led war on terrorism led to an improvement in the relationship, but it was strained by a divergence of interests and resulting mistrust during the war in Afghanistan and by issues related to terrorism.Pakistan does not have diplomatic relations with Israel; nonetheless, some Israeli citizens have visited the country on tourist visas. However, an exchange took place between the two countries using Turkey as a communication conduit. Despite Pakistan being the only country in the world that has not established diplomatic relations with Armenia, an Armenian community still resides in Pakistan. Pakistan had warm relations with Bangladesh, despite some initial strains in their relationship.Pakistan was one of the first countries to establish formal diplomatic relations with the People's Republic of China, and the relationship continues to be strong since China's war with India in 1962, forming a special relationship. From the 1960s to 1980s, Pakistan greatly helped China in reaching out to the world's major countries and helped facilitate US President Nixon's state visit to China. Despite the change of governments in Pakistan and fluctuations in the regional and global situation, China's policy in Pakistan continues to be a dominant factor at all times. In return, China is Pakistan's largest trading partner, and economic co-operation has flourished, with substantial Chinese investment in Pakistan's infrastructural expansion such as the Pakistani deep-water port at Gwadar. Friendly Sino-Pakistani relations reached new heights as both countries signed 51 agreements and Memorandums of Understanding (MoUs) in 2015 for co-operation in different areas. Both countries signed a Free Trade Agreement in the 2000s, and Pakistan continues to serve as China's communication bridge to the Muslim world. In 2016, China announced that it will set up an anti-terrorism alliance with Pakistan, Afghanistan, and Tajikistan. In December 2018, Pakistan's government defended China's re-education camps for a million Uyghur Muslims.After Independence, Pakistan vigorously pursued bilateral relations with other Muslim countries and made an active bid for leadership of the Muslim world, or at least for leadership in efforts to achieve unity. The Ali brothers had sought to project Pakistan as the natural leader of the Islamic world, in part due to its large manpower and military strength. A top-ranking Muslim League leader, Khaliquzzaman, declared that Pakistan would bring together all Muslim countries into Islamistan—a pan-Islamic entity.Such developments (along with Pakistan's creation) did not get American approval, and British Prime Minister Clement Attlee voiced international opinion at the time by stating that he wished that India and Pakistan would re-unite. Since most of the Arab world was undergoing a nationalist awakening at the time, there was little attraction to Pakistan's Pan-Islamic aspirations. Some of the Arab countries saw the 'Islamistan' project as a Pakistani attempt to dominate other Muslim states.Pakistan vigorously championed the right of self-determination for Muslims around the world. Pakistan's efforts for the independence movements of Indonesia, Algeria, Tunisia, Morocco, and Eritrea were significant and initially led to close ties between these countries and Pakistan. However, Pakistan also masterminded an attack on the Afghan city of Jalalabad during the Afghan Civil War to establish an Islamic government there. Pakistan had wished to foment an 'Islamic Revolution' that would transcend national borders, covering Pakistan, Afghanistan, and Central Asia.On the other hand, Pakistan's relations with Iran have been strained at times due to sectarian tensions. Iran and Saudi Arabia used Pakistan as a battleground for their proxy sectarian war, and by the 1990s Pakistan's support for the Sunni Taliban organisation in Afghanistan became a problem for Shia Iran, which opposed a Taliban-controlled Afghanistan. Tensions between Iran and Pakistan intensified in 1998 when Iran accused Pakistan of war crimes after Pakistani warplanes had bombarded Afghanistan's last Shia stronghold in support of the Taliban.Pakistan is an influential and founding member of the Organisation of Islamic Cooperation (OIC). Maintaining cultural, political, social, and economic relations with the Arab world and other countries in the Muslim world is a vital factor in Pakistan's foreign policy.A federal parliamentary republic state, Pakistan is a federation that comprises four provinces: Punjab, Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, Sindh and Balochistan, and three territories: Islamabad Capital Territory, Gilgit–Baltistan and Azad Kashmir. The Government of Pakistan exercises the "de facto" jurisdiction over the Frontier Regions and the western parts of the Kashmir Regions, which are organised into the separate political entities Azad Kashmir and Gilgit–Baltistan (formerly Northern Areas). In 2009, the constitutional assignment () awarded the Gilgit–Baltistan a semi-provincial status, giving it self-government.The local government system consists of a three-tier system of districts, tehsils, and union councils, with an elected body at each tier. There are about 130 districts altogether, of which Azad Kashmir has ten and Gilgit–Baltistan seven.Law enforcement is carried out by a joint network of the intelligence community with jurisdiction limited to the relevant province or territory. The National Intelligence Directorate coordinates the information intelligence at both federal and provincial levels; including the FIA, IB, Motorway Police, and paramilitary forces such as the Pakistan Rangers and the Frontier Corps.Pakistan's "premier" intelligence agency, the Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI), was formed just within a year after the Independence of Pakistan in 1947. ABC News Point in 2014 reported that the ISI was ranked as the top intelligence agency in the world while Zee News reported the ISI as ranking fifth among the world's most powerful intelligence agencies.The court system is organised as a hierarchy, with the Supreme Court at the apex, below which are High Courts, Federal Shariat Courts (one in each province and one in the federal capital), District Courts (one in each district), Judicial Magistrate Courts (in every town and city), Executive Magistrate Courts, and civil courts. The Penal code has limited jurisdiction in the Tribal Areas, where law is largely derived from tribal customs.The Kashmir—the most northwesterly region of South Asia—is a major territorial dispute that has hindered relations between India and Pakistan. The two nations have fought at least three large-scale conventional wars in successive years in 1947, 1965, and 1971. The conflict in 1971 witnessed Pakistan's unconditional surrender and a treaty that subsequently led to the independence of Bangladesh. Other serious military engagements and skirmishes have included the armed contacts in Siachen Glacier (1984) and Kargil (1999). Approximately 45.1% of the Kashmir region is controlled by India, which also claims the entire state of Jammu and Kashmir, including most of Jammu, the Kashmir Valley, Ladakh, and the Siachen. The claim is contested by Pakistan, which controls approximately 38.2% of the Kashmir region, an area known as the Azad Kashmir and Gilgit–Baltistan.India claims the Kashmir on the basis of the Instrument of Accession—a legal agreement with Kashmir's leaders executed by "Maharaja" Hari Singh, who agreed to cede the area to India. Pakistan claims Kashmir on the basis of a Muslim majority and of geography, the same principles that were applied for the creation of the two independent states. India referred the dispute to the United Nations on 1 January 1948. In a resolution passed in 1948, the UN's General Assembly asked Pakistan to remove most of its troops as a "plebiscite" would then be held. However, Pakistan failed to vacate the region and a ceasefire was reached in 1949 establishing a Line of Control (LoC) that divided Kashmir between the two nations. India, fearful that the Muslim majority populace of Kashmir would secede from India, did not allow a plebiscite to take place in the region. This was confirmed in a statement by India's Defense Minister, Krishna Menon, who said: "Kashmir would vote to join Pakistan and no Indian Government responsible for agreeing to plebiscite would survive."Pakistan claims that its position is for the right of the people of Jammu and Kashmir to determine their future through impartial elections as mandated by the United Nations, while India has stated that Kashmir is an integral part of India, referring to the Simla Agreement (1972) and to the fact that elections take place regularly. In recent developments, certain Kashmiri independence groups believe that Kashmir should be independent of both India and Pakistan.The law enforcement in Pakistan is carried out by joint network of several federal and provincial police agencies. The four provinces and the Islamabad Capital Territory (ICT) each have a civilian police force with jurisdiction extending only to the relevant province or territory. At the federal level, there are a number of civilian intelligence agencies with nationwide jurisdictions including the Federal Investigation Agency (FIA), Intelligence Bureau (IB), and the Motorway Patrol, as well as several paramilitary forces such as the National Guards (Northern Areas), the Rangers (Punjab and Sindh), and the Frontier Corps (Khyber Pakhtunkhwa and Balochistan).The most senior officers of all the civilian police forces also form part of the Police Service, which is a component of the civil service of Pakistan. Namely, there is four provincial police service including the Punjab Police, Sindh Police, Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa Police, and the Balochistan Police; all headed by the appointed senior Inspector-Generals. The ICT has its own police component, the Capital Police, to maintain law and order in the capital. The CID bureaus are the crime investigation unit and form a vital part in each provincial police service.The law enforcement in Pakistan also has a Motorway Patrol which is responsible for enforcement of traffic and safety laws, security and recovery on Pakistan's inter-provincial motorway network. In each of provincial Police Service, it also maintains a respective Elite Police units led by the NACTA—a counter-terrorism police unit as well as providing VIP escorts. In the Punjab and Sindh, the Pakistan Rangers are an internal security force with the prime objective to provide and maintain security in war zones and areas of conflict as well as maintaining law and order which includes providing assistance to the police. The Frontier Corps serves the similar purpose in Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa, and the Balochistan.Male homosexuality is illegal in Pakistan and punishable with up to life in prison. In its 2018 Press Freedom Index, Reporters Without Borders ranked Pakistan number 139 out of 180 countries based on freedom of the press. Television stations and newspapers are routinely shut down for publishing any reports critical of the government or the military.The armed forces of Pakistan are the sixth largest in the world in terms of numbers in full-time service, with about 651,800 personnel on active duty and 291,000 paramilitary personnel, as of tentative estimates in 2021. They came into existence after independence in 1947, and the military establishment has frequently influenced the national politics ever since. Chain of command of the military is kept under the control of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Committee; all of the branches joint works, co-ordination, military logistics, and joint missions are under the Joint Staff HQ. The Joint Staff HQ is composed of the Air HQ, Navy HQ, and Army GHQ in the vicinity of the Rawalpindi Military District.The Chairman Joint Chiefs of Staff Committee is the highest principle staff officer in the armed forces, and the chief military adviser to the civilian government though the chairman has no authority over the three branches of armed forces. The Chairman joint chiefs controls the military from the JS HQ and maintains strategic communications between the military and the civilian government. , the CJCSC is General Nadeem Raza alongside chief of army staff General Qamar Javed Bajwa, chief of naval staff Admiral Muhammad Amjad Khan Niazi, and chief of air staff Air Chief Marshal Zaheer Ahmad Babar. The main branches are the Army, the Air Force and the Navy, which are supported by a large number of paramilitary forces in the country. Control over the strategic arsenals, deployment, employment, development, military computers and command and control is a responsibility vested under the National Command Authority which oversaw the work on the nuclear policy as part of the credible minimum deterrence.The United States, Turkey, and China maintain close military relations and regularly export military equipment and technology transfer to Pakistan. Joint logistics and major war games are occasionally carried out by the militaries of China and Turkey. Philosophical basis for the military draft is introduced by the Constitution in times of emergency, but it has never been imposed.Since 1947 Pakistan has been involved in four conventional wars, the first war occurred in Kashmir with Pakistan gaining control of Western Kashmir, (Azad Kashmir and Gilgit–Baltistan), and India retaining Eastern Kashmir (Jammu and Kashmir and Ladakh). Territorial problems eventually led to another conventional war in 1965; over the issue of Bengali refugees that led to another war in 1971 which resulted in Pakistan's unconditional surrender in East Pakistan. Tensions in Kargil brought the two countries at the brink of war. Since 1947 the unresolved territorial problems with Afghanistan saw border skirmishes which were kept mostly at the mountainous border. In 1961, the military and intelligence community repelled the Afghan incursion in the Bajaur Agency near the Durand Line border.Rising tensions with neighbouring USSR in their involvement in Afghanistan, Pakistani intelligence community, mostly the ISI, systematically coordinated the US resources to the Afghan mujahideen and foreign fighters against the Soviet Union's presence in the region. Military reports indicated that the PAF was in engagement with the Soviet Air Force, supported by the Afghan Air Force during the course of the conflict; one of which belonged to Alexander Rutskoy. Apart from its own conflicts, Pakistan has been an active participant in United Nations peacekeeping missions. It played a major role in rescuing trapped American soldiers from Mogadishu, Somalia, in 1993 in Operation Gothic Serpent. According to UN reports, the Pakistani military is the third largest troop contributor to UN peacekeeping missions after Ethiopia and India.Pakistan has deployed its military in some Arab countries, providing defence, training, and playing advisory roles. The PAF and Navy's fighter pilots have voluntarily served in Arab nations' militaries against Israel in the Six-Day War (1967) and in the Yom Kippur War (1973). Pakistan's fighter pilots shot down ten Israeli planes in the Six-Day War. In the 1973 war one of the PAF pilots, Flt. Lt. Sattar Alvi (flying a MiG-21), shot down an Israeli Air Force Mirage and was honoured by the Syrian government. Requested by the Saudi monarchy in 1979, Pakistan's special forces units, operatives, and commandos were rushed to assist Saudi forces in Mecca to lead the operation of the Grand Mosque. For almost two weeks Saudi Special Forces and Pakistani commandos fought the insurgents who had occupied the Grand Mosque's compound. In 1991 Pakistan got involved with the Gulf War and sent 5,000 troops as part of a US-led coalition, specifically for the defence of Saudi Arabia.Despite the UN arms embargo on Bosnia, General Javed Nasir of the ISI airlifted anti-tank weapons and missiles to Bosnian mujahideen which turned the tide in favour of Bosnian Muslims and forced the Serbs to lift the siege. Under Nasir's leadership the ISI was also involved in supporting Chinese Muslims in Xinjiang Province, rebel Muslim groups in the Philippines, and some religious groups in Central Asia.Since 2004, the military has been engaged in an insurgency in the Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province, mainly against the Tehrik-i-Taliban factions. Major operations undertaken by the army include Operation Black Thunderstorm, Operation Rah-e-Nijat and Operation Zarb-e-Azb.According to SIPRI, Pakistan was the 9th-largest recipient and importer of arms between 2012–2016.The Economy of Pakistan is the 23rd-largest in the world in terms of purchasing power parity (PPP), and 42nd-largest in terms of nominal gross domestic product. Economists estimate that Pakistan was part of the wealthiest region of the world throughout the first millennium CE, with the largest economy by GDP. This advantage was lost in the 18th century as other regions such as China and Western Europe edged forward. Pakistan is considered a developing country and is one of the Next Eleven, a group of eleven countries that, along with the BRICs, have a high potential to become the world's largest economies in the 21st century.In recent years, after decades of social instability, , serious deficiencies in macromanagement and unbalanced macroeconomics in basic services such as rail transportation and electrical energy generation have developed. The economy is considered to be semi-industrialized, with centres of growth along the Indus River. The diversified economies of Karachi and Punjab's urban centres coexist with less-developed areas in other parts of the country, particularly in Balochistan. According to the Economic complexity index, Pakistan is the 67th-largest export economy in the world and the 106th most complex economy. During the fiscal year 2015–16, Pakistan's exports stood at US$20.81 billion and imports at US$44.76 billion, resulting in a negative trade balance of US$23.96 billion., Pakistan's estimated nominal GDP is US$284.2 billion. The GDP by PPP is US$1.254 trillion. The estimated nominal per capita GDP is US$1,388, the GDP (PPP)/capita is US$6,016 (international dollars), According to the World Bank, Pakistan has important strategic endowments and development potential. The increasing proportion of Pakistan's youth provides the country with both a potential demographic dividend and a challenge to provide adequate services and employment. 21.04% of the population live below the international poverty line of US$1.25 a day. The unemployment rate among the aged 15 and over population is 5.5%. Pakistan has an estimated 40 million middle class citizens, projected to increase to 100 million by 2050. A 2015 report published by the World Bank ranked Pakistan's economy at 24th-largest in the world by purchasing power and 41st-largest in absolute terms. It is South Asia's second-largest economy, representing about 15.0% of regional GDP.Pakistan's economic growth since its inception has been varied. It has been slow during periods of democratic transition, but robust during the three periods of martial law, although the foundation for sustainable and equitable growth was not formed. The early to middle 2000s was a period of rapid economic reforms; the government raised development spending, which reduced poverty levels by 10% and increased GDP by 3%. The economy cooled again from 2007. Inflation reached 25.0% in 2008, and Pakistan had to depend on a fiscal policy backed by the International Monetary Fund to avoid possible bankruptcy. A year later, the Asian Development Bank reported that Pakistan's economic crisis was easing. The inflation rate for the fiscal year was 14.1%. Since 2013, as part of an International Monetary Fund program, Pakistan's economic growth has picked up. In 2014 Goldman Sachs predicted that Pakistan's economy would grow 15 times in the next 35 years to become the 18th-largest economy in the world by 2050. In his 2016 book, "The Rise and Fall of Nations", Ruchir Sharma termed Pakistan's economy as at a 'take-off' stage and the future outlook until 2020 has been termed 'Very Good'. Sharma termed it possible to transform Pakistan from a "low-income to a middle-income country during the next five years".Pakistan is one of the largest producers of natural commodities, and its labour market is the 10th-largest in the world. The 7-million–strong Pakistani diaspora contributed US$19.9 billion to the economy in 2015–16. The major source countries of remittances to Pakistan are: the UAE; the United States; Saudi Arabia; the Gulf states (Bahrain, Kuwait, Qatar, and Oman); Australia; Canada; Japan; the United Kingdom; Norway; and Switzerland. According to the World Trade Organization, Pakistan's share of overall world exports is declining; it contributed only 0.13% in 2007.The structure of the Pakistani economy has changed from a mainly agricultural to a strong service base. Agriculture accounts for only 20.9% of the GDP. Even so, according to the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization, Pakistan produced 21,591,400 metric tons of wheat in 2005, more than all of Africa (20,304,585 metric tons) and nearly as much as all of South America (24,557,784 metric tons). Majority of the population, directly or indirectly, is dependent on this sector. It accounts for 43.5% of employed labour force and is the largest source of foreign exchange earnings.A large portion of the country's manufactured exports is dependent on raw materials such as cotton and hides that are part of the agriculture sector, while supply shortages and market disruptions in farm products do push up inflationary pressures. The country is also the fifth-largest producer of cotton, with cotton production of 14 million bales from a modest beginning of 1.7 million bales in the early 1950s; is self-sufficient in sugarcane; and is the fourth-largest producer in the world of milk. Land and water resources have not risen proportionately, but the increases have taken place mainly due to gains in labour and agriculture productivity. The major breakthrough in crop production took place in the late 1960s and 1970s due to the Green Revolution that made a significant contribution to land and yield increases of wheat and rice. Private tube wells led to a 50 percent increase in the cropping intensity which was augmented by tractor cultivation. While the tube wells raised crop yields by 50 percent, the High Yielding Varieties (HYVs) of wheat and rice led to a 50–60 percent higher yield. Meat industry accounts for 1.4 percent of overall GDP.Industry is the second-largest sector of the economy, accounting for 19.74% of gross domestic product (GDP), and 24 percent of total employment. Large-scale manufacturing (LSM), at 12.2% of GDP, dominates the overall sector, accounting for 66% of the sectoral share, followed by small-scale manufacturing, which accounts for 4.9% of total GDP. Pakistan's cement industry is also fast growing mainly because of demand from Afghanistan and from the domestic real estate sector. In 2013 Pakistan exported 7,708,557 metric tons of cement. Pakistan has an installed capacity of 44,768,250 metric tons of cement and 42,636,428 metric tons of clinker. In 2012 and 2013, the cement industry in Pakistan became the most profitable sector of the economy.The textile industry has a pivotal position in the manufacturing sector of Pakistan. In Asia, Pakistan is the eighth-largest exporter of textile products, contributing 9.5% to the GDP and providing employment to around 15 million people (some 30% of the 49 million people in the workforce). Pakistan is the fourth-largest producer of cotton with the third-largest spinning capacity in Asia after China and India, contributing 5% to the global spinning capacity. China is the second largest buyer of Pakistani textiles, importing US$1.527 billion of textiles last fiscal. Unlike the US, where mostly value-added textiles are imported, China buys only cotton yarn and cotton fabric from Pakistan. In 2012, Pakistani textile products accounted for 3.3% or US$1.07bn of all UK textile imports, 12.4% or $4.61bn of total Chinese textile imports, 3.0% of all US textile imports ($2,980 million), 1.6% of total German textile imports ($880 million) and 0.7% of total Indian textile imports ($888 million).The services sector makes up 58.8% of GDP and has emerged as the main driver of economic growth. Pakistani society like other developing countries is a consumption oriented society, having a high marginal propensity to consume. The growth rate of services sector is higher than the growth rate of agriculture and industrial sector. Services sector accounts for 54 percent of GDP in 2014 and little over one-third of total employment. Services sector has strong linkages with other sectors of economy; it provides essential inputs to agriculture sector and manufacturing sector. Pakistan's I.T sector is regarded as among the fastest growing sector's in Pakistan. The World Economic Forum, assessing the development of Information and Communication Technology in the country ranked Pakistan 110th among 139 countries on the 'Networked Readiness Index 2016'., Pakistan has about 82 million internet users, making it the 9th-largest population of Internet users in the world. The current growth rate and employment trend indicate that Pakistan's Information Communication Technology (ICT) industry will exceed the $10-billion mark by 2020. The sector employees 12,000 and count's among top five freelancing nations. The country has also improved its export performance in telecom, computer and information services, as the share of their exports surged from 8.2pc in 2005–06 to 12.6pc in 2012–13. This growth is much better than that of China, whose share in services exports was 3pc and 7.7pc for the same period respectively.With its diverse cultures, people, and landscapes, Pakistan attracted around 6.6 million foreign tourists in 2018, which represented a significant decline since the 1970s when the country received unprecedented numbers of foreign tourists due to the popular Hippie trail. The trail attracted thousands of Europeans and Americans in the 1960s and 1970s who travelled via land through Turkey and Iran into India through Pakistan. The main destinations of choice for these tourists were the Khyber Pass, Peshawar, Karachi, Lahore, Swat and Rawalpindi. The numbers following the trail declined after the Iranian Revolution and the Soviet–Afghan War.Pakistan's tourist attractions range from the mangroves in the south to the Himalayan hill stations in the north-east. The country's tourist destinations range from the Buddhist ruins of Takht-i-Bahi and Taxila, to the 5,000-year-old cities of the Indus Valley Civilization such as Mohenjo-daro and Harappa. Pakistan is home to several mountain peaks over . The northern part of Pakistan has many old fortresses, examples of ancient architecture, and the Hunza and Chitral valleys, home to the small pre-Islamic Kalasha community claiming descent from Alexander the Great. Pakistan's cultural capital, Lahore, contains many examples of Mughal architecture such as the Badshahi Masjid, the Shalimar Gardens, the Tomb of Jahangir, and the Lahore Fort.In October 2006, just one year after the 2005 Kashmir earthquake, "The Guardian" released what it described as "The top five tourist sites in Pakistan" in order to help the country's tourism industry. The five sites included Taxila, Lahore, the Karakoram Highway, Karimabad, and Lake Saiful Muluk. To promote Pakistan's unique cultural heritage, the government organizes various festivals throughout the year. In 2015 the World Economic Forum's Travel & Tourism Competitiveness Report ranked Pakistan 125 out of 141 countries.Pakistan was recognised as the best country for infrastructure development in South Asia during the IWF and World Bank annual meetings in 2016.As of May 2021, nuclear power is provided by six licensed commercial nuclear power plants. The Pakistan Atomic Energy Commission (PAEC) is solely responsible for operating these power plants, while the Pakistan Nuclear Regulatory Authority regulates safe usage of the nuclear energy. The electricity generated by commercial nuclear power plants constitutes roughly 5.8% of Pakistan's electrical energy, compared to 64.2% from fossil fuels (crude oil and natural gas), 29.9% from hydroelectric power, and 0.1% from coal. Pakistan is one of the four nuclear armed states (along with India, Israel, and North Korea) that is not a party to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, but it is a member in good standing of the International Atomic Energy Agency.The KANUPP-I, a Candu-type nuclear reactor, was supplied by Canada in 1971—the country's first commercial nuclear power plant. The Sino-Pakistani nuclear cooperation began in the early 1980s. After a Sino-Pakistani nuclear cooperation agreement in 1986, China provided Pakistan with a nuclear reactor dubbed CHASNUPP-I for energy and the industrial growth of the country. In 2005 both countries proposed working on a joint energy security plan, calling for a huge increase in generation capacity to more than 160,000 MWe by 2030. Under its Nuclear Energy Vision 2050, the Pakistani government plans to increase nuclear power generation capacity to 40,000 MWe, 8,900 MWe of it by 2030. In June 2008 the nuclear commercial complex was expanded with the ground work of installing and operationalising the Chashma-III and Chashma–IV reactors at Chashma, Punjab Province, each with 325–340 MWe and costing ₨ 129 billion; from which the ₨ 80 billion came from international sources, principally China. A further agreement for China's help with the project was signed in October 2008, and given prominence as a counter to the US–India agreement that shortly preceded it. The cost quoted then was US$1.7 billion, with a foreign loan component of US$1.07 billion. In 2013 Pakistan established a second commercial nuclear complex in Karachi with plans of additional reactors, similar to the one in Chashma. The electrical energy is generated by various energy corporations and evenly distributed by the National Electric Power Regulatory Authority (NEPRA) among the four provinces. However, the Karachi-based K-Electric and the Water and Power Development Authority (WAPDA) generates much of the electrical energy used in Pakistan in addition to gathering revenue nationwide. , Pakistan has an installed electricity generation capacity of ~22,797.The transport industry accounts for ~10.5% of the nation's GDP.Motorways of Pakistan are a network of multiple-lane, high-speed, controlled-access highways in Pakistan, which are owned, maintained, and operated federally by Pakistan's National Highway Authority. As of 20 February 2020, 1882 km of motorways are operational, while an additional 1854 km are under construction or planned. All motorways in Pakistan are pre-fixed with the letter 'M' (for "Motorway") followed by the unique numerical designation of the specific highway (with a hyphen in the middle), e.g. "M-1".Pakistan's motorways are an important part of Pakistan's "National Trade Corridor Project", which aims to link Pakistan's three Arabian Sea ports (Karachi Port, Port Bin Qasim and Gwadar Port) to the rest of the country through its national highways and motorways network and further north with Afghanistan, Central Asia and China. The project was planned in 1990. The China Pakistan Economic Corridor project aims to link Gwadar Port and Kashgar (China) using Pakistani motorways, national highways, and expressways.Highways form the backbone of Pakistan's transport system; a total road length of accounts for 92% of passengers and 96% of inland freight traffic. Road transport services are largely in the hands of the private sector. The National Highway Authority is responsible for the maintenance of national highways and motorways. The highway and motorway system depends mainly on north–south links connecting the southern ports to the populous provinces of Punjab and Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa. Although this network only accounts for 4.6% of total road length, it carries 85% of the country's traffic.The Pakistan Railways, under the Ministry of Railways (MoR), operates the railroad system. From 1947 until the 1970s the train system was the primary means of transport until the nationwide constructions of the national highways and the economic boom of the automotive industry. Beginning in the 1990s there was a marked shift in traffic from rail to highways; dependence grew on roads after the introduction of vehicles in the country. Now the railway's share of inland traffic is below 8% for passengers and 4% for freight traffic. As personal transportation began to be dominated by the automobile, total rail track decreased from in 1990–91 to in 2011. Pakistan expects to use the rail service to boost foreign trade with China, Iran, and Turkey.There are an estimated 151 airports and airfields in Pakistan as of 2013—including both the military and the mostly publicly owned civilian airports. Although Jinnah International Airport is the principal international gateway to Pakistan, the international airports in Lahore, Islamabad, Peshawar, Quetta, Faisalabad, Sialkot, and Multan also handle significant amounts of traffic.The civil aviation industry is mixed with public and private sectors, which was deregulated in 1993. While the state-owned Pakistan International Airlines (PIA) is the major and dominant air carrier that carries about 73% of domestic passengers and all domestic freight, the private airlines such as airBlue and Air Indus, also provide similar services at a low cost.Major seaports are in Karachi, Sindh (the Karachi port, Port Qasim). Since the 1990s some seaport operations have been moved to Balochistan with the construction of Gwadar Port, Port of Pasni and Gadani Port. Gwadar Port is the deepest sea port of the world. According to the WEF's Global Competitiveness Report, quality ratings of Pakistan's port infrastructure increased from 3.7 to 4.1 between 2007 and 2016.Many flyovers and underpasses are located in major urban areas of the country to regulate the flow of traffic. The highest number of flyovers and under passes are located in Karachi, followed by Lahore. Other cities having flyovers and underpasses for the regulation of flow of traffic includes Islamabad-Rawalpindi, Faisalabad, Gujranwala, Multan, Peshawar, Hyderabad, Quetta, Sargodha, Bahawalpur, Sukkur, Larkana, Rahim Yar Khan and Sahiwal etc.Beijing Underpass, Lahore is the longest underpass of Pakistan with a length of about . Muslim Town Flyover, Lahore is the longest flyover of the country with a length of about .Developments in science and technology have played an important role in Pakistan's infrastructure and helped the country connect to the rest of the world. Every year, scientists from around the world are invited by the Pakistan Academy of Sciences and the Pakistan Government to participate in the International Nathiagali Summer College on Physics. Pakistan hosted an international seminar on "Physics in Developing Countries" for the International Year of Physics 2005. Pakistani theoretical physicist Abdus Salam won a Nobel Prize in Physics for his work on the electroweak interaction. Influential publications and critical scientific work in the advancement of mathematics, biology, economics, computer science, and genetics have been produced by Pakistani scientists at both the domestic and international levels.In chemistry, Salimuzzaman Siddiqui was the first Pakistani scientist to bring the therapeutic constituents of the neem tree to the attention of natural products chemists. Pakistani neurosurgeon Ayub Ommaya invented the Ommaya reservoir, a system for treatment of brain tumours and other brain conditions. Scientific research and development play a pivotal role in Pakistani universities, government- sponsored national laboratories, science parks, and the industry. Abdul Qadeer Khan, regarded as the founder of the HEU-based gas-centrifuge uranium enrichment program for Pakistan's integrated atomic bomb project. He founded and established the Kahuta Research Laboratories (KRL) in 1976, serving as both its senior scientist and the Director-General until his retirement in 2001, and he was an early and vital figure in other science projects. Apart from participating in Pakistan's atomic bomb project, he made major contributions in molecular morphology, physical martensite, and its integrated applications in condensed and material physics.In 2010 Pakistan was ranked 43rd in the world in terms of published scientific papers. The Pakistan Academy of Sciences, a strong scientific community, plays an influential and vital role in formulating recommendations regarding science policies for the government.The 1960s saw the emergence of an active space program led by SUPARCO that produced advances in domestic rocketry, electronics, and aeronomy. The space program recorded a few notable feats and achievements. The successful launch of its first rocket into space made Pakistan the first South Asian country to have achieved such a task. Successfully producing and launching the nation's first space satellite in 1990, Pakistan became the first Muslim country and second South Asian country to put a satellite into space.As an aftermath of the 1971 war with India, the clandestine crash program developed atomic weapons partly motivated by fear and to prevent any foreign intervention, while ushering in the atomic age in the post cold war era. Competition with India and tensions eventually led to Pakistan's decision to conduct underground nuclear tests in 1998, thus becoming the seventh country in the world to successfully develop nuclear weapons.Pakistan is the first and only Muslim country that maintains an active research presence in Antarctica. Since 1991 Pakistan has maintained two summer research stations and one weather observatory on the continent and plans to open another full-fledged permanent base in Antarctica.Energy consumption by computers and usage has grown since the 1990s when PCs were introduced; Pakistan has about 82 million Internet users and is ranked as one of the top countries that have registered a high growth rate in Internet penetration . Key publications have been produced by Pakistan, and domestic software development has gained considerable international praise.As of May 2020, Pakistan has about 82 million internet users, making it the 9th-largest population of Internet users in the world. Since the 2000s Pakistan has made a significant amount of progress in supercomputing, and various institutions offer research opportunities in parallel computing. The Pakistan government reportedly spends ₨ 4.6 billion on information technology projects, with emphasis on e-government, human resources, and infrastructure development.The constitution of Pakistan requires the state to provide free primary and secondary education.At the time of the establishment of Pakistan as a state, the country had only one university, Punjab University in Lahore. Very soon the Pakistan government established public universities in each of the four provinces, including Sindh University (1949), Peshawar University (1950), Karachi University (1953), and Balochistan University (1970). Pakistan has a large network of both public and private universities, which includes collaboration between the universities aimed at providing research and higher education opportunities in the country, although there is concern about the low quality of teaching in many of the newer schools. It is estimated that there are 3,193 technical and vocational institutions in Pakistan, and there are also "madrassahs" that provide free Islamic education and offer free board and lodging to students, who come mainly from the poorer strata of society. Strong public pressure and popular criticism over extremists' usage of "madrassahs" for recruitment, the Pakistan government has made repeated efforts to regulate and monitor the quality of education in the "madrassahs".Education in Pakistan is divided into six main levels: nursery (preparatory classes); primary (grades one through five); middle (grades six through eight); matriculation (grades nine and ten, leading to the secondary certificate); intermediate (grades eleven and twelve, leading to a higher secondary certificate); and university programmes leading to graduate and postgraduate degrees. There is a network of private schools that constitutes a parallel secondary education system based on a curriculum set and administered by the Cambridge International Examinations of the United Kingdom. Some students choose to take the O-level and A level exams conducted by the British Council. According to the International Schools Consultancy, Pakistan has 439 international schools.As a result of initiatives taken in 2007, the English medium education has been made compulsory in all schools across the country. In 2012, Malala Yousafzai, a campaigner for female education, was shot by a Taliban gunman in retaliation for her activism. Yousafzai went on to become the youngest ever Nobel laureate for her global education-related advocacy. Additional reforms enacted in 2013 required all educational institutions in Sindh to begin offering Chinese language courses, reflecting China's growing role as a superpower and its increasing influence in Pakistan. The literacy rate of the population is 62.3% as of 2018. The rate of male literacy is 72.5% while the rate of female literacy is 51.8%. Literacy rates vary by region and particularly by sex; as one example, in tribal areas female literacy is 9.5%, while Azad Jammu & Kashmir has a literacy rate of 74%. With the advent of computer literacy in 1995, the government launched a nationwide initiative in 1998 with the aim of eradicating illiteracy and providing a basic education to all children. Through various educational reforms, by 2015 the Ministry of Education expected to attain 100% enrollment levels among children of primary school age and a literacy rate of ~86% among people aged over 10. Pakistan is currently spending 2.3 percent of its GDP on education; which according to the Institute of Social and Policy Sciences is one of the lowest in South Asia.As of 2020, Pakistan is the fifth most populous country in the world and accounts for about 2.8% of the world population. The 2017 Census of Pakistan provisionally estimated the population to be 207.8 million. This figure excludes data from Gilgit-Baltistan and Azad Kashmir, which is likely to be included in the final report.The population in 2017 represents a 57% increase from 1998. The annual growth rate in 2016 was reported to be 1.45%, which is the highest of the SAARC nations, though the growth rate has been decreasing in recent years. The population is projected to reach 263 million by 2030.At the time of the partition in 1947, Pakistan had a population of 32.5 million; the population increased by ~57.2% between the years 1990 and 2009. By 2030 Pakistan is expected to surpass Indonesia as the largest Muslim-majority country in the world. Pakistan is classified as a "young nation", with a median age of 23.4 in 2016; about 104 million people were under the age of 30 in 2010. In 2016 Pakistan's fertility rate was estimated to be 2.68, higher than its neighbour India (2.45). Around 35% of the people are under 15. The vast majority of those residing in southern Pakistan live along the Indus River, with Karachi being the most populous commercial city in the south. In eastern, western, and northern Pakistan, most of the population lives in an arc formed by the cities of Lahore, Faisalabad, Rawalpindi, Sargodha, Islamabad, Gujranwala, Sialkot, Gujrat, Jhelum, Sheikhupura, Nowshera, Mardan, and Peshawar. During 1990–2008, city dwellers made up 36% of Pakistan's population, making it the most urbanised nation in South Asia, which increased to 38% by 2013. Furthermore, 50% of Pakistanis live in towns of 5,000 people or more.Expenditure on healthcare was ~2.8% of GDP in 2013. Life expectancy at birth was 67 years for females and 65 years for males in 2013. The private sector accounts for about 80% of outpatient visits. Approximately 19% of the population and 30% of children under five are malnourished. Mortality of the under-fives was 86 per 1,000 live births in 2012.More than sixty languages are spoken in Pakistan, including a number of provincial languages. Urdu—the "lingua franca" and a symbol of Muslim identity and national unity—is the national language understood by over 75% of Pakistanis. It is the main medium of communication in the country but the primary language of only 7% of Pakistan's population. Urdu and English are the official languages of Pakistan, with English primarily used in official business and government, and in legal contracts; the local variety is known as Pakistani English. The Punjabi language, the most common in Pakistan and the first language of 38.78% of Pakistan's population, is mostly spoken in the Punjab. Saraiki is mainly spoken in South Punjab, and Hindko is predominant in the Hazara region of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa. Pashto is the provincial language of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa. The Sindhi language is commonly spoken in Sindh, while the Balochi language is dominant in Balochistan. Brahui, a Dravidian language, is spoken by the Brahui people who live in Balochistan. There are also speakers of Gujarati in Karachi. Marwari, a Rajasthani language, is also spoken in parts of Sindh. Various languages such as Shina, Balti, and Burushaski are spoken in Gilgit-Baltistan, whilst languages such as Pahari, Gojri, and Kashmiri are spoken by many in Azad Kashmir.The Arabic language is officially recognised by the constitution of Pakistan. It declares in article 31 No. 2 that ""The State shall endeavour, as respects the Muslims of Pakistan (a) to make the teaching of the Holy Quran and Islamiat compulsory, to encourage and facilitate the learning of Arabic language ...""Constitution of Pakistan: "Constitution of Pakistan, 1973 – Article: 31 Islamic way of life" , Article 31 No. 2, 1973, Retrieved 22 August 2018.Even after partition in 1947, Indian Muslims continued to migrate to Pakistan throughout the 1950s and 1960s, and these migrants settled mainly in Karachi and other towns of Sindh province. The wars in neighboring Afghanistan during the 1980s and 1990s also forced millions of Afghan refugees into Pakistan. The Pakistan Census excludes the 1.41 million registered refugees from Afghanistan, who are found mainly in the Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa and tribal belt, with small numbers residing in Karachi and Quetta. Pakistan is home to one of the world's largest refugee populations. In addition to Afghans, around 2 million Bangladeshis and half a million other undocumented people live in Pakistan. They are claimed to be from other areas such as Myanmar, Iran, Iraq, and Africa.Experts say that the migration of both Bengalis and Burmese (Rohingya) to Pakistan started in the 1980s and continued until 1998. Shaikh Muhammad Feroze, the chairman of the Pakistani Bengali Action Committee, claims that there are 200 settlements of Bengali-speaking people in Pakistan, of which 132 are in Karachi. They are also found in various other areas of Pakistan such as Thatta, Badin, Hyderabad, Tando Adam, and Lahore. Large-scale Rohingya migration to Karachi made that city one of the largest population centres of Rohingyas in the world after Myanmar. The Burmese community of Karachi is spread out over 60 of the city's slums such as the Burmi Colony in Korangi, Arakanabad, Machchar colony, Bilal colony, Ziaul Haq Colony, and Godhra Camp.Thousands of Uyghur Muslims have also migrated to the Gilgit-Baltistan region of Pakistan, fleeing religious and cultural persecution in Xinjiang, China. Since 1989 thousands of Kashmiri Muslim refugees have sought refuge in Pakistan, complaining that many of the refugee women had been raped by Indian soldiers and that they were forced out of their homes by the soldiers.The major ethnic groups are Punjabis (44.7% of the country's population), Pashtuns, also known as Pathans (15.4%), Sindhis (14.1%), Saraikis (8.4%), Muhajirs (the Indian emigrants, mostly Urdu-speaking), who make up 7.6% of the population, and the Baloch with 3.6%. The remaining 6.3% consist of a number of ethnic minorities such as the Brahuis, the Hindkowans, the various peoples of Gilgit-Baltistan, the Kashmiris, the Sheedis (who are of African descent), and the Hazaras. There is also a large Pakistani diaspora worldwide, numbering over seven million, which has been recorded as the sixth largest diaspora in the world.Since achieving independence as a result of the partition of India, the urbanisation has increased exponentially, with several different causes. The majority of the population in the south resides along the Indus River, with Karachi the most populous commercial city. In the east, west, and north, most of the population lives in an arc formed by the cities of Lahore, Faisalabad, Rawalpindi, Islamabad, Sargodha, Gujranwala, Sialkot, Gujrat, Jhelum, Sheikhupura, Nowshera, Mardan, and Peshawar. During the period 1990–2008, city dwellers made up 36% of Pakistan's population, making it the most urbanised nation in South Asia. Furthermore, more than 50% of Pakistanis live in towns of 5,000 people or more. Immigration, from both within and outside the country, is regarded as one of the main factors contributing to urbanisation in Pakistan. One analysis of the 1998 national census highlighted the significance of the partition of India in the 1940s as it relates to urban change in Pakistan.During and after the independence period, Urdu speaking Muslims from India migrated in large numbers to Pakistan, especially to the port city of Karachi, which is today the largest metropolis in Pakistan. Migration from other countries, mainly from those nearby, has further accelerated the process of urbanisation in Pakistani cities. Inevitably, the rapid urbanisation caused by these large population movements has also created new political and socio-economic challenges. In addition to immigration, economic trends such as the green revolution and political developments, among a host of other factors, are also important causes of urbanisation. The state religion in Pakistan is Islam. Freedom of religion is guaranteed by the Constitution of Pakistan, which provides all its citizens the right to profess, practice and propagate their religion subject to law, public order, and morality.The population of Pakistan follow different religions. Most of Pakistanis are Muslims (96.47%) followed by Hindus (2.14%) and Christians (1.27%). There are also people in Pakistan who follow other religions, such as Sikhism, Buddhism, Jainism and the minority of Parsi (who follow Zoroastrianism). The Kalash people maintain a unique identity and religion within Pakistan.Hinduism is mostly associated with Sindhis, and Pakistan hosts major events such as the Hinglaj Yatra pilgrimage. Hindu temples may be found throughout Sindh, where the dharma features prominently. Many Hindus in Pakistan complain about the prospect of religious violence against them and being treated like second-class citizens, and many have emigrated to India or further abroad.In addition, some Pakistanis also do not profess any faith (such as atheists and agnostics) in Pakistan. According to the 1998 census, people who did not state their religion accounted for 0.5% of the population. Secularism and criticism of over-religiosity is not uncommon in well-educated civil society, although in general Pakistan is a highly religious society, and the irreligious generally hide their beliefs due to fear of persecution.Islam is the dominant religion. About 96.47% of Pakistanis are Muslim, according to the 2017 Census. Pakistan has the second-largest number of Muslims in the world after Indonesia. and home for (10.5%) of the world's Muslim population. The majority of them are Sunni and mostly follow Sufism (estimated between 75 and 95%) while Shias represent between 5–25%. As of 2019, Shia population in Pakistan was estimated to be 42 million out of total population of 210 million. Pakistan also has the largest Muslim city in the world (Karachi).The Ahmadis, a small minority representing 0.22–2% of Pakistan's population, are officially considered non-Muslims by virtue of the constitutional amendment. The Ahmadis are particularly persecuted, especially since 1974 when they were banned from calling themselves Muslims. In 1984, Ahmadiyya places of worship were banned from being called "mosques". , 12% of Pakistani Muslims self-identify as non-denominational Muslims. There are also several Quraniyoon communities.Sufism, a mystical Islamic tradition, has a long history and a large following among the Sunni Muslims in Pakistan, at both the academic and popular levels. Popular Sufi culture is centered around gatherings and celebrations at the shrines of saints and annual festivals that feature Sufi music and dance. Two Sufis whose shrines receive much national attention are Ali Hajweri in Lahore (c. 12th century) and Shahbaz Qalander in Sehwan, Sindh (c. 12th century).There are two levels of Sufism in Pakistan. The first is the 'populist' Sufism of the rural population. This level of Sufism involves belief in intercession through saints, veneration of their shrines, and forming bonds (Mureed) with a "pir" (saint). Many rural Pakistani Muslims associate with "pirs" and seek their intercession. The second level of Sufism in Pakistan is 'intellectual Sufism', which is growing among the urban and educated population. They are influenced by the writings of Sufis such as the medieval theologian al-Ghazali, the Sufi reformer Shaykh Aḥmad Sirhindi, and Shah Wali Allah. Contemporary Islamic fundamentalists criticise Sufism's popular character, which in their view does not accurately reflect the teachings and practice of Muhammad and his companions.Hinduism is the second-largest religion in Pakistan after Islam, according to the 2017 census. Hindus are found in all provinces of Pakistan but are mostly concentrated in Sindh, where they account for 8.73% of the population. , Pakistan had the fifth-largest Hindu population in the world. In the 2017 census, the Hindu (jati) population was found to be 4,444,437 while the Hindu (scheduled castes) numbered an additional 851,504. At the time of Pakistan's creation, the 'hostage theory' gained currency. According to this theory, the Hindu minority in Pakistan was to be given a fair deal in Pakistan in order to ensure the protection of the Muslim minority in India. However, Khawaja Nazimuddin, the second Prime Minister of Pakistan, stated: Some Hindus in Pakistan feel that they are treated as second-class citizens and many have continued to migrate to India. Pakistani Hindus faced riots after the Babri Masjid demolition, endured a massacre (in 2005) by security forces in Balochistan, and have experienced other attacks, forced conversions, and abductions.Christians formed the next largest religious minority, after Hindus, with 1.27% of the population following it. They were followed by the Bahá'í Faith, which had a following of 30,000, then Sikhism, Buddhism, and Zoroastrianism, each back then claiming 20,000 adherents, and a very small community of Jains. There is a Roman Catholic community in Karachi that was established by Goan and Tamil migrants when Karachi's infrastructure was being developed by the British during the colonial administration between World War I and World War II. The influence of atheism is very small, with 1.0% of the population identifying as atheist in 2005. However, the figure rose to 2.0% in 2012 according to Gallup.Civil society in Pakistan is largely hierarchical, emphasising local cultural etiquette and traditional Islamic values that govern personal and political life. The basic family unit is the extended family, although for socio-economic reasons there has been a growing trend towards nuclear families. The traditional dress for both men and women is the "Shalwar Kameez"; trousers, jeans, and shirts are also popular among men. In recent decades, the middle class has increased to around 35 million and the upper and upper-middle classes to around 17 million, and power is shifting from rural landowners to the urbanised elites. Pakistani festivals, including "Eid-ul-Fitr", "Eid-ul-Azha", "Ramazan", Christmas, Easter, Holi, and Diwali, are mostly religious in origin. Increasing globalisation has resulted in Pakistan ranking 56th on the A.T. Kearney/FP Globalization Index.The "Shalwar Kameez" is the national dress of Pakistan and is worn by both men and women in all four provinces: Punjab, Sindh, Balochistan, and Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa, and Azad Kashmir. Each province has its own style of "Shalwar Kameez". Pakistanis wear clothes in a range of exquisite colours and designs and in type of fabric (silk, chiffon, cotton, etc.). Besides the national dress, domestically tailored suits and neckties are often worn by men, and are customary in offices, schools, and social gatherings.The fashion industry has flourished in the changing environment of the fashion world. Since Pakistan came into being, its fashion has evolved in different phases and developed a unique identity. Today, Pakistani fashion is a combination of traditional and modern dress and has become a mark of Pakistani culture. Despite modern trends, regional and traditional forms of dress have developed their own significance as a symbol of native tradition. This regional fashion continues to evolve into both more modern and purer forms. The Pakistan Fashion Design Council based in Lahore organizes PFDC Fashion Week and the Fashion Pakistan Council based in Karachi organizes Fashion Pakistan Week. Pakistan's first fashion week was held in November 2009.The private print media, state-owned Pakistan Television Corporation (PTV), and Pakistan Broadcasting Corporation (PBC) for radio were the dominant media outlets until the beginning of the 21st century. Pakistan now has a large network of domestic, privately owned 24-hour news media and television channels. A 2016 report by the Reporters Without Borders ranked Pakistan 147th on the Press Freedom Index, while at the same time terming the Pakistani media "among the freest in Asia when it comes to covering the squabbling among politicians." The BBC terms the Pakistani media "among the most outspoken in South Asia". Pakistani media has also played a vital role in exposing corruption.The Lollywood, Kariwood, Punjabi, and Pashto film industry is based in Karachi, Lahore, and Peshawar. While Bollywood films were banned from public cinemas from 1965 until 2008, they have remained an important part of popular culture. In contrast to the ailing Pakistani film industry, Urdu televised dramas and theatrical performances continue to be popular, as many entertainment media outlets air them regularly. Urdu dramas dominate the television entertainment industry, which has launched critically acclaimed miniseries and featured popular actors and actresses since the 1990s. In the 1960s–1970s, pop music and disco (1970s) dominated the country's music industry. In the 1980s–1990s, British influenced rock music appeared and jolted the country's entertainment industry. In the 2000s, heavy metal music gained popular and critical acclaim.Pakistani music ranges from diverse forms of provincial folk music and traditional styles such as Qawwali and Ghazal Gayaki to modern musical forms that fuse traditional and western music. Pakistan has many famous folk singers. The arrival of Afghan refugees in the western provinces has stimulated interest in Pashto music, although there has been intolerance of it in some places.According to the UN Department of Economic and Social Affairs, Pakistan has the sixth-largest diaspora in the world. Statistics gathered by the Pakistani government show that there are around 7 million Pakistanis residing abroad, with the vast majority living in the Middle East, Europe, and North America. Pakistan ranks 10th in the world for remittances sent home. The largest inflow of remittances, , is from Saudi Arabia, amounting to $5.9 billion. The term "Overseas Pakistani" is officially recognised by the Government of Pakistan. The Ministry of Overseas Pakistanis was established in 2008 to deal exclusively with all matters of overseas Pakistanis such as attending to their needs and problems, developing projects for their welfare, and working for resolution of their problems and issues. Overseas Pakistanis are the second-largest source of foreign exchange remittances to Pakistan after exports. Over the last several years, home remittances have maintained a steadily rising trend, with a more than 100% increase from US$8.9 billion in 2009–10 to US$19.9 billion in 2015–16.The Overseas Pakistani Division (OPD) was created in September 2004 within the Ministry of Labour (MoL). It has since recognised the importance of overseas Pakistanis and their contribution to the nation's economy. Together with Community Welfare Attaches (CWAs) and the Overseas Pakistanis Foundation (OPF), the OPD is making efforts to improve the welfare of Pakistanis who reside abroad. The division aims to provide better services through improved facilities at airports, and suitable schemes for housing, education, and health care. It also facilitates the reintegration into society of returning overseas Pakistanis. Notable members of the Pakistani diaspora include London Mayor Sadiq Khan, UK Cabinet Member Sajid Javid, former UK Conservative Party Chair Baroness Warsi, singers Zayn Malik and Nadia Ali, MIT Physics Professor Dr. Nergis Mavalvala, actors Riz Ahmed and Kumail Nanjiani, businessmen Shahid Khan and Sir Anwar Pervez, Boston University professors Adil Najam and Hamid Nawab, Texas A&M Professor Muhammad Suhail Zubairy, Yale Professor Sara Suleri, UC San Diego Professor Farooq Azam, and historian Ayesha Jalal.Pakistan has literature in Urdu, Sindhi, Punjabi, Pashto, Baluchi, Persian, English, and many other languages. The Pakistan Academy of Letters is a large literary community that promotes literature and poetry in Pakistan and abroad. The National Library publishes and promotes literature in the country. Before the 19th century, Pakistani literature consisted mainly of lyric and religious poetry and mystical and folkloric works. During the colonial period, native literary figures were influenced by western literary realism and took up increasingly varied topics and narrative forms. Prose fiction is now very popular.The national poet of Pakistan, Muhammad Iqbal, wrote poetry in Urdu and Persian. He was a strong proponent of the political and spiritual revival of Islamic civilisation and encouraged Muslims all over the world to bring about a successful revolution. Well-known figures in contemporary Pakistani Urdu literature include Josh Malihabadi Faiz Ahmed Faiz and Saadat Hasan Manto. Sadequain and Gulgee are known for their calligraphy and paintings. The Sufi poets Shah Abdul Latif, Bulleh Shah, Mian Muhammad Bakhsh, and Khawaja Farid enjoy considerable popularity in Pakistan. Mirza Kalich Beg has been termed the father of modern Sindhi prose. Historically, philosophical development in the country was dominated by Muhammad Iqbal, Sir Syed Ahmad Khan, Muhammad Asad, Maududi, and Mohammad Ali Johar.Ideas from British and American philosophy greatly shaped philosophical development in Pakistan. Analysts such as M. M. Sharif and Zafar Hassan established the first major Pakistani philosophical movement in 1947. After the 1971 war, philosophers such as Jalaludin Abdur Rahim, Gianchandani, and Malik Khalid incorporated Marxism into Pakistan's philosophical thinking. Influential work by Manzoor Ahmad, Jon Elia, Hasan Askari Rizvi, and Abdul Khaliq brought mainstream social, political, and analytical philosophy to the fore in academia. Works by Noam Chomsky have influenced philosophical ideas in various fields of social and political philosophy.Four periods are recognised in Pakistani architecture: pre-Islamic, Islamic, colonial, and post-colonial. With the beginning of the Indus civilization around the middle of the 3rd millennium BCE, an advanced urban culture developed for the first time in the region, with large buildings, some of which survive to this day. Mohenjo Daro, Harappa, and Kot Diji are among the pre-Islamic settlements that are now tourist attractions. The rise of Buddhism and the influence of Greek civilisation led to the development of a Greco-Buddhist style, starting from the 1st century CE. The high point of this era was the Gandhara style. An example of Buddhist architecture is the ruins of the Buddhist monastery Takht-i-Bahi in Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa.The arrival of Islam in what is today Pakistan meant the sudden end of Buddhist architecture in the area and a smooth transition to the predominantly pictureless Islamic architecture. The most important Indo-Islamic-style building still standing is the tomb of the Shah Rukn-i-Alam in Multan. During the Mughal era, design elements of Persian-Islamic architecture were fused with and often produced playful forms of Hindustani art. Lahore, as the occasional residence of Mughal rulers, contains many important buildings from the empire. Most prominent among them are the Badshahi Mosque, the fortress of Lahore with the famous Alamgiri Gate, the colourful, Mughal-style Wazir Khan Mosque, the Shalimar Gardens in Lahore, and the Shahjahan Mosque in Thatta. In the British colonial period, predominantly functional buildings of the Indo-European representative style developed from a mixture of European and Indian-Islamic components. Post-colonial national identity is expressed in modern structures such as the Faisal Mosque, the Minar-e-Pakistan, and the Mazar-e-Quaid. Several examples of architectural infrastructure demonstrating the influence of British design can be found in Lahore, Peshawar, and Karachi.Pakistani cuisine is similar to that of other regions of South Asia, with some of it being originated from the royal kitchens of 16th-century Mughal emperors. Most of those dishes have their roots in British, Indian, Central Asian and Middle Eastern cuisine. Unlike Middle Eastern cuisine, Pakistani cooking uses large quantities of spices, herbs, and seasoning. Garlic, ginger, turmeric, red chili, and garam masala are used in most dishes, and home cooking regularly includes curry, "roti", a thin flatbread made from wheat, is a staple food, usually served with curry, meat, vegetables, and lentils. Rice is also common; it is served plain, fried with spices, and in sweet dishes.Lassi is a traditional drink in the Punjab region. Black tea with milk and sugar is popular throughout Pakistan and is consumed daily by most of the population. Sohan halwa is a popular sweet dish from the southern region of Punjab province and is enjoyed all over Pakistan.Most sports played in Pakistan originated and were substantially developed by athletes and sports fans from the United Kingdom who introduced them during the British Raj. Field hockey is the national sport of Pakistan; it has won three gold medals in the Olympic Games held in 1960, 1968, and 1984. Pakistan has also won the Hockey World Cup a record four times, held in 1971, 1978, 1982, and 1994.Cricket, however, is the most popular game across the country. The country has had an array of success in the sport over the years, and has the distinct achievement of having won each of the major ICC international cricket tournaments: ICC Cricket World Cup, ICC World Twenty20, and ICC Champions Trophy; as well as the ICC Test Championship. The cricket team (known as "Shaheen") won the Cricket World Cup held in 1992; it was runner-up once, in 1999. Pakistan was runner-up in the inaugural World Twenty20 (2007) in South Africa and won the World Twenty20 in England in 2009. In March 2009, militants attacked the touring Sri Lankan cricket team, after which no international cricket was played in Pakistan until May 2015, when the Zimbabwean team agreed to a tour. Pakistan also won the 2017 ICC Champions Trophy by defeating arch-rivals India in the final.Pakistan Super League is one of the largest cricket leagues of the world with a brand value of about .Association Football is the second most played sports in Pakistan and it is organised and regulated by the Pakistan Football Federation. Football in Pakistan is as old as the country itself. Shortly after the creation of Pakistan in 1947, the Pakistan Football Federation (PFF) was created, and Muhammad Ali Jinnah became its first Patron-in-Chief. The highest football division in Pakistan is the Pakistan Premier League. Pakistan is known as one of the best manufacturer of the official FIFA World Cup ball. The best football players to play for Pakistan are Kaleemullah, Zesh Rehman, Muhammad Essa, Haroon Yousaf, and Muhammad Adil.Pakistan has hosted or co-hosted several international sporting events: the 1989 and 2004 South Asian Games; the 1984, 1993, 1996 and 2003 World Squash Championships; the 1987 and 1996 Cricket World Cup; and the 1990 Hockey World Cup.Pakistan is set to host the 2021 South Asian Games.	[ "Nawaz Sharif", "Nasir-ul-Mulk", "Shahid Khaqan Abbasi", "Shehbaz Sharif", "Imran Khan" ]
Who was the head of Pakistan in Apr 01, 2013?	April 01, 2013	{ "text": [ "Mir Hazar Khan Khoso" ] }	L2_Q843_P6_0	Imran Khan is the head of the government of Pakistan from Aug, 2018 to Apr, 2022. Mir Hazar Khan Khoso is the head of the government of Pakistan from Mar, 2013 to Jun, 2013. Shehbaz Sharif is the head of the government of Pakistan from Apr, 2022 to Dec, 2022. Shahid Khaqan Abbasi is the head of the government of Pakistan from Aug, 2017 to May, 2018. Nawaz Sharif is the head of the government of Pakistan from Jun, 2013 to Jul, 2017. Nasir-ul-Mulk is the head of the government of Pakistan from Jun, 2018 to Aug, 2018.	PakistanPakistan, officially the Islamic Republic of Pakistan, is a country in South Asia. It is the world's fifth-most populous country, with a population exceeding 225.2 million, and has the world's second-largest Muslim population. Pakistan is the 33rd-largest country by area, spanning . It has a coastline along the Arabian Sea and Gulf of Oman in the south, and is bordered by India to the east, Afghanistan to the west, Iran to the southwest, and China to the northeast. It is separated narrowly from Tajikistan by Afghanistan's Wakhan Corridor in the north, and also shares a maritime border with Oman.Pakistan is the site of several ancient cultures, including the 8,500-year-old Neolithic site of Mehrgarh in Balochistan, and the Indus Valley Civilisation of the Bronze Age, the most extensive of the civilisations of the Old World. The region that comprises the modern state of Pakistan was the realm of multiple empires and dynasties, including the Achaemenid; briefly that of Alexander the Great; the Seleucid, the Maurya, the Kushan, the Gupta; the Umayyad Caliphate in its southern regions, the Hindu Shahi, the Ghaznavids, the Delhi Sultanate, the Mughals, the Durranis, the Sikh Empire, British East India Company rule, and most recently, the British Indian Empire from 1858 to 1947.Spurred by the Pakistan Movement, which sought a homeland for the Muslims of British India, and election victories in 1946 by the All-India Muslim League, Pakistan gained independence in 1947 after the Partition of the British Indian Empire, which awarded separate statehood to its Muslim-majority regions and was accompanied by an unparalleled mass migration and loss of life. Initially a Dominion of the British Commonwealth, Pakistan officially drafted its constitution in 1956, and emerged as a declared Islamic republic. In 1971, the exclave of East Pakistan seceded as the new country of Bangladesh after a nine-month-long civil war. In the following four decades, Pakistan has been ruled by governments whose descriptions, although complex, commonly alternated between civilian and military, democratic and authoritarian, relatively secular and Islamist. Pakistan elected a civilian government in 2008, and in 2010 adopted a parliamentary system with periodic elections.Pakistan is a middle power, and has the world's sixth-largest standing armed forces. It is a declared nuclear-weapons state, and is ranked amongst the emerging and growth-leading economies, with a large and rapidly-growing middle class. Pakistan's political history since independence has been characterized by periods of significant economic and military growth as well those of political and economic instability. It is an ethnically and linguistically diverse country, with similarly diverse geography and wildlife. However, the country continues to face challenges, including poverty, illiteracy, corruption and terrorism. Pakistan is a member of the United Nations, the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation, the Organisation of Islamic Cooperation, the British Commonwealth of Nations, the South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation, the Islamic Military Counter-Terrorism Coalition, and is designated as a major non-NATO ally by the United States.The name "Pakistan" means literally "a land abounding in the pure" or "a land in which the pure abound", in Urdu and Persian. It references the word ("pāk"), meaning "pure" in Persian and Pashto. The suffix (transliterated in English as stân after stem word ending in a vowel; estân or istân after a stem ending in a consonant) is from Persian, and means "a place abounding in" or "a place where anything abounds".The name of the country was coined in 1933 by Choudhry Rahmat Ali, a Pakistan Movement activist, who published it in a pamphlet "Now or Never", using it as an acronym ("thirty million Muslim brethren who live in PAKISTAN"), and referring to the names of the five northern regions of the British Raj: "P"unjab, "A"fghania, "K"ashmir, "S"indh, and Baluchis"tan".Some of the earliest ancient human civilisations in South Asia originated from areas encompassing present-day Pakistan. The earliest known inhabitants in the region were Soanian during the Lower Paleolithic, of whom stone tools have been found in the Soan Valley of Punjab. The Indus region, which covers most of present day Pakistan, was the site of several successive ancient cultures including the Neolithic Mehrgarh and the Bronze Age Indus Valley Civilisation (2,800–1,800 BCE) at Harappa and Mohenjo-Daro.The Vedic period (1500–500 BCE) was characterised by an Indo-Aryan culture; during this period the Vedas, the oldest scriptures associated with Hinduism, were composed, and this culture later became well established in the region. Multan was an important Hindu pilgrimage centre. The Vedic civilisation flourished in the ancient Gandhāran city of Takṣaśilā, now Taxila in the Punjab, which was founded around 1000 BCE. Successive ancient empires and kingdoms ruled the region: the Persian Achaemenid Empire (around 519 BCE), Alexander the Great's empire in 326 BCE and the Maurya Empire, founded by Chandragupta Maurya and extended by Ashoka the Great, until 185 BCE. The Indo-Greek Kingdom founded by Demetrius of Bactria (180–165 BCE) included Gandhara and Punjab and reached its greatest extent under Menander (165–150 BCE), prospering the Greco-Buddhist culture in the region. Taxila had one of the earliest universities and centres of higher education in the world, which was established during the late Vedic period in 6th century BCE. The school consisted of several monasteries without large dormitories or lecture halls where the religious instruction was provided on an individualistic basis. The ancient university was documented by the invading forces of Alexander the Great and was also recorded by Chinese pilgrims in the 4th or 5th century CE.At its zenith, the Rai Dynasty (489–632 CE) of Sindh ruled this region and the surrounding territories. The Pala Dynasty was the last Buddhist empire, which, under Dharmapala and Devapala, stretched across South Asia from what is now Bangladesh through Northern India to Pakistan.The Arab conqueror Muhammad bin Qasim conquered Sindh in 711 CE. The Pakistan government's official chronology claims this as the time when the foundation of Pakistan was laid but the concept of "Pakistan" arrived in the 19th century. The Early Medieval period (642–1219 CE) witnessed the spread of Islam in the region. During this period, Sufi missionaries played a pivotal role in converting a majority of the regional Buddhist and Hindu population to Islam. Upon the defeat of the Turk and Hindu Shahi dynasties which governed the Kabul Valley, Gandhara (present-day Khyber Pakhtunkwa), and western Punjab in the 7th to 11th centuries CE, several successive Muslim empires ruled over the region, including the Ghaznavid Empire (975–1187 CE), the Ghorid Kingdom, and the Delhi Sultanate (1206–1526 CE). The Lodi dynasty, the last of the Delhi Sultanate, was replaced by the Mughal Empire (1526–1857 CE).The Mughals introduced Persian literature and high culture, establishing the roots of Indo-Persian culture in the region. In the region of modern-day Pakistan, key cities during the Mughal period were Lahore and Thatta, both of which were chosen as the site of impressive Mughal buildings. In the early 16th century, the region remained under the Mughal Empire ruled by Muslim emperors. By the early 18th century, increasing European influence contributed to the slow disintegration of the Mughal Empire as the lines between commercial and political dominance became increasingly blurred.During this time, the English East India Company had established coastal outposts. Control over the seas, greater resources, technology, and British military protection led the Company to increasingly flex its military muscle, allowing the Company to gain control over the subcontinent by 1765 and sideline European competitors. Expanding access beyond Bengal and the subsequent increased strength and size of its army enabled it to annex or subdue most of region by the 1820s. Many historians see this as the start of the region's colonial period. By this time, with its economic power severely curtailed by the British parliament and itself effectively made an arm of British administration, the Company began more deliberately to enter non-economic arenas such as education, social reform, and culture. Such reforms included the enforcement of the English Education Act in 1835 and the introduction of the Indian Civil Service (ICS). Traditional "madrasahs"—primary institutions of higher learning for Muslims in the subcontinent—were no longer supported by the English Crown, and nearly all of the "madrasahs" lost their financial endowment.The gradual decline of the Mughal Empire in the early 18th century enabled the Sikh Empire to control larger areas until the British East India Company gained ascendancy over South Asia. A rebellion in 1857 called the Sepoy mutiny of Bengal was the region's major armed struggle against the British Empire and Queen Victoria. Divergence in the relationship between Hinduism and Islam created a major rift in British India that led to motivated religious violence in British India. The language controversy further escalated the tensions between Hindus and Muslims. The Hindu renaissance witnessed an awakening of intellectualism in traditional Hinduism and saw the emergence of more assertive influence in the social and political spheres in British India. A Muslim intellectual movement, founded by Sir Syed Ahmed Khan to counter the Hindu renaissance, envisioned, as well as advocated for the two-nation theory, and led to the creation of the All-India Muslim League in 1906. In contrast to the Indian National Congress's anti-British efforts, the Muslim League was a pro-British movement whose political program inherited the British values that would shape Pakistan's future civil society. In events during World War I, British Intelligence foiled an anti-English conspiracy involving the nexus of Congress and the German Empire. The largely non-violent independence struggle led by the Indian Congress engaged millions of protesters in mass campaigns of civil disobedience in the 1920s and 1930s against the British Empire.The Muslim League slowly rose to mass popularity in the 1930s amid fears of under-representation and neglect of British Muslims in politics. In his presidential address of 29 December 1930, Allama Iqbal called for "the amalgamation of North-West Muslim-majority Indian states" consisting of Punjab, North-West Frontier Province, Sind, and Baluchistan. The perceived neglect of Muslim interests by Congress led British provincial governments during the period of 1937–39 convinced Muhammad Ali Jinnah, the founder of Pakistan to espouse the two-nation theory and led the Muslim League to adopt the Lahore Resolution of 1940 presented by Sher-e-Bangla A.K. Fazlul Haque, popularly known as the Pakistan Resolution. In World War II, Jinnah and British-educated founding fathers in the Muslim League supported the United Kingdom's war efforts, countering opposition against it whilst working towards Sir Syed's vision.The 1946 elections resulted in the Muslim League winning 90 percent of the seats reserved for Muslims. Thus, the 1946 election was effectively a plebiscite in which the Indian Muslims were to vote on the creation of Pakistan, a plebiscite won by the Muslim League. This victory was assisted by the support given to the Muslim League by the support of the landowners of Sindh and Punjab. The Congress, which initially denied the Muslim League's claim of being the sole representative of Indian Muslims, was now forced to recognise the fact. The British had no alternative except to take Jinnah's views into account as he had emerged as the sole spokesperson of the entirety of British India's Muslims. However, the British did not want colonial India to be partitioned, and in one last effort to prevent it, they devised the Cabinet Mission plan.As the cabinet mission failed, the British government announced its intention to end the British Rule in 1946–47. Nationalists in British India—including Jawaharlal Nehru and Abul Kalam Azad of Congress, Jinnah of the All-India Muslim League, and Master Tara Singh representing the Sikhs—agreed to the proposed terms of transfer of power and independence in June 1947 with the Viceroy of India, Lord Mountbatten of Burma. As the United Kingdom agreed to the partitioning of India in 1947, the modern state of Pakistan was established on 14 August 1947 , amalgamating the Muslim-majority eastern and northwestern regions of British India. It comprised the provinces of Balochistan, East Bengal, the North-West Frontier Province, West Punjab, and Sindh.In the riots that accompanied the partition in Punjab Province, it is believed that between 200,000 and 2,000,000 people were killed in what some have described as a retributive genocide between the religions while 50,000 Muslim women were abducted and raped by Hindu and Sikh men, 33,000 Hindu and Sikh women also experienced the same fate at the hands of Muslims. Around 6.5 million Muslims moved from India to West Pakistan and 4.7 million Hindus and Sikhs moved from West Pakistan to India. It was the largest mass migration in human history. A subsequent dispute over the princely state of Jammu and Kashmir eventually sparked the Indo-Pakistani War of 1947–1948.After independence in 1947, Jinnah, the President of the Muslim League, became the nation's first Governor-General as well as the first President-Speaker of the Parliament, but he died of tuberculosis on 11 September 1948. Meanwhile, Pakistan's founding fathers agreed to appoint Liaquat Ali Khan, the secretary-general of the party, the nation's first Prime Minister. With dominion status in the Commonwealth of Nations, independent Pakistan had two British monarchs before it became a republic.The creation of Pakistan was never fully accepted by many British leaders, among them Lord Mountbatten. Mountbatten clearly expressed his lack of support and faith in the Muslim League's idea of Pakistan. Jinnah refused Mountbatten's offer to serve as Governor-General of Pakistan. When Mountbatten was asked by Collins and Lapierre if he would have sabotaged Pakistan had he known that Jinnah was dying of tuberculosis, he replied 'most probably'.Maulana Shabbir Ahmad Usmani, a respected Deobandi "alim" (scholar) who occupied the position of Shaykh al-Islam in Pakistan in 1949, and Maulana Mawdudi of Jamaat-i-Islami played a pivotal role in the demand for an Islamic constitution. Mawdudi demanded that the Constituent Assembly make an explicit declaration affirming the "supreme sovereignty of God" and the supremacy of the "shariah" in Pakistan.A significant result of the efforts of the Jamaat-i-Islami and the "ulama" was the passage of the Objectives Resolution in March 1949. The Objectives Resolution, which Liaquat Ali Khan called the second most important step in Pakistan's history, declared that "sovereignty over the entire universe belongs to God Almighty alone and the authority which He has delegated to the State of Pakistan through its people for being exercised within the limits prescribed by Him is a sacred trust". The Objectives Resolution has been incorporated as a preamble to the constitutions of 1956, 1962, and 1973.Democracy was stalled by the martial law that had been enforced by President Iskander Mirza, who was replaced by the army chief, General Ayub Khan. After adopting a presidential system in 1962, the country experienced exceptional growth until a second war with India in 1965 that led to an economic downturn and wide-scale public disapproval in 1967. Consolidating control from Ayub Khan in 1969, President Yahya Khan had to deal with a devastating cyclone that caused 500,000 deaths in East Pakistan.In 1970 Pakistan held its first democratic elections since independence, meant to mark a transition from military rule to democracy, but after the East Pakistani Awami League won against the Pakistan Peoples Party (PPP), Yahya Khan and the military establishment refused to hand over power. Operation Searchlight, a military crackdown on the Bengali nationalist movement, led to a declaration of independence and the waging of a war of liberation by the Bengali Mukti Bahini forces in East Pakistan, which in West Pakistan was described as a civil war as opposed to a war of liberation.Independent researchers estimate that between 300,000 and 500,000 civilians died during this period while the Bangladesh government puts the number of dead at three million, a figure that is now nearly universally regarded as excessively inflated. Some academics such as Rudolph Rummel and Rounaq Jahan say both sides committed genocide; others such as Richard Sisson and Leo E. Rose believe there was no genocide. In response to India's support for the insurgency in East Pakistan, preemptive strikes on India by Pakistan's air force, navy, and marines sparked a conventional war in 1971 that resulted in an Indian victory and East Pakistan gaining independence as Bangladesh.With Pakistan surrendering in the war, Yahya Khan was replaced by Zulfikar Ali Bhutto as president; the country worked towards promulgating its constitution and putting the country on the road to democracy. Democratic rule resumed from 1972 to 1977—an era of self-consciousness, intellectual leftism, nationalism, and nationwide reconstruction. In 1972 Pakistan embarked on an ambitious plan to develop its nuclear deterrence capability with the goal of preventing any foreign invasion; the country's first nuclear power plant was inaugurated in that same year. Accelerated in response to India's first nuclear test in 1974, this crash program was completed in 1979.Democracy ended with a military coup in 1977 against the leftist PPP, which saw General Zia-ul-Haq become the president in 1978. From 1977 to 1988, President Zia's corporatisation and economic Islamisation initiatives led to Pakistan becoming one of the fastest-growing economies in South Asia. While building up the country's nuclear program, increasing Islamisation, and the rise of a homegrown conservative philosophy, Pakistan helped subsidise and distribute US resources to factions of the mujahideen against the USSR's intervention in communist Afghanistan. Pakistan's North-West Frontier Province became a base for the anti-Soviet Afghan fighters, with the province's influential Deobandi ulama playing a significant role in encouraging and organising the 'jihad'.President Zia died in a plane crash in 1988, and Benazir Bhutto, daughter of Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, was elected as the country's first female Prime Minister. The PPP was followed by conservative Pakistan Muslim League (N), and over the next decade the leaders of the two parties fought for power, alternating in office while the country's situation worsened; economic indicators fell sharply, in contrast to the 1980s. This period is marked by prolonged stagflation, instability, corruption, nationalism, geopolitical rivalry with India, and the clash of left wing-right wing ideologies. As PML (N) secured a supermajority in elections in 1997, Sharif authorised nuclear testings (See:"Chagai-I" and "Chagai-II"), as a retaliation to the second nuclear tests ordered by India, led by Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee in May 1998.Military tension between the two countries in the Kargil district led to the Kargil War of 1999, and turmoil in civic-military relations allowed General Pervez Musharraf to take over through a bloodless coup d'état. Musharraf governed Pakistan as chief executive from 1999 to 2001 and as President from 2001 to 2008—a period of enlightenment, social liberalism, extensive economic reforms, and direct involvement in the US-led war on terrorism. When the National Assembly historically completed its first full five-year term on 15 November 2007, the new elections were called by the Election Commission.After the assassination of Benazir Bhutto in 2007, the PPP secured the most votes in the elections of 2008, appointing party member Yousaf Raza Gillani as Prime Minister. Threatened with impeachment, President Musharraf resigned on 18 August 2008, and was succeeded by Asif Ali Zardari. Clashes with the judicature prompted Gillani's disqualification from the Parliament and as the Prime Minister in June 2012. By its own financial calculations, Pakistan's involvement in the war on terrorism has cost up to $118 billion, sixty thousand casualties and more than 1.8 million displaced civilians. The general election held in 2013 saw the PML (N) almost achieve a supermajority, following which Nawaz Sharif was elected as the Prime Minister, returning to the post for the third time in fourteen years, in a democratic transition. In 2018, Imran Khan (the chairman of PTI) won the 2018 Pakistan general election with 116 general seats and became the 22nd Prime Minister of Pakistan in election of National Assembly of Pakistan for Prime Minister by getting 176 votes against Shehbaz Sharif (the chairman of PML (N)) who got 96 votes.Pakistan is the only country to have been created in the name of Islam. The idea of Pakistan, which had received overwhelming popular support among Indian Muslims, especially those in the provinces of British India where Muslims were in a minority such as the United Provinces, was articulated in terms of an Islamic state by the Muslim League leadership, the ulama (Islamic clergy) and Jinnah. Jinnah had developed a close association with the "ulama" and upon his death was described by one such "alim", Maulana Shabbir Ahmad Usmani, as the greatest Muslim after Aurangzeb and as someone who desired to unite the Muslims of the world under the banner of Islam.The Objectives Resolution in March 1949, which declared God as the sole sovereign over the entire universe, represented the first formal step to transform Pakistan into an Islamic state. Muslim League leader Chaudhry Khaliquzzaman asserted that Pakistan could only truly become an Islamic state after bringing all believers of Islam into a single political unit. Keith Callard, one of the earliest scholars on Pakistani politics, observed that Pakistanis believed in the essential unity of purpose and outlook in the Muslim world and assumed that Muslim from other countries would share their views on the relationship between religion and nationality.However, Pakistan's pan-Islamist sentiments for a united Islamic bloc called Islamistan were not shared by other Muslim governments, although Islamists such as the Grand Mufti of Palestine, Al-Haj Amin al-Husseini, and leaders of the Muslim Brotherhood, became drawn to the country. Pakistan's desire for an international organization of Muslim countries was fulfilled in the 1970s when the Organization of Islamic Conference (OIC) was formed.The strongest opposition to the Islamist ideological paradigm being imposed on the state came from the Bengali Muslims of East Pakistan whose educated class, according to a survey by social scientist Nasim Ahmad Jawed, preferred secularism and focused on ethnic identity unlike educated West Pakistanis who tended to prefer an Islamic identity. The Islamist party Jamaat-e-Islami considered Pakistan to be an Islamic state and believed Bengali nationalism to be unacceptable. In the 1971 conflict over East Pakistan, the Jamaat-e-Islami fought the Bengali nationalists on the Pakistan Army's side.After Pakistan's first ever general elections, the 1973 Constitution was created by an elected Parliament. The Constitution declared Pakistan an Islamic Republic and Islam as the state religion. It also stated that all laws would have to be brought into accordance with the injunctions of Islam as laid down in the Quran and Sunnah and that no law repugnant to such injunctions could be enacted. The 1973 Constitution also created certain institutions such as the Shariat Court and the Council of Islamic Ideology to channel the interpretation and application of Islam.Pakistan's leftist Prime Minister Zulfikar Ali Bhutto faced vigorous opposition which coalesced into a movement united under the revivalist banner of "Nizam-e-Mustafa" ("Rule of the Prophet") which aimed to establish an Islamic state based on Sharia laws. Bhutto agreed to some Islamist demands before being overthrown in a coup.In 1977, after taking power from Bhutto in a coup d'état, General Zia-ul-Haq, who came from a religious background, committed himself to establishing an Islamic state and enforcing "sharia" law. Zia established separate Shariat judicial courts and court benches to judge legal cases using Islamic doctrine. Zia bolstered the influence of the "ulama" (Islamic clergy) and the Islamic parties. Zia-ul-Haq forged a strong alliance between the military and Deobandi institutions and even though most Barelvi ulama and only a few Deobandi scholars had supported Pakistan's creation, Islamic state politics came to be mostly in favour of Deobandi (and later Ahl-e-Hadith/Salafi) institutions instead of Barelvi. Sectarian tensions increased with Zia's anti-Shia policies.According to a Pew Research Center (PEW) opinion poll, a majority of Pakistanis support making Sharia the official law of the land. In a survey of several Muslim countries, PEW also found that Pakistanis tend to identify with their religion more than their nationality in contrast to Muslims in other nations such as Egypt, Indonesia and Jordan.The geography and climate of Pakistan are extremely diverse, and the country is home to a wide variety of wildlife. Pakistan covers an area of , approximately equal to the combined land areas of France and the United Kingdom. It is the 33rd-largest nation by total area, although this ranking varies depending on how the disputed territory of Kashmir is counted. Pakistan has a coastline along the Arabian Sea and the Gulf of Oman in the south and land borders of in total: with Afghanistan, with China, with India and with Iran. It shares a marine border with Oman, and is separated from Tajikistan by the cold, narrow Wakhan Corridor. Pakistan occupies a geopolitically important location at the crossroads of South Asia, the Middle East, and Central Asia.Geologically, Pakistan is located in the Indus–Tsangpo Suture Zone and overlaps the Indian tectonic plate in its Sindh and Punjab provinces; Balochistan and most of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa are within the Eurasian plate, mainly on the Iranian plateau. Gilgit–Baltistan and Azad Kashmir lie along the edge of the Indian plate and hence are prone to violent earthquakes. This region has the highest rates of seismicity and the largest earthquakes in the Himalaya region. Ranging from the coastal areas of the south to the glaciated mountains of the north, Pakistan's landscapes vary from plains to deserts, forests, hills, and plateaus.Pakistan is divided into three major geographic areas: the northern highlands, the Indus River plain, and the Balochistan Plateau. The northern highlands contain the Karakoram, Hindu Kush, and Pamir mountain ranges (see mountains of Pakistan), which contain some of the world's highest peaks, including five of the fourteen eight-thousanders (mountain peaks over ), which attract adventurers and mountaineers from all over the world, notably K2 () and Nanga Parbat (). The Balochistan Plateau lies in the west and the Thar Desert in the east. The Indus River and its tributaries flow through the country from the Kashmir region to the Arabian Sea. There is an expanse of alluvial plains along it in the Punjab and Sindh.The climate varies from tropical to temperate, with arid conditions in the coastal south. There is a monsoon season with frequent flooding due to heavy rainfall, and a dry season with significantly less rainfall or none at all. There are four distinct seasons in Pakistan: a cool, dry winter from December through February; a hot, dry spring from March through May; the summer rainy season, or southwest monsoon period, from June through September; and the retreating monsoon period of October and November. Rainfall varies greatly from year to year, and patterns of alternate flooding and drought are common.The diversity of the landscape and climate in Pakistan allows a wide variety of trees and plants to flourish. The forests range from coniferous alpine and subalpine trees such as spruce, pine, and deodar cedar in the extreme northern mountains to deciduous trees in most of the country (for example, the mulberry-like shisham found in the Sulaiman Mountains), to palms such as coconut and date in the southern Punjab, southern Balochistan, and all of Sindh. The western hills are home to juniper, tamarisk, coarse grasses, and scrub plants. Mangrove forests form much of the coastal wetlands along the coast in the south.Coniferous forests are found at altitudes ranging from in most of the northern and northwestern highlands. In the xeric regions of Balochistan, date palm and "Ephedra" are common. In most of the Punjab and Sindh, the Indus plains support tropical and subtropical dry and moist broadleaf forest as well as tropical and xeric shrublands. These forests are mostly of mulberry, acacia, and eucalyptus. About 2.2% or of Pakistan was forested in 2010.The fauna of Pakistan also reflects the country's varied climate. Around 668 bird species are found there, including crows, sparrows, mynas, hawks, falcons, and eagles. Palas, Kohistan, has a significant population of western tragopan. Many birds sighted in Pakistan are migratory, coming from Europe, Central Asia, and India.The southern plains are home to mongooses, small Indian civet, hares, the Asiatic jackal, the Indian pangolin, the jungle cat, and the desert cat. There are mugger crocodiles in the Indus, and wild boar, deer, porcupines, and small rodents in the surrounding areas. The sandy scrublands of central Pakistan are home to Asiatic jackals, striped hyenas, wildcats, and leopards. The lack of vegetative cover, the severe climate, and the impact of grazing on the deserts have left wild animals in a precarious position. The chinkara is the only animal that can still be found in significant numbers in Cholistan. A small number of nilgai are found along the Pakistan–India border and in some parts of Cholistan. A wide variety of animals live in the mountainous north, including the Marco Polo sheep, the urial (a subspecies of wild sheep), the markhor goat, the ibex goat, the Asian black bear, and the Himalayan brown bear. Among the rare animals found in the area are the snow leopard and the blind Indus river dolphin, of which there are believed to be about 1,100 remaining, protected at the Indus River Dolphin Reserve in Sindh. In total, 174 mammals, 177 reptiles, 22 amphibians, 198 freshwater fish species and 5,000 species of invertebrates (including insects) have been recorded in Pakistan.The flora and fauna of Pakistan suffer from a number of problems. Pakistan has the second-highest rate of deforestation in the world, which, along with hunting and pollution, has had adverse effects on the ecosystem. It had a 2019 Forest Landscape Integrity Index mean score of 7.42/10, ranking it 41st globally out of 172 countries. The government has established a large number of protected areas, wildlife sanctuaries, and game reserves to address these issues.Pakistan's political experience is essentially related to the struggle of Indian Muslims to regain the power they lost to British colonisation. Pakistan is a democratic parliamentary federal republic, with Islam as the state religion. The first constitution was adopted in 1956 but suspended by Ayub Khan in 1958, who replaced it with the second constitution in 1962. A complete and comprehensive constitution was adopted in 1973, it was suspended by Zia-ul-Haq in 1977 but reinstated in 1985. This constitution is the country's most important document, laying the foundations of the current government. The Pakistani military establishment has played an influential role in mainstream politics throughout Pakistan's political history. The periods 1958–1971, 1977–1988, and 1999–2008 saw military coups that resulted in the imposition of martial law and military commanders who governed as de facto presidents. Today Pakistan has a multi-party parliamentary system with clear division of powers and checks and balances among the branches of government. The first successful democratic transition occurred in May 2013. Politics in Pakistan is centred on, and dominated by, a homegrown social philosophy comprising a blend of ideas from socialism, conservatism, and the third way. As of the general elections held in 2013, the three main political parties in the country are: the centre-right conservative Pakistan Muslim League-N; the centre-left socialist PPP; and the centrist and third-way Pakistan Movement for Justice (PTI).Since Independence, Pakistan has attempted to balance its relations with foreign nations. Pakistan is a strong ally of China, with both countries placing considerable importance on the maintenance of an extremely close and supportive special relationship. It is also a major non-NATO ally of the United States in the war against terrorism—a status achieved in 2004. Pakistan's foreign policy and geostrategy mainly focus on the economy and security against threats to its national identity and territorial integrity, and on the cultivation of close relations with other Muslim countries.The Kashmir conflict remains the major point of contention between Pakistan and India; three of their four wars were fought over this territory. Due partly to difficulties in relations with its geopolitical rival India, Pakistan maintains close political relations with Turkey and Iran, and both countries have been a focal point in Pakistan's foreign policy. Saudi Arabia also maintains a respected position in Pakistan's foreign policy.A non-signatory party of the Treaty on Nuclear Non-Proliferation, Pakistan is an influential member of the IAEA. In recent events, Pakistan has blocked an international treaty to limit fissile material, arguing that the "treaty would target Pakistan specifically". In the 20th century, Pakistan's nuclear deterrence program focused on countering India's nuclear ambitions in the region, and nuclear tests by India eventually led Pakistan to reciprocate to maintain a geopolitical balance as becoming a nuclear power. Currently, Pakistan maintains a policy of credible minimum deterrence, calling its program vital nuclear deterrence against foreign aggression.Located in the strategic and geopolitical corridor of the world's major maritime oil supply lines and communication fibre optics, Pakistan has proximity to the natural resources of Central Asian countries. Briefing on the country's foreign policy in 2004, a Pakistani senator reportedly explained: "Pakistan highlights sovereign equality of states, bilateralism, mutuality of interests, and non-interference in each other's domestic affairs as the cardinal features of its foreign policy." Pakistan is an active member of the United Nations and has a Permanent Representative to represent Pakistan's positions in international politics. Pakistan has lobbied for the concept of "enlightened moderation" in the Muslim world. Pakistan is also a member of Commonwealth of Nations, the South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation (SAARC), the Economic Cooperation Organization (ECO), and the G20 developing nations.Due to ideological differences, Pakistan opposed the Soviet Union in the 1950s. During the Soviet–Afghan War in the 1980s, Pakistan was one of the closest allies of the United States. Relations between Pakistan and Russia have greatly improved since 1999, and co-operation in various sectors has increased. Pakistan has had an "on-and-off" relationship with the United States. A close ally of the United States during the Cold war, Pakistan's relationship with the United States soured in the 1990s when the US imposed sanctions because of Pakistan's secretive nuclear development. Since 9/11, Pakistan has been a close ally of the United States on the issue of counter-terrorism in the regions of the Middle East and South Asia, with the US supporting Pakistan with aid money and weapons. Initially, the United States-led war on terrorism led to an improvement in the relationship, but it was strained by a divergence of interests and resulting mistrust during the war in Afghanistan and by issues related to terrorism.Pakistan does not have diplomatic relations with Israel; nonetheless, some Israeli citizens have visited the country on tourist visas. However, an exchange took place between the two countries using Turkey as a communication conduit. Despite Pakistan being the only country in the world that has not established diplomatic relations with Armenia, an Armenian community still resides in Pakistan. Pakistan had warm relations with Bangladesh, despite some initial strains in their relationship.Pakistan was one of the first countries to establish formal diplomatic relations with the People's Republic of China, and the relationship continues to be strong since China's war with India in 1962, forming a special relationship. From the 1960s to 1980s, Pakistan greatly helped China in reaching out to the world's major countries and helped facilitate US President Nixon's state visit to China. Despite the change of governments in Pakistan and fluctuations in the regional and global situation, China's policy in Pakistan continues to be a dominant factor at all times. In return, China is Pakistan's largest trading partner, and economic co-operation has flourished, with substantial Chinese investment in Pakistan's infrastructural expansion such as the Pakistani deep-water port at Gwadar. Friendly Sino-Pakistani relations reached new heights as both countries signed 51 agreements and Memorandums of Understanding (MoUs) in 2015 for co-operation in different areas. Both countries signed a Free Trade Agreement in the 2000s, and Pakistan continues to serve as China's communication bridge to the Muslim world. In 2016, China announced that it will set up an anti-terrorism alliance with Pakistan, Afghanistan, and Tajikistan. In December 2018, Pakistan's government defended China's re-education camps for a million Uyghur Muslims.After Independence, Pakistan vigorously pursued bilateral relations with other Muslim countries and made an active bid for leadership of the Muslim world, or at least for leadership in efforts to achieve unity. The Ali brothers had sought to project Pakistan as the natural leader of the Islamic world, in part due to its large manpower and military strength. A top-ranking Muslim League leader, Khaliquzzaman, declared that Pakistan would bring together all Muslim countries into Islamistan—a pan-Islamic entity.Such developments (along with Pakistan's creation) did not get American approval, and British Prime Minister Clement Attlee voiced international opinion at the time by stating that he wished that India and Pakistan would re-unite. Since most of the Arab world was undergoing a nationalist awakening at the time, there was little attraction to Pakistan's Pan-Islamic aspirations. Some of the Arab countries saw the 'Islamistan' project as a Pakistani attempt to dominate other Muslim states.Pakistan vigorously championed the right of self-determination for Muslims around the world. Pakistan's efforts for the independence movements of Indonesia, Algeria, Tunisia, Morocco, and Eritrea were significant and initially led to close ties between these countries and Pakistan. However, Pakistan also masterminded an attack on the Afghan city of Jalalabad during the Afghan Civil War to establish an Islamic government there. Pakistan had wished to foment an 'Islamic Revolution' that would transcend national borders, covering Pakistan, Afghanistan, and Central Asia.On the other hand, Pakistan's relations with Iran have been strained at times due to sectarian tensions. Iran and Saudi Arabia used Pakistan as a battleground for their proxy sectarian war, and by the 1990s Pakistan's support for the Sunni Taliban organisation in Afghanistan became a problem for Shia Iran, which opposed a Taliban-controlled Afghanistan. Tensions between Iran and Pakistan intensified in 1998 when Iran accused Pakistan of war crimes after Pakistani warplanes had bombarded Afghanistan's last Shia stronghold in support of the Taliban.Pakistan is an influential and founding member of the Organisation of Islamic Cooperation (OIC). Maintaining cultural, political, social, and economic relations with the Arab world and other countries in the Muslim world is a vital factor in Pakistan's foreign policy.A federal parliamentary republic state, Pakistan is a federation that comprises four provinces: Punjab, Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, Sindh and Balochistan, and three territories: Islamabad Capital Territory, Gilgit–Baltistan and Azad Kashmir. The Government of Pakistan exercises the "de facto" jurisdiction over the Frontier Regions and the western parts of the Kashmir Regions, which are organised into the separate political entities Azad Kashmir and Gilgit–Baltistan (formerly Northern Areas). In 2009, the constitutional assignment () awarded the Gilgit–Baltistan a semi-provincial status, giving it self-government.The local government system consists of a three-tier system of districts, tehsils, and union councils, with an elected body at each tier. There are about 130 districts altogether, of which Azad Kashmir has ten and Gilgit–Baltistan seven.Law enforcement is carried out by a joint network of the intelligence community with jurisdiction limited to the relevant province or territory. The National Intelligence Directorate coordinates the information intelligence at both federal and provincial levels; including the FIA, IB, Motorway Police, and paramilitary forces such as the Pakistan Rangers and the Frontier Corps.Pakistan's "premier" intelligence agency, the Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI), was formed just within a year after the Independence of Pakistan in 1947. ABC News Point in 2014 reported that the ISI was ranked as the top intelligence agency in the world while Zee News reported the ISI as ranking fifth among the world's most powerful intelligence agencies.The court system is organised as a hierarchy, with the Supreme Court at the apex, below which are High Courts, Federal Shariat Courts (one in each province and one in the federal capital), District Courts (one in each district), Judicial Magistrate Courts (in every town and city), Executive Magistrate Courts, and civil courts. The Penal code has limited jurisdiction in the Tribal Areas, where law is largely derived from tribal customs.The Kashmir—the most northwesterly region of South Asia—is a major territorial dispute that has hindered relations between India and Pakistan. The two nations have fought at least three large-scale conventional wars in successive years in 1947, 1965, and 1971. The conflict in 1971 witnessed Pakistan's unconditional surrender and a treaty that subsequently led to the independence of Bangladesh. Other serious military engagements and skirmishes have included the armed contacts in Siachen Glacier (1984) and Kargil (1999). Approximately 45.1% of the Kashmir region is controlled by India, which also claims the entire state of Jammu and Kashmir, including most of Jammu, the Kashmir Valley, Ladakh, and the Siachen. The claim is contested by Pakistan, which controls approximately 38.2% of the Kashmir region, an area known as the Azad Kashmir and Gilgit–Baltistan.India claims the Kashmir on the basis of the Instrument of Accession—a legal agreement with Kashmir's leaders executed by "Maharaja" Hari Singh, who agreed to cede the area to India. Pakistan claims Kashmir on the basis of a Muslim majority and of geography, the same principles that were applied for the creation of the two independent states. India referred the dispute to the United Nations on 1 January 1948. In a resolution passed in 1948, the UN's General Assembly asked Pakistan to remove most of its troops as a "plebiscite" would then be held. However, Pakistan failed to vacate the region and a ceasefire was reached in 1949 establishing a Line of Control (LoC) that divided Kashmir between the two nations. India, fearful that the Muslim majority populace of Kashmir would secede from India, did not allow a plebiscite to take place in the region. This was confirmed in a statement by India's Defense Minister, Krishna Menon, who said: "Kashmir would vote to join Pakistan and no Indian Government responsible for agreeing to plebiscite would survive."Pakistan claims that its position is for the right of the people of Jammu and Kashmir to determine their future through impartial elections as mandated by the United Nations, while India has stated that Kashmir is an integral part of India, referring to the Simla Agreement (1972) and to the fact that elections take place regularly. In recent developments, certain Kashmiri independence groups believe that Kashmir should be independent of both India and Pakistan.The law enforcement in Pakistan is carried out by joint network of several federal and provincial police agencies. The four provinces and the Islamabad Capital Territory (ICT) each have a civilian police force with jurisdiction extending only to the relevant province or territory. At the federal level, there are a number of civilian intelligence agencies with nationwide jurisdictions including the Federal Investigation Agency (FIA), Intelligence Bureau (IB), and the Motorway Patrol, as well as several paramilitary forces such as the National Guards (Northern Areas), the Rangers (Punjab and Sindh), and the Frontier Corps (Khyber Pakhtunkhwa and Balochistan).The most senior officers of all the civilian police forces also form part of the Police Service, which is a component of the civil service of Pakistan. Namely, there is four provincial police service including the Punjab Police, Sindh Police, Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa Police, and the Balochistan Police; all headed by the appointed senior Inspector-Generals. The ICT has its own police component, the Capital Police, to maintain law and order in the capital. The CID bureaus are the crime investigation unit and form a vital part in each provincial police service.The law enforcement in Pakistan also has a Motorway Patrol which is responsible for enforcement of traffic and safety laws, security and recovery on Pakistan's inter-provincial motorway network. In each of provincial Police Service, it also maintains a respective Elite Police units led by the NACTA—a counter-terrorism police unit as well as providing VIP escorts. In the Punjab and Sindh, the Pakistan Rangers are an internal security force with the prime objective to provide and maintain security in war zones and areas of conflict as well as maintaining law and order which includes providing assistance to the police. The Frontier Corps serves the similar purpose in Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa, and the Balochistan.Male homosexuality is illegal in Pakistan and punishable with up to life in prison. In its 2018 Press Freedom Index, Reporters Without Borders ranked Pakistan number 139 out of 180 countries based on freedom of the press. Television stations and newspapers are routinely shut down for publishing any reports critical of the government or the military.The armed forces of Pakistan are the sixth largest in the world in terms of numbers in full-time service, with about 651,800 personnel on active duty and 291,000 paramilitary personnel, as of tentative estimates in 2021. They came into existence after independence in 1947, and the military establishment has frequently influenced the national politics ever since. Chain of command of the military is kept under the control of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Committee; all of the branches joint works, co-ordination, military logistics, and joint missions are under the Joint Staff HQ. The Joint Staff HQ is composed of the Air HQ, Navy HQ, and Army GHQ in the vicinity of the Rawalpindi Military District.The Chairman Joint Chiefs of Staff Committee is the highest principle staff officer in the armed forces, and the chief military adviser to the civilian government though the chairman has no authority over the three branches of armed forces. The Chairman joint chiefs controls the military from the JS HQ and maintains strategic communications between the military and the civilian government. , the CJCSC is General Nadeem Raza alongside chief of army staff General Qamar Javed Bajwa, chief of naval staff Admiral Muhammad Amjad Khan Niazi, and chief of air staff Air Chief Marshal Zaheer Ahmad Babar. The main branches are the Army, the Air Force and the Navy, which are supported by a large number of paramilitary forces in the country. Control over the strategic arsenals, deployment, employment, development, military computers and command and control is a responsibility vested under the National Command Authority which oversaw the work on the nuclear policy as part of the credible minimum deterrence.The United States, Turkey, and China maintain close military relations and regularly export military equipment and technology transfer to Pakistan. Joint logistics and major war games are occasionally carried out by the militaries of China and Turkey. Philosophical basis for the military draft is introduced by the Constitution in times of emergency, but it has never been imposed.Since 1947 Pakistan has been involved in four conventional wars, the first war occurred in Kashmir with Pakistan gaining control of Western Kashmir, (Azad Kashmir and Gilgit–Baltistan), and India retaining Eastern Kashmir (Jammu and Kashmir and Ladakh). Territorial problems eventually led to another conventional war in 1965; over the issue of Bengali refugees that led to another war in 1971 which resulted in Pakistan's unconditional surrender in East Pakistan. Tensions in Kargil brought the two countries at the brink of war. Since 1947 the unresolved territorial problems with Afghanistan saw border skirmishes which were kept mostly at the mountainous border. In 1961, the military and intelligence community repelled the Afghan incursion in the Bajaur Agency near the Durand Line border.Rising tensions with neighbouring USSR in their involvement in Afghanistan, Pakistani intelligence community, mostly the ISI, systematically coordinated the US resources to the Afghan mujahideen and foreign fighters against the Soviet Union's presence in the region. Military reports indicated that the PAF was in engagement with the Soviet Air Force, supported by the Afghan Air Force during the course of the conflict; one of which belonged to Alexander Rutskoy. Apart from its own conflicts, Pakistan has been an active participant in United Nations peacekeeping missions. It played a major role in rescuing trapped American soldiers from Mogadishu, Somalia, in 1993 in Operation Gothic Serpent. According to UN reports, the Pakistani military is the third largest troop contributor to UN peacekeeping missions after Ethiopia and India.Pakistan has deployed its military in some Arab countries, providing defence, training, and playing advisory roles. The PAF and Navy's fighter pilots have voluntarily served in Arab nations' militaries against Israel in the Six-Day War (1967) and in the Yom Kippur War (1973). Pakistan's fighter pilots shot down ten Israeli planes in the Six-Day War. In the 1973 war one of the PAF pilots, Flt. Lt. Sattar Alvi (flying a MiG-21), shot down an Israeli Air Force Mirage and was honoured by the Syrian government. Requested by the Saudi monarchy in 1979, Pakistan's special forces units, operatives, and commandos were rushed to assist Saudi forces in Mecca to lead the operation of the Grand Mosque. For almost two weeks Saudi Special Forces and Pakistani commandos fought the insurgents who had occupied the Grand Mosque's compound. In 1991 Pakistan got involved with the Gulf War and sent 5,000 troops as part of a US-led coalition, specifically for the defence of Saudi Arabia.Despite the UN arms embargo on Bosnia, General Javed Nasir of the ISI airlifted anti-tank weapons and missiles to Bosnian mujahideen which turned the tide in favour of Bosnian Muslims and forced the Serbs to lift the siege. Under Nasir's leadership the ISI was also involved in supporting Chinese Muslims in Xinjiang Province, rebel Muslim groups in the Philippines, and some religious groups in Central Asia.Since 2004, the military has been engaged in an insurgency in the Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province, mainly against the Tehrik-i-Taliban factions. Major operations undertaken by the army include Operation Black Thunderstorm, Operation Rah-e-Nijat and Operation Zarb-e-Azb.According to SIPRI, Pakistan was the 9th-largest recipient and importer of arms between 2012–2016.The Economy of Pakistan is the 23rd-largest in the world in terms of purchasing power parity (PPP), and 42nd-largest in terms of nominal gross domestic product. Economists estimate that Pakistan was part of the wealthiest region of the world throughout the first millennium CE, with the largest economy by GDP. This advantage was lost in the 18th century as other regions such as China and Western Europe edged forward. Pakistan is considered a developing country and is one of the Next Eleven, a group of eleven countries that, along with the BRICs, have a high potential to become the world's largest economies in the 21st century.In recent years, after decades of social instability, , serious deficiencies in macromanagement and unbalanced macroeconomics in basic services such as rail transportation and electrical energy generation have developed. The economy is considered to be semi-industrialized, with centres of growth along the Indus River. The diversified economies of Karachi and Punjab's urban centres coexist with less-developed areas in other parts of the country, particularly in Balochistan. According to the Economic complexity index, Pakistan is the 67th-largest export economy in the world and the 106th most complex economy. During the fiscal year 2015–16, Pakistan's exports stood at US$20.81 billion and imports at US$44.76 billion, resulting in a negative trade balance of US$23.96 billion., Pakistan's estimated nominal GDP is US$284.2 billion. The GDP by PPP is US$1.254 trillion. The estimated nominal per capita GDP is US$1,388, the GDP (PPP)/capita is US$6,016 (international dollars), According to the World Bank, Pakistan has important strategic endowments and development potential. The increasing proportion of Pakistan's youth provides the country with both a potential demographic dividend and a challenge to provide adequate services and employment. 21.04% of the population live below the international poverty line of US$1.25 a day. The unemployment rate among the aged 15 and over population is 5.5%. Pakistan has an estimated 40 million middle class citizens, projected to increase to 100 million by 2050. A 2015 report published by the World Bank ranked Pakistan's economy at 24th-largest in the world by purchasing power and 41st-largest in absolute terms. It is South Asia's second-largest economy, representing about 15.0% of regional GDP.Pakistan's economic growth since its inception has been varied. It has been slow during periods of democratic transition, but robust during the three periods of martial law, although the foundation for sustainable and equitable growth was not formed. The early to middle 2000s was a period of rapid economic reforms; the government raised development spending, which reduced poverty levels by 10% and increased GDP by 3%. The economy cooled again from 2007. Inflation reached 25.0% in 2008, and Pakistan had to depend on a fiscal policy backed by the International Monetary Fund to avoid possible bankruptcy. A year later, the Asian Development Bank reported that Pakistan's economic crisis was easing. The inflation rate for the fiscal year was 14.1%. Since 2013, as part of an International Monetary Fund program, Pakistan's economic growth has picked up. In 2014 Goldman Sachs predicted that Pakistan's economy would grow 15 times in the next 35 years to become the 18th-largest economy in the world by 2050. In his 2016 book, "The Rise and Fall of Nations", Ruchir Sharma termed Pakistan's economy as at a 'take-off' stage and the future outlook until 2020 has been termed 'Very Good'. Sharma termed it possible to transform Pakistan from a "low-income to a middle-income country during the next five years".Pakistan is one of the largest producers of natural commodities, and its labour market is the 10th-largest in the world. The 7-million–strong Pakistani diaspora contributed US$19.9 billion to the economy in 2015–16. The major source countries of remittances to Pakistan are: the UAE; the United States; Saudi Arabia; the Gulf states (Bahrain, Kuwait, Qatar, and Oman); Australia; Canada; Japan; the United Kingdom; Norway; and Switzerland. According to the World Trade Organization, Pakistan's share of overall world exports is declining; it contributed only 0.13% in 2007.The structure of the Pakistani economy has changed from a mainly agricultural to a strong service base. Agriculture accounts for only 20.9% of the GDP. Even so, according to the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization, Pakistan produced 21,591,400 metric tons of wheat in 2005, more than all of Africa (20,304,585 metric tons) and nearly as much as all of South America (24,557,784 metric tons). Majority of the population, directly or indirectly, is dependent on this sector. It accounts for 43.5% of employed labour force and is the largest source of foreign exchange earnings.A large portion of the country's manufactured exports is dependent on raw materials such as cotton and hides that are part of the agriculture sector, while supply shortages and market disruptions in farm products do push up inflationary pressures. The country is also the fifth-largest producer of cotton, with cotton production of 14 million bales from a modest beginning of 1.7 million bales in the early 1950s; is self-sufficient in sugarcane; and is the fourth-largest producer in the world of milk. Land and water resources have not risen proportionately, but the increases have taken place mainly due to gains in labour and agriculture productivity. The major breakthrough in crop production took place in the late 1960s and 1970s due to the Green Revolution that made a significant contribution to land and yield increases of wheat and rice. Private tube wells led to a 50 percent increase in the cropping intensity which was augmented by tractor cultivation. While the tube wells raised crop yields by 50 percent, the High Yielding Varieties (HYVs) of wheat and rice led to a 50–60 percent higher yield. Meat industry accounts for 1.4 percent of overall GDP.Industry is the second-largest sector of the economy, accounting for 19.74% of gross domestic product (GDP), and 24 percent of total employment. Large-scale manufacturing (LSM), at 12.2% of GDP, dominates the overall sector, accounting for 66% of the sectoral share, followed by small-scale manufacturing, which accounts for 4.9% of total GDP. Pakistan's cement industry is also fast growing mainly because of demand from Afghanistan and from the domestic real estate sector. In 2013 Pakistan exported 7,708,557 metric tons of cement. Pakistan has an installed capacity of 44,768,250 metric tons of cement and 42,636,428 metric tons of clinker. In 2012 and 2013, the cement industry in Pakistan became the most profitable sector of the economy.The textile industry has a pivotal position in the manufacturing sector of Pakistan. In Asia, Pakistan is the eighth-largest exporter of textile products, contributing 9.5% to the GDP and providing employment to around 15 million people (some 30% of the 49 million people in the workforce). Pakistan is the fourth-largest producer of cotton with the third-largest spinning capacity in Asia after China and India, contributing 5% to the global spinning capacity. China is the second largest buyer of Pakistani textiles, importing US$1.527 billion of textiles last fiscal. Unlike the US, where mostly value-added textiles are imported, China buys only cotton yarn and cotton fabric from Pakistan. In 2012, Pakistani textile products accounted for 3.3% or US$1.07bn of all UK textile imports, 12.4% or $4.61bn of total Chinese textile imports, 3.0% of all US textile imports ($2,980 million), 1.6% of total German textile imports ($880 million) and 0.7% of total Indian textile imports ($888 million).The services sector makes up 58.8% of GDP and has emerged as the main driver of economic growth. Pakistani society like other developing countries is a consumption oriented society, having a high marginal propensity to consume. The growth rate of services sector is higher than the growth rate of agriculture and industrial sector. Services sector accounts for 54 percent of GDP in 2014 and little over one-third of total employment. Services sector has strong linkages with other sectors of economy; it provides essential inputs to agriculture sector and manufacturing sector. Pakistan's I.T sector is regarded as among the fastest growing sector's in Pakistan. The World Economic Forum, assessing the development of Information and Communication Technology in the country ranked Pakistan 110th among 139 countries on the 'Networked Readiness Index 2016'., Pakistan has about 82 million internet users, making it the 9th-largest population of Internet users in the world. The current growth rate and employment trend indicate that Pakistan's Information Communication Technology (ICT) industry will exceed the $10-billion mark by 2020. The sector employees 12,000 and count's among top five freelancing nations. The country has also improved its export performance in telecom, computer and information services, as the share of their exports surged from 8.2pc in 2005–06 to 12.6pc in 2012–13. This growth is much better than that of China, whose share in services exports was 3pc and 7.7pc for the same period respectively.With its diverse cultures, people, and landscapes, Pakistan attracted around 6.6 million foreign tourists in 2018, which represented a significant decline since the 1970s when the country received unprecedented numbers of foreign tourists due to the popular Hippie trail. The trail attracted thousands of Europeans and Americans in the 1960s and 1970s who travelled via land through Turkey and Iran into India through Pakistan. The main destinations of choice for these tourists were the Khyber Pass, Peshawar, Karachi, Lahore, Swat and Rawalpindi. The numbers following the trail declined after the Iranian Revolution and the Soviet–Afghan War.Pakistan's tourist attractions range from the mangroves in the south to the Himalayan hill stations in the north-east. The country's tourist destinations range from the Buddhist ruins of Takht-i-Bahi and Taxila, to the 5,000-year-old cities of the Indus Valley Civilization such as Mohenjo-daro and Harappa. Pakistan is home to several mountain peaks over . The northern part of Pakistan has many old fortresses, examples of ancient architecture, and the Hunza and Chitral valleys, home to the small pre-Islamic Kalasha community claiming descent from Alexander the Great. Pakistan's cultural capital, Lahore, contains many examples of Mughal architecture such as the Badshahi Masjid, the Shalimar Gardens, the Tomb of Jahangir, and the Lahore Fort.In October 2006, just one year after the 2005 Kashmir earthquake, "The Guardian" released what it described as "The top five tourist sites in Pakistan" in order to help the country's tourism industry. The five sites included Taxila, Lahore, the Karakoram Highway, Karimabad, and Lake Saiful Muluk. To promote Pakistan's unique cultural heritage, the government organizes various festivals throughout the year. In 2015 the World Economic Forum's Travel & Tourism Competitiveness Report ranked Pakistan 125 out of 141 countries.Pakistan was recognised as the best country for infrastructure development in South Asia during the IWF and World Bank annual meetings in 2016.As of May 2021, nuclear power is provided by six licensed commercial nuclear power plants. The Pakistan Atomic Energy Commission (PAEC) is solely responsible for operating these power plants, while the Pakistan Nuclear Regulatory Authority regulates safe usage of the nuclear energy. The electricity generated by commercial nuclear power plants constitutes roughly 5.8% of Pakistan's electrical energy, compared to 64.2% from fossil fuels (crude oil and natural gas), 29.9% from hydroelectric power, and 0.1% from coal. Pakistan is one of the four nuclear armed states (along with India, Israel, and North Korea) that is not a party to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, but it is a member in good standing of the International Atomic Energy Agency.The KANUPP-I, a Candu-type nuclear reactor, was supplied by Canada in 1971—the country's first commercial nuclear power plant. The Sino-Pakistani nuclear cooperation began in the early 1980s. After a Sino-Pakistani nuclear cooperation agreement in 1986, China provided Pakistan with a nuclear reactor dubbed CHASNUPP-I for energy and the industrial growth of the country. In 2005 both countries proposed working on a joint energy security plan, calling for a huge increase in generation capacity to more than 160,000 MWe by 2030. Under its Nuclear Energy Vision 2050, the Pakistani government plans to increase nuclear power generation capacity to 40,000 MWe, 8,900 MWe of it by 2030. In June 2008 the nuclear commercial complex was expanded with the ground work of installing and operationalising the Chashma-III and Chashma–IV reactors at Chashma, Punjab Province, each with 325–340 MWe and costing ₨ 129 billion; from which the ₨ 80 billion came from international sources, principally China. A further agreement for China's help with the project was signed in October 2008, and given prominence as a counter to the US–India agreement that shortly preceded it. The cost quoted then was US$1.7 billion, with a foreign loan component of US$1.07 billion. In 2013 Pakistan established a second commercial nuclear complex in Karachi with plans of additional reactors, similar to the one in Chashma. The electrical energy is generated by various energy corporations and evenly distributed by the National Electric Power Regulatory Authority (NEPRA) among the four provinces. However, the Karachi-based K-Electric and the Water and Power Development Authority (WAPDA) generates much of the electrical energy used in Pakistan in addition to gathering revenue nationwide. , Pakistan has an installed electricity generation capacity of ~22,797.The transport industry accounts for ~10.5% of the nation's GDP.Motorways of Pakistan are a network of multiple-lane, high-speed, controlled-access highways in Pakistan, which are owned, maintained, and operated federally by Pakistan's National Highway Authority. As of 20 February 2020, 1882 km of motorways are operational, while an additional 1854 km are under construction or planned. All motorways in Pakistan are pre-fixed with the letter 'M' (for "Motorway") followed by the unique numerical designation of the specific highway (with a hyphen in the middle), e.g. "M-1".Pakistan's motorways are an important part of Pakistan's "National Trade Corridor Project", which aims to link Pakistan's three Arabian Sea ports (Karachi Port, Port Bin Qasim and Gwadar Port) to the rest of the country through its national highways and motorways network and further north with Afghanistan, Central Asia and China. The project was planned in 1990. The China Pakistan Economic Corridor project aims to link Gwadar Port and Kashgar (China) using Pakistani motorways, national highways, and expressways.Highways form the backbone of Pakistan's transport system; a total road length of accounts for 92% of passengers and 96% of inland freight traffic. Road transport services are largely in the hands of the private sector. The National Highway Authority is responsible for the maintenance of national highways and motorways. The highway and motorway system depends mainly on north–south links connecting the southern ports to the populous provinces of Punjab and Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa. Although this network only accounts for 4.6% of total road length, it carries 85% of the country's traffic.The Pakistan Railways, under the Ministry of Railways (MoR), operates the railroad system. From 1947 until the 1970s the train system was the primary means of transport until the nationwide constructions of the national highways and the economic boom of the automotive industry. Beginning in the 1990s there was a marked shift in traffic from rail to highways; dependence grew on roads after the introduction of vehicles in the country. Now the railway's share of inland traffic is below 8% for passengers and 4% for freight traffic. As personal transportation began to be dominated by the automobile, total rail track decreased from in 1990–91 to in 2011. Pakistan expects to use the rail service to boost foreign trade with China, Iran, and Turkey.There are an estimated 151 airports and airfields in Pakistan as of 2013—including both the military and the mostly publicly owned civilian airports. Although Jinnah International Airport is the principal international gateway to Pakistan, the international airports in Lahore, Islamabad, Peshawar, Quetta, Faisalabad, Sialkot, and Multan also handle significant amounts of traffic.The civil aviation industry is mixed with public and private sectors, which was deregulated in 1993. While the state-owned Pakistan International Airlines (PIA) is the major and dominant air carrier that carries about 73% of domestic passengers and all domestic freight, the private airlines such as airBlue and Air Indus, also provide similar services at a low cost.Major seaports are in Karachi, Sindh (the Karachi port, Port Qasim). Since the 1990s some seaport operations have been moved to Balochistan with the construction of Gwadar Port, Port of Pasni and Gadani Port. Gwadar Port is the deepest sea port of the world. According to the WEF's Global Competitiveness Report, quality ratings of Pakistan's port infrastructure increased from 3.7 to 4.1 between 2007 and 2016.Many flyovers and underpasses are located in major urban areas of the country to regulate the flow of traffic. The highest number of flyovers and under passes are located in Karachi, followed by Lahore. Other cities having flyovers and underpasses for the regulation of flow of traffic includes Islamabad-Rawalpindi, Faisalabad, Gujranwala, Multan, Peshawar, Hyderabad, Quetta, Sargodha, Bahawalpur, Sukkur, Larkana, Rahim Yar Khan and Sahiwal etc.Beijing Underpass, Lahore is the longest underpass of Pakistan with a length of about . Muslim Town Flyover, Lahore is the longest flyover of the country with a length of about .Developments in science and technology have played an important role in Pakistan's infrastructure and helped the country connect to the rest of the world. Every year, scientists from around the world are invited by the Pakistan Academy of Sciences and the Pakistan Government to participate in the International Nathiagali Summer College on Physics. Pakistan hosted an international seminar on "Physics in Developing Countries" for the International Year of Physics 2005. Pakistani theoretical physicist Abdus Salam won a Nobel Prize in Physics for his work on the electroweak interaction. Influential publications and critical scientific work in the advancement of mathematics, biology, economics, computer science, and genetics have been produced by Pakistani scientists at both the domestic and international levels.In chemistry, Salimuzzaman Siddiqui was the first Pakistani scientist to bring the therapeutic constituents of the neem tree to the attention of natural products chemists. Pakistani neurosurgeon Ayub Ommaya invented the Ommaya reservoir, a system for treatment of brain tumours and other brain conditions. Scientific research and development play a pivotal role in Pakistani universities, government- sponsored national laboratories, science parks, and the industry. Abdul Qadeer Khan, regarded as the founder of the HEU-based gas-centrifuge uranium enrichment program for Pakistan's integrated atomic bomb project. He founded and established the Kahuta Research Laboratories (KRL) in 1976, serving as both its senior scientist and the Director-General until his retirement in 2001, and he was an early and vital figure in other science projects. Apart from participating in Pakistan's atomic bomb project, he made major contributions in molecular morphology, physical martensite, and its integrated applications in condensed and material physics.In 2010 Pakistan was ranked 43rd in the world in terms of published scientific papers. The Pakistan Academy of Sciences, a strong scientific community, plays an influential and vital role in formulating recommendations regarding science policies for the government.The 1960s saw the emergence of an active space program led by SUPARCO that produced advances in domestic rocketry, electronics, and aeronomy. The space program recorded a few notable feats and achievements. The successful launch of its first rocket into space made Pakistan the first South Asian country to have achieved such a task. Successfully producing and launching the nation's first space satellite in 1990, Pakistan became the first Muslim country and second South Asian country to put a satellite into space.As an aftermath of the 1971 war with India, the clandestine crash program developed atomic weapons partly motivated by fear and to prevent any foreign intervention, while ushering in the atomic age in the post cold war era. Competition with India and tensions eventually led to Pakistan's decision to conduct underground nuclear tests in 1998, thus becoming the seventh country in the world to successfully develop nuclear weapons.Pakistan is the first and only Muslim country that maintains an active research presence in Antarctica. Since 1991 Pakistan has maintained two summer research stations and one weather observatory on the continent and plans to open another full-fledged permanent base in Antarctica.Energy consumption by computers and usage has grown since the 1990s when PCs were introduced; Pakistan has about 82 million Internet users and is ranked as one of the top countries that have registered a high growth rate in Internet penetration . Key publications have been produced by Pakistan, and domestic software development has gained considerable international praise.As of May 2020, Pakistan has about 82 million internet users, making it the 9th-largest population of Internet users in the world. Since the 2000s Pakistan has made a significant amount of progress in supercomputing, and various institutions offer research opportunities in parallel computing. The Pakistan government reportedly spends ₨ 4.6 billion on information technology projects, with emphasis on e-government, human resources, and infrastructure development.The constitution of Pakistan requires the state to provide free primary and secondary education.At the time of the establishment of Pakistan as a state, the country had only one university, Punjab University in Lahore. Very soon the Pakistan government established public universities in each of the four provinces, including Sindh University (1949), Peshawar University (1950), Karachi University (1953), and Balochistan University (1970). Pakistan has a large network of both public and private universities, which includes collaboration between the universities aimed at providing research and higher education opportunities in the country, although there is concern about the low quality of teaching in many of the newer schools. It is estimated that there are 3,193 technical and vocational institutions in Pakistan, and there are also "madrassahs" that provide free Islamic education and offer free board and lodging to students, who come mainly from the poorer strata of society. Strong public pressure and popular criticism over extremists' usage of "madrassahs" for recruitment, the Pakistan government has made repeated efforts to regulate and monitor the quality of education in the "madrassahs".Education in Pakistan is divided into six main levels: nursery (preparatory classes); primary (grades one through five); middle (grades six through eight); matriculation (grades nine and ten, leading to the secondary certificate); intermediate (grades eleven and twelve, leading to a higher secondary certificate); and university programmes leading to graduate and postgraduate degrees. There is a network of private schools that constitutes a parallel secondary education system based on a curriculum set and administered by the Cambridge International Examinations of the United Kingdom. Some students choose to take the O-level and A level exams conducted by the British Council. According to the International Schools Consultancy, Pakistan has 439 international schools.As a result of initiatives taken in 2007, the English medium education has been made compulsory in all schools across the country. In 2012, Malala Yousafzai, a campaigner for female education, was shot by a Taliban gunman in retaliation for her activism. Yousafzai went on to become the youngest ever Nobel laureate for her global education-related advocacy. Additional reforms enacted in 2013 required all educational institutions in Sindh to begin offering Chinese language courses, reflecting China's growing role as a superpower and its increasing influence in Pakistan. The literacy rate of the population is 62.3% as of 2018. The rate of male literacy is 72.5% while the rate of female literacy is 51.8%. Literacy rates vary by region and particularly by sex; as one example, in tribal areas female literacy is 9.5%, while Azad Jammu & Kashmir has a literacy rate of 74%. With the advent of computer literacy in 1995, the government launched a nationwide initiative in 1998 with the aim of eradicating illiteracy and providing a basic education to all children. Through various educational reforms, by 2015 the Ministry of Education expected to attain 100% enrollment levels among children of primary school age and a literacy rate of ~86% among people aged over 10. Pakistan is currently spending 2.3 percent of its GDP on education; which according to the Institute of Social and Policy Sciences is one of the lowest in South Asia.As of 2020, Pakistan is the fifth most populous country in the world and accounts for about 2.8% of the world population. The 2017 Census of Pakistan provisionally estimated the population to be 207.8 million. This figure excludes data from Gilgit-Baltistan and Azad Kashmir, which is likely to be included in the final report.The population in 2017 represents a 57% increase from 1998. The annual growth rate in 2016 was reported to be 1.45%, which is the highest of the SAARC nations, though the growth rate has been decreasing in recent years. The population is projected to reach 263 million by 2030.At the time of the partition in 1947, Pakistan had a population of 32.5 million; the population increased by ~57.2% between the years 1990 and 2009. By 2030 Pakistan is expected to surpass Indonesia as the largest Muslim-majority country in the world. Pakistan is classified as a "young nation", with a median age of 23.4 in 2016; about 104 million people were under the age of 30 in 2010. In 2016 Pakistan's fertility rate was estimated to be 2.68, higher than its neighbour India (2.45). Around 35% of the people are under 15. The vast majority of those residing in southern Pakistan live along the Indus River, with Karachi being the most populous commercial city in the south. In eastern, western, and northern Pakistan, most of the population lives in an arc formed by the cities of Lahore, Faisalabad, Rawalpindi, Sargodha, Islamabad, Gujranwala, Sialkot, Gujrat, Jhelum, Sheikhupura, Nowshera, Mardan, and Peshawar. During 1990–2008, city dwellers made up 36% of Pakistan's population, making it the most urbanised nation in South Asia, which increased to 38% by 2013. Furthermore, 50% of Pakistanis live in towns of 5,000 people or more.Expenditure on healthcare was ~2.8% of GDP in 2013. Life expectancy at birth was 67 years for females and 65 years for males in 2013. The private sector accounts for about 80% of outpatient visits. Approximately 19% of the population and 30% of children under five are malnourished. Mortality of the under-fives was 86 per 1,000 live births in 2012.More than sixty languages are spoken in Pakistan, including a number of provincial languages. Urdu—the "lingua franca" and a symbol of Muslim identity and national unity—is the national language understood by over 75% of Pakistanis. It is the main medium of communication in the country but the primary language of only 7% of Pakistan's population. Urdu and English are the official languages of Pakistan, with English primarily used in official business and government, and in legal contracts; the local variety is known as Pakistani English. The Punjabi language, the most common in Pakistan and the first language of 38.78% of Pakistan's population, is mostly spoken in the Punjab. Saraiki is mainly spoken in South Punjab, and Hindko is predominant in the Hazara region of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa. Pashto is the provincial language of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa. The Sindhi language is commonly spoken in Sindh, while the Balochi language is dominant in Balochistan. Brahui, a Dravidian language, is spoken by the Brahui people who live in Balochistan. There are also speakers of Gujarati in Karachi. Marwari, a Rajasthani language, is also spoken in parts of Sindh. Various languages such as Shina, Balti, and Burushaski are spoken in Gilgit-Baltistan, whilst languages such as Pahari, Gojri, and Kashmiri are spoken by many in Azad Kashmir.The Arabic language is officially recognised by the constitution of Pakistan. It declares in article 31 No. 2 that ""The State shall endeavour, as respects the Muslims of Pakistan (a) to make the teaching of the Holy Quran and Islamiat compulsory, to encourage and facilitate the learning of Arabic language ...""Constitution of Pakistan: "Constitution of Pakistan, 1973 – Article: 31 Islamic way of life" , Article 31 No. 2, 1973, Retrieved 22 August 2018.Even after partition in 1947, Indian Muslims continued to migrate to Pakistan throughout the 1950s and 1960s, and these migrants settled mainly in Karachi and other towns of Sindh province. The wars in neighboring Afghanistan during the 1980s and 1990s also forced millions of Afghan refugees into Pakistan. The Pakistan Census excludes the 1.41 million registered refugees from Afghanistan, who are found mainly in the Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa and tribal belt, with small numbers residing in Karachi and Quetta. Pakistan is home to one of the world's largest refugee populations. In addition to Afghans, around 2 million Bangladeshis and half a million other undocumented people live in Pakistan. They are claimed to be from other areas such as Myanmar, Iran, Iraq, and Africa.Experts say that the migration of both Bengalis and Burmese (Rohingya) to Pakistan started in the 1980s and continued until 1998. Shaikh Muhammad Feroze, the chairman of the Pakistani Bengali Action Committee, claims that there are 200 settlements of Bengali-speaking people in Pakistan, of which 132 are in Karachi. They are also found in various other areas of Pakistan such as Thatta, Badin, Hyderabad, Tando Adam, and Lahore. Large-scale Rohingya migration to Karachi made that city one of the largest population centres of Rohingyas in the world after Myanmar. The Burmese community of Karachi is spread out over 60 of the city's slums such as the Burmi Colony in Korangi, Arakanabad, Machchar colony, Bilal colony, Ziaul Haq Colony, and Godhra Camp.Thousands of Uyghur Muslims have also migrated to the Gilgit-Baltistan region of Pakistan, fleeing religious and cultural persecution in Xinjiang, China. Since 1989 thousands of Kashmiri Muslim refugees have sought refuge in Pakistan, complaining that many of the refugee women had been raped by Indian soldiers and that they were forced out of their homes by the soldiers.The major ethnic groups are Punjabis (44.7% of the country's population), Pashtuns, also known as Pathans (15.4%), Sindhis (14.1%), Saraikis (8.4%), Muhajirs (the Indian emigrants, mostly Urdu-speaking), who make up 7.6% of the population, and the Baloch with 3.6%. The remaining 6.3% consist of a number of ethnic minorities such as the Brahuis, the Hindkowans, the various peoples of Gilgit-Baltistan, the Kashmiris, the Sheedis (who are of African descent), and the Hazaras. There is also a large Pakistani diaspora worldwide, numbering over seven million, which has been recorded as the sixth largest diaspora in the world.Since achieving independence as a result of the partition of India, the urbanisation has increased exponentially, with several different causes. The majority of the population in the south resides along the Indus River, with Karachi the most populous commercial city. In the east, west, and north, most of the population lives in an arc formed by the cities of Lahore, Faisalabad, Rawalpindi, Islamabad, Sargodha, Gujranwala, Sialkot, Gujrat, Jhelum, Sheikhupura, Nowshera, Mardan, and Peshawar. During the period 1990–2008, city dwellers made up 36% of Pakistan's population, making it the most urbanised nation in South Asia. Furthermore, more than 50% of Pakistanis live in towns of 5,000 people or more. Immigration, from both within and outside the country, is regarded as one of the main factors contributing to urbanisation in Pakistan. One analysis of the 1998 national census highlighted the significance of the partition of India in the 1940s as it relates to urban change in Pakistan.During and after the independence period, Urdu speaking Muslims from India migrated in large numbers to Pakistan, especially to the port city of Karachi, which is today the largest metropolis in Pakistan. Migration from other countries, mainly from those nearby, has further accelerated the process of urbanisation in Pakistani cities. Inevitably, the rapid urbanisation caused by these large population movements has also created new political and socio-economic challenges. In addition to immigration, economic trends such as the green revolution and political developments, among a host of other factors, are also important causes of urbanisation. The state religion in Pakistan is Islam. Freedom of religion is guaranteed by the Constitution of Pakistan, which provides all its citizens the right to profess, practice and propagate their religion subject to law, public order, and morality.The population of Pakistan follow different religions. Most of Pakistanis are Muslims (96.47%) followed by Hindus (2.14%) and Christians (1.27%). There are also people in Pakistan who follow other religions, such as Sikhism, Buddhism, Jainism and the minority of Parsi (who follow Zoroastrianism). The Kalash people maintain a unique identity and religion within Pakistan.Hinduism is mostly associated with Sindhis, and Pakistan hosts major events such as the Hinglaj Yatra pilgrimage. Hindu temples may be found throughout Sindh, where the dharma features prominently. Many Hindus in Pakistan complain about the prospect of religious violence against them and being treated like second-class citizens, and many have emigrated to India or further abroad.In addition, some Pakistanis also do not profess any faith (such as atheists and agnostics) in Pakistan. According to the 1998 census, people who did not state their religion accounted for 0.5% of the population. Secularism and criticism of over-religiosity is not uncommon in well-educated civil society, although in general Pakistan is a highly religious society, and the irreligious generally hide their beliefs due to fear of persecution.Islam is the dominant religion. About 96.47% of Pakistanis are Muslim, according to the 2017 Census. Pakistan has the second-largest number of Muslims in the world after Indonesia. and home for (10.5%) of the world's Muslim population. The majority of them are Sunni and mostly follow Sufism (estimated between 75 and 95%) while Shias represent between 5–25%. As of 2019, Shia population in Pakistan was estimated to be 42 million out of total population of 210 million. Pakistan also has the largest Muslim city in the world (Karachi).The Ahmadis, a small minority representing 0.22–2% of Pakistan's population, are officially considered non-Muslims by virtue of the constitutional amendment. The Ahmadis are particularly persecuted, especially since 1974 when they were banned from calling themselves Muslims. In 1984, Ahmadiyya places of worship were banned from being called "mosques". , 12% of Pakistani Muslims self-identify as non-denominational Muslims. There are also several Quraniyoon communities.Sufism, a mystical Islamic tradition, has a long history and a large following among the Sunni Muslims in Pakistan, at both the academic and popular levels. Popular Sufi culture is centered around gatherings and celebrations at the shrines of saints and annual festivals that feature Sufi music and dance. Two Sufis whose shrines receive much national attention are Ali Hajweri in Lahore (c. 12th century) and Shahbaz Qalander in Sehwan, Sindh (c. 12th century).There are two levels of Sufism in Pakistan. The first is the 'populist' Sufism of the rural population. This level of Sufism involves belief in intercession through saints, veneration of their shrines, and forming bonds (Mureed) with a "pir" (saint). Many rural Pakistani Muslims associate with "pirs" and seek their intercession. The second level of Sufism in Pakistan is 'intellectual Sufism', which is growing among the urban and educated population. They are influenced by the writings of Sufis such as the medieval theologian al-Ghazali, the Sufi reformer Shaykh Aḥmad Sirhindi, and Shah Wali Allah. Contemporary Islamic fundamentalists criticise Sufism's popular character, which in their view does not accurately reflect the teachings and practice of Muhammad and his companions.Hinduism is the second-largest religion in Pakistan after Islam, according to the 2017 census. Hindus are found in all provinces of Pakistan but are mostly concentrated in Sindh, where they account for 8.73% of the population. , Pakistan had the fifth-largest Hindu population in the world. In the 2017 census, the Hindu (jati) population was found to be 4,444,437 while the Hindu (scheduled castes) numbered an additional 851,504. At the time of Pakistan's creation, the 'hostage theory' gained currency. According to this theory, the Hindu minority in Pakistan was to be given a fair deal in Pakistan in order to ensure the protection of the Muslim minority in India. However, Khawaja Nazimuddin, the second Prime Minister of Pakistan, stated: Some Hindus in Pakistan feel that they are treated as second-class citizens and many have continued to migrate to India. Pakistani Hindus faced riots after the Babri Masjid demolition, endured a massacre (in 2005) by security forces in Balochistan, and have experienced other attacks, forced conversions, and abductions.Christians formed the next largest religious minority, after Hindus, with 1.27% of the population following it. They were followed by the Bahá'í Faith, which had a following of 30,000, then Sikhism, Buddhism, and Zoroastrianism, each back then claiming 20,000 adherents, and a very small community of Jains. There is a Roman Catholic community in Karachi that was established by Goan and Tamil migrants when Karachi's infrastructure was being developed by the British during the colonial administration between World War I and World War II. The influence of atheism is very small, with 1.0% of the population identifying as atheist in 2005. However, the figure rose to 2.0% in 2012 according to Gallup.Civil society in Pakistan is largely hierarchical, emphasising local cultural etiquette and traditional Islamic values that govern personal and political life. The basic family unit is the extended family, although for socio-economic reasons there has been a growing trend towards nuclear families. The traditional dress for both men and women is the "Shalwar Kameez"; trousers, jeans, and shirts are also popular among men. In recent decades, the middle class has increased to around 35 million and the upper and upper-middle classes to around 17 million, and power is shifting from rural landowners to the urbanised elites. Pakistani festivals, including "Eid-ul-Fitr", "Eid-ul-Azha", "Ramazan", Christmas, Easter, Holi, and Diwali, are mostly religious in origin. Increasing globalisation has resulted in Pakistan ranking 56th on the A.T. Kearney/FP Globalization Index.The "Shalwar Kameez" is the national dress of Pakistan and is worn by both men and women in all four provinces: Punjab, Sindh, Balochistan, and Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa, and Azad Kashmir. Each province has its own style of "Shalwar Kameez". Pakistanis wear clothes in a range of exquisite colours and designs and in type of fabric (silk, chiffon, cotton, etc.). Besides the national dress, domestically tailored suits and neckties are often worn by men, and are customary in offices, schools, and social gatherings.The fashion industry has flourished in the changing environment of the fashion world. Since Pakistan came into being, its fashion has evolved in different phases and developed a unique identity. Today, Pakistani fashion is a combination of traditional and modern dress and has become a mark of Pakistani culture. Despite modern trends, regional and traditional forms of dress have developed their own significance as a symbol of native tradition. This regional fashion continues to evolve into both more modern and purer forms. The Pakistan Fashion Design Council based in Lahore organizes PFDC Fashion Week and the Fashion Pakistan Council based in Karachi organizes Fashion Pakistan Week. Pakistan's first fashion week was held in November 2009.The private print media, state-owned Pakistan Television Corporation (PTV), and Pakistan Broadcasting Corporation (PBC) for radio were the dominant media outlets until the beginning of the 21st century. Pakistan now has a large network of domestic, privately owned 24-hour news media and television channels. A 2016 report by the Reporters Without Borders ranked Pakistan 147th on the Press Freedom Index, while at the same time terming the Pakistani media "among the freest in Asia when it comes to covering the squabbling among politicians." The BBC terms the Pakistani media "among the most outspoken in South Asia". Pakistani media has also played a vital role in exposing corruption.The Lollywood, Kariwood, Punjabi, and Pashto film industry is based in Karachi, Lahore, and Peshawar. While Bollywood films were banned from public cinemas from 1965 until 2008, they have remained an important part of popular culture. In contrast to the ailing Pakistani film industry, Urdu televised dramas and theatrical performances continue to be popular, as many entertainment media outlets air them regularly. Urdu dramas dominate the television entertainment industry, which has launched critically acclaimed miniseries and featured popular actors and actresses since the 1990s. In the 1960s–1970s, pop music and disco (1970s) dominated the country's music industry. In the 1980s–1990s, British influenced rock music appeared and jolted the country's entertainment industry. In the 2000s, heavy metal music gained popular and critical acclaim.Pakistani music ranges from diverse forms of provincial folk music and traditional styles such as Qawwali and Ghazal Gayaki to modern musical forms that fuse traditional and western music. Pakistan has many famous folk singers. The arrival of Afghan refugees in the western provinces has stimulated interest in Pashto music, although there has been intolerance of it in some places.According to the UN Department of Economic and Social Affairs, Pakistan has the sixth-largest diaspora in the world. Statistics gathered by the Pakistani government show that there are around 7 million Pakistanis residing abroad, with the vast majority living in the Middle East, Europe, and North America. Pakistan ranks 10th in the world for remittances sent home. The largest inflow of remittances, , is from Saudi Arabia, amounting to $5.9 billion. The term "Overseas Pakistani" is officially recognised by the Government of Pakistan. The Ministry of Overseas Pakistanis was established in 2008 to deal exclusively with all matters of overseas Pakistanis such as attending to their needs and problems, developing projects for their welfare, and working for resolution of their problems and issues. Overseas Pakistanis are the second-largest source of foreign exchange remittances to Pakistan after exports. Over the last several years, home remittances have maintained a steadily rising trend, with a more than 100% increase from US$8.9 billion in 2009–10 to US$19.9 billion in 2015–16.The Overseas Pakistani Division (OPD) was created in September 2004 within the Ministry of Labour (MoL). It has since recognised the importance of overseas Pakistanis and their contribution to the nation's economy. Together with Community Welfare Attaches (CWAs) and the Overseas Pakistanis Foundation (OPF), the OPD is making efforts to improve the welfare of Pakistanis who reside abroad. The division aims to provide better services through improved facilities at airports, and suitable schemes for housing, education, and health care. It also facilitates the reintegration into society of returning overseas Pakistanis. Notable members of the Pakistani diaspora include London Mayor Sadiq Khan, UK Cabinet Member Sajid Javid, former UK Conservative Party Chair Baroness Warsi, singers Zayn Malik and Nadia Ali, MIT Physics Professor Dr. Nergis Mavalvala, actors Riz Ahmed and Kumail Nanjiani, businessmen Shahid Khan and Sir Anwar Pervez, Boston University professors Adil Najam and Hamid Nawab, Texas A&M Professor Muhammad Suhail Zubairy, Yale Professor Sara Suleri, UC San Diego Professor Farooq Azam, and historian Ayesha Jalal.Pakistan has literature in Urdu, Sindhi, Punjabi, Pashto, Baluchi, Persian, English, and many other languages. The Pakistan Academy of Letters is a large literary community that promotes literature and poetry in Pakistan and abroad. The National Library publishes and promotes literature in the country. Before the 19th century, Pakistani literature consisted mainly of lyric and religious poetry and mystical and folkloric works. During the colonial period, native literary figures were influenced by western literary realism and took up increasingly varied topics and narrative forms. Prose fiction is now very popular.The national poet of Pakistan, Muhammad Iqbal, wrote poetry in Urdu and Persian. He was a strong proponent of the political and spiritual revival of Islamic civilisation and encouraged Muslims all over the world to bring about a successful revolution. Well-known figures in contemporary Pakistani Urdu literature include Josh Malihabadi Faiz Ahmed Faiz and Saadat Hasan Manto. Sadequain and Gulgee are known for their calligraphy and paintings. The Sufi poets Shah Abdul Latif, Bulleh Shah, Mian Muhammad Bakhsh, and Khawaja Farid enjoy considerable popularity in Pakistan. Mirza Kalich Beg has been termed the father of modern Sindhi prose. Historically, philosophical development in the country was dominated by Muhammad Iqbal, Sir Syed Ahmad Khan, Muhammad Asad, Maududi, and Mohammad Ali Johar.Ideas from British and American philosophy greatly shaped philosophical development in Pakistan. Analysts such as M. M. Sharif and Zafar Hassan established the first major Pakistani philosophical movement in 1947. After the 1971 war, philosophers such as Jalaludin Abdur Rahim, Gianchandani, and Malik Khalid incorporated Marxism into Pakistan's philosophical thinking. Influential work by Manzoor Ahmad, Jon Elia, Hasan Askari Rizvi, and Abdul Khaliq brought mainstream social, political, and analytical philosophy to the fore in academia. Works by Noam Chomsky have influenced philosophical ideas in various fields of social and political philosophy.Four periods are recognised in Pakistani architecture: pre-Islamic, Islamic, colonial, and post-colonial. With the beginning of the Indus civilization around the middle of the 3rd millennium BCE, an advanced urban culture developed for the first time in the region, with large buildings, some of which survive to this day. Mohenjo Daro, Harappa, and Kot Diji are among the pre-Islamic settlements that are now tourist attractions. The rise of Buddhism and the influence of Greek civilisation led to the development of a Greco-Buddhist style, starting from the 1st century CE. The high point of this era was the Gandhara style. An example of Buddhist architecture is the ruins of the Buddhist monastery Takht-i-Bahi in Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa.The arrival of Islam in what is today Pakistan meant the sudden end of Buddhist architecture in the area and a smooth transition to the predominantly pictureless Islamic architecture. The most important Indo-Islamic-style building still standing is the tomb of the Shah Rukn-i-Alam in Multan. During the Mughal era, design elements of Persian-Islamic architecture were fused with and often produced playful forms of Hindustani art. Lahore, as the occasional residence of Mughal rulers, contains many important buildings from the empire. Most prominent among them are the Badshahi Mosque, the fortress of Lahore with the famous Alamgiri Gate, the colourful, Mughal-style Wazir Khan Mosque, the Shalimar Gardens in Lahore, and the Shahjahan Mosque in Thatta. In the British colonial period, predominantly functional buildings of the Indo-European representative style developed from a mixture of European and Indian-Islamic components. Post-colonial national identity is expressed in modern structures such as the Faisal Mosque, the Minar-e-Pakistan, and the Mazar-e-Quaid. Several examples of architectural infrastructure demonstrating the influence of British design can be found in Lahore, Peshawar, and Karachi.Pakistani cuisine is similar to that of other regions of South Asia, with some of it being originated from the royal kitchens of 16th-century Mughal emperors. Most of those dishes have their roots in British, Indian, Central Asian and Middle Eastern cuisine. Unlike Middle Eastern cuisine, Pakistani cooking uses large quantities of spices, herbs, and seasoning. Garlic, ginger, turmeric, red chili, and garam masala are used in most dishes, and home cooking regularly includes curry, "roti", a thin flatbread made from wheat, is a staple food, usually served with curry, meat, vegetables, and lentils. Rice is also common; it is served plain, fried with spices, and in sweet dishes.Lassi is a traditional drink in the Punjab region. Black tea with milk and sugar is popular throughout Pakistan and is consumed daily by most of the population. Sohan halwa is a popular sweet dish from the southern region of Punjab province and is enjoyed all over Pakistan.Most sports played in Pakistan originated and were substantially developed by athletes and sports fans from the United Kingdom who introduced them during the British Raj. Field hockey is the national sport of Pakistan; it has won three gold medals in the Olympic Games held in 1960, 1968, and 1984. Pakistan has also won the Hockey World Cup a record four times, held in 1971, 1978, 1982, and 1994.Cricket, however, is the most popular game across the country. The country has had an array of success in the sport over the years, and has the distinct achievement of having won each of the major ICC international cricket tournaments: ICC Cricket World Cup, ICC World Twenty20, and ICC Champions Trophy; as well as the ICC Test Championship. The cricket team (known as "Shaheen") won the Cricket World Cup held in 1992; it was runner-up once, in 1999. Pakistan was runner-up in the inaugural World Twenty20 (2007) in South Africa and won the World Twenty20 in England in 2009. In March 2009, militants attacked the touring Sri Lankan cricket team, after which no international cricket was played in Pakistan until May 2015, when the Zimbabwean team agreed to a tour. Pakistan also won the 2017 ICC Champions Trophy by defeating arch-rivals India in the final.Pakistan Super League is one of the largest cricket leagues of the world with a brand value of about .Association Football is the second most played sports in Pakistan and it is organised and regulated by the Pakistan Football Federation. Football in Pakistan is as old as the country itself. Shortly after the creation of Pakistan in 1947, the Pakistan Football Federation (PFF) was created, and Muhammad Ali Jinnah became its first Patron-in-Chief. The highest football division in Pakistan is the Pakistan Premier League. Pakistan is known as one of the best manufacturer of the official FIFA World Cup ball. The best football players to play for Pakistan are Kaleemullah, Zesh Rehman, Muhammad Essa, Haroon Yousaf, and Muhammad Adil.Pakistan has hosted or co-hosted several international sporting events: the 1989 and 2004 South Asian Games; the 1984, 1993, 1996 and 2003 World Squash Championships; the 1987 and 1996 Cricket World Cup; and the 1990 Hockey World Cup.Pakistan is set to host the 2021 South Asian Games.	[ "Nawaz Sharif", "Nasir-ul-Mulk", "Shahid Khaqan Abbasi", "Shehbaz Sharif", "Imran Khan" ]
Who was the head of Pakistan in 04/01/2013?	April 01, 2013	{ "text": [ "Mir Hazar Khan Khoso" ] }	L2_Q843_P6_0	Imran Khan is the head of the government of Pakistan from Aug, 2018 to Apr, 2022. Mir Hazar Khan Khoso is the head of the government of Pakistan from Mar, 2013 to Jun, 2013. Shehbaz Sharif is the head of the government of Pakistan from Apr, 2022 to Dec, 2022. Shahid Khaqan Abbasi is the head of the government of Pakistan from Aug, 2017 to May, 2018. Nawaz Sharif is the head of the government of Pakistan from Jun, 2013 to Jul, 2017. Nasir-ul-Mulk is the head of the government of Pakistan from Jun, 2018 to Aug, 2018.	PakistanPakistan, officially the Islamic Republic of Pakistan, is a country in South Asia. It is the world's fifth-most populous country, with a population exceeding 225.2 million, and has the world's second-largest Muslim population. Pakistan is the 33rd-largest country by area, spanning . It has a coastline along the Arabian Sea and Gulf of Oman in the south, and is bordered by India to the east, Afghanistan to the west, Iran to the southwest, and China to the northeast. It is separated narrowly from Tajikistan by Afghanistan's Wakhan Corridor in the north, and also shares a maritime border with Oman.Pakistan is the site of several ancient cultures, including the 8,500-year-old Neolithic site of Mehrgarh in Balochistan, and the Indus Valley Civilisation of the Bronze Age, the most extensive of the civilisations of the Old World. The region that comprises the modern state of Pakistan was the realm of multiple empires and dynasties, including the Achaemenid; briefly that of Alexander the Great; the Seleucid, the Maurya, the Kushan, the Gupta; the Umayyad Caliphate in its southern regions, the Hindu Shahi, the Ghaznavids, the Delhi Sultanate, the Mughals, the Durranis, the Sikh Empire, British East India Company rule, and most recently, the British Indian Empire from 1858 to 1947.Spurred by the Pakistan Movement, which sought a homeland for the Muslims of British India, and election victories in 1946 by the All-India Muslim League, Pakistan gained independence in 1947 after the Partition of the British Indian Empire, which awarded separate statehood to its Muslim-majority regions and was accompanied by an unparalleled mass migration and loss of life. Initially a Dominion of the British Commonwealth, Pakistan officially drafted its constitution in 1956, and emerged as a declared Islamic republic. In 1971, the exclave of East Pakistan seceded as the new country of Bangladesh after a nine-month-long civil war. In the following four decades, Pakistan has been ruled by governments whose descriptions, although complex, commonly alternated between civilian and military, democratic and authoritarian, relatively secular and Islamist. Pakistan elected a civilian government in 2008, and in 2010 adopted a parliamentary system with periodic elections.Pakistan is a middle power, and has the world's sixth-largest standing armed forces. It is a declared nuclear-weapons state, and is ranked amongst the emerging and growth-leading economies, with a large and rapidly-growing middle class. Pakistan's political history since independence has been characterized by periods of significant economic and military growth as well those of political and economic instability. It is an ethnically and linguistically diverse country, with similarly diverse geography and wildlife. However, the country continues to face challenges, including poverty, illiteracy, corruption and terrorism. Pakistan is a member of the United Nations, the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation, the Organisation of Islamic Cooperation, the British Commonwealth of Nations, the South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation, the Islamic Military Counter-Terrorism Coalition, and is designated as a major non-NATO ally by the United States.The name "Pakistan" means literally "a land abounding in the pure" or "a land in which the pure abound", in Urdu and Persian. It references the word ("pāk"), meaning "pure" in Persian and Pashto. The suffix (transliterated in English as stân after stem word ending in a vowel; estân or istân after a stem ending in a consonant) is from Persian, and means "a place abounding in" or "a place where anything abounds".The name of the country was coined in 1933 by Choudhry Rahmat Ali, a Pakistan Movement activist, who published it in a pamphlet "Now or Never", using it as an acronym ("thirty million Muslim brethren who live in PAKISTAN"), and referring to the names of the five northern regions of the British Raj: "P"unjab, "A"fghania, "K"ashmir, "S"indh, and Baluchis"tan".Some of the earliest ancient human civilisations in South Asia originated from areas encompassing present-day Pakistan. The earliest known inhabitants in the region were Soanian during the Lower Paleolithic, of whom stone tools have been found in the Soan Valley of Punjab. The Indus region, which covers most of present day Pakistan, was the site of several successive ancient cultures including the Neolithic Mehrgarh and the Bronze Age Indus Valley Civilisation (2,800–1,800 BCE) at Harappa and Mohenjo-Daro.The Vedic period (1500–500 BCE) was characterised by an Indo-Aryan culture; during this period the Vedas, the oldest scriptures associated with Hinduism, were composed, and this culture later became well established in the region. Multan was an important Hindu pilgrimage centre. The Vedic civilisation flourished in the ancient Gandhāran city of Takṣaśilā, now Taxila in the Punjab, which was founded around 1000 BCE. Successive ancient empires and kingdoms ruled the region: the Persian Achaemenid Empire (around 519 BCE), Alexander the Great's empire in 326 BCE and the Maurya Empire, founded by Chandragupta Maurya and extended by Ashoka the Great, until 185 BCE. The Indo-Greek Kingdom founded by Demetrius of Bactria (180–165 BCE) included Gandhara and Punjab and reached its greatest extent under Menander (165–150 BCE), prospering the Greco-Buddhist culture in the region. Taxila had one of the earliest universities and centres of higher education in the world, which was established during the late Vedic period in 6th century BCE. The school consisted of several monasteries without large dormitories or lecture halls where the religious instruction was provided on an individualistic basis. The ancient university was documented by the invading forces of Alexander the Great and was also recorded by Chinese pilgrims in the 4th or 5th century CE.At its zenith, the Rai Dynasty (489–632 CE) of Sindh ruled this region and the surrounding territories. The Pala Dynasty was the last Buddhist empire, which, under Dharmapala and Devapala, stretched across South Asia from what is now Bangladesh through Northern India to Pakistan.The Arab conqueror Muhammad bin Qasim conquered Sindh in 711 CE. The Pakistan government's official chronology claims this as the time when the foundation of Pakistan was laid but the concept of "Pakistan" arrived in the 19th century. The Early Medieval period (642–1219 CE) witnessed the spread of Islam in the region. During this period, Sufi missionaries played a pivotal role in converting a majority of the regional Buddhist and Hindu population to Islam. Upon the defeat of the Turk and Hindu Shahi dynasties which governed the Kabul Valley, Gandhara (present-day Khyber Pakhtunkwa), and western Punjab in the 7th to 11th centuries CE, several successive Muslim empires ruled over the region, including the Ghaznavid Empire (975–1187 CE), the Ghorid Kingdom, and the Delhi Sultanate (1206–1526 CE). The Lodi dynasty, the last of the Delhi Sultanate, was replaced by the Mughal Empire (1526–1857 CE).The Mughals introduced Persian literature and high culture, establishing the roots of Indo-Persian culture in the region. In the region of modern-day Pakistan, key cities during the Mughal period were Lahore and Thatta, both of which were chosen as the site of impressive Mughal buildings. In the early 16th century, the region remained under the Mughal Empire ruled by Muslim emperors. By the early 18th century, increasing European influence contributed to the slow disintegration of the Mughal Empire as the lines between commercial and political dominance became increasingly blurred.During this time, the English East India Company had established coastal outposts. Control over the seas, greater resources, technology, and British military protection led the Company to increasingly flex its military muscle, allowing the Company to gain control over the subcontinent by 1765 and sideline European competitors. Expanding access beyond Bengal and the subsequent increased strength and size of its army enabled it to annex or subdue most of region by the 1820s. Many historians see this as the start of the region's colonial period. By this time, with its economic power severely curtailed by the British parliament and itself effectively made an arm of British administration, the Company began more deliberately to enter non-economic arenas such as education, social reform, and culture. Such reforms included the enforcement of the English Education Act in 1835 and the introduction of the Indian Civil Service (ICS). Traditional "madrasahs"—primary institutions of higher learning for Muslims in the subcontinent—were no longer supported by the English Crown, and nearly all of the "madrasahs" lost their financial endowment.The gradual decline of the Mughal Empire in the early 18th century enabled the Sikh Empire to control larger areas until the British East India Company gained ascendancy over South Asia. A rebellion in 1857 called the Sepoy mutiny of Bengal was the region's major armed struggle against the British Empire and Queen Victoria. Divergence in the relationship between Hinduism and Islam created a major rift in British India that led to motivated religious violence in British India. The language controversy further escalated the tensions between Hindus and Muslims. The Hindu renaissance witnessed an awakening of intellectualism in traditional Hinduism and saw the emergence of more assertive influence in the social and political spheres in British India. A Muslim intellectual movement, founded by Sir Syed Ahmed Khan to counter the Hindu renaissance, envisioned, as well as advocated for the two-nation theory, and led to the creation of the All-India Muslim League in 1906. In contrast to the Indian National Congress's anti-British efforts, the Muslim League was a pro-British movement whose political program inherited the British values that would shape Pakistan's future civil society. In events during World War I, British Intelligence foiled an anti-English conspiracy involving the nexus of Congress and the German Empire. The largely non-violent independence struggle led by the Indian Congress engaged millions of protesters in mass campaigns of civil disobedience in the 1920s and 1930s against the British Empire.The Muslim League slowly rose to mass popularity in the 1930s amid fears of under-representation and neglect of British Muslims in politics. In his presidential address of 29 December 1930, Allama Iqbal called for "the amalgamation of North-West Muslim-majority Indian states" consisting of Punjab, North-West Frontier Province, Sind, and Baluchistan. The perceived neglect of Muslim interests by Congress led British provincial governments during the period of 1937–39 convinced Muhammad Ali Jinnah, the founder of Pakistan to espouse the two-nation theory and led the Muslim League to adopt the Lahore Resolution of 1940 presented by Sher-e-Bangla A.K. Fazlul Haque, popularly known as the Pakistan Resolution. In World War II, Jinnah and British-educated founding fathers in the Muslim League supported the United Kingdom's war efforts, countering opposition against it whilst working towards Sir Syed's vision.The 1946 elections resulted in the Muslim League winning 90 percent of the seats reserved for Muslims. Thus, the 1946 election was effectively a plebiscite in which the Indian Muslims were to vote on the creation of Pakistan, a plebiscite won by the Muslim League. This victory was assisted by the support given to the Muslim League by the support of the landowners of Sindh and Punjab. The Congress, which initially denied the Muslim League's claim of being the sole representative of Indian Muslims, was now forced to recognise the fact. The British had no alternative except to take Jinnah's views into account as he had emerged as the sole spokesperson of the entirety of British India's Muslims. However, the British did not want colonial India to be partitioned, and in one last effort to prevent it, they devised the Cabinet Mission plan.As the cabinet mission failed, the British government announced its intention to end the British Rule in 1946–47. Nationalists in British India—including Jawaharlal Nehru and Abul Kalam Azad of Congress, Jinnah of the All-India Muslim League, and Master Tara Singh representing the Sikhs—agreed to the proposed terms of transfer of power and independence in June 1947 with the Viceroy of India, Lord Mountbatten of Burma. As the United Kingdom agreed to the partitioning of India in 1947, the modern state of Pakistan was established on 14 August 1947 , amalgamating the Muslim-majority eastern and northwestern regions of British India. It comprised the provinces of Balochistan, East Bengal, the North-West Frontier Province, West Punjab, and Sindh.In the riots that accompanied the partition in Punjab Province, it is believed that between 200,000 and 2,000,000 people were killed in what some have described as a retributive genocide between the religions while 50,000 Muslim women were abducted and raped by Hindu and Sikh men, 33,000 Hindu and Sikh women also experienced the same fate at the hands of Muslims. Around 6.5 million Muslims moved from India to West Pakistan and 4.7 million Hindus and Sikhs moved from West Pakistan to India. It was the largest mass migration in human history. A subsequent dispute over the princely state of Jammu and Kashmir eventually sparked the Indo-Pakistani War of 1947–1948.After independence in 1947, Jinnah, the President of the Muslim League, became the nation's first Governor-General as well as the first President-Speaker of the Parliament, but he died of tuberculosis on 11 September 1948. Meanwhile, Pakistan's founding fathers agreed to appoint Liaquat Ali Khan, the secretary-general of the party, the nation's first Prime Minister. With dominion status in the Commonwealth of Nations, independent Pakistan had two British monarchs before it became a republic.The creation of Pakistan was never fully accepted by many British leaders, among them Lord Mountbatten. Mountbatten clearly expressed his lack of support and faith in the Muslim League's idea of Pakistan. Jinnah refused Mountbatten's offer to serve as Governor-General of Pakistan. When Mountbatten was asked by Collins and Lapierre if he would have sabotaged Pakistan had he known that Jinnah was dying of tuberculosis, he replied 'most probably'.Maulana Shabbir Ahmad Usmani, a respected Deobandi "alim" (scholar) who occupied the position of Shaykh al-Islam in Pakistan in 1949, and Maulana Mawdudi of Jamaat-i-Islami played a pivotal role in the demand for an Islamic constitution. Mawdudi demanded that the Constituent Assembly make an explicit declaration affirming the "supreme sovereignty of God" and the supremacy of the "shariah" in Pakistan.A significant result of the efforts of the Jamaat-i-Islami and the "ulama" was the passage of the Objectives Resolution in March 1949. The Objectives Resolution, which Liaquat Ali Khan called the second most important step in Pakistan's history, declared that "sovereignty over the entire universe belongs to God Almighty alone and the authority which He has delegated to the State of Pakistan through its people for being exercised within the limits prescribed by Him is a sacred trust". The Objectives Resolution has been incorporated as a preamble to the constitutions of 1956, 1962, and 1973.Democracy was stalled by the martial law that had been enforced by President Iskander Mirza, who was replaced by the army chief, General Ayub Khan. After adopting a presidential system in 1962, the country experienced exceptional growth until a second war with India in 1965 that led to an economic downturn and wide-scale public disapproval in 1967. Consolidating control from Ayub Khan in 1969, President Yahya Khan had to deal with a devastating cyclone that caused 500,000 deaths in East Pakistan.In 1970 Pakistan held its first democratic elections since independence, meant to mark a transition from military rule to democracy, but after the East Pakistani Awami League won against the Pakistan Peoples Party (PPP), Yahya Khan and the military establishment refused to hand over power. Operation Searchlight, a military crackdown on the Bengali nationalist movement, led to a declaration of independence and the waging of a war of liberation by the Bengali Mukti Bahini forces in East Pakistan, which in West Pakistan was described as a civil war as opposed to a war of liberation.Independent researchers estimate that between 300,000 and 500,000 civilians died during this period while the Bangladesh government puts the number of dead at three million, a figure that is now nearly universally regarded as excessively inflated. Some academics such as Rudolph Rummel and Rounaq Jahan say both sides committed genocide; others such as Richard Sisson and Leo E. Rose believe there was no genocide. In response to India's support for the insurgency in East Pakistan, preemptive strikes on India by Pakistan's air force, navy, and marines sparked a conventional war in 1971 that resulted in an Indian victory and East Pakistan gaining independence as Bangladesh.With Pakistan surrendering in the war, Yahya Khan was replaced by Zulfikar Ali Bhutto as president; the country worked towards promulgating its constitution and putting the country on the road to democracy. Democratic rule resumed from 1972 to 1977—an era of self-consciousness, intellectual leftism, nationalism, and nationwide reconstruction. In 1972 Pakistan embarked on an ambitious plan to develop its nuclear deterrence capability with the goal of preventing any foreign invasion; the country's first nuclear power plant was inaugurated in that same year. Accelerated in response to India's first nuclear test in 1974, this crash program was completed in 1979.Democracy ended with a military coup in 1977 against the leftist PPP, which saw General Zia-ul-Haq become the president in 1978. From 1977 to 1988, President Zia's corporatisation and economic Islamisation initiatives led to Pakistan becoming one of the fastest-growing economies in South Asia. While building up the country's nuclear program, increasing Islamisation, and the rise of a homegrown conservative philosophy, Pakistan helped subsidise and distribute US resources to factions of the mujahideen against the USSR's intervention in communist Afghanistan. Pakistan's North-West Frontier Province became a base for the anti-Soviet Afghan fighters, with the province's influential Deobandi ulama playing a significant role in encouraging and organising the 'jihad'.President Zia died in a plane crash in 1988, and Benazir Bhutto, daughter of Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, was elected as the country's first female Prime Minister. The PPP was followed by conservative Pakistan Muslim League (N), and over the next decade the leaders of the two parties fought for power, alternating in office while the country's situation worsened; economic indicators fell sharply, in contrast to the 1980s. This period is marked by prolonged stagflation, instability, corruption, nationalism, geopolitical rivalry with India, and the clash of left wing-right wing ideologies. As PML (N) secured a supermajority in elections in 1997, Sharif authorised nuclear testings (See:"Chagai-I" and "Chagai-II"), as a retaliation to the second nuclear tests ordered by India, led by Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee in May 1998.Military tension between the two countries in the Kargil district led to the Kargil War of 1999, and turmoil in civic-military relations allowed General Pervez Musharraf to take over through a bloodless coup d'état. Musharraf governed Pakistan as chief executive from 1999 to 2001 and as President from 2001 to 2008—a period of enlightenment, social liberalism, extensive economic reforms, and direct involvement in the US-led war on terrorism. When the National Assembly historically completed its first full five-year term on 15 November 2007, the new elections were called by the Election Commission.After the assassination of Benazir Bhutto in 2007, the PPP secured the most votes in the elections of 2008, appointing party member Yousaf Raza Gillani as Prime Minister. Threatened with impeachment, President Musharraf resigned on 18 August 2008, and was succeeded by Asif Ali Zardari. Clashes with the judicature prompted Gillani's disqualification from the Parliament and as the Prime Minister in June 2012. By its own financial calculations, Pakistan's involvement in the war on terrorism has cost up to $118 billion, sixty thousand casualties and more than 1.8 million displaced civilians. The general election held in 2013 saw the PML (N) almost achieve a supermajority, following which Nawaz Sharif was elected as the Prime Minister, returning to the post for the third time in fourteen years, in a democratic transition. In 2018, Imran Khan (the chairman of PTI) won the 2018 Pakistan general election with 116 general seats and became the 22nd Prime Minister of Pakistan in election of National Assembly of Pakistan for Prime Minister by getting 176 votes against Shehbaz Sharif (the chairman of PML (N)) who got 96 votes.Pakistan is the only country to have been created in the name of Islam. The idea of Pakistan, which had received overwhelming popular support among Indian Muslims, especially those in the provinces of British India where Muslims were in a minority such as the United Provinces, was articulated in terms of an Islamic state by the Muslim League leadership, the ulama (Islamic clergy) and Jinnah. Jinnah had developed a close association with the "ulama" and upon his death was described by one such "alim", Maulana Shabbir Ahmad Usmani, as the greatest Muslim after Aurangzeb and as someone who desired to unite the Muslims of the world under the banner of Islam.The Objectives Resolution in March 1949, which declared God as the sole sovereign over the entire universe, represented the first formal step to transform Pakistan into an Islamic state. Muslim League leader Chaudhry Khaliquzzaman asserted that Pakistan could only truly become an Islamic state after bringing all believers of Islam into a single political unit. Keith Callard, one of the earliest scholars on Pakistani politics, observed that Pakistanis believed in the essential unity of purpose and outlook in the Muslim world and assumed that Muslim from other countries would share their views on the relationship between religion and nationality.However, Pakistan's pan-Islamist sentiments for a united Islamic bloc called Islamistan were not shared by other Muslim governments, although Islamists such as the Grand Mufti of Palestine, Al-Haj Amin al-Husseini, and leaders of the Muslim Brotherhood, became drawn to the country. Pakistan's desire for an international organization of Muslim countries was fulfilled in the 1970s when the Organization of Islamic Conference (OIC) was formed.The strongest opposition to the Islamist ideological paradigm being imposed on the state came from the Bengali Muslims of East Pakistan whose educated class, according to a survey by social scientist Nasim Ahmad Jawed, preferred secularism and focused on ethnic identity unlike educated West Pakistanis who tended to prefer an Islamic identity. The Islamist party Jamaat-e-Islami considered Pakistan to be an Islamic state and believed Bengali nationalism to be unacceptable. In the 1971 conflict over East Pakistan, the Jamaat-e-Islami fought the Bengali nationalists on the Pakistan Army's side.After Pakistan's first ever general elections, the 1973 Constitution was created by an elected Parliament. The Constitution declared Pakistan an Islamic Republic and Islam as the state religion. It also stated that all laws would have to be brought into accordance with the injunctions of Islam as laid down in the Quran and Sunnah and that no law repugnant to such injunctions could be enacted. The 1973 Constitution also created certain institutions such as the Shariat Court and the Council of Islamic Ideology to channel the interpretation and application of Islam.Pakistan's leftist Prime Minister Zulfikar Ali Bhutto faced vigorous opposition which coalesced into a movement united under the revivalist banner of "Nizam-e-Mustafa" ("Rule of the Prophet") which aimed to establish an Islamic state based on Sharia laws. Bhutto agreed to some Islamist demands before being overthrown in a coup.In 1977, after taking power from Bhutto in a coup d'état, General Zia-ul-Haq, who came from a religious background, committed himself to establishing an Islamic state and enforcing "sharia" law. Zia established separate Shariat judicial courts and court benches to judge legal cases using Islamic doctrine. Zia bolstered the influence of the "ulama" (Islamic clergy) and the Islamic parties. Zia-ul-Haq forged a strong alliance between the military and Deobandi institutions and even though most Barelvi ulama and only a few Deobandi scholars had supported Pakistan's creation, Islamic state politics came to be mostly in favour of Deobandi (and later Ahl-e-Hadith/Salafi) institutions instead of Barelvi. Sectarian tensions increased with Zia's anti-Shia policies.According to a Pew Research Center (PEW) opinion poll, a majority of Pakistanis support making Sharia the official law of the land. In a survey of several Muslim countries, PEW also found that Pakistanis tend to identify with their religion more than their nationality in contrast to Muslims in other nations such as Egypt, Indonesia and Jordan.The geography and climate of Pakistan are extremely diverse, and the country is home to a wide variety of wildlife. Pakistan covers an area of , approximately equal to the combined land areas of France and the United Kingdom. It is the 33rd-largest nation by total area, although this ranking varies depending on how the disputed territory of Kashmir is counted. Pakistan has a coastline along the Arabian Sea and the Gulf of Oman in the south and land borders of in total: with Afghanistan, with China, with India and with Iran. It shares a marine border with Oman, and is separated from Tajikistan by the cold, narrow Wakhan Corridor. Pakistan occupies a geopolitically important location at the crossroads of South Asia, the Middle East, and Central Asia.Geologically, Pakistan is located in the Indus–Tsangpo Suture Zone and overlaps the Indian tectonic plate in its Sindh and Punjab provinces; Balochistan and most of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa are within the Eurasian plate, mainly on the Iranian plateau. Gilgit–Baltistan and Azad Kashmir lie along the edge of the Indian plate and hence are prone to violent earthquakes. This region has the highest rates of seismicity and the largest earthquakes in the Himalaya region. Ranging from the coastal areas of the south to the glaciated mountains of the north, Pakistan's landscapes vary from plains to deserts, forests, hills, and plateaus.Pakistan is divided into three major geographic areas: the northern highlands, the Indus River plain, and the Balochistan Plateau. The northern highlands contain the Karakoram, Hindu Kush, and Pamir mountain ranges (see mountains of Pakistan), which contain some of the world's highest peaks, including five of the fourteen eight-thousanders (mountain peaks over ), which attract adventurers and mountaineers from all over the world, notably K2 () and Nanga Parbat (). The Balochistan Plateau lies in the west and the Thar Desert in the east. The Indus River and its tributaries flow through the country from the Kashmir region to the Arabian Sea. There is an expanse of alluvial plains along it in the Punjab and Sindh.The climate varies from tropical to temperate, with arid conditions in the coastal south. There is a monsoon season with frequent flooding due to heavy rainfall, and a dry season with significantly less rainfall or none at all. There are four distinct seasons in Pakistan: a cool, dry winter from December through February; a hot, dry spring from March through May; the summer rainy season, or southwest monsoon period, from June through September; and the retreating monsoon period of October and November. Rainfall varies greatly from year to year, and patterns of alternate flooding and drought are common.The diversity of the landscape and climate in Pakistan allows a wide variety of trees and plants to flourish. The forests range from coniferous alpine and subalpine trees such as spruce, pine, and deodar cedar in the extreme northern mountains to deciduous trees in most of the country (for example, the mulberry-like shisham found in the Sulaiman Mountains), to palms such as coconut and date in the southern Punjab, southern Balochistan, and all of Sindh. The western hills are home to juniper, tamarisk, coarse grasses, and scrub plants. Mangrove forests form much of the coastal wetlands along the coast in the south.Coniferous forests are found at altitudes ranging from in most of the northern and northwestern highlands. In the xeric regions of Balochistan, date palm and "Ephedra" are common. In most of the Punjab and Sindh, the Indus plains support tropical and subtropical dry and moist broadleaf forest as well as tropical and xeric shrublands. These forests are mostly of mulberry, acacia, and eucalyptus. About 2.2% or of Pakistan was forested in 2010.The fauna of Pakistan also reflects the country's varied climate. Around 668 bird species are found there, including crows, sparrows, mynas, hawks, falcons, and eagles. Palas, Kohistan, has a significant population of western tragopan. Many birds sighted in Pakistan are migratory, coming from Europe, Central Asia, and India.The southern plains are home to mongooses, small Indian civet, hares, the Asiatic jackal, the Indian pangolin, the jungle cat, and the desert cat. There are mugger crocodiles in the Indus, and wild boar, deer, porcupines, and small rodents in the surrounding areas. The sandy scrublands of central Pakistan are home to Asiatic jackals, striped hyenas, wildcats, and leopards. The lack of vegetative cover, the severe climate, and the impact of grazing on the deserts have left wild animals in a precarious position. The chinkara is the only animal that can still be found in significant numbers in Cholistan. A small number of nilgai are found along the Pakistan–India border and in some parts of Cholistan. A wide variety of animals live in the mountainous north, including the Marco Polo sheep, the urial (a subspecies of wild sheep), the markhor goat, the ibex goat, the Asian black bear, and the Himalayan brown bear. Among the rare animals found in the area are the snow leopard and the blind Indus river dolphin, of which there are believed to be about 1,100 remaining, protected at the Indus River Dolphin Reserve in Sindh. In total, 174 mammals, 177 reptiles, 22 amphibians, 198 freshwater fish species and 5,000 species of invertebrates (including insects) have been recorded in Pakistan.The flora and fauna of Pakistan suffer from a number of problems. Pakistan has the second-highest rate of deforestation in the world, which, along with hunting and pollution, has had adverse effects on the ecosystem. It had a 2019 Forest Landscape Integrity Index mean score of 7.42/10, ranking it 41st globally out of 172 countries. The government has established a large number of protected areas, wildlife sanctuaries, and game reserves to address these issues.Pakistan's political experience is essentially related to the struggle of Indian Muslims to regain the power they lost to British colonisation. Pakistan is a democratic parliamentary federal republic, with Islam as the state religion. The first constitution was adopted in 1956 but suspended by Ayub Khan in 1958, who replaced it with the second constitution in 1962. A complete and comprehensive constitution was adopted in 1973, it was suspended by Zia-ul-Haq in 1977 but reinstated in 1985. This constitution is the country's most important document, laying the foundations of the current government. The Pakistani military establishment has played an influential role in mainstream politics throughout Pakistan's political history. The periods 1958–1971, 1977–1988, and 1999–2008 saw military coups that resulted in the imposition of martial law and military commanders who governed as de facto presidents. Today Pakistan has a multi-party parliamentary system with clear division of powers and checks and balances among the branches of government. The first successful democratic transition occurred in May 2013. Politics in Pakistan is centred on, and dominated by, a homegrown social philosophy comprising a blend of ideas from socialism, conservatism, and the third way. As of the general elections held in 2013, the three main political parties in the country are: the centre-right conservative Pakistan Muslim League-N; the centre-left socialist PPP; and the centrist and third-way Pakistan Movement for Justice (PTI).Since Independence, Pakistan has attempted to balance its relations with foreign nations. Pakistan is a strong ally of China, with both countries placing considerable importance on the maintenance of an extremely close and supportive special relationship. It is also a major non-NATO ally of the United States in the war against terrorism—a status achieved in 2004. Pakistan's foreign policy and geostrategy mainly focus on the economy and security against threats to its national identity and territorial integrity, and on the cultivation of close relations with other Muslim countries.The Kashmir conflict remains the major point of contention between Pakistan and India; three of their four wars were fought over this territory. Due partly to difficulties in relations with its geopolitical rival India, Pakistan maintains close political relations with Turkey and Iran, and both countries have been a focal point in Pakistan's foreign policy. Saudi Arabia also maintains a respected position in Pakistan's foreign policy.A non-signatory party of the Treaty on Nuclear Non-Proliferation, Pakistan is an influential member of the IAEA. In recent events, Pakistan has blocked an international treaty to limit fissile material, arguing that the "treaty would target Pakistan specifically". In the 20th century, Pakistan's nuclear deterrence program focused on countering India's nuclear ambitions in the region, and nuclear tests by India eventually led Pakistan to reciprocate to maintain a geopolitical balance as becoming a nuclear power. Currently, Pakistan maintains a policy of credible minimum deterrence, calling its program vital nuclear deterrence against foreign aggression.Located in the strategic and geopolitical corridor of the world's major maritime oil supply lines and communication fibre optics, Pakistan has proximity to the natural resources of Central Asian countries. Briefing on the country's foreign policy in 2004, a Pakistani senator reportedly explained: "Pakistan highlights sovereign equality of states, bilateralism, mutuality of interests, and non-interference in each other's domestic affairs as the cardinal features of its foreign policy." Pakistan is an active member of the United Nations and has a Permanent Representative to represent Pakistan's positions in international politics. Pakistan has lobbied for the concept of "enlightened moderation" in the Muslim world. Pakistan is also a member of Commonwealth of Nations, the South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation (SAARC), the Economic Cooperation Organization (ECO), and the G20 developing nations.Due to ideological differences, Pakistan opposed the Soviet Union in the 1950s. During the Soviet–Afghan War in the 1980s, Pakistan was one of the closest allies of the United States. Relations between Pakistan and Russia have greatly improved since 1999, and co-operation in various sectors has increased. Pakistan has had an "on-and-off" relationship with the United States. A close ally of the United States during the Cold war, Pakistan's relationship with the United States soured in the 1990s when the US imposed sanctions because of Pakistan's secretive nuclear development. Since 9/11, Pakistan has been a close ally of the United States on the issue of counter-terrorism in the regions of the Middle East and South Asia, with the US supporting Pakistan with aid money and weapons. Initially, the United States-led war on terrorism led to an improvement in the relationship, but it was strained by a divergence of interests and resulting mistrust during the war in Afghanistan and by issues related to terrorism.Pakistan does not have diplomatic relations with Israel; nonetheless, some Israeli citizens have visited the country on tourist visas. However, an exchange took place between the two countries using Turkey as a communication conduit. Despite Pakistan being the only country in the world that has not established diplomatic relations with Armenia, an Armenian community still resides in Pakistan. Pakistan had warm relations with Bangladesh, despite some initial strains in their relationship.Pakistan was one of the first countries to establish formal diplomatic relations with the People's Republic of China, and the relationship continues to be strong since China's war with India in 1962, forming a special relationship. From the 1960s to 1980s, Pakistan greatly helped China in reaching out to the world's major countries and helped facilitate US President Nixon's state visit to China. Despite the change of governments in Pakistan and fluctuations in the regional and global situation, China's policy in Pakistan continues to be a dominant factor at all times. In return, China is Pakistan's largest trading partner, and economic co-operation has flourished, with substantial Chinese investment in Pakistan's infrastructural expansion such as the Pakistani deep-water port at Gwadar. Friendly Sino-Pakistani relations reached new heights as both countries signed 51 agreements and Memorandums of Understanding (MoUs) in 2015 for co-operation in different areas. Both countries signed a Free Trade Agreement in the 2000s, and Pakistan continues to serve as China's communication bridge to the Muslim world. In 2016, China announced that it will set up an anti-terrorism alliance with Pakistan, Afghanistan, and Tajikistan. In December 2018, Pakistan's government defended China's re-education camps for a million Uyghur Muslims.After Independence, Pakistan vigorously pursued bilateral relations with other Muslim countries and made an active bid for leadership of the Muslim world, or at least for leadership in efforts to achieve unity. The Ali brothers had sought to project Pakistan as the natural leader of the Islamic world, in part due to its large manpower and military strength. A top-ranking Muslim League leader, Khaliquzzaman, declared that Pakistan would bring together all Muslim countries into Islamistan—a pan-Islamic entity.Such developments (along with Pakistan's creation) did not get American approval, and British Prime Minister Clement Attlee voiced international opinion at the time by stating that he wished that India and Pakistan would re-unite. Since most of the Arab world was undergoing a nationalist awakening at the time, there was little attraction to Pakistan's Pan-Islamic aspirations. Some of the Arab countries saw the 'Islamistan' project as a Pakistani attempt to dominate other Muslim states.Pakistan vigorously championed the right of self-determination for Muslims around the world. Pakistan's efforts for the independence movements of Indonesia, Algeria, Tunisia, Morocco, and Eritrea were significant and initially led to close ties between these countries and Pakistan. However, Pakistan also masterminded an attack on the Afghan city of Jalalabad during the Afghan Civil War to establish an Islamic government there. Pakistan had wished to foment an 'Islamic Revolution' that would transcend national borders, covering Pakistan, Afghanistan, and Central Asia.On the other hand, Pakistan's relations with Iran have been strained at times due to sectarian tensions. Iran and Saudi Arabia used Pakistan as a battleground for their proxy sectarian war, and by the 1990s Pakistan's support for the Sunni Taliban organisation in Afghanistan became a problem for Shia Iran, which opposed a Taliban-controlled Afghanistan. Tensions between Iran and Pakistan intensified in 1998 when Iran accused Pakistan of war crimes after Pakistani warplanes had bombarded Afghanistan's last Shia stronghold in support of the Taliban.Pakistan is an influential and founding member of the Organisation of Islamic Cooperation (OIC). Maintaining cultural, political, social, and economic relations with the Arab world and other countries in the Muslim world is a vital factor in Pakistan's foreign policy.A federal parliamentary republic state, Pakistan is a federation that comprises four provinces: Punjab, Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, Sindh and Balochistan, and three territories: Islamabad Capital Territory, Gilgit–Baltistan and Azad Kashmir. The Government of Pakistan exercises the "de facto" jurisdiction over the Frontier Regions and the western parts of the Kashmir Regions, which are organised into the separate political entities Azad Kashmir and Gilgit–Baltistan (formerly Northern Areas). In 2009, the constitutional assignment () awarded the Gilgit–Baltistan a semi-provincial status, giving it self-government.The local government system consists of a three-tier system of districts, tehsils, and union councils, with an elected body at each tier. There are about 130 districts altogether, of which Azad Kashmir has ten and Gilgit–Baltistan seven.Law enforcement is carried out by a joint network of the intelligence community with jurisdiction limited to the relevant province or territory. The National Intelligence Directorate coordinates the information intelligence at both federal and provincial levels; including the FIA, IB, Motorway Police, and paramilitary forces such as the Pakistan Rangers and the Frontier Corps.Pakistan's "premier" intelligence agency, the Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI), was formed just within a year after the Independence of Pakistan in 1947. ABC News Point in 2014 reported that the ISI was ranked as the top intelligence agency in the world while Zee News reported the ISI as ranking fifth among the world's most powerful intelligence agencies.The court system is organised as a hierarchy, with the Supreme Court at the apex, below which are High Courts, Federal Shariat Courts (one in each province and one in the federal capital), District Courts (one in each district), Judicial Magistrate Courts (in every town and city), Executive Magistrate Courts, and civil courts. The Penal code has limited jurisdiction in the Tribal Areas, where law is largely derived from tribal customs.The Kashmir—the most northwesterly region of South Asia—is a major territorial dispute that has hindered relations between India and Pakistan. The two nations have fought at least three large-scale conventional wars in successive years in 1947, 1965, and 1971. The conflict in 1971 witnessed Pakistan's unconditional surrender and a treaty that subsequently led to the independence of Bangladesh. Other serious military engagements and skirmishes have included the armed contacts in Siachen Glacier (1984) and Kargil (1999). Approximately 45.1% of the Kashmir region is controlled by India, which also claims the entire state of Jammu and Kashmir, including most of Jammu, the Kashmir Valley, Ladakh, and the Siachen. The claim is contested by Pakistan, which controls approximately 38.2% of the Kashmir region, an area known as the Azad Kashmir and Gilgit–Baltistan.India claims the Kashmir on the basis of the Instrument of Accession—a legal agreement with Kashmir's leaders executed by "Maharaja" Hari Singh, who agreed to cede the area to India. Pakistan claims Kashmir on the basis of a Muslim majority and of geography, the same principles that were applied for the creation of the two independent states. India referred the dispute to the United Nations on 1 January 1948. In a resolution passed in 1948, the UN's General Assembly asked Pakistan to remove most of its troops as a "plebiscite" would then be held. However, Pakistan failed to vacate the region and a ceasefire was reached in 1949 establishing a Line of Control (LoC) that divided Kashmir between the two nations. India, fearful that the Muslim majority populace of Kashmir would secede from India, did not allow a plebiscite to take place in the region. This was confirmed in a statement by India's Defense Minister, Krishna Menon, who said: "Kashmir would vote to join Pakistan and no Indian Government responsible for agreeing to plebiscite would survive."Pakistan claims that its position is for the right of the people of Jammu and Kashmir to determine their future through impartial elections as mandated by the United Nations, while India has stated that Kashmir is an integral part of India, referring to the Simla Agreement (1972) and to the fact that elections take place regularly. In recent developments, certain Kashmiri independence groups believe that Kashmir should be independent of both India and Pakistan.The law enforcement in Pakistan is carried out by joint network of several federal and provincial police agencies. The four provinces and the Islamabad Capital Territory (ICT) each have a civilian police force with jurisdiction extending only to the relevant province or territory. At the federal level, there are a number of civilian intelligence agencies with nationwide jurisdictions including the Federal Investigation Agency (FIA), Intelligence Bureau (IB), and the Motorway Patrol, as well as several paramilitary forces such as the National Guards (Northern Areas), the Rangers (Punjab and Sindh), and the Frontier Corps (Khyber Pakhtunkhwa and Balochistan).The most senior officers of all the civilian police forces also form part of the Police Service, which is a component of the civil service of Pakistan. Namely, there is four provincial police service including the Punjab Police, Sindh Police, Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa Police, and the Balochistan Police; all headed by the appointed senior Inspector-Generals. The ICT has its own police component, the Capital Police, to maintain law and order in the capital. The CID bureaus are the crime investigation unit and form a vital part in each provincial police service.The law enforcement in Pakistan also has a Motorway Patrol which is responsible for enforcement of traffic and safety laws, security and recovery on Pakistan's inter-provincial motorway network. In each of provincial Police Service, it also maintains a respective Elite Police units led by the NACTA—a counter-terrorism police unit as well as providing VIP escorts. In the Punjab and Sindh, the Pakistan Rangers are an internal security force with the prime objective to provide and maintain security in war zones and areas of conflict as well as maintaining law and order which includes providing assistance to the police. The Frontier Corps serves the similar purpose in Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa, and the Balochistan.Male homosexuality is illegal in Pakistan and punishable with up to life in prison. In its 2018 Press Freedom Index, Reporters Without Borders ranked Pakistan number 139 out of 180 countries based on freedom of the press. Television stations and newspapers are routinely shut down for publishing any reports critical of the government or the military.The armed forces of Pakistan are the sixth largest in the world in terms of numbers in full-time service, with about 651,800 personnel on active duty and 291,000 paramilitary personnel, as of tentative estimates in 2021. They came into existence after independence in 1947, and the military establishment has frequently influenced the national politics ever since. Chain of command of the military is kept under the control of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Committee; all of the branches joint works, co-ordination, military logistics, and joint missions are under the Joint Staff HQ. The Joint Staff HQ is composed of the Air HQ, Navy HQ, and Army GHQ in the vicinity of the Rawalpindi Military District.The Chairman Joint Chiefs of Staff Committee is the highest principle staff officer in the armed forces, and the chief military adviser to the civilian government though the chairman has no authority over the three branches of armed forces. The Chairman joint chiefs controls the military from the JS HQ and maintains strategic communications between the military and the civilian government. , the CJCSC is General Nadeem Raza alongside chief of army staff General Qamar Javed Bajwa, chief of naval staff Admiral Muhammad Amjad Khan Niazi, and chief of air staff Air Chief Marshal Zaheer Ahmad Babar. The main branches are the Army, the Air Force and the Navy, which are supported by a large number of paramilitary forces in the country. Control over the strategic arsenals, deployment, employment, development, military computers and command and control is a responsibility vested under the National Command Authority which oversaw the work on the nuclear policy as part of the credible minimum deterrence.The United States, Turkey, and China maintain close military relations and regularly export military equipment and technology transfer to Pakistan. Joint logistics and major war games are occasionally carried out by the militaries of China and Turkey. Philosophical basis for the military draft is introduced by the Constitution in times of emergency, but it has never been imposed.Since 1947 Pakistan has been involved in four conventional wars, the first war occurred in Kashmir with Pakistan gaining control of Western Kashmir, (Azad Kashmir and Gilgit–Baltistan), and India retaining Eastern Kashmir (Jammu and Kashmir and Ladakh). Territorial problems eventually led to another conventional war in 1965; over the issue of Bengali refugees that led to another war in 1971 which resulted in Pakistan's unconditional surrender in East Pakistan. Tensions in Kargil brought the two countries at the brink of war. Since 1947 the unresolved territorial problems with Afghanistan saw border skirmishes which were kept mostly at the mountainous border. In 1961, the military and intelligence community repelled the Afghan incursion in the Bajaur Agency near the Durand Line border.Rising tensions with neighbouring USSR in their involvement in Afghanistan, Pakistani intelligence community, mostly the ISI, systematically coordinated the US resources to the Afghan mujahideen and foreign fighters against the Soviet Union's presence in the region. Military reports indicated that the PAF was in engagement with the Soviet Air Force, supported by the Afghan Air Force during the course of the conflict; one of which belonged to Alexander Rutskoy. Apart from its own conflicts, Pakistan has been an active participant in United Nations peacekeeping missions. It played a major role in rescuing trapped American soldiers from Mogadishu, Somalia, in 1993 in Operation Gothic Serpent. According to UN reports, the Pakistani military is the third largest troop contributor to UN peacekeeping missions after Ethiopia and India.Pakistan has deployed its military in some Arab countries, providing defence, training, and playing advisory roles. The PAF and Navy's fighter pilots have voluntarily served in Arab nations' militaries against Israel in the Six-Day War (1967) and in the Yom Kippur War (1973). Pakistan's fighter pilots shot down ten Israeli planes in the Six-Day War. In the 1973 war one of the PAF pilots, Flt. Lt. Sattar Alvi (flying a MiG-21), shot down an Israeli Air Force Mirage and was honoured by the Syrian government. Requested by the Saudi monarchy in 1979, Pakistan's special forces units, operatives, and commandos were rushed to assist Saudi forces in Mecca to lead the operation of the Grand Mosque. For almost two weeks Saudi Special Forces and Pakistani commandos fought the insurgents who had occupied the Grand Mosque's compound. In 1991 Pakistan got involved with the Gulf War and sent 5,000 troops as part of a US-led coalition, specifically for the defence of Saudi Arabia.Despite the UN arms embargo on Bosnia, General Javed Nasir of the ISI airlifted anti-tank weapons and missiles to Bosnian mujahideen which turned the tide in favour of Bosnian Muslims and forced the Serbs to lift the siege. Under Nasir's leadership the ISI was also involved in supporting Chinese Muslims in Xinjiang Province, rebel Muslim groups in the Philippines, and some religious groups in Central Asia.Since 2004, the military has been engaged in an insurgency in the Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province, mainly against the Tehrik-i-Taliban factions. Major operations undertaken by the army include Operation Black Thunderstorm, Operation Rah-e-Nijat and Operation Zarb-e-Azb.According to SIPRI, Pakistan was the 9th-largest recipient and importer of arms between 2012–2016.The Economy of Pakistan is the 23rd-largest in the world in terms of purchasing power parity (PPP), and 42nd-largest in terms of nominal gross domestic product. Economists estimate that Pakistan was part of the wealthiest region of the world throughout the first millennium CE, with the largest economy by GDP. This advantage was lost in the 18th century as other regions such as China and Western Europe edged forward. Pakistan is considered a developing country and is one of the Next Eleven, a group of eleven countries that, along with the BRICs, have a high potential to become the world's largest economies in the 21st century.In recent years, after decades of social instability, , serious deficiencies in macromanagement and unbalanced macroeconomics in basic services such as rail transportation and electrical energy generation have developed. The economy is considered to be semi-industrialized, with centres of growth along the Indus River. The diversified economies of Karachi and Punjab's urban centres coexist with less-developed areas in other parts of the country, particularly in Balochistan. According to the Economic complexity index, Pakistan is the 67th-largest export economy in the world and the 106th most complex economy. During the fiscal year 2015–16, Pakistan's exports stood at US$20.81 billion and imports at US$44.76 billion, resulting in a negative trade balance of US$23.96 billion., Pakistan's estimated nominal GDP is US$284.2 billion. The GDP by PPP is US$1.254 trillion. The estimated nominal per capita GDP is US$1,388, the GDP (PPP)/capita is US$6,016 (international dollars), According to the World Bank, Pakistan has important strategic endowments and development potential. The increasing proportion of Pakistan's youth provides the country with both a potential demographic dividend and a challenge to provide adequate services and employment. 21.04% of the population live below the international poverty line of US$1.25 a day. The unemployment rate among the aged 15 and over population is 5.5%. Pakistan has an estimated 40 million middle class citizens, projected to increase to 100 million by 2050. A 2015 report published by the World Bank ranked Pakistan's economy at 24th-largest in the world by purchasing power and 41st-largest in absolute terms. It is South Asia's second-largest economy, representing about 15.0% of regional GDP.Pakistan's economic growth since its inception has been varied. It has been slow during periods of democratic transition, but robust during the three periods of martial law, although the foundation for sustainable and equitable growth was not formed. The early to middle 2000s was a period of rapid economic reforms; the government raised development spending, which reduced poverty levels by 10% and increased GDP by 3%. The economy cooled again from 2007. Inflation reached 25.0% in 2008, and Pakistan had to depend on a fiscal policy backed by the International Monetary Fund to avoid possible bankruptcy. A year later, the Asian Development Bank reported that Pakistan's economic crisis was easing. The inflation rate for the fiscal year was 14.1%. Since 2013, as part of an International Monetary Fund program, Pakistan's economic growth has picked up. In 2014 Goldman Sachs predicted that Pakistan's economy would grow 15 times in the next 35 years to become the 18th-largest economy in the world by 2050. In his 2016 book, "The Rise and Fall of Nations", Ruchir Sharma termed Pakistan's economy as at a 'take-off' stage and the future outlook until 2020 has been termed 'Very Good'. Sharma termed it possible to transform Pakistan from a "low-income to a middle-income country during the next five years".Pakistan is one of the largest producers of natural commodities, and its labour market is the 10th-largest in the world. The 7-million–strong Pakistani diaspora contributed US$19.9 billion to the economy in 2015–16. The major source countries of remittances to Pakistan are: the UAE; the United States; Saudi Arabia; the Gulf states (Bahrain, Kuwait, Qatar, and Oman); Australia; Canada; Japan; the United Kingdom; Norway; and Switzerland. According to the World Trade Organization, Pakistan's share of overall world exports is declining; it contributed only 0.13% in 2007.The structure of the Pakistani economy has changed from a mainly agricultural to a strong service base. Agriculture accounts for only 20.9% of the GDP. Even so, according to the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization, Pakistan produced 21,591,400 metric tons of wheat in 2005, more than all of Africa (20,304,585 metric tons) and nearly as much as all of South America (24,557,784 metric tons). Majority of the population, directly or indirectly, is dependent on this sector. It accounts for 43.5% of employed labour force and is the largest source of foreign exchange earnings.A large portion of the country's manufactured exports is dependent on raw materials such as cotton and hides that are part of the agriculture sector, while supply shortages and market disruptions in farm products do push up inflationary pressures. The country is also the fifth-largest producer of cotton, with cotton production of 14 million bales from a modest beginning of 1.7 million bales in the early 1950s; is self-sufficient in sugarcane; and is the fourth-largest producer in the world of milk. Land and water resources have not risen proportionately, but the increases have taken place mainly due to gains in labour and agriculture productivity. The major breakthrough in crop production took place in the late 1960s and 1970s due to the Green Revolution that made a significant contribution to land and yield increases of wheat and rice. Private tube wells led to a 50 percent increase in the cropping intensity which was augmented by tractor cultivation. While the tube wells raised crop yields by 50 percent, the High Yielding Varieties (HYVs) of wheat and rice led to a 50–60 percent higher yield. Meat industry accounts for 1.4 percent of overall GDP.Industry is the second-largest sector of the economy, accounting for 19.74% of gross domestic product (GDP), and 24 percent of total employment. Large-scale manufacturing (LSM), at 12.2% of GDP, dominates the overall sector, accounting for 66% of the sectoral share, followed by small-scale manufacturing, which accounts for 4.9% of total GDP. Pakistan's cement industry is also fast growing mainly because of demand from Afghanistan and from the domestic real estate sector. In 2013 Pakistan exported 7,708,557 metric tons of cement. Pakistan has an installed capacity of 44,768,250 metric tons of cement and 42,636,428 metric tons of clinker. In 2012 and 2013, the cement industry in Pakistan became the most profitable sector of the economy.The textile industry has a pivotal position in the manufacturing sector of Pakistan. In Asia, Pakistan is the eighth-largest exporter of textile products, contributing 9.5% to the GDP and providing employment to around 15 million people (some 30% of the 49 million people in the workforce). Pakistan is the fourth-largest producer of cotton with the third-largest spinning capacity in Asia after China and India, contributing 5% to the global spinning capacity. China is the second largest buyer of Pakistani textiles, importing US$1.527 billion of textiles last fiscal. Unlike the US, where mostly value-added textiles are imported, China buys only cotton yarn and cotton fabric from Pakistan. In 2012, Pakistani textile products accounted for 3.3% or US$1.07bn of all UK textile imports, 12.4% or $4.61bn of total Chinese textile imports, 3.0% of all US textile imports ($2,980 million), 1.6% of total German textile imports ($880 million) and 0.7% of total Indian textile imports ($888 million).The services sector makes up 58.8% of GDP and has emerged as the main driver of economic growth. Pakistani society like other developing countries is a consumption oriented society, having a high marginal propensity to consume. The growth rate of services sector is higher than the growth rate of agriculture and industrial sector. Services sector accounts for 54 percent of GDP in 2014 and little over one-third of total employment. Services sector has strong linkages with other sectors of economy; it provides essential inputs to agriculture sector and manufacturing sector. Pakistan's I.T sector is regarded as among the fastest growing sector's in Pakistan. The World Economic Forum, assessing the development of Information and Communication Technology in the country ranked Pakistan 110th among 139 countries on the 'Networked Readiness Index 2016'., Pakistan has about 82 million internet users, making it the 9th-largest population of Internet users in the world. The current growth rate and employment trend indicate that Pakistan's Information Communication Technology (ICT) industry will exceed the $10-billion mark by 2020. The sector employees 12,000 and count's among top five freelancing nations. The country has also improved its export performance in telecom, computer and information services, as the share of their exports surged from 8.2pc in 2005–06 to 12.6pc in 2012–13. This growth is much better than that of China, whose share in services exports was 3pc and 7.7pc for the same period respectively.With its diverse cultures, people, and landscapes, Pakistan attracted around 6.6 million foreign tourists in 2018, which represented a significant decline since the 1970s when the country received unprecedented numbers of foreign tourists due to the popular Hippie trail. The trail attracted thousands of Europeans and Americans in the 1960s and 1970s who travelled via land through Turkey and Iran into India through Pakistan. The main destinations of choice for these tourists were the Khyber Pass, Peshawar, Karachi, Lahore, Swat and Rawalpindi. The numbers following the trail declined after the Iranian Revolution and the Soviet–Afghan War.Pakistan's tourist attractions range from the mangroves in the south to the Himalayan hill stations in the north-east. The country's tourist destinations range from the Buddhist ruins of Takht-i-Bahi and Taxila, to the 5,000-year-old cities of the Indus Valley Civilization such as Mohenjo-daro and Harappa. Pakistan is home to several mountain peaks over . The northern part of Pakistan has many old fortresses, examples of ancient architecture, and the Hunza and Chitral valleys, home to the small pre-Islamic Kalasha community claiming descent from Alexander the Great. Pakistan's cultural capital, Lahore, contains many examples of Mughal architecture such as the Badshahi Masjid, the Shalimar Gardens, the Tomb of Jahangir, and the Lahore Fort.In October 2006, just one year after the 2005 Kashmir earthquake, "The Guardian" released what it described as "The top five tourist sites in Pakistan" in order to help the country's tourism industry. The five sites included Taxila, Lahore, the Karakoram Highway, Karimabad, and Lake Saiful Muluk. To promote Pakistan's unique cultural heritage, the government organizes various festivals throughout the year. In 2015 the World Economic Forum's Travel & Tourism Competitiveness Report ranked Pakistan 125 out of 141 countries.Pakistan was recognised as the best country for infrastructure development in South Asia during the IWF and World Bank annual meetings in 2016.As of May 2021, nuclear power is provided by six licensed commercial nuclear power plants. The Pakistan Atomic Energy Commission (PAEC) is solely responsible for operating these power plants, while the Pakistan Nuclear Regulatory Authority regulates safe usage of the nuclear energy. The electricity generated by commercial nuclear power plants constitutes roughly 5.8% of Pakistan's electrical energy, compared to 64.2% from fossil fuels (crude oil and natural gas), 29.9% from hydroelectric power, and 0.1% from coal. Pakistan is one of the four nuclear armed states (along with India, Israel, and North Korea) that is not a party to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, but it is a member in good standing of the International Atomic Energy Agency.The KANUPP-I, a Candu-type nuclear reactor, was supplied by Canada in 1971—the country's first commercial nuclear power plant. The Sino-Pakistani nuclear cooperation began in the early 1980s. After a Sino-Pakistani nuclear cooperation agreement in 1986, China provided Pakistan with a nuclear reactor dubbed CHASNUPP-I for energy and the industrial growth of the country. In 2005 both countries proposed working on a joint energy security plan, calling for a huge increase in generation capacity to more than 160,000 MWe by 2030. Under its Nuclear Energy Vision 2050, the Pakistani government plans to increase nuclear power generation capacity to 40,000 MWe, 8,900 MWe of it by 2030. In June 2008 the nuclear commercial complex was expanded with the ground work of installing and operationalising the Chashma-III and Chashma–IV reactors at Chashma, Punjab Province, each with 325–340 MWe and costing ₨ 129 billion; from which the ₨ 80 billion came from international sources, principally China. A further agreement for China's help with the project was signed in October 2008, and given prominence as a counter to the US–India agreement that shortly preceded it. The cost quoted then was US$1.7 billion, with a foreign loan component of US$1.07 billion. In 2013 Pakistan established a second commercial nuclear complex in Karachi with plans of additional reactors, similar to the one in Chashma. The electrical energy is generated by various energy corporations and evenly distributed by the National Electric Power Regulatory Authority (NEPRA) among the four provinces. However, the Karachi-based K-Electric and the Water and Power Development Authority (WAPDA) generates much of the electrical energy used in Pakistan in addition to gathering revenue nationwide. , Pakistan has an installed electricity generation capacity of ~22,797.The transport industry accounts for ~10.5% of the nation's GDP.Motorways of Pakistan are a network of multiple-lane, high-speed, controlled-access highways in Pakistan, which are owned, maintained, and operated federally by Pakistan's National Highway Authority. As of 20 February 2020, 1882 km of motorways are operational, while an additional 1854 km are under construction or planned. All motorways in Pakistan are pre-fixed with the letter 'M' (for "Motorway") followed by the unique numerical designation of the specific highway (with a hyphen in the middle), e.g. "M-1".Pakistan's motorways are an important part of Pakistan's "National Trade Corridor Project", which aims to link Pakistan's three Arabian Sea ports (Karachi Port, Port Bin Qasim and Gwadar Port) to the rest of the country through its national highways and motorways network and further north with Afghanistan, Central Asia and China. The project was planned in 1990. The China Pakistan Economic Corridor project aims to link Gwadar Port and Kashgar (China) using Pakistani motorways, national highways, and expressways.Highways form the backbone of Pakistan's transport system; a total road length of accounts for 92% of passengers and 96% of inland freight traffic. Road transport services are largely in the hands of the private sector. The National Highway Authority is responsible for the maintenance of national highways and motorways. The highway and motorway system depends mainly on north–south links connecting the southern ports to the populous provinces of Punjab and Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa. Although this network only accounts for 4.6% of total road length, it carries 85% of the country's traffic.The Pakistan Railways, under the Ministry of Railways (MoR), operates the railroad system. From 1947 until the 1970s the train system was the primary means of transport until the nationwide constructions of the national highways and the economic boom of the automotive industry. Beginning in the 1990s there was a marked shift in traffic from rail to highways; dependence grew on roads after the introduction of vehicles in the country. Now the railway's share of inland traffic is below 8% for passengers and 4% for freight traffic. As personal transportation began to be dominated by the automobile, total rail track decreased from in 1990–91 to in 2011. Pakistan expects to use the rail service to boost foreign trade with China, Iran, and Turkey.There are an estimated 151 airports and airfields in Pakistan as of 2013—including both the military and the mostly publicly owned civilian airports. Although Jinnah International Airport is the principal international gateway to Pakistan, the international airports in Lahore, Islamabad, Peshawar, Quetta, Faisalabad, Sialkot, and Multan also handle significant amounts of traffic.The civil aviation industry is mixed with public and private sectors, which was deregulated in 1993. While the state-owned Pakistan International Airlines (PIA) is the major and dominant air carrier that carries about 73% of domestic passengers and all domestic freight, the private airlines such as airBlue and Air Indus, also provide similar services at a low cost.Major seaports are in Karachi, Sindh (the Karachi port, Port Qasim). Since the 1990s some seaport operations have been moved to Balochistan with the construction of Gwadar Port, Port of Pasni and Gadani Port. Gwadar Port is the deepest sea port of the world. According to the WEF's Global Competitiveness Report, quality ratings of Pakistan's port infrastructure increased from 3.7 to 4.1 between 2007 and 2016.Many flyovers and underpasses are located in major urban areas of the country to regulate the flow of traffic. The highest number of flyovers and under passes are located in Karachi, followed by Lahore. Other cities having flyovers and underpasses for the regulation of flow of traffic includes Islamabad-Rawalpindi, Faisalabad, Gujranwala, Multan, Peshawar, Hyderabad, Quetta, Sargodha, Bahawalpur, Sukkur, Larkana, Rahim Yar Khan and Sahiwal etc.Beijing Underpass, Lahore is the longest underpass of Pakistan with a length of about . Muslim Town Flyover, Lahore is the longest flyover of the country with a length of about .Developments in science and technology have played an important role in Pakistan's infrastructure and helped the country connect to the rest of the world. Every year, scientists from around the world are invited by the Pakistan Academy of Sciences and the Pakistan Government to participate in the International Nathiagali Summer College on Physics. Pakistan hosted an international seminar on "Physics in Developing Countries" for the International Year of Physics 2005. Pakistani theoretical physicist Abdus Salam won a Nobel Prize in Physics for his work on the electroweak interaction. Influential publications and critical scientific work in the advancement of mathematics, biology, economics, computer science, and genetics have been produced by Pakistani scientists at both the domestic and international levels.In chemistry, Salimuzzaman Siddiqui was the first Pakistani scientist to bring the therapeutic constituents of the neem tree to the attention of natural products chemists. Pakistani neurosurgeon Ayub Ommaya invented the Ommaya reservoir, a system for treatment of brain tumours and other brain conditions. Scientific research and development play a pivotal role in Pakistani universities, government- sponsored national laboratories, science parks, and the industry. Abdul Qadeer Khan, regarded as the founder of the HEU-based gas-centrifuge uranium enrichment program for Pakistan's integrated atomic bomb project. He founded and established the Kahuta Research Laboratories (KRL) in 1976, serving as both its senior scientist and the Director-General until his retirement in 2001, and he was an early and vital figure in other science projects. Apart from participating in Pakistan's atomic bomb project, he made major contributions in molecular morphology, physical martensite, and its integrated applications in condensed and material physics.In 2010 Pakistan was ranked 43rd in the world in terms of published scientific papers. The Pakistan Academy of Sciences, a strong scientific community, plays an influential and vital role in formulating recommendations regarding science policies for the government.The 1960s saw the emergence of an active space program led by SUPARCO that produced advances in domestic rocketry, electronics, and aeronomy. The space program recorded a few notable feats and achievements. The successful launch of its first rocket into space made Pakistan the first South Asian country to have achieved such a task. Successfully producing and launching the nation's first space satellite in 1990, Pakistan became the first Muslim country and second South Asian country to put a satellite into space.As an aftermath of the 1971 war with India, the clandestine crash program developed atomic weapons partly motivated by fear and to prevent any foreign intervention, while ushering in the atomic age in the post cold war era. Competition with India and tensions eventually led to Pakistan's decision to conduct underground nuclear tests in 1998, thus becoming the seventh country in the world to successfully develop nuclear weapons.Pakistan is the first and only Muslim country that maintains an active research presence in Antarctica. Since 1991 Pakistan has maintained two summer research stations and one weather observatory on the continent and plans to open another full-fledged permanent base in Antarctica.Energy consumption by computers and usage has grown since the 1990s when PCs were introduced; Pakistan has about 82 million Internet users and is ranked as one of the top countries that have registered a high growth rate in Internet penetration . Key publications have been produced by Pakistan, and domestic software development has gained considerable international praise.As of May 2020, Pakistan has about 82 million internet users, making it the 9th-largest population of Internet users in the world. Since the 2000s Pakistan has made a significant amount of progress in supercomputing, and various institutions offer research opportunities in parallel computing. The Pakistan government reportedly spends ₨ 4.6 billion on information technology projects, with emphasis on e-government, human resources, and infrastructure development.The constitution of Pakistan requires the state to provide free primary and secondary education.At the time of the establishment of Pakistan as a state, the country had only one university, Punjab University in Lahore. Very soon the Pakistan government established public universities in each of the four provinces, including Sindh University (1949), Peshawar University (1950), Karachi University (1953), and Balochistan University (1970). Pakistan has a large network of both public and private universities, which includes collaboration between the universities aimed at providing research and higher education opportunities in the country, although there is concern about the low quality of teaching in many of the newer schools. It is estimated that there are 3,193 technical and vocational institutions in Pakistan, and there are also "madrassahs" that provide free Islamic education and offer free board and lodging to students, who come mainly from the poorer strata of society. Strong public pressure and popular criticism over extremists' usage of "madrassahs" for recruitment, the Pakistan government has made repeated efforts to regulate and monitor the quality of education in the "madrassahs".Education in Pakistan is divided into six main levels: nursery (preparatory classes); primary (grades one through five); middle (grades six through eight); matriculation (grades nine and ten, leading to the secondary certificate); intermediate (grades eleven and twelve, leading to a higher secondary certificate); and university programmes leading to graduate and postgraduate degrees. There is a network of private schools that constitutes a parallel secondary education system based on a curriculum set and administered by the Cambridge International Examinations of the United Kingdom. Some students choose to take the O-level and A level exams conducted by the British Council. According to the International Schools Consultancy, Pakistan has 439 international schools.As a result of initiatives taken in 2007, the English medium education has been made compulsory in all schools across the country. In 2012, Malala Yousafzai, a campaigner for female education, was shot by a Taliban gunman in retaliation for her activism. Yousafzai went on to become the youngest ever Nobel laureate for her global education-related advocacy. Additional reforms enacted in 2013 required all educational institutions in Sindh to begin offering Chinese language courses, reflecting China's growing role as a superpower and its increasing influence in Pakistan. The literacy rate of the population is 62.3% as of 2018. The rate of male literacy is 72.5% while the rate of female literacy is 51.8%. Literacy rates vary by region and particularly by sex; as one example, in tribal areas female literacy is 9.5%, while Azad Jammu & Kashmir has a literacy rate of 74%. With the advent of computer literacy in 1995, the government launched a nationwide initiative in 1998 with the aim of eradicating illiteracy and providing a basic education to all children. Through various educational reforms, by 2015 the Ministry of Education expected to attain 100% enrollment levels among children of primary school age and a literacy rate of ~86% among people aged over 10. Pakistan is currently spending 2.3 percent of its GDP on education; which according to the Institute of Social and Policy Sciences is one of the lowest in South Asia.As of 2020, Pakistan is the fifth most populous country in the world and accounts for about 2.8% of the world population. The 2017 Census of Pakistan provisionally estimated the population to be 207.8 million. This figure excludes data from Gilgit-Baltistan and Azad Kashmir, which is likely to be included in the final report.The population in 2017 represents a 57% increase from 1998. The annual growth rate in 2016 was reported to be 1.45%, which is the highest of the SAARC nations, though the growth rate has been decreasing in recent years. The population is projected to reach 263 million by 2030.At the time of the partition in 1947, Pakistan had a population of 32.5 million; the population increased by ~57.2% between the years 1990 and 2009. By 2030 Pakistan is expected to surpass Indonesia as the largest Muslim-majority country in the world. Pakistan is classified as a "young nation", with a median age of 23.4 in 2016; about 104 million people were under the age of 30 in 2010. In 2016 Pakistan's fertility rate was estimated to be 2.68, higher than its neighbour India (2.45). Around 35% of the people are under 15. The vast majority of those residing in southern Pakistan live along the Indus River, with Karachi being the most populous commercial city in the south. In eastern, western, and northern Pakistan, most of the population lives in an arc formed by the cities of Lahore, Faisalabad, Rawalpindi, Sargodha, Islamabad, Gujranwala, Sialkot, Gujrat, Jhelum, Sheikhupura, Nowshera, Mardan, and Peshawar. During 1990–2008, city dwellers made up 36% of Pakistan's population, making it the most urbanised nation in South Asia, which increased to 38% by 2013. Furthermore, 50% of Pakistanis live in towns of 5,000 people or more.Expenditure on healthcare was ~2.8% of GDP in 2013. Life expectancy at birth was 67 years for females and 65 years for males in 2013. The private sector accounts for about 80% of outpatient visits. Approximately 19% of the population and 30% of children under five are malnourished. Mortality of the under-fives was 86 per 1,000 live births in 2012.More than sixty languages are spoken in Pakistan, including a number of provincial languages. Urdu—the "lingua franca" and a symbol of Muslim identity and national unity—is the national language understood by over 75% of Pakistanis. It is the main medium of communication in the country but the primary language of only 7% of Pakistan's population. Urdu and English are the official languages of Pakistan, with English primarily used in official business and government, and in legal contracts; the local variety is known as Pakistani English. The Punjabi language, the most common in Pakistan and the first language of 38.78% of Pakistan's population, is mostly spoken in the Punjab. Saraiki is mainly spoken in South Punjab, and Hindko is predominant in the Hazara region of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa. Pashto is the provincial language of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa. The Sindhi language is commonly spoken in Sindh, while the Balochi language is dominant in Balochistan. Brahui, a Dravidian language, is spoken by the Brahui people who live in Balochistan. There are also speakers of Gujarati in Karachi. Marwari, a Rajasthani language, is also spoken in parts of Sindh. Various languages such as Shina, Balti, and Burushaski are spoken in Gilgit-Baltistan, whilst languages such as Pahari, Gojri, and Kashmiri are spoken by many in Azad Kashmir.The Arabic language is officially recognised by the constitution of Pakistan. It declares in article 31 No. 2 that ""The State shall endeavour, as respects the Muslims of Pakistan (a) to make the teaching of the Holy Quran and Islamiat compulsory, to encourage and facilitate the learning of Arabic language ...""Constitution of Pakistan: "Constitution of Pakistan, 1973 – Article: 31 Islamic way of life" , Article 31 No. 2, 1973, Retrieved 22 August 2018.Even after partition in 1947, Indian Muslims continued to migrate to Pakistan throughout the 1950s and 1960s, and these migrants settled mainly in Karachi and other towns of Sindh province. The wars in neighboring Afghanistan during the 1980s and 1990s also forced millions of Afghan refugees into Pakistan. The Pakistan Census excludes the 1.41 million registered refugees from Afghanistan, who are found mainly in the Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa and tribal belt, with small numbers residing in Karachi and Quetta. Pakistan is home to one of the world's largest refugee populations. In addition to Afghans, around 2 million Bangladeshis and half a million other undocumented people live in Pakistan. They are claimed to be from other areas such as Myanmar, Iran, Iraq, and Africa.Experts say that the migration of both Bengalis and Burmese (Rohingya) to Pakistan started in the 1980s and continued until 1998. Shaikh Muhammad Feroze, the chairman of the Pakistani Bengali Action Committee, claims that there are 200 settlements of Bengali-speaking people in Pakistan, of which 132 are in Karachi. They are also found in various other areas of Pakistan such as Thatta, Badin, Hyderabad, Tando Adam, and Lahore. Large-scale Rohingya migration to Karachi made that city one of the largest population centres of Rohingyas in the world after Myanmar. The Burmese community of Karachi is spread out over 60 of the city's slums such as the Burmi Colony in Korangi, Arakanabad, Machchar colony, Bilal colony, Ziaul Haq Colony, and Godhra Camp.Thousands of Uyghur Muslims have also migrated to the Gilgit-Baltistan region of Pakistan, fleeing religious and cultural persecution in Xinjiang, China. Since 1989 thousands of Kashmiri Muslim refugees have sought refuge in Pakistan, complaining that many of the refugee women had been raped by Indian soldiers and that they were forced out of their homes by the soldiers.The major ethnic groups are Punjabis (44.7% of the country's population), Pashtuns, also known as Pathans (15.4%), Sindhis (14.1%), Saraikis (8.4%), Muhajirs (the Indian emigrants, mostly Urdu-speaking), who make up 7.6% of the population, and the Baloch with 3.6%. The remaining 6.3% consist of a number of ethnic minorities such as the Brahuis, the Hindkowans, the various peoples of Gilgit-Baltistan, the Kashmiris, the Sheedis (who are of African descent), and the Hazaras. There is also a large Pakistani diaspora worldwide, numbering over seven million, which has been recorded as the sixth largest diaspora in the world.Since achieving independence as a result of the partition of India, the urbanisation has increased exponentially, with several different causes. The majority of the population in the south resides along the Indus River, with Karachi the most populous commercial city. In the east, west, and north, most of the population lives in an arc formed by the cities of Lahore, Faisalabad, Rawalpindi, Islamabad, Sargodha, Gujranwala, Sialkot, Gujrat, Jhelum, Sheikhupura, Nowshera, Mardan, and Peshawar. During the period 1990–2008, city dwellers made up 36% of Pakistan's population, making it the most urbanised nation in South Asia. Furthermore, more than 50% of Pakistanis live in towns of 5,000 people or more. Immigration, from both within and outside the country, is regarded as one of the main factors contributing to urbanisation in Pakistan. One analysis of the 1998 national census highlighted the significance of the partition of India in the 1940s as it relates to urban change in Pakistan.During and after the independence period, Urdu speaking Muslims from India migrated in large numbers to Pakistan, especially to the port city of Karachi, which is today the largest metropolis in Pakistan. Migration from other countries, mainly from those nearby, has further accelerated the process of urbanisation in Pakistani cities. Inevitably, the rapid urbanisation caused by these large population movements has also created new political and socio-economic challenges. In addition to immigration, economic trends such as the green revolution and political developments, among a host of other factors, are also important causes of urbanisation. The state religion in Pakistan is Islam. Freedom of religion is guaranteed by the Constitution of Pakistan, which provides all its citizens the right to profess, practice and propagate their religion subject to law, public order, and morality.The population of Pakistan follow different religions. Most of Pakistanis are Muslims (96.47%) followed by Hindus (2.14%) and Christians (1.27%). There are also people in Pakistan who follow other religions, such as Sikhism, Buddhism, Jainism and the minority of Parsi (who follow Zoroastrianism). The Kalash people maintain a unique identity and religion within Pakistan.Hinduism is mostly associated with Sindhis, and Pakistan hosts major events such as the Hinglaj Yatra pilgrimage. Hindu temples may be found throughout Sindh, where the dharma features prominently. Many Hindus in Pakistan complain about the prospect of religious violence against them and being treated like second-class citizens, and many have emigrated to India or further abroad.In addition, some Pakistanis also do not profess any faith (such as atheists and agnostics) in Pakistan. According to the 1998 census, people who did not state their religion accounted for 0.5% of the population. Secularism and criticism of over-religiosity is not uncommon in well-educated civil society, although in general Pakistan is a highly religious society, and the irreligious generally hide their beliefs due to fear of persecution.Islam is the dominant religion. About 96.47% of Pakistanis are Muslim, according to the 2017 Census. Pakistan has the second-largest number of Muslims in the world after Indonesia. and home for (10.5%) of the world's Muslim population. The majority of them are Sunni and mostly follow Sufism (estimated between 75 and 95%) while Shias represent between 5–25%. As of 2019, Shia population in Pakistan was estimated to be 42 million out of total population of 210 million. Pakistan also has the largest Muslim city in the world (Karachi).The Ahmadis, a small minority representing 0.22–2% of Pakistan's population, are officially considered non-Muslims by virtue of the constitutional amendment. The Ahmadis are particularly persecuted, especially since 1974 when they were banned from calling themselves Muslims. In 1984, Ahmadiyya places of worship were banned from being called "mosques". , 12% of Pakistani Muslims self-identify as non-denominational Muslims. There are also several Quraniyoon communities.Sufism, a mystical Islamic tradition, has a long history and a large following among the Sunni Muslims in Pakistan, at both the academic and popular levels. Popular Sufi culture is centered around gatherings and celebrations at the shrines of saints and annual festivals that feature Sufi music and dance. Two Sufis whose shrines receive much national attention are Ali Hajweri in Lahore (c. 12th century) and Shahbaz Qalander in Sehwan, Sindh (c. 12th century).There are two levels of Sufism in Pakistan. The first is the 'populist' Sufism of the rural population. This level of Sufism involves belief in intercession through saints, veneration of their shrines, and forming bonds (Mureed) with a "pir" (saint). Many rural Pakistani Muslims associate with "pirs" and seek their intercession. The second level of Sufism in Pakistan is 'intellectual Sufism', which is growing among the urban and educated population. They are influenced by the writings of Sufis such as the medieval theologian al-Ghazali, the Sufi reformer Shaykh Aḥmad Sirhindi, and Shah Wali Allah. Contemporary Islamic fundamentalists criticise Sufism's popular character, which in their view does not accurately reflect the teachings and practice of Muhammad and his companions.Hinduism is the second-largest religion in Pakistan after Islam, according to the 2017 census. Hindus are found in all provinces of Pakistan but are mostly concentrated in Sindh, where they account for 8.73% of the population. , Pakistan had the fifth-largest Hindu population in the world. In the 2017 census, the Hindu (jati) population was found to be 4,444,437 while the Hindu (scheduled castes) numbered an additional 851,504. At the time of Pakistan's creation, the 'hostage theory' gained currency. According to this theory, the Hindu minority in Pakistan was to be given a fair deal in Pakistan in order to ensure the protection of the Muslim minority in India. However, Khawaja Nazimuddin, the second Prime Minister of Pakistan, stated: Some Hindus in Pakistan feel that they are treated as second-class citizens and many have continued to migrate to India. Pakistani Hindus faced riots after the Babri Masjid demolition, endured a massacre (in 2005) by security forces in Balochistan, and have experienced other attacks, forced conversions, and abductions.Christians formed the next largest religious minority, after Hindus, with 1.27% of the population following it. They were followed by the Bahá'í Faith, which had a following of 30,000, then Sikhism, Buddhism, and Zoroastrianism, each back then claiming 20,000 adherents, and a very small community of Jains. There is a Roman Catholic community in Karachi that was established by Goan and Tamil migrants when Karachi's infrastructure was being developed by the British during the colonial administration between World War I and World War II. The influence of atheism is very small, with 1.0% of the population identifying as atheist in 2005. However, the figure rose to 2.0% in 2012 according to Gallup.Civil society in Pakistan is largely hierarchical, emphasising local cultural etiquette and traditional Islamic values that govern personal and political life. The basic family unit is the extended family, although for socio-economic reasons there has been a growing trend towards nuclear families. The traditional dress for both men and women is the "Shalwar Kameez"; trousers, jeans, and shirts are also popular among men. In recent decades, the middle class has increased to around 35 million and the upper and upper-middle classes to around 17 million, and power is shifting from rural landowners to the urbanised elites. Pakistani festivals, including "Eid-ul-Fitr", "Eid-ul-Azha", "Ramazan", Christmas, Easter, Holi, and Diwali, are mostly religious in origin. Increasing globalisation has resulted in Pakistan ranking 56th on the A.T. Kearney/FP Globalization Index.The "Shalwar Kameez" is the national dress of Pakistan and is worn by both men and women in all four provinces: Punjab, Sindh, Balochistan, and Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa, and Azad Kashmir. Each province has its own style of "Shalwar Kameez". Pakistanis wear clothes in a range of exquisite colours and designs and in type of fabric (silk, chiffon, cotton, etc.). Besides the national dress, domestically tailored suits and neckties are often worn by men, and are customary in offices, schools, and social gatherings.The fashion industry has flourished in the changing environment of the fashion world. Since Pakistan came into being, its fashion has evolved in different phases and developed a unique identity. Today, Pakistani fashion is a combination of traditional and modern dress and has become a mark of Pakistani culture. Despite modern trends, regional and traditional forms of dress have developed their own significance as a symbol of native tradition. This regional fashion continues to evolve into both more modern and purer forms. The Pakistan Fashion Design Council based in Lahore organizes PFDC Fashion Week and the Fashion Pakistan Council based in Karachi organizes Fashion Pakistan Week. Pakistan's first fashion week was held in November 2009.The private print media, state-owned Pakistan Television Corporation (PTV), and Pakistan Broadcasting Corporation (PBC) for radio were the dominant media outlets until the beginning of the 21st century. Pakistan now has a large network of domestic, privately owned 24-hour news media and television channels. A 2016 report by the Reporters Without Borders ranked Pakistan 147th on the Press Freedom Index, while at the same time terming the Pakistani media "among the freest in Asia when it comes to covering the squabbling among politicians." The BBC terms the Pakistani media "among the most outspoken in South Asia". Pakistani media has also played a vital role in exposing corruption.The Lollywood, Kariwood, Punjabi, and Pashto film industry is based in Karachi, Lahore, and Peshawar. While Bollywood films were banned from public cinemas from 1965 until 2008, they have remained an important part of popular culture. In contrast to the ailing Pakistani film industry, Urdu televised dramas and theatrical performances continue to be popular, as many entertainment media outlets air them regularly. Urdu dramas dominate the television entertainment industry, which has launched critically acclaimed miniseries and featured popular actors and actresses since the 1990s. In the 1960s–1970s, pop music and disco (1970s) dominated the country's music industry. In the 1980s–1990s, British influenced rock music appeared and jolted the country's entertainment industry. In the 2000s, heavy metal music gained popular and critical acclaim.Pakistani music ranges from diverse forms of provincial folk music and traditional styles such as Qawwali and Ghazal Gayaki to modern musical forms that fuse traditional and western music. Pakistan has many famous folk singers. The arrival of Afghan refugees in the western provinces has stimulated interest in Pashto music, although there has been intolerance of it in some places.According to the UN Department of Economic and Social Affairs, Pakistan has the sixth-largest diaspora in the world. Statistics gathered by the Pakistani government show that there are around 7 million Pakistanis residing abroad, with the vast majority living in the Middle East, Europe, and North America. Pakistan ranks 10th in the world for remittances sent home. The largest inflow of remittances, , is from Saudi Arabia, amounting to $5.9 billion. The term "Overseas Pakistani" is officially recognised by the Government of Pakistan. The Ministry of Overseas Pakistanis was established in 2008 to deal exclusively with all matters of overseas Pakistanis such as attending to their needs and problems, developing projects for their welfare, and working for resolution of their problems and issues. Overseas Pakistanis are the second-largest source of foreign exchange remittances to Pakistan after exports. Over the last several years, home remittances have maintained a steadily rising trend, with a more than 100% increase from US$8.9 billion in 2009–10 to US$19.9 billion in 2015–16.The Overseas Pakistani Division (OPD) was created in September 2004 within the Ministry of Labour (MoL). It has since recognised the importance of overseas Pakistanis and their contribution to the nation's economy. Together with Community Welfare Attaches (CWAs) and the Overseas Pakistanis Foundation (OPF), the OPD is making efforts to improve the welfare of Pakistanis who reside abroad. The division aims to provide better services through improved facilities at airports, and suitable schemes for housing, education, and health care. It also facilitates the reintegration into society of returning overseas Pakistanis. Notable members of the Pakistani diaspora include London Mayor Sadiq Khan, UK Cabinet Member Sajid Javid, former UK Conservative Party Chair Baroness Warsi, singers Zayn Malik and Nadia Ali, MIT Physics Professor Dr. Nergis Mavalvala, actors Riz Ahmed and Kumail Nanjiani, businessmen Shahid Khan and Sir Anwar Pervez, Boston University professors Adil Najam and Hamid Nawab, Texas A&M Professor Muhammad Suhail Zubairy, Yale Professor Sara Suleri, UC San Diego Professor Farooq Azam, and historian Ayesha Jalal.Pakistan has literature in Urdu, Sindhi, Punjabi, Pashto, Baluchi, Persian, English, and many other languages. The Pakistan Academy of Letters is a large literary community that promotes literature and poetry in Pakistan and abroad. The National Library publishes and promotes literature in the country. Before the 19th century, Pakistani literature consisted mainly of lyric and religious poetry and mystical and folkloric works. During the colonial period, native literary figures were influenced by western literary realism and took up increasingly varied topics and narrative forms. Prose fiction is now very popular.The national poet of Pakistan, Muhammad Iqbal, wrote poetry in Urdu and Persian. He was a strong proponent of the political and spiritual revival of Islamic civilisation and encouraged Muslims all over the world to bring about a successful revolution. Well-known figures in contemporary Pakistani Urdu literature include Josh Malihabadi Faiz Ahmed Faiz and Saadat Hasan Manto. Sadequain and Gulgee are known for their calligraphy and paintings. The Sufi poets Shah Abdul Latif, Bulleh Shah, Mian Muhammad Bakhsh, and Khawaja Farid enjoy considerable popularity in Pakistan. Mirza Kalich Beg has been termed the father of modern Sindhi prose. Historically, philosophical development in the country was dominated by Muhammad Iqbal, Sir Syed Ahmad Khan, Muhammad Asad, Maududi, and Mohammad Ali Johar.Ideas from British and American philosophy greatly shaped philosophical development in Pakistan. Analysts such as M. M. Sharif and Zafar Hassan established the first major Pakistani philosophical movement in 1947. After the 1971 war, philosophers such as Jalaludin Abdur Rahim, Gianchandani, and Malik Khalid incorporated Marxism into Pakistan's philosophical thinking. Influential work by Manzoor Ahmad, Jon Elia, Hasan Askari Rizvi, and Abdul Khaliq brought mainstream social, political, and analytical philosophy to the fore in academia. Works by Noam Chomsky have influenced philosophical ideas in various fields of social and political philosophy.Four periods are recognised in Pakistani architecture: pre-Islamic, Islamic, colonial, and post-colonial. With the beginning of the Indus civilization around the middle of the 3rd millennium BCE, an advanced urban culture developed for the first time in the region, with large buildings, some of which survive to this day. Mohenjo Daro, Harappa, and Kot Diji are among the pre-Islamic settlements that are now tourist attractions. The rise of Buddhism and the influence of Greek civilisation led to the development of a Greco-Buddhist style, starting from the 1st century CE. The high point of this era was the Gandhara style. An example of Buddhist architecture is the ruins of the Buddhist monastery Takht-i-Bahi in Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa.The arrival of Islam in what is today Pakistan meant the sudden end of Buddhist architecture in the area and a smooth transition to the predominantly pictureless Islamic architecture. The most important Indo-Islamic-style building still standing is the tomb of the Shah Rukn-i-Alam in Multan. During the Mughal era, design elements of Persian-Islamic architecture were fused with and often produced playful forms of Hindustani art. Lahore, as the occasional residence of Mughal rulers, contains many important buildings from the empire. Most prominent among them are the Badshahi Mosque, the fortress of Lahore with the famous Alamgiri Gate, the colourful, Mughal-style Wazir Khan Mosque, the Shalimar Gardens in Lahore, and the Shahjahan Mosque in Thatta. In the British colonial period, predominantly functional buildings of the Indo-European representative style developed from a mixture of European and Indian-Islamic components. Post-colonial national identity is expressed in modern structures such as the Faisal Mosque, the Minar-e-Pakistan, and the Mazar-e-Quaid. Several examples of architectural infrastructure demonstrating the influence of British design can be found in Lahore, Peshawar, and Karachi.Pakistani cuisine is similar to that of other regions of South Asia, with some of it being originated from the royal kitchens of 16th-century Mughal emperors. Most of those dishes have their roots in British, Indian, Central Asian and Middle Eastern cuisine. Unlike Middle Eastern cuisine, Pakistani cooking uses large quantities of spices, herbs, and seasoning. Garlic, ginger, turmeric, red chili, and garam masala are used in most dishes, and home cooking regularly includes curry, "roti", a thin flatbread made from wheat, is a staple food, usually served with curry, meat, vegetables, and lentils. Rice is also common; it is served plain, fried with spices, and in sweet dishes.Lassi is a traditional drink in the Punjab region. Black tea with milk and sugar is popular throughout Pakistan and is consumed daily by most of the population. Sohan halwa is a popular sweet dish from the southern region of Punjab province and is enjoyed all over Pakistan.Most sports played in Pakistan originated and were substantially developed by athletes and sports fans from the United Kingdom who introduced them during the British Raj. Field hockey is the national sport of Pakistan; it has won three gold medals in the Olympic Games held in 1960, 1968, and 1984. Pakistan has also won the Hockey World Cup a record four times, held in 1971, 1978, 1982, and 1994.Cricket, however, is the most popular game across the country. The country has had an array of success in the sport over the years, and has the distinct achievement of having won each of the major ICC international cricket tournaments: ICC Cricket World Cup, ICC World Twenty20, and ICC Champions Trophy; as well as the ICC Test Championship. The cricket team (known as "Shaheen") won the Cricket World Cup held in 1992; it was runner-up once, in 1999. Pakistan was runner-up in the inaugural World Twenty20 (2007) in South Africa and won the World Twenty20 in England in 2009. In March 2009, militants attacked the touring Sri Lankan cricket team, after which no international cricket was played in Pakistan until May 2015, when the Zimbabwean team agreed to a tour. Pakistan also won the 2017 ICC Champions Trophy by defeating arch-rivals India in the final.Pakistan Super League is one of the largest cricket leagues of the world with a brand value of about .Association Football is the second most played sports in Pakistan and it is organised and regulated by the Pakistan Football Federation. Football in Pakistan is as old as the country itself. Shortly after the creation of Pakistan in 1947, the Pakistan Football Federation (PFF) was created, and Muhammad Ali Jinnah became its first Patron-in-Chief. The highest football division in Pakistan is the Pakistan Premier League. Pakistan is known as one of the best manufacturer of the official FIFA World Cup ball. The best football players to play for Pakistan are Kaleemullah, Zesh Rehman, Muhammad Essa, Haroon Yousaf, and Muhammad Adil.Pakistan has hosted or co-hosted several international sporting events: the 1989 and 2004 South Asian Games; the 1984, 1993, 1996 and 2003 World Squash Championships; the 1987 and 1996 Cricket World Cup; and the 1990 Hockey World Cup.Pakistan is set to host the 2021 South Asian Games.	[ "Nawaz Sharif", "Nasir-ul-Mulk", "Shahid Khaqan Abbasi", "Shehbaz Sharif", "Imran Khan" ]
Who was the head of Pakistan in 01-Apr-201301-April-2013?	April 01, 2013	{ "text": [ "Mir Hazar Khan Khoso" ] }	L2_Q843_P6_0	Imran Khan is the head of the government of Pakistan from Aug, 2018 to Apr, 2022. Mir Hazar Khan Khoso is the head of the government of Pakistan from Mar, 2013 to Jun, 2013. Shehbaz Sharif is the head of the government of Pakistan from Apr, 2022 to Dec, 2022. Shahid Khaqan Abbasi is the head of the government of Pakistan from Aug, 2017 to May, 2018. Nawaz Sharif is the head of the government of Pakistan from Jun, 2013 to Jul, 2017. Nasir-ul-Mulk is the head of the government of Pakistan from Jun, 2018 to Aug, 2018.	PakistanPakistan, officially the Islamic Republic of Pakistan, is a country in South Asia. It is the world's fifth-most populous country, with a population exceeding 225.2 million, and has the world's second-largest Muslim population. Pakistan is the 33rd-largest country by area, spanning . It has a coastline along the Arabian Sea and Gulf of Oman in the south, and is bordered by India to the east, Afghanistan to the west, Iran to the southwest, and China to the northeast. It is separated narrowly from Tajikistan by Afghanistan's Wakhan Corridor in the north, and also shares a maritime border with Oman.Pakistan is the site of several ancient cultures, including the 8,500-year-old Neolithic site of Mehrgarh in Balochistan, and the Indus Valley Civilisation of the Bronze Age, the most extensive of the civilisations of the Old World. The region that comprises the modern state of Pakistan was the realm of multiple empires and dynasties, including the Achaemenid; briefly that of Alexander the Great; the Seleucid, the Maurya, the Kushan, the Gupta; the Umayyad Caliphate in its southern regions, the Hindu Shahi, the Ghaznavids, the Delhi Sultanate, the Mughals, the Durranis, the Sikh Empire, British East India Company rule, and most recently, the British Indian Empire from 1858 to 1947.Spurred by the Pakistan Movement, which sought a homeland for the Muslims of British India, and election victories in 1946 by the All-India Muslim League, Pakistan gained independence in 1947 after the Partition of the British Indian Empire, which awarded separate statehood to its Muslim-majority regions and was accompanied by an unparalleled mass migration and loss of life. Initially a Dominion of the British Commonwealth, Pakistan officially drafted its constitution in 1956, and emerged as a declared Islamic republic. In 1971, the exclave of East Pakistan seceded as the new country of Bangladesh after a nine-month-long civil war. In the following four decades, Pakistan has been ruled by governments whose descriptions, although complex, commonly alternated between civilian and military, democratic and authoritarian, relatively secular and Islamist. Pakistan elected a civilian government in 2008, and in 2010 adopted a parliamentary system with periodic elections.Pakistan is a middle power, and has the world's sixth-largest standing armed forces. It is a declared nuclear-weapons state, and is ranked amongst the emerging and growth-leading economies, with a large and rapidly-growing middle class. Pakistan's political history since independence has been characterized by periods of significant economic and military growth as well those of political and economic instability. It is an ethnically and linguistically diverse country, with similarly diverse geography and wildlife. However, the country continues to face challenges, including poverty, illiteracy, corruption and terrorism. Pakistan is a member of the United Nations, the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation, the Organisation of Islamic Cooperation, the British Commonwealth of Nations, the South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation, the Islamic Military Counter-Terrorism Coalition, and is designated as a major non-NATO ally by the United States.The name "Pakistan" means literally "a land abounding in the pure" or "a land in which the pure abound", in Urdu and Persian. It references the word ("pāk"), meaning "pure" in Persian and Pashto. The suffix (transliterated in English as stân after stem word ending in a vowel; estân or istân after a stem ending in a consonant) is from Persian, and means "a place abounding in" or "a place where anything abounds".The name of the country was coined in 1933 by Choudhry Rahmat Ali, a Pakistan Movement activist, who published it in a pamphlet "Now or Never", using it as an acronym ("thirty million Muslim brethren who live in PAKISTAN"), and referring to the names of the five northern regions of the British Raj: "P"unjab, "A"fghania, "K"ashmir, "S"indh, and Baluchis"tan".Some of the earliest ancient human civilisations in South Asia originated from areas encompassing present-day Pakistan. The earliest known inhabitants in the region were Soanian during the Lower Paleolithic, of whom stone tools have been found in the Soan Valley of Punjab. The Indus region, which covers most of present day Pakistan, was the site of several successive ancient cultures including the Neolithic Mehrgarh and the Bronze Age Indus Valley Civilisation (2,800–1,800 BCE) at Harappa and Mohenjo-Daro.The Vedic period (1500–500 BCE) was characterised by an Indo-Aryan culture; during this period the Vedas, the oldest scriptures associated with Hinduism, were composed, and this culture later became well established in the region. Multan was an important Hindu pilgrimage centre. The Vedic civilisation flourished in the ancient Gandhāran city of Takṣaśilā, now Taxila in the Punjab, which was founded around 1000 BCE. Successive ancient empires and kingdoms ruled the region: the Persian Achaemenid Empire (around 519 BCE), Alexander the Great's empire in 326 BCE and the Maurya Empire, founded by Chandragupta Maurya and extended by Ashoka the Great, until 185 BCE. The Indo-Greek Kingdom founded by Demetrius of Bactria (180–165 BCE) included Gandhara and Punjab and reached its greatest extent under Menander (165–150 BCE), prospering the Greco-Buddhist culture in the region. Taxila had one of the earliest universities and centres of higher education in the world, which was established during the late Vedic period in 6th century BCE. The school consisted of several monasteries without large dormitories or lecture halls where the religious instruction was provided on an individualistic basis. The ancient university was documented by the invading forces of Alexander the Great and was also recorded by Chinese pilgrims in the 4th or 5th century CE.At its zenith, the Rai Dynasty (489–632 CE) of Sindh ruled this region and the surrounding territories. The Pala Dynasty was the last Buddhist empire, which, under Dharmapala and Devapala, stretched across South Asia from what is now Bangladesh through Northern India to Pakistan.The Arab conqueror Muhammad bin Qasim conquered Sindh in 711 CE. The Pakistan government's official chronology claims this as the time when the foundation of Pakistan was laid but the concept of "Pakistan" arrived in the 19th century. The Early Medieval period (642–1219 CE) witnessed the spread of Islam in the region. During this period, Sufi missionaries played a pivotal role in converting a majority of the regional Buddhist and Hindu population to Islam. Upon the defeat of the Turk and Hindu Shahi dynasties which governed the Kabul Valley, Gandhara (present-day Khyber Pakhtunkwa), and western Punjab in the 7th to 11th centuries CE, several successive Muslim empires ruled over the region, including the Ghaznavid Empire (975–1187 CE), the Ghorid Kingdom, and the Delhi Sultanate (1206–1526 CE). The Lodi dynasty, the last of the Delhi Sultanate, was replaced by the Mughal Empire (1526–1857 CE).The Mughals introduced Persian literature and high culture, establishing the roots of Indo-Persian culture in the region. In the region of modern-day Pakistan, key cities during the Mughal period were Lahore and Thatta, both of which were chosen as the site of impressive Mughal buildings. In the early 16th century, the region remained under the Mughal Empire ruled by Muslim emperors. By the early 18th century, increasing European influence contributed to the slow disintegration of the Mughal Empire as the lines between commercial and political dominance became increasingly blurred.During this time, the English East India Company had established coastal outposts. Control over the seas, greater resources, technology, and British military protection led the Company to increasingly flex its military muscle, allowing the Company to gain control over the subcontinent by 1765 and sideline European competitors. Expanding access beyond Bengal and the subsequent increased strength and size of its army enabled it to annex or subdue most of region by the 1820s. Many historians see this as the start of the region's colonial period. By this time, with its economic power severely curtailed by the British parliament and itself effectively made an arm of British administration, the Company began more deliberately to enter non-economic arenas such as education, social reform, and culture. Such reforms included the enforcement of the English Education Act in 1835 and the introduction of the Indian Civil Service (ICS). Traditional "madrasahs"—primary institutions of higher learning for Muslims in the subcontinent—were no longer supported by the English Crown, and nearly all of the "madrasahs" lost their financial endowment.The gradual decline of the Mughal Empire in the early 18th century enabled the Sikh Empire to control larger areas until the British East India Company gained ascendancy over South Asia. A rebellion in 1857 called the Sepoy mutiny of Bengal was the region's major armed struggle against the British Empire and Queen Victoria. Divergence in the relationship between Hinduism and Islam created a major rift in British India that led to motivated religious violence in British India. The language controversy further escalated the tensions between Hindus and Muslims. The Hindu renaissance witnessed an awakening of intellectualism in traditional Hinduism and saw the emergence of more assertive influence in the social and political spheres in British India. A Muslim intellectual movement, founded by Sir Syed Ahmed Khan to counter the Hindu renaissance, envisioned, as well as advocated for the two-nation theory, and led to the creation of the All-India Muslim League in 1906. In contrast to the Indian National Congress's anti-British efforts, the Muslim League was a pro-British movement whose political program inherited the British values that would shape Pakistan's future civil society. In events during World War I, British Intelligence foiled an anti-English conspiracy involving the nexus of Congress and the German Empire. The largely non-violent independence struggle led by the Indian Congress engaged millions of protesters in mass campaigns of civil disobedience in the 1920s and 1930s against the British Empire.The Muslim League slowly rose to mass popularity in the 1930s amid fears of under-representation and neglect of British Muslims in politics. In his presidential address of 29 December 1930, Allama Iqbal called for "the amalgamation of North-West Muslim-majority Indian states" consisting of Punjab, North-West Frontier Province, Sind, and Baluchistan. The perceived neglect of Muslim interests by Congress led British provincial governments during the period of 1937–39 convinced Muhammad Ali Jinnah, the founder of Pakistan to espouse the two-nation theory and led the Muslim League to adopt the Lahore Resolution of 1940 presented by Sher-e-Bangla A.K. Fazlul Haque, popularly known as the Pakistan Resolution. In World War II, Jinnah and British-educated founding fathers in the Muslim League supported the United Kingdom's war efforts, countering opposition against it whilst working towards Sir Syed's vision.The 1946 elections resulted in the Muslim League winning 90 percent of the seats reserved for Muslims. Thus, the 1946 election was effectively a plebiscite in which the Indian Muslims were to vote on the creation of Pakistan, a plebiscite won by the Muslim League. This victory was assisted by the support given to the Muslim League by the support of the landowners of Sindh and Punjab. The Congress, which initially denied the Muslim League's claim of being the sole representative of Indian Muslims, was now forced to recognise the fact. The British had no alternative except to take Jinnah's views into account as he had emerged as the sole spokesperson of the entirety of British India's Muslims. However, the British did not want colonial India to be partitioned, and in one last effort to prevent it, they devised the Cabinet Mission plan.As the cabinet mission failed, the British government announced its intention to end the British Rule in 1946–47. Nationalists in British India—including Jawaharlal Nehru and Abul Kalam Azad of Congress, Jinnah of the All-India Muslim League, and Master Tara Singh representing the Sikhs—agreed to the proposed terms of transfer of power and independence in June 1947 with the Viceroy of India, Lord Mountbatten of Burma. As the United Kingdom agreed to the partitioning of India in 1947, the modern state of Pakistan was established on 14 August 1947 , amalgamating the Muslim-majority eastern and northwestern regions of British India. It comprised the provinces of Balochistan, East Bengal, the North-West Frontier Province, West Punjab, and Sindh.In the riots that accompanied the partition in Punjab Province, it is believed that between 200,000 and 2,000,000 people were killed in what some have described as a retributive genocide between the religions while 50,000 Muslim women were abducted and raped by Hindu and Sikh men, 33,000 Hindu and Sikh women also experienced the same fate at the hands of Muslims. Around 6.5 million Muslims moved from India to West Pakistan and 4.7 million Hindus and Sikhs moved from West Pakistan to India. It was the largest mass migration in human history. A subsequent dispute over the princely state of Jammu and Kashmir eventually sparked the Indo-Pakistani War of 1947–1948.After independence in 1947, Jinnah, the President of the Muslim League, became the nation's first Governor-General as well as the first President-Speaker of the Parliament, but he died of tuberculosis on 11 September 1948. Meanwhile, Pakistan's founding fathers agreed to appoint Liaquat Ali Khan, the secretary-general of the party, the nation's first Prime Minister. With dominion status in the Commonwealth of Nations, independent Pakistan had two British monarchs before it became a republic.The creation of Pakistan was never fully accepted by many British leaders, among them Lord Mountbatten. Mountbatten clearly expressed his lack of support and faith in the Muslim League's idea of Pakistan. Jinnah refused Mountbatten's offer to serve as Governor-General of Pakistan. When Mountbatten was asked by Collins and Lapierre if he would have sabotaged Pakistan had he known that Jinnah was dying of tuberculosis, he replied 'most probably'.Maulana Shabbir Ahmad Usmani, a respected Deobandi "alim" (scholar) who occupied the position of Shaykh al-Islam in Pakistan in 1949, and Maulana Mawdudi of Jamaat-i-Islami played a pivotal role in the demand for an Islamic constitution. Mawdudi demanded that the Constituent Assembly make an explicit declaration affirming the "supreme sovereignty of God" and the supremacy of the "shariah" in Pakistan.A significant result of the efforts of the Jamaat-i-Islami and the "ulama" was the passage of the Objectives Resolution in March 1949. The Objectives Resolution, which Liaquat Ali Khan called the second most important step in Pakistan's history, declared that "sovereignty over the entire universe belongs to God Almighty alone and the authority which He has delegated to the State of Pakistan through its people for being exercised within the limits prescribed by Him is a sacred trust". The Objectives Resolution has been incorporated as a preamble to the constitutions of 1956, 1962, and 1973.Democracy was stalled by the martial law that had been enforced by President Iskander Mirza, who was replaced by the army chief, General Ayub Khan. After adopting a presidential system in 1962, the country experienced exceptional growth until a second war with India in 1965 that led to an economic downturn and wide-scale public disapproval in 1967. Consolidating control from Ayub Khan in 1969, President Yahya Khan had to deal with a devastating cyclone that caused 500,000 deaths in East Pakistan.In 1970 Pakistan held its first democratic elections since independence, meant to mark a transition from military rule to democracy, but after the East Pakistani Awami League won against the Pakistan Peoples Party (PPP), Yahya Khan and the military establishment refused to hand over power. Operation Searchlight, a military crackdown on the Bengali nationalist movement, led to a declaration of independence and the waging of a war of liberation by the Bengali Mukti Bahini forces in East Pakistan, which in West Pakistan was described as a civil war as opposed to a war of liberation.Independent researchers estimate that between 300,000 and 500,000 civilians died during this period while the Bangladesh government puts the number of dead at three million, a figure that is now nearly universally regarded as excessively inflated. Some academics such as Rudolph Rummel and Rounaq Jahan say both sides committed genocide; others such as Richard Sisson and Leo E. Rose believe there was no genocide. In response to India's support for the insurgency in East Pakistan, preemptive strikes on India by Pakistan's air force, navy, and marines sparked a conventional war in 1971 that resulted in an Indian victory and East Pakistan gaining independence as Bangladesh.With Pakistan surrendering in the war, Yahya Khan was replaced by Zulfikar Ali Bhutto as president; the country worked towards promulgating its constitution and putting the country on the road to democracy. Democratic rule resumed from 1972 to 1977—an era of self-consciousness, intellectual leftism, nationalism, and nationwide reconstruction. In 1972 Pakistan embarked on an ambitious plan to develop its nuclear deterrence capability with the goal of preventing any foreign invasion; the country's first nuclear power plant was inaugurated in that same year. Accelerated in response to India's first nuclear test in 1974, this crash program was completed in 1979.Democracy ended with a military coup in 1977 against the leftist PPP, which saw General Zia-ul-Haq become the president in 1978. From 1977 to 1988, President Zia's corporatisation and economic Islamisation initiatives led to Pakistan becoming one of the fastest-growing economies in South Asia. While building up the country's nuclear program, increasing Islamisation, and the rise of a homegrown conservative philosophy, Pakistan helped subsidise and distribute US resources to factions of the mujahideen against the USSR's intervention in communist Afghanistan. Pakistan's North-West Frontier Province became a base for the anti-Soviet Afghan fighters, with the province's influential Deobandi ulama playing a significant role in encouraging and organising the 'jihad'.President Zia died in a plane crash in 1988, and Benazir Bhutto, daughter of Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, was elected as the country's first female Prime Minister. The PPP was followed by conservative Pakistan Muslim League (N), and over the next decade the leaders of the two parties fought for power, alternating in office while the country's situation worsened; economic indicators fell sharply, in contrast to the 1980s. This period is marked by prolonged stagflation, instability, corruption, nationalism, geopolitical rivalry with India, and the clash of left wing-right wing ideologies. As PML (N) secured a supermajority in elections in 1997, Sharif authorised nuclear testings (See:"Chagai-I" and "Chagai-II"), as a retaliation to the second nuclear tests ordered by India, led by Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee in May 1998.Military tension between the two countries in the Kargil district led to the Kargil War of 1999, and turmoil in civic-military relations allowed General Pervez Musharraf to take over through a bloodless coup d'état. Musharraf governed Pakistan as chief executive from 1999 to 2001 and as President from 2001 to 2008—a period of enlightenment, social liberalism, extensive economic reforms, and direct involvement in the US-led war on terrorism. When the National Assembly historically completed its first full five-year term on 15 November 2007, the new elections were called by the Election Commission.After the assassination of Benazir Bhutto in 2007, the PPP secured the most votes in the elections of 2008, appointing party member Yousaf Raza Gillani as Prime Minister. Threatened with impeachment, President Musharraf resigned on 18 August 2008, and was succeeded by Asif Ali Zardari. Clashes with the judicature prompted Gillani's disqualification from the Parliament and as the Prime Minister in June 2012. By its own financial calculations, Pakistan's involvement in the war on terrorism has cost up to $118 billion, sixty thousand casualties and more than 1.8 million displaced civilians. The general election held in 2013 saw the PML (N) almost achieve a supermajority, following which Nawaz Sharif was elected as the Prime Minister, returning to the post for the third time in fourteen years, in a democratic transition. In 2018, Imran Khan (the chairman of PTI) won the 2018 Pakistan general election with 116 general seats and became the 22nd Prime Minister of Pakistan in election of National Assembly of Pakistan for Prime Minister by getting 176 votes against Shehbaz Sharif (the chairman of PML (N)) who got 96 votes.Pakistan is the only country to have been created in the name of Islam. The idea of Pakistan, which had received overwhelming popular support among Indian Muslims, especially those in the provinces of British India where Muslims were in a minority such as the United Provinces, was articulated in terms of an Islamic state by the Muslim League leadership, the ulama (Islamic clergy) and Jinnah. Jinnah had developed a close association with the "ulama" and upon his death was described by one such "alim", Maulana Shabbir Ahmad Usmani, as the greatest Muslim after Aurangzeb and as someone who desired to unite the Muslims of the world under the banner of Islam.The Objectives Resolution in March 1949, which declared God as the sole sovereign over the entire universe, represented the first formal step to transform Pakistan into an Islamic state. Muslim League leader Chaudhry Khaliquzzaman asserted that Pakistan could only truly become an Islamic state after bringing all believers of Islam into a single political unit. Keith Callard, one of the earliest scholars on Pakistani politics, observed that Pakistanis believed in the essential unity of purpose and outlook in the Muslim world and assumed that Muslim from other countries would share their views on the relationship between religion and nationality.However, Pakistan's pan-Islamist sentiments for a united Islamic bloc called Islamistan were not shared by other Muslim governments, although Islamists such as the Grand Mufti of Palestine, Al-Haj Amin al-Husseini, and leaders of the Muslim Brotherhood, became drawn to the country. Pakistan's desire for an international organization of Muslim countries was fulfilled in the 1970s when the Organization of Islamic Conference (OIC) was formed.The strongest opposition to the Islamist ideological paradigm being imposed on the state came from the Bengali Muslims of East Pakistan whose educated class, according to a survey by social scientist Nasim Ahmad Jawed, preferred secularism and focused on ethnic identity unlike educated West Pakistanis who tended to prefer an Islamic identity. The Islamist party Jamaat-e-Islami considered Pakistan to be an Islamic state and believed Bengali nationalism to be unacceptable. In the 1971 conflict over East Pakistan, the Jamaat-e-Islami fought the Bengali nationalists on the Pakistan Army's side.After Pakistan's first ever general elections, the 1973 Constitution was created by an elected Parliament. The Constitution declared Pakistan an Islamic Republic and Islam as the state religion. It also stated that all laws would have to be brought into accordance with the injunctions of Islam as laid down in the Quran and Sunnah and that no law repugnant to such injunctions could be enacted. The 1973 Constitution also created certain institutions such as the Shariat Court and the Council of Islamic Ideology to channel the interpretation and application of Islam.Pakistan's leftist Prime Minister Zulfikar Ali Bhutto faced vigorous opposition which coalesced into a movement united under the revivalist banner of "Nizam-e-Mustafa" ("Rule of the Prophet") which aimed to establish an Islamic state based on Sharia laws. Bhutto agreed to some Islamist demands before being overthrown in a coup.In 1977, after taking power from Bhutto in a coup d'état, General Zia-ul-Haq, who came from a religious background, committed himself to establishing an Islamic state and enforcing "sharia" law. Zia established separate Shariat judicial courts and court benches to judge legal cases using Islamic doctrine. Zia bolstered the influence of the "ulama" (Islamic clergy) and the Islamic parties. Zia-ul-Haq forged a strong alliance between the military and Deobandi institutions and even though most Barelvi ulama and only a few Deobandi scholars had supported Pakistan's creation, Islamic state politics came to be mostly in favour of Deobandi (and later Ahl-e-Hadith/Salafi) institutions instead of Barelvi. Sectarian tensions increased with Zia's anti-Shia policies.According to a Pew Research Center (PEW) opinion poll, a majority of Pakistanis support making Sharia the official law of the land. In a survey of several Muslim countries, PEW also found that Pakistanis tend to identify with their religion more than their nationality in contrast to Muslims in other nations such as Egypt, Indonesia and Jordan.The geography and climate of Pakistan are extremely diverse, and the country is home to a wide variety of wildlife. Pakistan covers an area of , approximately equal to the combined land areas of France and the United Kingdom. It is the 33rd-largest nation by total area, although this ranking varies depending on how the disputed territory of Kashmir is counted. Pakistan has a coastline along the Arabian Sea and the Gulf of Oman in the south and land borders of in total: with Afghanistan, with China, with India and with Iran. It shares a marine border with Oman, and is separated from Tajikistan by the cold, narrow Wakhan Corridor. Pakistan occupies a geopolitically important location at the crossroads of South Asia, the Middle East, and Central Asia.Geologically, Pakistan is located in the Indus–Tsangpo Suture Zone and overlaps the Indian tectonic plate in its Sindh and Punjab provinces; Balochistan and most of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa are within the Eurasian plate, mainly on the Iranian plateau. Gilgit–Baltistan and Azad Kashmir lie along the edge of the Indian plate and hence are prone to violent earthquakes. This region has the highest rates of seismicity and the largest earthquakes in the Himalaya region. Ranging from the coastal areas of the south to the glaciated mountains of the north, Pakistan's landscapes vary from plains to deserts, forests, hills, and plateaus.Pakistan is divided into three major geographic areas: the northern highlands, the Indus River plain, and the Balochistan Plateau. The northern highlands contain the Karakoram, Hindu Kush, and Pamir mountain ranges (see mountains of Pakistan), which contain some of the world's highest peaks, including five of the fourteen eight-thousanders (mountain peaks over ), which attract adventurers and mountaineers from all over the world, notably K2 () and Nanga Parbat (). The Balochistan Plateau lies in the west and the Thar Desert in the east. The Indus River and its tributaries flow through the country from the Kashmir region to the Arabian Sea. There is an expanse of alluvial plains along it in the Punjab and Sindh.The climate varies from tropical to temperate, with arid conditions in the coastal south. There is a monsoon season with frequent flooding due to heavy rainfall, and a dry season with significantly less rainfall or none at all. There are four distinct seasons in Pakistan: a cool, dry winter from December through February; a hot, dry spring from March through May; the summer rainy season, or southwest monsoon period, from June through September; and the retreating monsoon period of October and November. Rainfall varies greatly from year to year, and patterns of alternate flooding and drought are common.The diversity of the landscape and climate in Pakistan allows a wide variety of trees and plants to flourish. The forests range from coniferous alpine and subalpine trees such as spruce, pine, and deodar cedar in the extreme northern mountains to deciduous trees in most of the country (for example, the mulberry-like shisham found in the Sulaiman Mountains), to palms such as coconut and date in the southern Punjab, southern Balochistan, and all of Sindh. The western hills are home to juniper, tamarisk, coarse grasses, and scrub plants. Mangrove forests form much of the coastal wetlands along the coast in the south.Coniferous forests are found at altitudes ranging from in most of the northern and northwestern highlands. In the xeric regions of Balochistan, date palm and "Ephedra" are common. In most of the Punjab and Sindh, the Indus plains support tropical and subtropical dry and moist broadleaf forest as well as tropical and xeric shrublands. These forests are mostly of mulberry, acacia, and eucalyptus. About 2.2% or of Pakistan was forested in 2010.The fauna of Pakistan also reflects the country's varied climate. Around 668 bird species are found there, including crows, sparrows, mynas, hawks, falcons, and eagles. Palas, Kohistan, has a significant population of western tragopan. Many birds sighted in Pakistan are migratory, coming from Europe, Central Asia, and India.The southern plains are home to mongooses, small Indian civet, hares, the Asiatic jackal, the Indian pangolin, the jungle cat, and the desert cat. There are mugger crocodiles in the Indus, and wild boar, deer, porcupines, and small rodents in the surrounding areas. The sandy scrublands of central Pakistan are home to Asiatic jackals, striped hyenas, wildcats, and leopards. The lack of vegetative cover, the severe climate, and the impact of grazing on the deserts have left wild animals in a precarious position. The chinkara is the only animal that can still be found in significant numbers in Cholistan. A small number of nilgai are found along the Pakistan–India border and in some parts of Cholistan. A wide variety of animals live in the mountainous north, including the Marco Polo sheep, the urial (a subspecies of wild sheep), the markhor goat, the ibex goat, the Asian black bear, and the Himalayan brown bear. Among the rare animals found in the area are the snow leopard and the blind Indus river dolphin, of which there are believed to be about 1,100 remaining, protected at the Indus River Dolphin Reserve in Sindh. In total, 174 mammals, 177 reptiles, 22 amphibians, 198 freshwater fish species and 5,000 species of invertebrates (including insects) have been recorded in Pakistan.The flora and fauna of Pakistan suffer from a number of problems. Pakistan has the second-highest rate of deforestation in the world, which, along with hunting and pollution, has had adverse effects on the ecosystem. It had a 2019 Forest Landscape Integrity Index mean score of 7.42/10, ranking it 41st globally out of 172 countries. The government has established a large number of protected areas, wildlife sanctuaries, and game reserves to address these issues.Pakistan's political experience is essentially related to the struggle of Indian Muslims to regain the power they lost to British colonisation. Pakistan is a democratic parliamentary federal republic, with Islam as the state religion. The first constitution was adopted in 1956 but suspended by Ayub Khan in 1958, who replaced it with the second constitution in 1962. A complete and comprehensive constitution was adopted in 1973, it was suspended by Zia-ul-Haq in 1977 but reinstated in 1985. This constitution is the country's most important document, laying the foundations of the current government. The Pakistani military establishment has played an influential role in mainstream politics throughout Pakistan's political history. The periods 1958–1971, 1977–1988, and 1999–2008 saw military coups that resulted in the imposition of martial law and military commanders who governed as de facto presidents. Today Pakistan has a multi-party parliamentary system with clear division of powers and checks and balances among the branches of government. The first successful democratic transition occurred in May 2013. Politics in Pakistan is centred on, and dominated by, a homegrown social philosophy comprising a blend of ideas from socialism, conservatism, and the third way. As of the general elections held in 2013, the three main political parties in the country are: the centre-right conservative Pakistan Muslim League-N; the centre-left socialist PPP; and the centrist and third-way Pakistan Movement for Justice (PTI).Since Independence, Pakistan has attempted to balance its relations with foreign nations. Pakistan is a strong ally of China, with both countries placing considerable importance on the maintenance of an extremely close and supportive special relationship. It is also a major non-NATO ally of the United States in the war against terrorism—a status achieved in 2004. Pakistan's foreign policy and geostrategy mainly focus on the economy and security against threats to its national identity and territorial integrity, and on the cultivation of close relations with other Muslim countries.The Kashmir conflict remains the major point of contention between Pakistan and India; three of their four wars were fought over this territory. Due partly to difficulties in relations with its geopolitical rival India, Pakistan maintains close political relations with Turkey and Iran, and both countries have been a focal point in Pakistan's foreign policy. Saudi Arabia also maintains a respected position in Pakistan's foreign policy.A non-signatory party of the Treaty on Nuclear Non-Proliferation, Pakistan is an influential member of the IAEA. In recent events, Pakistan has blocked an international treaty to limit fissile material, arguing that the "treaty would target Pakistan specifically". In the 20th century, Pakistan's nuclear deterrence program focused on countering India's nuclear ambitions in the region, and nuclear tests by India eventually led Pakistan to reciprocate to maintain a geopolitical balance as becoming a nuclear power. Currently, Pakistan maintains a policy of credible minimum deterrence, calling its program vital nuclear deterrence against foreign aggression.Located in the strategic and geopolitical corridor of the world's major maritime oil supply lines and communication fibre optics, Pakistan has proximity to the natural resources of Central Asian countries. Briefing on the country's foreign policy in 2004, a Pakistani senator reportedly explained: "Pakistan highlights sovereign equality of states, bilateralism, mutuality of interests, and non-interference in each other's domestic affairs as the cardinal features of its foreign policy." Pakistan is an active member of the United Nations and has a Permanent Representative to represent Pakistan's positions in international politics. Pakistan has lobbied for the concept of "enlightened moderation" in the Muslim world. Pakistan is also a member of Commonwealth of Nations, the South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation (SAARC), the Economic Cooperation Organization (ECO), and the G20 developing nations.Due to ideological differences, Pakistan opposed the Soviet Union in the 1950s. During the Soviet–Afghan War in the 1980s, Pakistan was one of the closest allies of the United States. Relations between Pakistan and Russia have greatly improved since 1999, and co-operation in various sectors has increased. Pakistan has had an "on-and-off" relationship with the United States. A close ally of the United States during the Cold war, Pakistan's relationship with the United States soured in the 1990s when the US imposed sanctions because of Pakistan's secretive nuclear development. Since 9/11, Pakistan has been a close ally of the United States on the issue of counter-terrorism in the regions of the Middle East and South Asia, with the US supporting Pakistan with aid money and weapons. Initially, the United States-led war on terrorism led to an improvement in the relationship, but it was strained by a divergence of interests and resulting mistrust during the war in Afghanistan and by issues related to terrorism.Pakistan does not have diplomatic relations with Israel; nonetheless, some Israeli citizens have visited the country on tourist visas. However, an exchange took place between the two countries using Turkey as a communication conduit. Despite Pakistan being the only country in the world that has not established diplomatic relations with Armenia, an Armenian community still resides in Pakistan. Pakistan had warm relations with Bangladesh, despite some initial strains in their relationship.Pakistan was one of the first countries to establish formal diplomatic relations with the People's Republic of China, and the relationship continues to be strong since China's war with India in 1962, forming a special relationship. From the 1960s to 1980s, Pakistan greatly helped China in reaching out to the world's major countries and helped facilitate US President Nixon's state visit to China. Despite the change of governments in Pakistan and fluctuations in the regional and global situation, China's policy in Pakistan continues to be a dominant factor at all times. In return, China is Pakistan's largest trading partner, and economic co-operation has flourished, with substantial Chinese investment in Pakistan's infrastructural expansion such as the Pakistani deep-water port at Gwadar. Friendly Sino-Pakistani relations reached new heights as both countries signed 51 agreements and Memorandums of Understanding (MoUs) in 2015 for co-operation in different areas. Both countries signed a Free Trade Agreement in the 2000s, and Pakistan continues to serve as China's communication bridge to the Muslim world. In 2016, China announced that it will set up an anti-terrorism alliance with Pakistan, Afghanistan, and Tajikistan. In December 2018, Pakistan's government defended China's re-education camps for a million Uyghur Muslims.After Independence, Pakistan vigorously pursued bilateral relations with other Muslim countries and made an active bid for leadership of the Muslim world, or at least for leadership in efforts to achieve unity. The Ali brothers had sought to project Pakistan as the natural leader of the Islamic world, in part due to its large manpower and military strength. A top-ranking Muslim League leader, Khaliquzzaman, declared that Pakistan would bring together all Muslim countries into Islamistan—a pan-Islamic entity.Such developments (along with Pakistan's creation) did not get American approval, and British Prime Minister Clement Attlee voiced international opinion at the time by stating that he wished that India and Pakistan would re-unite. Since most of the Arab world was undergoing a nationalist awakening at the time, there was little attraction to Pakistan's Pan-Islamic aspirations. Some of the Arab countries saw the 'Islamistan' project as a Pakistani attempt to dominate other Muslim states.Pakistan vigorously championed the right of self-determination for Muslims around the world. Pakistan's efforts for the independence movements of Indonesia, Algeria, Tunisia, Morocco, and Eritrea were significant and initially led to close ties between these countries and Pakistan. However, Pakistan also masterminded an attack on the Afghan city of Jalalabad during the Afghan Civil War to establish an Islamic government there. Pakistan had wished to foment an 'Islamic Revolution' that would transcend national borders, covering Pakistan, Afghanistan, and Central Asia.On the other hand, Pakistan's relations with Iran have been strained at times due to sectarian tensions. Iran and Saudi Arabia used Pakistan as a battleground for their proxy sectarian war, and by the 1990s Pakistan's support for the Sunni Taliban organisation in Afghanistan became a problem for Shia Iran, which opposed a Taliban-controlled Afghanistan. Tensions between Iran and Pakistan intensified in 1998 when Iran accused Pakistan of war crimes after Pakistani warplanes had bombarded Afghanistan's last Shia stronghold in support of the Taliban.Pakistan is an influential and founding member of the Organisation of Islamic Cooperation (OIC). Maintaining cultural, political, social, and economic relations with the Arab world and other countries in the Muslim world is a vital factor in Pakistan's foreign policy.A federal parliamentary republic state, Pakistan is a federation that comprises four provinces: Punjab, Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, Sindh and Balochistan, and three territories: Islamabad Capital Territory, Gilgit–Baltistan and Azad Kashmir. The Government of Pakistan exercises the "de facto" jurisdiction over the Frontier Regions and the western parts of the Kashmir Regions, which are organised into the separate political entities Azad Kashmir and Gilgit–Baltistan (formerly Northern Areas). In 2009, the constitutional assignment () awarded the Gilgit–Baltistan a semi-provincial status, giving it self-government.The local government system consists of a three-tier system of districts, tehsils, and union councils, with an elected body at each tier. There are about 130 districts altogether, of which Azad Kashmir has ten and Gilgit–Baltistan seven.Law enforcement is carried out by a joint network of the intelligence community with jurisdiction limited to the relevant province or territory. The National Intelligence Directorate coordinates the information intelligence at both federal and provincial levels; including the FIA, IB, Motorway Police, and paramilitary forces such as the Pakistan Rangers and the Frontier Corps.Pakistan's "premier" intelligence agency, the Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI), was formed just within a year after the Independence of Pakistan in 1947. ABC News Point in 2014 reported that the ISI was ranked as the top intelligence agency in the world while Zee News reported the ISI as ranking fifth among the world's most powerful intelligence agencies.The court system is organised as a hierarchy, with the Supreme Court at the apex, below which are High Courts, Federal Shariat Courts (one in each province and one in the federal capital), District Courts (one in each district), Judicial Magistrate Courts (in every town and city), Executive Magistrate Courts, and civil courts. The Penal code has limited jurisdiction in the Tribal Areas, where law is largely derived from tribal customs.The Kashmir—the most northwesterly region of South Asia—is a major territorial dispute that has hindered relations between India and Pakistan. The two nations have fought at least three large-scale conventional wars in successive years in 1947, 1965, and 1971. The conflict in 1971 witnessed Pakistan's unconditional surrender and a treaty that subsequently led to the independence of Bangladesh. Other serious military engagements and skirmishes have included the armed contacts in Siachen Glacier (1984) and Kargil (1999). Approximately 45.1% of the Kashmir region is controlled by India, which also claims the entire state of Jammu and Kashmir, including most of Jammu, the Kashmir Valley, Ladakh, and the Siachen. The claim is contested by Pakistan, which controls approximately 38.2% of the Kashmir region, an area known as the Azad Kashmir and Gilgit–Baltistan.India claims the Kashmir on the basis of the Instrument of Accession—a legal agreement with Kashmir's leaders executed by "Maharaja" Hari Singh, who agreed to cede the area to India. Pakistan claims Kashmir on the basis of a Muslim majority and of geography, the same principles that were applied for the creation of the two independent states. India referred the dispute to the United Nations on 1 January 1948. In a resolution passed in 1948, the UN's General Assembly asked Pakistan to remove most of its troops as a "plebiscite" would then be held. However, Pakistan failed to vacate the region and a ceasefire was reached in 1949 establishing a Line of Control (LoC) that divided Kashmir between the two nations. India, fearful that the Muslim majority populace of Kashmir would secede from India, did not allow a plebiscite to take place in the region. This was confirmed in a statement by India's Defense Minister, Krishna Menon, who said: "Kashmir would vote to join Pakistan and no Indian Government responsible for agreeing to plebiscite would survive."Pakistan claims that its position is for the right of the people of Jammu and Kashmir to determine their future through impartial elections as mandated by the United Nations, while India has stated that Kashmir is an integral part of India, referring to the Simla Agreement (1972) and to the fact that elections take place regularly. In recent developments, certain Kashmiri independence groups believe that Kashmir should be independent of both India and Pakistan.The law enforcement in Pakistan is carried out by joint network of several federal and provincial police agencies. The four provinces and the Islamabad Capital Territory (ICT) each have a civilian police force with jurisdiction extending only to the relevant province or territory. At the federal level, there are a number of civilian intelligence agencies with nationwide jurisdictions including the Federal Investigation Agency (FIA), Intelligence Bureau (IB), and the Motorway Patrol, as well as several paramilitary forces such as the National Guards (Northern Areas), the Rangers (Punjab and Sindh), and the Frontier Corps (Khyber Pakhtunkhwa and Balochistan).The most senior officers of all the civilian police forces also form part of the Police Service, which is a component of the civil service of Pakistan. Namely, there is four provincial police service including the Punjab Police, Sindh Police, Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa Police, and the Balochistan Police; all headed by the appointed senior Inspector-Generals. The ICT has its own police component, the Capital Police, to maintain law and order in the capital. The CID bureaus are the crime investigation unit and form a vital part in each provincial police service.The law enforcement in Pakistan also has a Motorway Patrol which is responsible for enforcement of traffic and safety laws, security and recovery on Pakistan's inter-provincial motorway network. In each of provincial Police Service, it also maintains a respective Elite Police units led by the NACTA—a counter-terrorism police unit as well as providing VIP escorts. In the Punjab and Sindh, the Pakistan Rangers are an internal security force with the prime objective to provide and maintain security in war zones and areas of conflict as well as maintaining law and order which includes providing assistance to the police. The Frontier Corps serves the similar purpose in Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa, and the Balochistan.Male homosexuality is illegal in Pakistan and punishable with up to life in prison. In its 2018 Press Freedom Index, Reporters Without Borders ranked Pakistan number 139 out of 180 countries based on freedom of the press. Television stations and newspapers are routinely shut down for publishing any reports critical of the government or the military.The armed forces of Pakistan are the sixth largest in the world in terms of numbers in full-time service, with about 651,800 personnel on active duty and 291,000 paramilitary personnel, as of tentative estimates in 2021. They came into existence after independence in 1947, and the military establishment has frequently influenced the national politics ever since. Chain of command of the military is kept under the control of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Committee; all of the branches joint works, co-ordination, military logistics, and joint missions are under the Joint Staff HQ. The Joint Staff HQ is composed of the Air HQ, Navy HQ, and Army GHQ in the vicinity of the Rawalpindi Military District.The Chairman Joint Chiefs of Staff Committee is the highest principle staff officer in the armed forces, and the chief military adviser to the civilian government though the chairman has no authority over the three branches of armed forces. The Chairman joint chiefs controls the military from the JS HQ and maintains strategic communications between the military and the civilian government. , the CJCSC is General Nadeem Raza alongside chief of army staff General Qamar Javed Bajwa, chief of naval staff Admiral Muhammad Amjad Khan Niazi, and chief of air staff Air Chief Marshal Zaheer Ahmad Babar. The main branches are the Army, the Air Force and the Navy, which are supported by a large number of paramilitary forces in the country. Control over the strategic arsenals, deployment, employment, development, military computers and command and control is a responsibility vested under the National Command Authority which oversaw the work on the nuclear policy as part of the credible minimum deterrence.The United States, Turkey, and China maintain close military relations and regularly export military equipment and technology transfer to Pakistan. Joint logistics and major war games are occasionally carried out by the militaries of China and Turkey. Philosophical basis for the military draft is introduced by the Constitution in times of emergency, but it has never been imposed.Since 1947 Pakistan has been involved in four conventional wars, the first war occurred in Kashmir with Pakistan gaining control of Western Kashmir, (Azad Kashmir and Gilgit–Baltistan), and India retaining Eastern Kashmir (Jammu and Kashmir and Ladakh). Territorial problems eventually led to another conventional war in 1965; over the issue of Bengali refugees that led to another war in 1971 which resulted in Pakistan's unconditional surrender in East Pakistan. Tensions in Kargil brought the two countries at the brink of war. Since 1947 the unresolved territorial problems with Afghanistan saw border skirmishes which were kept mostly at the mountainous border. In 1961, the military and intelligence community repelled the Afghan incursion in the Bajaur Agency near the Durand Line border.Rising tensions with neighbouring USSR in their involvement in Afghanistan, Pakistani intelligence community, mostly the ISI, systematically coordinated the US resources to the Afghan mujahideen and foreign fighters against the Soviet Union's presence in the region. Military reports indicated that the PAF was in engagement with the Soviet Air Force, supported by the Afghan Air Force during the course of the conflict; one of which belonged to Alexander Rutskoy. Apart from its own conflicts, Pakistan has been an active participant in United Nations peacekeeping missions. It played a major role in rescuing trapped American soldiers from Mogadishu, Somalia, in 1993 in Operation Gothic Serpent. According to UN reports, the Pakistani military is the third largest troop contributor to UN peacekeeping missions after Ethiopia and India.Pakistan has deployed its military in some Arab countries, providing defence, training, and playing advisory roles. The PAF and Navy's fighter pilots have voluntarily served in Arab nations' militaries against Israel in the Six-Day War (1967) and in the Yom Kippur War (1973). Pakistan's fighter pilots shot down ten Israeli planes in the Six-Day War. In the 1973 war one of the PAF pilots, Flt. Lt. Sattar Alvi (flying a MiG-21), shot down an Israeli Air Force Mirage and was honoured by the Syrian government. Requested by the Saudi monarchy in 1979, Pakistan's special forces units, operatives, and commandos were rushed to assist Saudi forces in Mecca to lead the operation of the Grand Mosque. For almost two weeks Saudi Special Forces and Pakistani commandos fought the insurgents who had occupied the Grand Mosque's compound. In 1991 Pakistan got involved with the Gulf War and sent 5,000 troops as part of a US-led coalition, specifically for the defence of Saudi Arabia.Despite the UN arms embargo on Bosnia, General Javed Nasir of the ISI airlifted anti-tank weapons and missiles to Bosnian mujahideen which turned the tide in favour of Bosnian Muslims and forced the Serbs to lift the siege. Under Nasir's leadership the ISI was also involved in supporting Chinese Muslims in Xinjiang Province, rebel Muslim groups in the Philippines, and some religious groups in Central Asia.Since 2004, the military has been engaged in an insurgency in the Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province, mainly against the Tehrik-i-Taliban factions. Major operations undertaken by the army include Operation Black Thunderstorm, Operation Rah-e-Nijat and Operation Zarb-e-Azb.According to SIPRI, Pakistan was the 9th-largest recipient and importer of arms between 2012–2016.The Economy of Pakistan is the 23rd-largest in the world in terms of purchasing power parity (PPP), and 42nd-largest in terms of nominal gross domestic product. Economists estimate that Pakistan was part of the wealthiest region of the world throughout the first millennium CE, with the largest economy by GDP. This advantage was lost in the 18th century as other regions such as China and Western Europe edged forward. Pakistan is considered a developing country and is one of the Next Eleven, a group of eleven countries that, along with the BRICs, have a high potential to become the world's largest economies in the 21st century.In recent years, after decades of social instability, , serious deficiencies in macromanagement and unbalanced macroeconomics in basic services such as rail transportation and electrical energy generation have developed. The economy is considered to be semi-industrialized, with centres of growth along the Indus River. The diversified economies of Karachi and Punjab's urban centres coexist with less-developed areas in other parts of the country, particularly in Balochistan. According to the Economic complexity index, Pakistan is the 67th-largest export economy in the world and the 106th most complex economy. During the fiscal year 2015–16, Pakistan's exports stood at US$20.81 billion and imports at US$44.76 billion, resulting in a negative trade balance of US$23.96 billion., Pakistan's estimated nominal GDP is US$284.2 billion. The GDP by PPP is US$1.254 trillion. The estimated nominal per capita GDP is US$1,388, the GDP (PPP)/capita is US$6,016 (international dollars), According to the World Bank, Pakistan has important strategic endowments and development potential. The increasing proportion of Pakistan's youth provides the country with both a potential demographic dividend and a challenge to provide adequate services and employment. 21.04% of the population live below the international poverty line of US$1.25 a day. The unemployment rate among the aged 15 and over population is 5.5%. Pakistan has an estimated 40 million middle class citizens, projected to increase to 100 million by 2050. A 2015 report published by the World Bank ranked Pakistan's economy at 24th-largest in the world by purchasing power and 41st-largest in absolute terms. It is South Asia's second-largest economy, representing about 15.0% of regional GDP.Pakistan's economic growth since its inception has been varied. It has been slow during periods of democratic transition, but robust during the three periods of martial law, although the foundation for sustainable and equitable growth was not formed. The early to middle 2000s was a period of rapid economic reforms; the government raised development spending, which reduced poverty levels by 10% and increased GDP by 3%. The economy cooled again from 2007. Inflation reached 25.0% in 2008, and Pakistan had to depend on a fiscal policy backed by the International Monetary Fund to avoid possible bankruptcy. A year later, the Asian Development Bank reported that Pakistan's economic crisis was easing. The inflation rate for the fiscal year was 14.1%. Since 2013, as part of an International Monetary Fund program, Pakistan's economic growth has picked up. In 2014 Goldman Sachs predicted that Pakistan's economy would grow 15 times in the next 35 years to become the 18th-largest economy in the world by 2050. In his 2016 book, "The Rise and Fall of Nations", Ruchir Sharma termed Pakistan's economy as at a 'take-off' stage and the future outlook until 2020 has been termed 'Very Good'. Sharma termed it possible to transform Pakistan from a "low-income to a middle-income country during the next five years".Pakistan is one of the largest producers of natural commodities, and its labour market is the 10th-largest in the world. The 7-million–strong Pakistani diaspora contributed US$19.9 billion to the economy in 2015–16. The major source countries of remittances to Pakistan are: the UAE; the United States; Saudi Arabia; the Gulf states (Bahrain, Kuwait, Qatar, and Oman); Australia; Canada; Japan; the United Kingdom; Norway; and Switzerland. According to the World Trade Organization, Pakistan's share of overall world exports is declining; it contributed only 0.13% in 2007.The structure of the Pakistani economy has changed from a mainly agricultural to a strong service base. Agriculture accounts for only 20.9% of the GDP. Even so, according to the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization, Pakistan produced 21,591,400 metric tons of wheat in 2005, more than all of Africa (20,304,585 metric tons) and nearly as much as all of South America (24,557,784 metric tons). Majority of the population, directly or indirectly, is dependent on this sector. It accounts for 43.5% of employed labour force and is the largest source of foreign exchange earnings.A large portion of the country's manufactured exports is dependent on raw materials such as cotton and hides that are part of the agriculture sector, while supply shortages and market disruptions in farm products do push up inflationary pressures. The country is also the fifth-largest producer of cotton, with cotton production of 14 million bales from a modest beginning of 1.7 million bales in the early 1950s; is self-sufficient in sugarcane; and is the fourth-largest producer in the world of milk. Land and water resources have not risen proportionately, but the increases have taken place mainly due to gains in labour and agriculture productivity. The major breakthrough in crop production took place in the late 1960s and 1970s due to the Green Revolution that made a significant contribution to land and yield increases of wheat and rice. Private tube wells led to a 50 percent increase in the cropping intensity which was augmented by tractor cultivation. While the tube wells raised crop yields by 50 percent, the High Yielding Varieties (HYVs) of wheat and rice led to a 50–60 percent higher yield. Meat industry accounts for 1.4 percent of overall GDP.Industry is the second-largest sector of the economy, accounting for 19.74% of gross domestic product (GDP), and 24 percent of total employment. Large-scale manufacturing (LSM), at 12.2% of GDP, dominates the overall sector, accounting for 66% of the sectoral share, followed by small-scale manufacturing, which accounts for 4.9% of total GDP. Pakistan's cement industry is also fast growing mainly because of demand from Afghanistan and from the domestic real estate sector. In 2013 Pakistan exported 7,708,557 metric tons of cement. Pakistan has an installed capacity of 44,768,250 metric tons of cement and 42,636,428 metric tons of clinker. In 2012 and 2013, the cement industry in Pakistan became the most profitable sector of the economy.The textile industry has a pivotal position in the manufacturing sector of Pakistan. In Asia, Pakistan is the eighth-largest exporter of textile products, contributing 9.5% to the GDP and providing employment to around 15 million people (some 30% of the 49 million people in the workforce). Pakistan is the fourth-largest producer of cotton with the third-largest spinning capacity in Asia after China and India, contributing 5% to the global spinning capacity. China is the second largest buyer of Pakistani textiles, importing US$1.527 billion of textiles last fiscal. Unlike the US, where mostly value-added textiles are imported, China buys only cotton yarn and cotton fabric from Pakistan. In 2012, Pakistani textile products accounted for 3.3% or US$1.07bn of all UK textile imports, 12.4% or $4.61bn of total Chinese textile imports, 3.0% of all US textile imports ($2,980 million), 1.6% of total German textile imports ($880 million) and 0.7% of total Indian textile imports ($888 million).The services sector makes up 58.8% of GDP and has emerged as the main driver of economic growth. Pakistani society like other developing countries is a consumption oriented society, having a high marginal propensity to consume. The growth rate of services sector is higher than the growth rate of agriculture and industrial sector. Services sector accounts for 54 percent of GDP in 2014 and little over one-third of total employment. Services sector has strong linkages with other sectors of economy; it provides essential inputs to agriculture sector and manufacturing sector. Pakistan's I.T sector is regarded as among the fastest growing sector's in Pakistan. The World Economic Forum, assessing the development of Information and Communication Technology in the country ranked Pakistan 110th among 139 countries on the 'Networked Readiness Index 2016'., Pakistan has about 82 million internet users, making it the 9th-largest population of Internet users in the world. The current growth rate and employment trend indicate that Pakistan's Information Communication Technology (ICT) industry will exceed the $10-billion mark by 2020. The sector employees 12,000 and count's among top five freelancing nations. The country has also improved its export performance in telecom, computer and information services, as the share of their exports surged from 8.2pc in 2005–06 to 12.6pc in 2012–13. This growth is much better than that of China, whose share in services exports was 3pc and 7.7pc for the same period respectively.With its diverse cultures, people, and landscapes, Pakistan attracted around 6.6 million foreign tourists in 2018, which represented a significant decline since the 1970s when the country received unprecedented numbers of foreign tourists due to the popular Hippie trail. The trail attracted thousands of Europeans and Americans in the 1960s and 1970s who travelled via land through Turkey and Iran into India through Pakistan. The main destinations of choice for these tourists were the Khyber Pass, Peshawar, Karachi, Lahore, Swat and Rawalpindi. The numbers following the trail declined after the Iranian Revolution and the Soviet–Afghan War.Pakistan's tourist attractions range from the mangroves in the south to the Himalayan hill stations in the north-east. The country's tourist destinations range from the Buddhist ruins of Takht-i-Bahi and Taxila, to the 5,000-year-old cities of the Indus Valley Civilization such as Mohenjo-daro and Harappa. Pakistan is home to several mountain peaks over . The northern part of Pakistan has many old fortresses, examples of ancient architecture, and the Hunza and Chitral valleys, home to the small pre-Islamic Kalasha community claiming descent from Alexander the Great. Pakistan's cultural capital, Lahore, contains many examples of Mughal architecture such as the Badshahi Masjid, the Shalimar Gardens, the Tomb of Jahangir, and the Lahore Fort.In October 2006, just one year after the 2005 Kashmir earthquake, "The Guardian" released what it described as "The top five tourist sites in Pakistan" in order to help the country's tourism industry. The five sites included Taxila, Lahore, the Karakoram Highway, Karimabad, and Lake Saiful Muluk. To promote Pakistan's unique cultural heritage, the government organizes various festivals throughout the year. In 2015 the World Economic Forum's Travel & Tourism Competitiveness Report ranked Pakistan 125 out of 141 countries.Pakistan was recognised as the best country for infrastructure development in South Asia during the IWF and World Bank annual meetings in 2016.As of May 2021, nuclear power is provided by six licensed commercial nuclear power plants. The Pakistan Atomic Energy Commission (PAEC) is solely responsible for operating these power plants, while the Pakistan Nuclear Regulatory Authority regulates safe usage of the nuclear energy. The electricity generated by commercial nuclear power plants constitutes roughly 5.8% of Pakistan's electrical energy, compared to 64.2% from fossil fuels (crude oil and natural gas), 29.9% from hydroelectric power, and 0.1% from coal. Pakistan is one of the four nuclear armed states (along with India, Israel, and North Korea) that is not a party to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, but it is a member in good standing of the International Atomic Energy Agency.The KANUPP-I, a Candu-type nuclear reactor, was supplied by Canada in 1971—the country's first commercial nuclear power plant. The Sino-Pakistani nuclear cooperation began in the early 1980s. After a Sino-Pakistani nuclear cooperation agreement in 1986, China provided Pakistan with a nuclear reactor dubbed CHASNUPP-I for energy and the industrial growth of the country. In 2005 both countries proposed working on a joint energy security plan, calling for a huge increase in generation capacity to more than 160,000 MWe by 2030. Under its Nuclear Energy Vision 2050, the Pakistani government plans to increase nuclear power generation capacity to 40,000 MWe, 8,900 MWe of it by 2030. In June 2008 the nuclear commercial complex was expanded with the ground work of installing and operationalising the Chashma-III and Chashma–IV reactors at Chashma, Punjab Province, each with 325–340 MWe and costing ₨ 129 billion; from which the ₨ 80 billion came from international sources, principally China. A further agreement for China's help with the project was signed in October 2008, and given prominence as a counter to the US–India agreement that shortly preceded it. The cost quoted then was US$1.7 billion, with a foreign loan component of US$1.07 billion. In 2013 Pakistan established a second commercial nuclear complex in Karachi with plans of additional reactors, similar to the one in Chashma. The electrical energy is generated by various energy corporations and evenly distributed by the National Electric Power Regulatory Authority (NEPRA) among the four provinces. However, the Karachi-based K-Electric and the Water and Power Development Authority (WAPDA) generates much of the electrical energy used in Pakistan in addition to gathering revenue nationwide. , Pakistan has an installed electricity generation capacity of ~22,797.The transport industry accounts for ~10.5% of the nation's GDP.Motorways of Pakistan are a network of multiple-lane, high-speed, controlled-access highways in Pakistan, which are owned, maintained, and operated federally by Pakistan's National Highway Authority. As of 20 February 2020, 1882 km of motorways are operational, while an additional 1854 km are under construction or planned. All motorways in Pakistan are pre-fixed with the letter 'M' (for "Motorway") followed by the unique numerical designation of the specific highway (with a hyphen in the middle), e.g. "M-1".Pakistan's motorways are an important part of Pakistan's "National Trade Corridor Project", which aims to link Pakistan's three Arabian Sea ports (Karachi Port, Port Bin Qasim and Gwadar Port) to the rest of the country through its national highways and motorways network and further north with Afghanistan, Central Asia and China. The project was planned in 1990. The China Pakistan Economic Corridor project aims to link Gwadar Port and Kashgar (China) using Pakistani motorways, national highways, and expressways.Highways form the backbone of Pakistan's transport system; a total road length of accounts for 92% of passengers and 96% of inland freight traffic. Road transport services are largely in the hands of the private sector. The National Highway Authority is responsible for the maintenance of national highways and motorways. The highway and motorway system depends mainly on north–south links connecting the southern ports to the populous provinces of Punjab and Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa. Although this network only accounts for 4.6% of total road length, it carries 85% of the country's traffic.The Pakistan Railways, under the Ministry of Railways (MoR), operates the railroad system. From 1947 until the 1970s the train system was the primary means of transport until the nationwide constructions of the national highways and the economic boom of the automotive industry. Beginning in the 1990s there was a marked shift in traffic from rail to highways; dependence grew on roads after the introduction of vehicles in the country. Now the railway's share of inland traffic is below 8% for passengers and 4% for freight traffic. As personal transportation began to be dominated by the automobile, total rail track decreased from in 1990–91 to in 2011. Pakistan expects to use the rail service to boost foreign trade with China, Iran, and Turkey.There are an estimated 151 airports and airfields in Pakistan as of 2013—including both the military and the mostly publicly owned civilian airports. Although Jinnah International Airport is the principal international gateway to Pakistan, the international airports in Lahore, Islamabad, Peshawar, Quetta, Faisalabad, Sialkot, and Multan also handle significant amounts of traffic.The civil aviation industry is mixed with public and private sectors, which was deregulated in 1993. While the state-owned Pakistan International Airlines (PIA) is the major and dominant air carrier that carries about 73% of domestic passengers and all domestic freight, the private airlines such as airBlue and Air Indus, also provide similar services at a low cost.Major seaports are in Karachi, Sindh (the Karachi port, Port Qasim). Since the 1990s some seaport operations have been moved to Balochistan with the construction of Gwadar Port, Port of Pasni and Gadani Port. Gwadar Port is the deepest sea port of the world. According to the WEF's Global Competitiveness Report, quality ratings of Pakistan's port infrastructure increased from 3.7 to 4.1 between 2007 and 2016.Many flyovers and underpasses are located in major urban areas of the country to regulate the flow of traffic. The highest number of flyovers and under passes are located in Karachi, followed by Lahore. Other cities having flyovers and underpasses for the regulation of flow of traffic includes Islamabad-Rawalpindi, Faisalabad, Gujranwala, Multan, Peshawar, Hyderabad, Quetta, Sargodha, Bahawalpur, Sukkur, Larkana, Rahim Yar Khan and Sahiwal etc.Beijing Underpass, Lahore is the longest underpass of Pakistan with a length of about . Muslim Town Flyover, Lahore is the longest flyover of the country with a length of about .Developments in science and technology have played an important role in Pakistan's infrastructure and helped the country connect to the rest of the world. Every year, scientists from around the world are invited by the Pakistan Academy of Sciences and the Pakistan Government to participate in the International Nathiagali Summer College on Physics. Pakistan hosted an international seminar on "Physics in Developing Countries" for the International Year of Physics 2005. Pakistani theoretical physicist Abdus Salam won a Nobel Prize in Physics for his work on the electroweak interaction. Influential publications and critical scientific work in the advancement of mathematics, biology, economics, computer science, and genetics have been produced by Pakistani scientists at both the domestic and international levels.In chemistry, Salimuzzaman Siddiqui was the first Pakistani scientist to bring the therapeutic constituents of the neem tree to the attention of natural products chemists. Pakistani neurosurgeon Ayub Ommaya invented the Ommaya reservoir, a system for treatment of brain tumours and other brain conditions. Scientific research and development play a pivotal role in Pakistani universities, government- sponsored national laboratories, science parks, and the industry. Abdul Qadeer Khan, regarded as the founder of the HEU-based gas-centrifuge uranium enrichment program for Pakistan's integrated atomic bomb project. He founded and established the Kahuta Research Laboratories (KRL) in 1976, serving as both its senior scientist and the Director-General until his retirement in 2001, and he was an early and vital figure in other science projects. Apart from participating in Pakistan's atomic bomb project, he made major contributions in molecular morphology, physical martensite, and its integrated applications in condensed and material physics.In 2010 Pakistan was ranked 43rd in the world in terms of published scientific papers. The Pakistan Academy of Sciences, a strong scientific community, plays an influential and vital role in formulating recommendations regarding science policies for the government.The 1960s saw the emergence of an active space program led by SUPARCO that produced advances in domestic rocketry, electronics, and aeronomy. The space program recorded a few notable feats and achievements. The successful launch of its first rocket into space made Pakistan the first South Asian country to have achieved such a task. Successfully producing and launching the nation's first space satellite in 1990, Pakistan became the first Muslim country and second South Asian country to put a satellite into space.As an aftermath of the 1971 war with India, the clandestine crash program developed atomic weapons partly motivated by fear and to prevent any foreign intervention, while ushering in the atomic age in the post cold war era. Competition with India and tensions eventually led to Pakistan's decision to conduct underground nuclear tests in 1998, thus becoming the seventh country in the world to successfully develop nuclear weapons.Pakistan is the first and only Muslim country that maintains an active research presence in Antarctica. Since 1991 Pakistan has maintained two summer research stations and one weather observatory on the continent and plans to open another full-fledged permanent base in Antarctica.Energy consumption by computers and usage has grown since the 1990s when PCs were introduced; Pakistan has about 82 million Internet users and is ranked as one of the top countries that have registered a high growth rate in Internet penetration . Key publications have been produced by Pakistan, and domestic software development has gained considerable international praise.As of May 2020, Pakistan has about 82 million internet users, making it the 9th-largest population of Internet users in the world. Since the 2000s Pakistan has made a significant amount of progress in supercomputing, and various institutions offer research opportunities in parallel computing. The Pakistan government reportedly spends ₨ 4.6 billion on information technology projects, with emphasis on e-government, human resources, and infrastructure development.The constitution of Pakistan requires the state to provide free primary and secondary education.At the time of the establishment of Pakistan as a state, the country had only one university, Punjab University in Lahore. Very soon the Pakistan government established public universities in each of the four provinces, including Sindh University (1949), Peshawar University (1950), Karachi University (1953), and Balochistan University (1970). Pakistan has a large network of both public and private universities, which includes collaboration between the universities aimed at providing research and higher education opportunities in the country, although there is concern about the low quality of teaching in many of the newer schools. It is estimated that there are 3,193 technical and vocational institutions in Pakistan, and there are also "madrassahs" that provide free Islamic education and offer free board and lodging to students, who come mainly from the poorer strata of society. Strong public pressure and popular criticism over extremists' usage of "madrassahs" for recruitment, the Pakistan government has made repeated efforts to regulate and monitor the quality of education in the "madrassahs".Education in Pakistan is divided into six main levels: nursery (preparatory classes); primary (grades one through five); middle (grades six through eight); matriculation (grades nine and ten, leading to the secondary certificate); intermediate (grades eleven and twelve, leading to a higher secondary certificate); and university programmes leading to graduate and postgraduate degrees. There is a network of private schools that constitutes a parallel secondary education system based on a curriculum set and administered by the Cambridge International Examinations of the United Kingdom. Some students choose to take the O-level and A level exams conducted by the British Council. According to the International Schools Consultancy, Pakistan has 439 international schools.As a result of initiatives taken in 2007, the English medium education has been made compulsory in all schools across the country. In 2012, Malala Yousafzai, a campaigner for female education, was shot by a Taliban gunman in retaliation for her activism. Yousafzai went on to become the youngest ever Nobel laureate for her global education-related advocacy. Additional reforms enacted in 2013 required all educational institutions in Sindh to begin offering Chinese language courses, reflecting China's growing role as a superpower and its increasing influence in Pakistan. The literacy rate of the population is 62.3% as of 2018. The rate of male literacy is 72.5% while the rate of female literacy is 51.8%. Literacy rates vary by region and particularly by sex; as one example, in tribal areas female literacy is 9.5%, while Azad Jammu & Kashmir has a literacy rate of 74%. With the advent of computer literacy in 1995, the government launched a nationwide initiative in 1998 with the aim of eradicating illiteracy and providing a basic education to all children. Through various educational reforms, by 2015 the Ministry of Education expected to attain 100% enrollment levels among children of primary school age and a literacy rate of ~86% among people aged over 10. Pakistan is currently spending 2.3 percent of its GDP on education; which according to the Institute of Social and Policy Sciences is one of the lowest in South Asia.As of 2020, Pakistan is the fifth most populous country in the world and accounts for about 2.8% of the world population. The 2017 Census of Pakistan provisionally estimated the population to be 207.8 million. This figure excludes data from Gilgit-Baltistan and Azad Kashmir, which is likely to be included in the final report.The population in 2017 represents a 57% increase from 1998. The annual growth rate in 2016 was reported to be 1.45%, which is the highest of the SAARC nations, though the growth rate has been decreasing in recent years. The population is projected to reach 263 million by 2030.At the time of the partition in 1947, Pakistan had a population of 32.5 million; the population increased by ~57.2% between the years 1990 and 2009. By 2030 Pakistan is expected to surpass Indonesia as the largest Muslim-majority country in the world. Pakistan is classified as a "young nation", with a median age of 23.4 in 2016; about 104 million people were under the age of 30 in 2010. In 2016 Pakistan's fertility rate was estimated to be 2.68, higher than its neighbour India (2.45). Around 35% of the people are under 15. The vast majority of those residing in southern Pakistan live along the Indus River, with Karachi being the most populous commercial city in the south. In eastern, western, and northern Pakistan, most of the population lives in an arc formed by the cities of Lahore, Faisalabad, Rawalpindi, Sargodha, Islamabad, Gujranwala, Sialkot, Gujrat, Jhelum, Sheikhupura, Nowshera, Mardan, and Peshawar. During 1990–2008, city dwellers made up 36% of Pakistan's population, making it the most urbanised nation in South Asia, which increased to 38% by 2013. Furthermore, 50% of Pakistanis live in towns of 5,000 people or more.Expenditure on healthcare was ~2.8% of GDP in 2013. Life expectancy at birth was 67 years for females and 65 years for males in 2013. The private sector accounts for about 80% of outpatient visits. Approximately 19% of the population and 30% of children under five are malnourished. Mortality of the under-fives was 86 per 1,000 live births in 2012.More than sixty languages are spoken in Pakistan, including a number of provincial languages. Urdu—the "lingua franca" and a symbol of Muslim identity and national unity—is the national language understood by over 75% of Pakistanis. It is the main medium of communication in the country but the primary language of only 7% of Pakistan's population. Urdu and English are the official languages of Pakistan, with English primarily used in official business and government, and in legal contracts; the local variety is known as Pakistani English. The Punjabi language, the most common in Pakistan and the first language of 38.78% of Pakistan's population, is mostly spoken in the Punjab. Saraiki is mainly spoken in South Punjab, and Hindko is predominant in the Hazara region of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa. Pashto is the provincial language of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa. The Sindhi language is commonly spoken in Sindh, while the Balochi language is dominant in Balochistan. Brahui, a Dravidian language, is spoken by the Brahui people who live in Balochistan. There are also speakers of Gujarati in Karachi. Marwari, a Rajasthani language, is also spoken in parts of Sindh. Various languages such as Shina, Balti, and Burushaski are spoken in Gilgit-Baltistan, whilst languages such as Pahari, Gojri, and Kashmiri are spoken by many in Azad Kashmir.The Arabic language is officially recognised by the constitution of Pakistan. It declares in article 31 No. 2 that ""The State shall endeavour, as respects the Muslims of Pakistan (a) to make the teaching of the Holy Quran and Islamiat compulsory, to encourage and facilitate the learning of Arabic language ...""Constitution of Pakistan: "Constitution of Pakistan, 1973 – Article: 31 Islamic way of life" , Article 31 No. 2, 1973, Retrieved 22 August 2018.Even after partition in 1947, Indian Muslims continued to migrate to Pakistan throughout the 1950s and 1960s, and these migrants settled mainly in Karachi and other towns of Sindh province. The wars in neighboring Afghanistan during the 1980s and 1990s also forced millions of Afghan refugees into Pakistan. The Pakistan Census excludes the 1.41 million registered refugees from Afghanistan, who are found mainly in the Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa and tribal belt, with small numbers residing in Karachi and Quetta. Pakistan is home to one of the world's largest refugee populations. In addition to Afghans, around 2 million Bangladeshis and half a million other undocumented people live in Pakistan. They are claimed to be from other areas such as Myanmar, Iran, Iraq, and Africa.Experts say that the migration of both Bengalis and Burmese (Rohingya) to Pakistan started in the 1980s and continued until 1998. Shaikh Muhammad Feroze, the chairman of the Pakistani Bengali Action Committee, claims that there are 200 settlements of Bengali-speaking people in Pakistan, of which 132 are in Karachi. They are also found in various other areas of Pakistan such as Thatta, Badin, Hyderabad, Tando Adam, and Lahore. Large-scale Rohingya migration to Karachi made that city one of the largest population centres of Rohingyas in the world after Myanmar. The Burmese community of Karachi is spread out over 60 of the city's slums such as the Burmi Colony in Korangi, Arakanabad, Machchar colony, Bilal colony, Ziaul Haq Colony, and Godhra Camp.Thousands of Uyghur Muslims have also migrated to the Gilgit-Baltistan region of Pakistan, fleeing religious and cultural persecution in Xinjiang, China. Since 1989 thousands of Kashmiri Muslim refugees have sought refuge in Pakistan, complaining that many of the refugee women had been raped by Indian soldiers and that they were forced out of their homes by the soldiers.The major ethnic groups are Punjabis (44.7% of the country's population), Pashtuns, also known as Pathans (15.4%), Sindhis (14.1%), Saraikis (8.4%), Muhajirs (the Indian emigrants, mostly Urdu-speaking), who make up 7.6% of the population, and the Baloch with 3.6%. The remaining 6.3% consist of a number of ethnic minorities such as the Brahuis, the Hindkowans, the various peoples of Gilgit-Baltistan, the Kashmiris, the Sheedis (who are of African descent), and the Hazaras. There is also a large Pakistani diaspora worldwide, numbering over seven million, which has been recorded as the sixth largest diaspora in the world.Since achieving independence as a result of the partition of India, the urbanisation has increased exponentially, with several different causes. The majority of the population in the south resides along the Indus River, with Karachi the most populous commercial city. In the east, west, and north, most of the population lives in an arc formed by the cities of Lahore, Faisalabad, Rawalpindi, Islamabad, Sargodha, Gujranwala, Sialkot, Gujrat, Jhelum, Sheikhupura, Nowshera, Mardan, and Peshawar. During the period 1990–2008, city dwellers made up 36% of Pakistan's population, making it the most urbanised nation in South Asia. Furthermore, more than 50% of Pakistanis live in towns of 5,000 people or more. Immigration, from both within and outside the country, is regarded as one of the main factors contributing to urbanisation in Pakistan. One analysis of the 1998 national census highlighted the significance of the partition of India in the 1940s as it relates to urban change in Pakistan.During and after the independence period, Urdu speaking Muslims from India migrated in large numbers to Pakistan, especially to the port city of Karachi, which is today the largest metropolis in Pakistan. Migration from other countries, mainly from those nearby, has further accelerated the process of urbanisation in Pakistani cities. Inevitably, the rapid urbanisation caused by these large population movements has also created new political and socio-economic challenges. In addition to immigration, economic trends such as the green revolution and political developments, among a host of other factors, are also important causes of urbanisation. The state religion in Pakistan is Islam. Freedom of religion is guaranteed by the Constitution of Pakistan, which provides all its citizens the right to profess, practice and propagate their religion subject to law, public order, and morality.The population of Pakistan follow different religions. Most of Pakistanis are Muslims (96.47%) followed by Hindus (2.14%) and Christians (1.27%). There are also people in Pakistan who follow other religions, such as Sikhism, Buddhism, Jainism and the minority of Parsi (who follow Zoroastrianism). The Kalash people maintain a unique identity and religion within Pakistan.Hinduism is mostly associated with Sindhis, and Pakistan hosts major events such as the Hinglaj Yatra pilgrimage. Hindu temples may be found throughout Sindh, where the dharma features prominently. Many Hindus in Pakistan complain about the prospect of religious violence against them and being treated like second-class citizens, and many have emigrated to India or further abroad.In addition, some Pakistanis also do not profess any faith (such as atheists and agnostics) in Pakistan. According to the 1998 census, people who did not state their religion accounted for 0.5% of the population. Secularism and criticism of over-religiosity is not uncommon in well-educated civil society, although in general Pakistan is a highly religious society, and the irreligious generally hide their beliefs due to fear of persecution.Islam is the dominant religion. About 96.47% of Pakistanis are Muslim, according to the 2017 Census. Pakistan has the second-largest number of Muslims in the world after Indonesia. and home for (10.5%) of the world's Muslim population. The majority of them are Sunni and mostly follow Sufism (estimated between 75 and 95%) while Shias represent between 5–25%. As of 2019, Shia population in Pakistan was estimated to be 42 million out of total population of 210 million. Pakistan also has the largest Muslim city in the world (Karachi).The Ahmadis, a small minority representing 0.22–2% of Pakistan's population, are officially considered non-Muslims by virtue of the constitutional amendment. The Ahmadis are particularly persecuted, especially since 1974 when they were banned from calling themselves Muslims. In 1984, Ahmadiyya places of worship were banned from being called "mosques". , 12% of Pakistani Muslims self-identify as non-denominational Muslims. There are also several Quraniyoon communities.Sufism, a mystical Islamic tradition, has a long history and a large following among the Sunni Muslims in Pakistan, at both the academic and popular levels. Popular Sufi culture is centered around gatherings and celebrations at the shrines of saints and annual festivals that feature Sufi music and dance. Two Sufis whose shrines receive much national attention are Ali Hajweri in Lahore (c. 12th century) and Shahbaz Qalander in Sehwan, Sindh (c. 12th century).There are two levels of Sufism in Pakistan. The first is the 'populist' Sufism of the rural population. This level of Sufism involves belief in intercession through saints, veneration of their shrines, and forming bonds (Mureed) with a "pir" (saint). Many rural Pakistani Muslims associate with "pirs" and seek their intercession. The second level of Sufism in Pakistan is 'intellectual Sufism', which is growing among the urban and educated population. They are influenced by the writings of Sufis such as the medieval theologian al-Ghazali, the Sufi reformer Shaykh Aḥmad Sirhindi, and Shah Wali Allah. Contemporary Islamic fundamentalists criticise Sufism's popular character, which in their view does not accurately reflect the teachings and practice of Muhammad and his companions.Hinduism is the second-largest religion in Pakistan after Islam, according to the 2017 census. Hindus are found in all provinces of Pakistan but are mostly concentrated in Sindh, where they account for 8.73% of the population. , Pakistan had the fifth-largest Hindu population in the world. In the 2017 census, the Hindu (jati) population was found to be 4,444,437 while the Hindu (scheduled castes) numbered an additional 851,504. At the time of Pakistan's creation, the 'hostage theory' gained currency. According to this theory, the Hindu minority in Pakistan was to be given a fair deal in Pakistan in order to ensure the protection of the Muslim minority in India. However, Khawaja Nazimuddin, the second Prime Minister of Pakistan, stated: Some Hindus in Pakistan feel that they are treated as second-class citizens and many have continued to migrate to India. Pakistani Hindus faced riots after the Babri Masjid demolition, endured a massacre (in 2005) by security forces in Balochistan, and have experienced other attacks, forced conversions, and abductions.Christians formed the next largest religious minority, after Hindus, with 1.27% of the population following it. They were followed by the Bahá'í Faith, which had a following of 30,000, then Sikhism, Buddhism, and Zoroastrianism, each back then claiming 20,000 adherents, and a very small community of Jains. There is a Roman Catholic community in Karachi that was established by Goan and Tamil migrants when Karachi's infrastructure was being developed by the British during the colonial administration between World War I and World War II. The influence of atheism is very small, with 1.0% of the population identifying as atheist in 2005. However, the figure rose to 2.0% in 2012 according to Gallup.Civil society in Pakistan is largely hierarchical, emphasising local cultural etiquette and traditional Islamic values that govern personal and political life. The basic family unit is the extended family, although for socio-economic reasons there has been a growing trend towards nuclear families. The traditional dress for both men and women is the "Shalwar Kameez"; trousers, jeans, and shirts are also popular among men. In recent decades, the middle class has increased to around 35 million and the upper and upper-middle classes to around 17 million, and power is shifting from rural landowners to the urbanised elites. Pakistani festivals, including "Eid-ul-Fitr", "Eid-ul-Azha", "Ramazan", Christmas, Easter, Holi, and Diwali, are mostly religious in origin. Increasing globalisation has resulted in Pakistan ranking 56th on the A.T. Kearney/FP Globalization Index.The "Shalwar Kameez" is the national dress of Pakistan and is worn by both men and women in all four provinces: Punjab, Sindh, Balochistan, and Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa, and Azad Kashmir. Each province has its own style of "Shalwar Kameez". Pakistanis wear clothes in a range of exquisite colours and designs and in type of fabric (silk, chiffon, cotton, etc.). Besides the national dress, domestically tailored suits and neckties are often worn by men, and are customary in offices, schools, and social gatherings.The fashion industry has flourished in the changing environment of the fashion world. Since Pakistan came into being, its fashion has evolved in different phases and developed a unique identity. Today, Pakistani fashion is a combination of traditional and modern dress and has become a mark of Pakistani culture. Despite modern trends, regional and traditional forms of dress have developed their own significance as a symbol of native tradition. This regional fashion continues to evolve into both more modern and purer forms. The Pakistan Fashion Design Council based in Lahore organizes PFDC Fashion Week and the Fashion Pakistan Council based in Karachi organizes Fashion Pakistan Week. Pakistan's first fashion week was held in November 2009.The private print media, state-owned Pakistan Television Corporation (PTV), and Pakistan Broadcasting Corporation (PBC) for radio were the dominant media outlets until the beginning of the 21st century. Pakistan now has a large network of domestic, privately owned 24-hour news media and television channels. A 2016 report by the Reporters Without Borders ranked Pakistan 147th on the Press Freedom Index, while at the same time terming the Pakistani media "among the freest in Asia when it comes to covering the squabbling among politicians." The BBC terms the Pakistani media "among the most outspoken in South Asia". Pakistani media has also played a vital role in exposing corruption.The Lollywood, Kariwood, Punjabi, and Pashto film industry is based in Karachi, Lahore, and Peshawar. While Bollywood films were banned from public cinemas from 1965 until 2008, they have remained an important part of popular culture. In contrast to the ailing Pakistani film industry, Urdu televised dramas and theatrical performances continue to be popular, as many entertainment media outlets air them regularly. Urdu dramas dominate the television entertainment industry, which has launched critically acclaimed miniseries and featured popular actors and actresses since the 1990s. In the 1960s–1970s, pop music and disco (1970s) dominated the country's music industry. In the 1980s–1990s, British influenced rock music appeared and jolted the country's entertainment industry. In the 2000s, heavy metal music gained popular and critical acclaim.Pakistani music ranges from diverse forms of provincial folk music and traditional styles such as Qawwali and Ghazal Gayaki to modern musical forms that fuse traditional and western music. Pakistan has many famous folk singers. The arrival of Afghan refugees in the western provinces has stimulated interest in Pashto music, although there has been intolerance of it in some places.According to the UN Department of Economic and Social Affairs, Pakistan has the sixth-largest diaspora in the world. Statistics gathered by the Pakistani government show that there are around 7 million Pakistanis residing abroad, with the vast majority living in the Middle East, Europe, and North America. Pakistan ranks 10th in the world for remittances sent home. The largest inflow of remittances, , is from Saudi Arabia, amounting to $5.9 billion. The term "Overseas Pakistani" is officially recognised by the Government of Pakistan. The Ministry of Overseas Pakistanis was established in 2008 to deal exclusively with all matters of overseas Pakistanis such as attending to their needs and problems, developing projects for their welfare, and working for resolution of their problems and issues. Overseas Pakistanis are the second-largest source of foreign exchange remittances to Pakistan after exports. Over the last several years, home remittances have maintained a steadily rising trend, with a more than 100% increase from US$8.9 billion in 2009–10 to US$19.9 billion in 2015–16.The Overseas Pakistani Division (OPD) was created in September 2004 within the Ministry of Labour (MoL). It has since recognised the importance of overseas Pakistanis and their contribution to the nation's economy. Together with Community Welfare Attaches (CWAs) and the Overseas Pakistanis Foundation (OPF), the OPD is making efforts to improve the welfare of Pakistanis who reside abroad. The division aims to provide better services through improved facilities at airports, and suitable schemes for housing, education, and health care. It also facilitates the reintegration into society of returning overseas Pakistanis. Notable members of the Pakistani diaspora include London Mayor Sadiq Khan, UK Cabinet Member Sajid Javid, former UK Conservative Party Chair Baroness Warsi, singers Zayn Malik and Nadia Ali, MIT Physics Professor Dr. Nergis Mavalvala, actors Riz Ahmed and Kumail Nanjiani, businessmen Shahid Khan and Sir Anwar Pervez, Boston University professors Adil Najam and Hamid Nawab, Texas A&M Professor Muhammad Suhail Zubairy, Yale Professor Sara Suleri, UC San Diego Professor Farooq Azam, and historian Ayesha Jalal.Pakistan has literature in Urdu, Sindhi, Punjabi, Pashto, Baluchi, Persian, English, and many other languages. The Pakistan Academy of Letters is a large literary community that promotes literature and poetry in Pakistan and abroad. The National Library publishes and promotes literature in the country. Before the 19th century, Pakistani literature consisted mainly of lyric and religious poetry and mystical and folkloric works. During the colonial period, native literary figures were influenced by western literary realism and took up increasingly varied topics and narrative forms. Prose fiction is now very popular.The national poet of Pakistan, Muhammad Iqbal, wrote poetry in Urdu and Persian. He was a strong proponent of the political and spiritual revival of Islamic civilisation and encouraged Muslims all over the world to bring about a successful revolution. Well-known figures in contemporary Pakistani Urdu literature include Josh Malihabadi Faiz Ahmed Faiz and Saadat Hasan Manto. Sadequain and Gulgee are known for their calligraphy and paintings. The Sufi poets Shah Abdul Latif, Bulleh Shah, Mian Muhammad Bakhsh, and Khawaja Farid enjoy considerable popularity in Pakistan. Mirza Kalich Beg has been termed the father of modern Sindhi prose. Historically, philosophical development in the country was dominated by Muhammad Iqbal, Sir Syed Ahmad Khan, Muhammad Asad, Maududi, and Mohammad Ali Johar.Ideas from British and American philosophy greatly shaped philosophical development in Pakistan. Analysts such as M. M. Sharif and Zafar Hassan established the first major Pakistani philosophical movement in 1947. After the 1971 war, philosophers such as Jalaludin Abdur Rahim, Gianchandani, and Malik Khalid incorporated Marxism into Pakistan's philosophical thinking. Influential work by Manzoor Ahmad, Jon Elia, Hasan Askari Rizvi, and Abdul Khaliq brought mainstream social, political, and analytical philosophy to the fore in academia. Works by Noam Chomsky have influenced philosophical ideas in various fields of social and political philosophy.Four periods are recognised in Pakistani architecture: pre-Islamic, Islamic, colonial, and post-colonial. With the beginning of the Indus civilization around the middle of the 3rd millennium BCE, an advanced urban culture developed for the first time in the region, with large buildings, some of which survive to this day. Mohenjo Daro, Harappa, and Kot Diji are among the pre-Islamic settlements that are now tourist attractions. The rise of Buddhism and the influence of Greek civilisation led to the development of a Greco-Buddhist style, starting from the 1st century CE. The high point of this era was the Gandhara style. An example of Buddhist architecture is the ruins of the Buddhist monastery Takht-i-Bahi in Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa.The arrival of Islam in what is today Pakistan meant the sudden end of Buddhist architecture in the area and a smooth transition to the predominantly pictureless Islamic architecture. The most important Indo-Islamic-style building still standing is the tomb of the Shah Rukn-i-Alam in Multan. During the Mughal era, design elements of Persian-Islamic architecture were fused with and often produced playful forms of Hindustani art. Lahore, as the occasional residence of Mughal rulers, contains many important buildings from the empire. Most prominent among them are the Badshahi Mosque, the fortress of Lahore with the famous Alamgiri Gate, the colourful, Mughal-style Wazir Khan Mosque, the Shalimar Gardens in Lahore, and the Shahjahan Mosque in Thatta. In the British colonial period, predominantly functional buildings of the Indo-European representative style developed from a mixture of European and Indian-Islamic components. Post-colonial national identity is expressed in modern structures such as the Faisal Mosque, the Minar-e-Pakistan, and the Mazar-e-Quaid. Several examples of architectural infrastructure demonstrating the influence of British design can be found in Lahore, Peshawar, and Karachi.Pakistani cuisine is similar to that of other regions of South Asia, with some of it being originated from the royal kitchens of 16th-century Mughal emperors. Most of those dishes have their roots in British, Indian, Central Asian and Middle Eastern cuisine. Unlike Middle Eastern cuisine, Pakistani cooking uses large quantities of spices, herbs, and seasoning. Garlic, ginger, turmeric, red chili, and garam masala are used in most dishes, and home cooking regularly includes curry, "roti", a thin flatbread made from wheat, is a staple food, usually served with curry, meat, vegetables, and lentils. Rice is also common; it is served plain, fried with spices, and in sweet dishes.Lassi is a traditional drink in the Punjab region. Black tea with milk and sugar is popular throughout Pakistan and is consumed daily by most of the population. Sohan halwa is a popular sweet dish from the southern region of Punjab province and is enjoyed all over Pakistan.Most sports played in Pakistan originated and were substantially developed by athletes and sports fans from the United Kingdom who introduced them during the British Raj. Field hockey is the national sport of Pakistan; it has won three gold medals in the Olympic Games held in 1960, 1968, and 1984. Pakistan has also won the Hockey World Cup a record four times, held in 1971, 1978, 1982, and 1994.Cricket, however, is the most popular game across the country. The country has had an array of success in the sport over the years, and has the distinct achievement of having won each of the major ICC international cricket tournaments: ICC Cricket World Cup, ICC World Twenty20, and ICC Champions Trophy; as well as the ICC Test Championship. The cricket team (known as "Shaheen") won the Cricket World Cup held in 1992; it was runner-up once, in 1999. Pakistan was runner-up in the inaugural World Twenty20 (2007) in South Africa and won the World Twenty20 in England in 2009. In March 2009, militants attacked the touring Sri Lankan cricket team, after which no international cricket was played in Pakistan until May 2015, when the Zimbabwean team agreed to a tour. Pakistan also won the 2017 ICC Champions Trophy by defeating arch-rivals India in the final.Pakistan Super League is one of the largest cricket leagues of the world with a brand value of about .Association Football is the second most played sports in Pakistan and it is organised and regulated by the Pakistan Football Federation. Football in Pakistan is as old as the country itself. Shortly after the creation of Pakistan in 1947, the Pakistan Football Federation (PFF) was created, and Muhammad Ali Jinnah became its first Patron-in-Chief. The highest football division in Pakistan is the Pakistan Premier League. Pakistan is known as one of the best manufacturer of the official FIFA World Cup ball. The best football players to play for Pakistan are Kaleemullah, Zesh Rehman, Muhammad Essa, Haroon Yousaf, and Muhammad Adil.Pakistan has hosted or co-hosted several international sporting events: the 1989 and 2004 South Asian Games; the 1984, 1993, 1996 and 2003 World Squash Championships; the 1987 and 1996 Cricket World Cup; and the 1990 Hockey World Cup.Pakistan is set to host the 2021 South Asian Games.	[ "Nawaz Sharif", "Nasir-ul-Mulk", "Shahid Khaqan Abbasi", "Shehbaz Sharif", "Imran Khan" ]
Which employer did Ellen Muehlberger work for in Jun, 2003?	June 25, 2003	{ "text": [ "Indiana University Bloomington" ] }	L2_Q74558739_P108_0	Ellen Muehlberger works for DePauw University from Aug, 2008 to May, 2009. Ellen Muehlberger works for University of Michigan from Jul, 2009 to Dec, 2022. Ellen Muehlberger works for Indiana University Bloomington from Aug, 2000 to May, 2008.	Ellen MuehlbergerEllen Muehlberger is an American scholar of Christianity and late antiquity, Professor of History and Middle East Studies at the University of Michigan-Ann Arbor with appointments in Classical Studies and the Frankel Center for Judaic Studies.Muehlberger has taught at the University of Michigan since 2009. She was briefly a visiting assistant professor of Religious Studies at DePauw University. Her scholarship focuses on Christianity in late antiquity (300-700 C.E.) and examines specifically "rhetorical and historiographical methods Christians adopted as Christian culture shifted from being in the minority to being dominant in the later Roman Empire." She specializes in topics such as angels, notorious heretics and their deaths (e.g. Arius shows up on the list of people who died on the toilet) and has published on saintly women such as Macrina the Younger. She has also published extensively in the growing field of the study of Syriac Christianity.Muehlberger is a specialist in the late antique religious imagination. Her first book, "Angels in Late Ancient Christianity", was published in 2013. A review in "Bryn Mawr Classic Review" noted that "Muehlberger succeeds in demonstrating that angels were an important source of lively speculation and contestation within fourth and early-fifth century Christian discourse. The book also reveals how discourse on angels can provide an entry into other aspects of Christianity, like conceptualizations of the liturgy." The book has been reviewed in such journals as "Journal of Theological Studies", the "American Historical Review", the "Journal of Early Christian Studies", "Horizons", and "Marginalia Review of Books".Muehlberger's second book, "The moment of Reckoning: Imagined Death and Its Consequences in Late Ancient Christianity", was published in 2019 has also been well received. Another reviewer during a book panel published on "Ancient Jew Review", remarked, "Muehlberger’s conclusions have significant implications for our research on the machine of narrative and ethics.Muehlberger has also written numerous scholarly articles and chapters in collected volumes. She has edited The Cambridge Edition of Early Christian Writings and sits on the editorial boards of Studies of Late Antiquity, Bryn Mawr Classical Review, and Early Christianity in the Context of Antiquity.Muehlberger is an active contributor to public scholarship and has published in online publications such as "Marginalia Review of Books", where she has written on the "architecture of knowledge" in late antiquity and provided other editorial contributions as well. Muehlberger is an active public scholar on Twitter and has been credited as one of the popularizers of the term "doomscrolling."Muehlberger was a Charles A. Ryskamp Research Fellow of the American Council of Learned Societies (2014-2015). In 2015 she received the Class of 1923 Memorial Teaching Award at the University of Michigan. She was also awarded a National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship (2016-2017).	[ "University of Michigan", "DePauw University" ]
Which employer did Ellen Muehlberger work for in 2003-06-25?	June 25, 2003	{ "text": [ "Indiana University Bloomington" ] }	L2_Q74558739_P108_0	Ellen Muehlberger works for DePauw University from Aug, 2008 to May, 2009. Ellen Muehlberger works for University of Michigan from Jul, 2009 to Dec, 2022. Ellen Muehlberger works for Indiana University Bloomington from Aug, 2000 to May, 2008.	Ellen MuehlbergerEllen Muehlberger is an American scholar of Christianity and late antiquity, Professor of History and Middle East Studies at the University of Michigan-Ann Arbor with appointments in Classical Studies and the Frankel Center for Judaic Studies.Muehlberger has taught at the University of Michigan since 2009. She was briefly a visiting assistant professor of Religious Studies at DePauw University. Her scholarship focuses on Christianity in late antiquity (300-700 C.E.) and examines specifically "rhetorical and historiographical methods Christians adopted as Christian culture shifted from being in the minority to being dominant in the later Roman Empire." She specializes in topics such as angels, notorious heretics and their deaths (e.g. Arius shows up on the list of people who died on the toilet) and has published on saintly women such as Macrina the Younger. She has also published extensively in the growing field of the study of Syriac Christianity.Muehlberger is a specialist in the late antique religious imagination. Her first book, "Angels in Late Ancient Christianity", was published in 2013. A review in "Bryn Mawr Classic Review" noted that "Muehlberger succeeds in demonstrating that angels were an important source of lively speculation and contestation within fourth and early-fifth century Christian discourse. The book also reveals how discourse on angels can provide an entry into other aspects of Christianity, like conceptualizations of the liturgy." The book has been reviewed in such journals as "Journal of Theological Studies", the "American Historical Review", the "Journal of Early Christian Studies", "Horizons", and "Marginalia Review of Books".Muehlberger's second book, "The moment of Reckoning: Imagined Death and Its Consequences in Late Ancient Christianity", was published in 2019 has also been well received. Another reviewer during a book panel published on "Ancient Jew Review", remarked, "Muehlberger’s conclusions have significant implications for our research on the machine of narrative and ethics.Muehlberger has also written numerous scholarly articles and chapters in collected volumes. She has edited The Cambridge Edition of Early Christian Writings and sits on the editorial boards of Studies of Late Antiquity, Bryn Mawr Classical Review, and Early Christianity in the Context of Antiquity.Muehlberger is an active contributor to public scholarship and has published in online publications such as "Marginalia Review of Books", where she has written on the "architecture of knowledge" in late antiquity and provided other editorial contributions as well. Muehlberger is an active public scholar on Twitter and has been credited as one of the popularizers of the term "doomscrolling."Muehlberger was a Charles A. Ryskamp Research Fellow of the American Council of Learned Societies (2014-2015). In 2015 she received the Class of 1923 Memorial Teaching Award at the University of Michigan. She was also awarded a National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship (2016-2017).	[ "University of Michigan", "DePauw University" ]
Which employer did Ellen Muehlberger work for in 25/06/2003?	June 25, 2003	{ "text": [ "Indiana University Bloomington" ] }	L2_Q74558739_P108_0	Ellen Muehlberger works for DePauw University from Aug, 2008 to May, 2009. Ellen Muehlberger works for University of Michigan from Jul, 2009 to Dec, 2022. Ellen Muehlberger works for Indiana University Bloomington from Aug, 2000 to May, 2008.	Ellen MuehlbergerEllen Muehlberger is an American scholar of Christianity and late antiquity, Professor of History and Middle East Studies at the University of Michigan-Ann Arbor with appointments in Classical Studies and the Frankel Center for Judaic Studies.Muehlberger has taught at the University of Michigan since 2009. She was briefly a visiting assistant professor of Religious Studies at DePauw University. Her scholarship focuses on Christianity in late antiquity (300-700 C.E.) and examines specifically "rhetorical and historiographical methods Christians adopted as Christian culture shifted from being in the minority to being dominant in the later Roman Empire." She specializes in topics such as angels, notorious heretics and their deaths (e.g. Arius shows up on the list of people who died on the toilet) and has published on saintly women such as Macrina the Younger. She has also published extensively in the growing field of the study of Syriac Christianity.Muehlberger is a specialist in the late antique religious imagination. Her first book, "Angels in Late Ancient Christianity", was published in 2013. A review in "Bryn Mawr Classic Review" noted that "Muehlberger succeeds in demonstrating that angels were an important source of lively speculation and contestation within fourth and early-fifth century Christian discourse. The book also reveals how discourse on angels can provide an entry into other aspects of Christianity, like conceptualizations of the liturgy." The book has been reviewed in such journals as "Journal of Theological Studies", the "American Historical Review", the "Journal of Early Christian Studies", "Horizons", and "Marginalia Review of Books".Muehlberger's second book, "The moment of Reckoning: Imagined Death and Its Consequences in Late Ancient Christianity", was published in 2019 has also been well received. Another reviewer during a book panel published on "Ancient Jew Review", remarked, "Muehlberger’s conclusions have significant implications for our research on the machine of narrative and ethics.Muehlberger has also written numerous scholarly articles and chapters in collected volumes. She has edited The Cambridge Edition of Early Christian Writings and sits on the editorial boards of Studies of Late Antiquity, Bryn Mawr Classical Review, and Early Christianity in the Context of Antiquity.Muehlberger is an active contributor to public scholarship and has published in online publications such as "Marginalia Review of Books", where she has written on the "architecture of knowledge" in late antiquity and provided other editorial contributions as well. Muehlberger is an active public scholar on Twitter and has been credited as one of the popularizers of the term "doomscrolling."Muehlberger was a Charles A. Ryskamp Research Fellow of the American Council of Learned Societies (2014-2015). In 2015 she received the Class of 1923 Memorial Teaching Award at the University of Michigan. She was also awarded a National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship (2016-2017).	[ "University of Michigan", "DePauw University" ]
Which employer did Ellen Muehlberger work for in Jun 25, 2003?	June 25, 2003	{ "text": [ "Indiana University Bloomington" ] }	L2_Q74558739_P108_0	Ellen Muehlberger works for DePauw University from Aug, 2008 to May, 2009. Ellen Muehlberger works for University of Michigan from Jul, 2009 to Dec, 2022. Ellen Muehlberger works for Indiana University Bloomington from Aug, 2000 to May, 2008.	Ellen MuehlbergerEllen Muehlberger is an American scholar of Christianity and late antiquity, Professor of History and Middle East Studies at the University of Michigan-Ann Arbor with appointments in Classical Studies and the Frankel Center for Judaic Studies.Muehlberger has taught at the University of Michigan since 2009. She was briefly a visiting assistant professor of Religious Studies at DePauw University. Her scholarship focuses on Christianity in late antiquity (300-700 C.E.) and examines specifically "rhetorical and historiographical methods Christians adopted as Christian culture shifted from being in the minority to being dominant in the later Roman Empire." She specializes in topics such as angels, notorious heretics and their deaths (e.g. Arius shows up on the list of people who died on the toilet) and has published on saintly women such as Macrina the Younger. She has also published extensively in the growing field of the study of Syriac Christianity.Muehlberger is a specialist in the late antique religious imagination. Her first book, "Angels in Late Ancient Christianity", was published in 2013. A review in "Bryn Mawr Classic Review" noted that "Muehlberger succeeds in demonstrating that angels were an important source of lively speculation and contestation within fourth and early-fifth century Christian discourse. The book also reveals how discourse on angels can provide an entry into other aspects of Christianity, like conceptualizations of the liturgy." The book has been reviewed in such journals as "Journal of Theological Studies", the "American Historical Review", the "Journal of Early Christian Studies", "Horizons", and "Marginalia Review of Books".Muehlberger's second book, "The moment of Reckoning: Imagined Death and Its Consequences in Late Ancient Christianity", was published in 2019 has also been well received. Another reviewer during a book panel published on "Ancient Jew Review", remarked, "Muehlberger’s conclusions have significant implications for our research on the machine of narrative and ethics.Muehlberger has also written numerous scholarly articles and chapters in collected volumes. She has edited The Cambridge Edition of Early Christian Writings and sits on the editorial boards of Studies of Late Antiquity, Bryn Mawr Classical Review, and Early Christianity in the Context of Antiquity.Muehlberger is an active contributor to public scholarship and has published in online publications such as "Marginalia Review of Books", where she has written on the "architecture of knowledge" in late antiquity and provided other editorial contributions as well. Muehlberger is an active public scholar on Twitter and has been credited as one of the popularizers of the term "doomscrolling."Muehlberger was a Charles A. Ryskamp Research Fellow of the American Council of Learned Societies (2014-2015). In 2015 she received the Class of 1923 Memorial Teaching Award at the University of Michigan. She was also awarded a National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship (2016-2017).	[ "University of Michigan", "DePauw University" ]
Which employer did Ellen Muehlberger work for in 06/25/2003?	June 25, 2003	{ "text": [ "Indiana University Bloomington" ] }	L2_Q74558739_P108_0	Ellen Muehlberger works for DePauw University from Aug, 2008 to May, 2009. Ellen Muehlberger works for University of Michigan from Jul, 2009 to Dec, 2022. Ellen Muehlberger works for Indiana University Bloomington from Aug, 2000 to May, 2008.	Ellen MuehlbergerEllen Muehlberger is an American scholar of Christianity and late antiquity, Professor of History and Middle East Studies at the University of Michigan-Ann Arbor with appointments in Classical Studies and the Frankel Center for Judaic Studies.Muehlberger has taught at the University of Michigan since 2009. She was briefly a visiting assistant professor of Religious Studies at DePauw University. Her scholarship focuses on Christianity in late antiquity (300-700 C.E.) and examines specifically "rhetorical and historiographical methods Christians adopted as Christian culture shifted from being in the minority to being dominant in the later Roman Empire." She specializes in topics such as angels, notorious heretics and their deaths (e.g. Arius shows up on the list of people who died on the toilet) and has published on saintly women such as Macrina the Younger. She has also published extensively in the growing field of the study of Syriac Christianity.Muehlberger is a specialist in the late antique religious imagination. Her first book, "Angels in Late Ancient Christianity", was published in 2013. A review in "Bryn Mawr Classic Review" noted that "Muehlberger succeeds in demonstrating that angels were an important source of lively speculation and contestation within fourth and early-fifth century Christian discourse. The book also reveals how discourse on angels can provide an entry into other aspects of Christianity, like conceptualizations of the liturgy." The book has been reviewed in such journals as "Journal of Theological Studies", the "American Historical Review", the "Journal of Early Christian Studies", "Horizons", and "Marginalia Review of Books".Muehlberger's second book, "The moment of Reckoning: Imagined Death and Its Consequences in Late Ancient Christianity", was published in 2019 has also been well received. Another reviewer during a book panel published on "Ancient Jew Review", remarked, "Muehlberger’s conclusions have significant implications for our research on the machine of narrative and ethics.Muehlberger has also written numerous scholarly articles and chapters in collected volumes. She has edited The Cambridge Edition of Early Christian Writings and sits on the editorial boards of Studies of Late Antiquity, Bryn Mawr Classical Review, and Early Christianity in the Context of Antiquity.Muehlberger is an active contributor to public scholarship and has published in online publications such as "Marginalia Review of Books", where she has written on the "architecture of knowledge" in late antiquity and provided other editorial contributions as well. Muehlberger is an active public scholar on Twitter and has been credited as one of the popularizers of the term "doomscrolling."Muehlberger was a Charles A. Ryskamp Research Fellow of the American Council of Learned Societies (2014-2015). In 2015 she received the Class of 1923 Memorial Teaching Award at the University of Michigan. She was also awarded a National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship (2016-2017).	[ "University of Michigan", "DePauw University" ]
Which employer did Ellen Muehlberger work for in 25-Jun-200325-June-2003?	June 25, 2003	{ "text": [ "Indiana University Bloomington" ] }	L2_Q74558739_P108_0	Ellen Muehlberger works for DePauw University from Aug, 2008 to May, 2009. Ellen Muehlberger works for University of Michigan from Jul, 2009 to Dec, 2022. Ellen Muehlberger works for Indiana University Bloomington from Aug, 2000 to May, 2008.	Ellen MuehlbergerEllen Muehlberger is an American scholar of Christianity and late antiquity, Professor of History and Middle East Studies at the University of Michigan-Ann Arbor with appointments in Classical Studies and the Frankel Center for Judaic Studies.Muehlberger has taught at the University of Michigan since 2009. She was briefly a visiting assistant professor of Religious Studies at DePauw University. Her scholarship focuses on Christianity in late antiquity (300-700 C.E.) and examines specifically "rhetorical and historiographical methods Christians adopted as Christian culture shifted from being in the minority to being dominant in the later Roman Empire." She specializes in topics such as angels, notorious heretics and their deaths (e.g. Arius shows up on the list of people who died on the toilet) and has published on saintly women such as Macrina the Younger. She has also published extensively in the growing field of the study of Syriac Christianity.Muehlberger is a specialist in the late antique religious imagination. Her first book, "Angels in Late Ancient Christianity", was published in 2013. A review in "Bryn Mawr Classic Review" noted that "Muehlberger succeeds in demonstrating that angels were an important source of lively speculation and contestation within fourth and early-fifth century Christian discourse. The book also reveals how discourse on angels can provide an entry into other aspects of Christianity, like conceptualizations of the liturgy." The book has been reviewed in such journals as "Journal of Theological Studies", the "American Historical Review", the "Journal of Early Christian Studies", "Horizons", and "Marginalia Review of Books".Muehlberger's second book, "The moment of Reckoning: Imagined Death and Its Consequences in Late Ancient Christianity", was published in 2019 has also been well received. Another reviewer during a book panel published on "Ancient Jew Review", remarked, "Muehlberger’s conclusions have significant implications for our research on the machine of narrative and ethics.Muehlberger has also written numerous scholarly articles and chapters in collected volumes. She has edited The Cambridge Edition of Early Christian Writings and sits on the editorial boards of Studies of Late Antiquity, Bryn Mawr Classical Review, and Early Christianity in the Context of Antiquity.Muehlberger is an active contributor to public scholarship and has published in online publications such as "Marginalia Review of Books", where she has written on the "architecture of knowledge" in late antiquity and provided other editorial contributions as well. Muehlberger is an active public scholar on Twitter and has been credited as one of the popularizers of the term "doomscrolling."Muehlberger was a Charles A. Ryskamp Research Fellow of the American Council of Learned Societies (2014-2015). In 2015 she received the Class of 1923 Memorial Teaching Award at the University of Michigan. She was also awarded a National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship (2016-2017).	[ "University of Michigan", "DePauw University" ]
Which employer did Nancy E. Gwinn work for in Nov, 1981?	November 12, 1981	{ "text": [ "Research Libraries Group" ] }	L2_Q59777034_P108_2	Nancy E. Gwinn works for Smithsonian Institution Libraries from Jan, 1984 to Jan, 2020. Nancy E. Gwinn works for Research Libraries Group from Jan, 1980 to Jan, 1984. Nancy E. Gwinn works for Council on Library and Information Resources from Jan, 1975 to Jan, 1980. Nancy E. Gwinn works for Library of Congress from Jan, 1969 to Jan, 1975.	Nancy E. GwinnNancy E. Gwinn (born August 19, 1945) is an American librarian and administrator. She was the director of the Smithsonian Libraries, the world's largest museum library system, from 1997 until her retirement in 2020.Nancy Gwinn was born in Sheridan, Wyoming on August 19, 1945. She earned a Bachelor of Arts degree in 1967 from the University of Wyoming; after graduating, she attended the University of Oxford on a Fulbright scholarship. She went on to earn a Master of Library Science at the University of Michigan School of Library Science in 1969, and a Ph.D. in American civilization from George Washington University in 1996.Gwinn started her library career in 1969 working as a reference librarian at the Library of Congress. From 1975 to 1980, she worked at the Council on Library and Information Resources, and in 1980 she became the associate director and program coordinator at the Research Library Group, where she was instrumental in founding the RLG Preservation Program, developing a model for libraries to collaborate on preservation microfilming.Gwinn joined the Smithsonian Institution Libraries as the assistant director for library collections management in 1984. Since 1997 she has been the director of the Smithsonian Libraries, where she leads 130 research and curatorial staff in preserving cultural history. During her tenure, Gwinn has expanded outreach, bolstered the Libraries' rare book and electronic collections, and created the first Libraries Advisory Board to assist with fundraising. Under her leadership, the Smithsonian Libraries initiated and became the lead partner in establishing the Biodiversity Heritage Library, an international consortium of natural history and botanical libraries dedicated to digitizing and providing open access to works from their collections. Gwinn served as chair of the Biodiversity Heritage Library Members Council from 2011 to 2017.Gwinn has held a number of leadership roles in library organizations, including serving as president of the District of Columbia Library Association from 1979 to 1980, chairing the Association of Research Libraries Committee on Preservation of Library Material, and serving as secretary of the Standing Committee on Preservation and Conservation of the International Federation of Library Associations (IFLA). She has also served as a member of the IFLA Governing Board from 2004 to 2009 and as chair of its Professional Committee from 2007 to 2009.Gwinn is the author of several books on library and historical subjects, including "Preservation Microfilming: A Guide for Librarians and Archivists"; the Society of American Archivists awarded her the 1988 Waldo Gifford Leland Award for that book.In 2012 Gwinn was awarded the Ainsworth Rand Spofford President's Award by the District of Columbia Library Association, in recognition of "outstanding contributions to the development or improvement of library and information services".The University of Wyoming awarded her an honorary doctorate degree in 2013.Since 2003 Gwinn and her husband, Library of Congress Historian John Y. Cole, have maintained endowments to support the internships of library and information science students at the Smithsonian Libraries and at the University of Michigan School of Information. They also fund an endowment for supporting the operations of the technical services of the University of Wyoming Libraries.	[ "Smithsonian Institution Libraries", "Library of Congress", "Council on Library and Information Resources" ]
Which employer did Nancy E. Gwinn work for in 1981-11-12?	November 12, 1981	{ "text": [ "Research Libraries Group" ] }	L2_Q59777034_P108_2	Nancy E. Gwinn works for Smithsonian Institution Libraries from Jan, 1984 to Jan, 2020. Nancy E. Gwinn works for Research Libraries Group from Jan, 1980 to Jan, 1984. Nancy E. Gwinn works for Council on Library and Information Resources from Jan, 1975 to Jan, 1980. Nancy E. Gwinn works for Library of Congress from Jan, 1969 to Jan, 1975.	Nancy E. GwinnNancy E. Gwinn (born August 19, 1945) is an American librarian and administrator. She was the director of the Smithsonian Libraries, the world's largest museum library system, from 1997 until her retirement in 2020.Nancy Gwinn was born in Sheridan, Wyoming on August 19, 1945. She earned a Bachelor of Arts degree in 1967 from the University of Wyoming; after graduating, she attended the University of Oxford on a Fulbright scholarship. She went on to earn a Master of Library Science at the University of Michigan School of Library Science in 1969, and a Ph.D. in American civilization from George Washington University in 1996.Gwinn started her library career in 1969 working as a reference librarian at the Library of Congress. From 1975 to 1980, she worked at the Council on Library and Information Resources, and in 1980 she became the associate director and program coordinator at the Research Library Group, where she was instrumental in founding the RLG Preservation Program, developing a model for libraries to collaborate on preservation microfilming.Gwinn joined the Smithsonian Institution Libraries as the assistant director for library collections management in 1984. Since 1997 she has been the director of the Smithsonian Libraries, where she leads 130 research and curatorial staff in preserving cultural history. During her tenure, Gwinn has expanded outreach, bolstered the Libraries' rare book and electronic collections, and created the first Libraries Advisory Board to assist with fundraising. Under her leadership, the Smithsonian Libraries initiated and became the lead partner in establishing the Biodiversity Heritage Library, an international consortium of natural history and botanical libraries dedicated to digitizing and providing open access to works from their collections. Gwinn served as chair of the Biodiversity Heritage Library Members Council from 2011 to 2017.Gwinn has held a number of leadership roles in library organizations, including serving as president of the District of Columbia Library Association from 1979 to 1980, chairing the Association of Research Libraries Committee on Preservation of Library Material, and serving as secretary of the Standing Committee on Preservation and Conservation of the International Federation of Library Associations (IFLA). She has also served as a member of the IFLA Governing Board from 2004 to 2009 and as chair of its Professional Committee from 2007 to 2009.Gwinn is the author of several books on library and historical subjects, including "Preservation Microfilming: A Guide for Librarians and Archivists"; the Society of American Archivists awarded her the 1988 Waldo Gifford Leland Award for that book.In 2012 Gwinn was awarded the Ainsworth Rand Spofford President's Award by the District of Columbia Library Association, in recognition of "outstanding contributions to the development or improvement of library and information services".The University of Wyoming awarded her an honorary doctorate degree in 2013.Since 2003 Gwinn and her husband, Library of Congress Historian John Y. Cole, have maintained endowments to support the internships of library and information science students at the Smithsonian Libraries and at the University of Michigan School of Information. They also fund an endowment for supporting the operations of the technical services of the University of Wyoming Libraries.	[ "Smithsonian Institution Libraries", "Library of Congress", "Council on Library and Information Resources" ]
Which employer did Nancy E. Gwinn work for in 12/11/1981?	November 12, 1981	{ "text": [ "Research Libraries Group" ] }	L2_Q59777034_P108_2	Nancy E. Gwinn works for Smithsonian Institution Libraries from Jan, 1984 to Jan, 2020. Nancy E. Gwinn works for Research Libraries Group from Jan, 1980 to Jan, 1984. Nancy E. Gwinn works for Council on Library and Information Resources from Jan, 1975 to Jan, 1980. Nancy E. Gwinn works for Library of Congress from Jan, 1969 to Jan, 1975.	Nancy E. GwinnNancy E. Gwinn (born August 19, 1945) is an American librarian and administrator. She was the director of the Smithsonian Libraries, the world's largest museum library system, from 1997 until her retirement in 2020.Nancy Gwinn was born in Sheridan, Wyoming on August 19, 1945. She earned a Bachelor of Arts degree in 1967 from the University of Wyoming; after graduating, she attended the University of Oxford on a Fulbright scholarship. She went on to earn a Master of Library Science at the University of Michigan School of Library Science in 1969, and a Ph.D. in American civilization from George Washington University in 1996.Gwinn started her library career in 1969 working as a reference librarian at the Library of Congress. From 1975 to 1980, she worked at the Council on Library and Information Resources, and in 1980 she became the associate director and program coordinator at the Research Library Group, where she was instrumental in founding the RLG Preservation Program, developing a model for libraries to collaborate on preservation microfilming.Gwinn joined the Smithsonian Institution Libraries as the assistant director for library collections management in 1984. Since 1997 she has been the director of the Smithsonian Libraries, where she leads 130 research and curatorial staff in preserving cultural history. During her tenure, Gwinn has expanded outreach, bolstered the Libraries' rare book and electronic collections, and created the first Libraries Advisory Board to assist with fundraising. Under her leadership, the Smithsonian Libraries initiated and became the lead partner in establishing the Biodiversity Heritage Library, an international consortium of natural history and botanical libraries dedicated to digitizing and providing open access to works from their collections. Gwinn served as chair of the Biodiversity Heritage Library Members Council from 2011 to 2017.Gwinn has held a number of leadership roles in library organizations, including serving as president of the District of Columbia Library Association from 1979 to 1980, chairing the Association of Research Libraries Committee on Preservation of Library Material, and serving as secretary of the Standing Committee on Preservation and Conservation of the International Federation of Library Associations (IFLA). She has also served as a member of the IFLA Governing Board from 2004 to 2009 and as chair of its Professional Committee from 2007 to 2009.Gwinn is the author of several books on library and historical subjects, including "Preservation Microfilming: A Guide for Librarians and Archivists"; the Society of American Archivists awarded her the 1988 Waldo Gifford Leland Award for that book.In 2012 Gwinn was awarded the Ainsworth Rand Spofford President's Award by the District of Columbia Library Association, in recognition of "outstanding contributions to the development or improvement of library and information services".The University of Wyoming awarded her an honorary doctorate degree in 2013.Since 2003 Gwinn and her husband, Library of Congress Historian John Y. Cole, have maintained endowments to support the internships of library and information science students at the Smithsonian Libraries and at the University of Michigan School of Information. They also fund an endowment for supporting the operations of the technical services of the University of Wyoming Libraries.	[ "Smithsonian Institution Libraries", "Library of Congress", "Council on Library and Information Resources" ]
Which employer did Nancy E. Gwinn work for in Nov 12, 1981?	November 12, 1981	{ "text": [ "Research Libraries Group" ] }	L2_Q59777034_P108_2	Nancy E. Gwinn works for Smithsonian Institution Libraries from Jan, 1984 to Jan, 2020. Nancy E. Gwinn works for Research Libraries Group from Jan, 1980 to Jan, 1984. Nancy E. Gwinn works for Council on Library and Information Resources from Jan, 1975 to Jan, 1980. Nancy E. Gwinn works for Library of Congress from Jan, 1969 to Jan, 1975.	Nancy E. GwinnNancy E. Gwinn (born August 19, 1945) is an American librarian and administrator. She was the director of the Smithsonian Libraries, the world's largest museum library system, from 1997 until her retirement in 2020.Nancy Gwinn was born in Sheridan, Wyoming on August 19, 1945. She earned a Bachelor of Arts degree in 1967 from the University of Wyoming; after graduating, she attended the University of Oxford on a Fulbright scholarship. She went on to earn a Master of Library Science at the University of Michigan School of Library Science in 1969, and a Ph.D. in American civilization from George Washington University in 1996.Gwinn started her library career in 1969 working as a reference librarian at the Library of Congress. From 1975 to 1980, she worked at the Council on Library and Information Resources, and in 1980 she became the associate director and program coordinator at the Research Library Group, where she was instrumental in founding the RLG Preservation Program, developing a model for libraries to collaborate on preservation microfilming.Gwinn joined the Smithsonian Institution Libraries as the assistant director for library collections management in 1984. Since 1997 she has been the director of the Smithsonian Libraries, where she leads 130 research and curatorial staff in preserving cultural history. During her tenure, Gwinn has expanded outreach, bolstered the Libraries' rare book and electronic collections, and created the first Libraries Advisory Board to assist with fundraising. Under her leadership, the Smithsonian Libraries initiated and became the lead partner in establishing the Biodiversity Heritage Library, an international consortium of natural history and botanical libraries dedicated to digitizing and providing open access to works from their collections. Gwinn served as chair of the Biodiversity Heritage Library Members Council from 2011 to 2017.Gwinn has held a number of leadership roles in library organizations, including serving as president of the District of Columbia Library Association from 1979 to 1980, chairing the Association of Research Libraries Committee on Preservation of Library Material, and serving as secretary of the Standing Committee on Preservation and Conservation of the International Federation of Library Associations (IFLA). She has also served as a member of the IFLA Governing Board from 2004 to 2009 and as chair of its Professional Committee from 2007 to 2009.Gwinn is the author of several books on library and historical subjects, including "Preservation Microfilming: A Guide for Librarians and Archivists"; the Society of American Archivists awarded her the 1988 Waldo Gifford Leland Award for that book.In 2012 Gwinn was awarded the Ainsworth Rand Spofford President's Award by the District of Columbia Library Association, in recognition of "outstanding contributions to the development or improvement of library and information services".The University of Wyoming awarded her an honorary doctorate degree in 2013.Since 2003 Gwinn and her husband, Library of Congress Historian John Y. Cole, have maintained endowments to support the internships of library and information science students at the Smithsonian Libraries and at the University of Michigan School of Information. They also fund an endowment for supporting the operations of the technical services of the University of Wyoming Libraries.	[ "Smithsonian Institution Libraries", "Library of Congress", "Council on Library and Information Resources" ]
Which employer did Nancy E. Gwinn work for in 11/12/1981?	November 12, 1981	{ "text": [ "Research Libraries Group" ] }	L2_Q59777034_P108_2	Nancy E. Gwinn works for Smithsonian Institution Libraries from Jan, 1984 to Jan, 2020. Nancy E. Gwinn works for Research Libraries Group from Jan, 1980 to Jan, 1984. Nancy E. Gwinn works for Council on Library and Information Resources from Jan, 1975 to Jan, 1980. Nancy E. Gwinn works for Library of Congress from Jan, 1969 to Jan, 1975.	Nancy E. GwinnNancy E. Gwinn (born August 19, 1945) is an American librarian and administrator. She was the director of the Smithsonian Libraries, the world's largest museum library system, from 1997 until her retirement in 2020.Nancy Gwinn was born in Sheridan, Wyoming on August 19, 1945. She earned a Bachelor of Arts degree in 1967 from the University of Wyoming; after graduating, she attended the University of Oxford on a Fulbright scholarship. She went on to earn a Master of Library Science at the University of Michigan School of Library Science in 1969, and a Ph.D. in American civilization from George Washington University in 1996.Gwinn started her library career in 1969 working as a reference librarian at the Library of Congress. From 1975 to 1980, she worked at the Council on Library and Information Resources, and in 1980 she became the associate director and program coordinator at the Research Library Group, where she was instrumental in founding the RLG Preservation Program, developing a model for libraries to collaborate on preservation microfilming.Gwinn joined the Smithsonian Institution Libraries as the assistant director for library collections management in 1984. Since 1997 she has been the director of the Smithsonian Libraries, where she leads 130 research and curatorial staff in preserving cultural history. During her tenure, Gwinn has expanded outreach, bolstered the Libraries' rare book and electronic collections, and created the first Libraries Advisory Board to assist with fundraising. Under her leadership, the Smithsonian Libraries initiated and became the lead partner in establishing the Biodiversity Heritage Library, an international consortium of natural history and botanical libraries dedicated to digitizing and providing open access to works from their collections. Gwinn served as chair of the Biodiversity Heritage Library Members Council from 2011 to 2017.Gwinn has held a number of leadership roles in library organizations, including serving as president of the District of Columbia Library Association from 1979 to 1980, chairing the Association of Research Libraries Committee on Preservation of Library Material, and serving as secretary of the Standing Committee on Preservation and Conservation of the International Federation of Library Associations (IFLA). She has also served as a member of the IFLA Governing Board from 2004 to 2009 and as chair of its Professional Committee from 2007 to 2009.Gwinn is the author of several books on library and historical subjects, including "Preservation Microfilming: A Guide for Librarians and Archivists"; the Society of American Archivists awarded her the 1988 Waldo Gifford Leland Award for that book.In 2012 Gwinn was awarded the Ainsworth Rand Spofford President's Award by the District of Columbia Library Association, in recognition of "outstanding contributions to the development or improvement of library and information services".The University of Wyoming awarded her an honorary doctorate degree in 2013.Since 2003 Gwinn and her husband, Library of Congress Historian John Y. Cole, have maintained endowments to support the internships of library and information science students at the Smithsonian Libraries and at the University of Michigan School of Information. They also fund an endowment for supporting the operations of the technical services of the University of Wyoming Libraries.	[ "Smithsonian Institution Libraries", "Library of Congress", "Council on Library and Information Resources" ]
Which employer did Nancy E. Gwinn work for in 12-Nov-198112-November-1981?	November 12, 1981	{ "text": [ "Research Libraries Group" ] }	L2_Q59777034_P108_2	Nancy E. Gwinn works for Smithsonian Institution Libraries from Jan, 1984 to Jan, 2020. Nancy E. Gwinn works for Research Libraries Group from Jan, 1980 to Jan, 1984. Nancy E. Gwinn works for Council on Library and Information Resources from Jan, 1975 to Jan, 1980. Nancy E. Gwinn works for Library of Congress from Jan, 1969 to Jan, 1975.	Nancy E. GwinnNancy E. Gwinn (born August 19, 1945) is an American librarian and administrator. She was the director of the Smithsonian Libraries, the world's largest museum library system, from 1997 until her retirement in 2020.Nancy Gwinn was born in Sheridan, Wyoming on August 19, 1945. She earned a Bachelor of Arts degree in 1967 from the University of Wyoming; after graduating, she attended the University of Oxford on a Fulbright scholarship. She went on to earn a Master of Library Science at the University of Michigan School of Library Science in 1969, and a Ph.D. in American civilization from George Washington University in 1996.Gwinn started her library career in 1969 working as a reference librarian at the Library of Congress. From 1975 to 1980, she worked at the Council on Library and Information Resources, and in 1980 she became the associate director and program coordinator at the Research Library Group, where she was instrumental in founding the RLG Preservation Program, developing a model for libraries to collaborate on preservation microfilming.Gwinn joined the Smithsonian Institution Libraries as the assistant director for library collections management in 1984. Since 1997 she has been the director of the Smithsonian Libraries, where she leads 130 research and curatorial staff in preserving cultural history. During her tenure, Gwinn has expanded outreach, bolstered the Libraries' rare book and electronic collections, and created the first Libraries Advisory Board to assist with fundraising. Under her leadership, the Smithsonian Libraries initiated and became the lead partner in establishing the Biodiversity Heritage Library, an international consortium of natural history and botanical libraries dedicated to digitizing and providing open access to works from their collections. Gwinn served as chair of the Biodiversity Heritage Library Members Council from 2011 to 2017.Gwinn has held a number of leadership roles in library organizations, including serving as president of the District of Columbia Library Association from 1979 to 1980, chairing the Association of Research Libraries Committee on Preservation of Library Material, and serving as secretary of the Standing Committee on Preservation and Conservation of the International Federation of Library Associations (IFLA). She has also served as a member of the IFLA Governing Board from 2004 to 2009 and as chair of its Professional Committee from 2007 to 2009.Gwinn is the author of several books on library and historical subjects, including "Preservation Microfilming: A Guide for Librarians and Archivists"; the Society of American Archivists awarded her the 1988 Waldo Gifford Leland Award for that book.In 2012 Gwinn was awarded the Ainsworth Rand Spofford President's Award by the District of Columbia Library Association, in recognition of "outstanding contributions to the development or improvement of library and information services".The University of Wyoming awarded her an honorary doctorate degree in 2013.Since 2003 Gwinn and her husband, Library of Congress Historian John Y. Cole, have maintained endowments to support the internships of library and information science students at the Smithsonian Libraries and at the University of Michigan School of Information. They also fund an endowment for supporting the operations of the technical services of the University of Wyoming Libraries.	[ "Smithsonian Institution Libraries", "Library of Congress", "Council on Library and Information Resources" ]
Which team did Alexander Farnerud play for in Nov, 2005?	November 14, 2005	{ "text": [ "Sweden national under-21 football team", "Sweden national association football team", "RC Strasbourg" ] }	L2_Q1341836_P54_5	Alexander Farnerud plays for Brøndby IF from Jan, 2008 to Jan, 2011. Alexander Farnerud plays for Sweden national under-16 football team from Jan, 1999 to Jan, 2001. Alexander Farnerud plays for VfB Stuttgart II from Jan, 2006 to Jan, 2008. Alexander Farnerud plays for Torino F.C. from Jan, 2013 to Dec, 2022. Alexander Farnerud plays for VfB Stuttgart from Jan, 2006 to Jan, 2008. Alexander Farnerud plays for Sweden national association football team from Jan, 2003 to Jan, 2010. Alexander Farnerud plays for BSC Young Boys from Jan, 2011 to Jan, 2013. Alexander Farnerud plays for Sweden national under-21 football team from Jan, 2002 to Jan, 2006. Alexander Farnerud plays for Sweden national under-19 football team from Jan, 2001 to Jan, 2002. Alexander Farnerud plays for RC Strasbourg from Jan, 2004 to Jan, 2006. Alexander Farnerud plays for Landskrona BoIS from Jan, 2002 to Jan, 2003.	Alexander FarnerudAlexander Hans Christian Farnerud (born 1 May 1984) is a Swedish professional footballer who plays as attacking midfielder. Starting out at Landskrona BoIS in the early 2000s, he has gone on to represent clubs in France, Germany, Denmark, Switzerland, and Italy before returning to his native Sweden in 2016. A full international between 2003 and 2010, he won eight caps and scored two goals for the Sweden national team. Born in Landskrona, Farnerud made his professional debut with Landskrona BoIS. He scored in one of his first Allsvenskan matches, a 2–1 home win against reigning champions Hammarby.On 15 November 2003, Farnerud was bought by France's Strasbourg, being an automatic first-choice in his two-and-a-half-year spell. In his first and third seasons in Ligue 1, he played alongside older brother Pontus who was first loaned by Monaco, then acquired.Upon Strasbourg's 2006 relegation, Farnerud moved to VfB Stuttgart in Germany, on a four-year deal. He was used sporadically over the course of two Bundesliga campaigns, appearing nine times for the 2007 champions.On 8 July 2008, Farnerud signed with the Danish Superliga club Brøndby.On 18 January 2011, Farnerud changed clubs and countries again, joining Young Boys from Switzerland for an undisclosed fee until 2014. He made his Super League debut on 13 February in the 4–2 victory over Zürich, and on 16 April he also netted twice for the hosts against Bellinzona (4–0).On 18 June 2013, Farnerud was signed by Italian side Torino for €1.8 million on a three-year contract. He made his official debut on 17 August, in a Coppa Italia tie against Pescara which ended in a 1–2 loss. On 20 October he scored his first goal in Serie A, opening the scoreline in an eventual 3–3 home draw to Inter Milan.After a difficult start to the season, in which he was often benched, Farnerud became a regular and consistent performer for "Toro", netting again in the 14th round against Genoa and two days later against Udinese.On 9 August 2016, Farnerud returned to his native country, signing a long-term deal with BK Häcken and re-joining his childhood friend Rasmus Lindgren at his new club. He played 11 matches and scored three goals in his debut campaign, and went to provide eight assists during his spell before attracting a serious knee injury in a fixture against IK Sirius on 22 July 2017; due to his recurrent physical ailments, he chose to leave by mutual consent in November.In October 2018, Farnerud joined Helsingborgs IF ahead of the upcoming season. In January 2020, following his release, he trialled with 3. Liga team SG Sonnenhof Großaspach.On 14 May 2020, Farnerud signed with IFK Göteborg. He scored the winning goal in the 2020 Svenska Cupen final when Göteborg beat Malmö FF 2–1 in overtime.After appearing for all the Swedish national youth teams, Farnerud became a permanent fixture in the under-21s, with whom he participated in the 2004 UEFA European Championship. He won his first cap for the full side on 16 February 2003 at age 18, in a King's Cup fixture against Qatar; four days later, in the same competition, he scored his first goal to help to a 2–0 defeat of Thailand.On 21 March 2015, after more than five years of absence, Farnerud was called by manager Erik Hamrén for a Euro 2016 qualifier against Moldova and a friendly with Iran.Farnerud's older brother, Pontus, was also a footballer. He too was a midfielder and a Swedish international.International goalsStuttgartStrasbourgIFK GöteborgSweden	[ "VfB Stuttgart II", "BSC Young Boys", "Torino F.C.", "Landskrona BoIS", "Sweden national under-16 football team", "VfB Stuttgart", "Sweden national under-19 football team", "Brøndby IF" ]
Which team did Alexander Farnerud play for in 2005-11-14?	November 14, 2005	{ "text": [ "Sweden national under-21 football team", "Sweden national association football team", "RC Strasbourg" ] }	L2_Q1341836_P54_5	Alexander Farnerud plays for Brøndby IF from Jan, 2008 to Jan, 2011. Alexander Farnerud plays for Sweden national under-16 football team from Jan, 1999 to Jan, 2001. Alexander Farnerud plays for VfB Stuttgart II from Jan, 2006 to Jan, 2008. Alexander Farnerud plays for Torino F.C. from Jan, 2013 to Dec, 2022. Alexander Farnerud plays for VfB Stuttgart from Jan, 2006 to Jan, 2008. Alexander Farnerud plays for Sweden national association football team from Jan, 2003 to Jan, 2010. Alexander Farnerud plays for BSC Young Boys from Jan, 2011 to Jan, 2013. Alexander Farnerud plays for Sweden national under-21 football team from Jan, 2002 to Jan, 2006. Alexander Farnerud plays for Sweden national under-19 football team from Jan, 2001 to Jan, 2002. Alexander Farnerud plays for RC Strasbourg from Jan, 2004 to Jan, 2006. Alexander Farnerud plays for Landskrona BoIS from Jan, 2002 to Jan, 2003.	Alexander FarnerudAlexander Hans Christian Farnerud (born 1 May 1984) is a Swedish professional footballer who plays as attacking midfielder. Starting out at Landskrona BoIS in the early 2000s, he has gone on to represent clubs in France, Germany, Denmark, Switzerland, and Italy before returning to his native Sweden in 2016. A full international between 2003 and 2010, he won eight caps and scored two goals for the Sweden national team. Born in Landskrona, Farnerud made his professional debut with Landskrona BoIS. He scored in one of his first Allsvenskan matches, a 2–1 home win against reigning champions Hammarby.On 15 November 2003, Farnerud was bought by France's Strasbourg, being an automatic first-choice in his two-and-a-half-year spell. In his first and third seasons in Ligue 1, he played alongside older brother Pontus who was first loaned by Monaco, then acquired.Upon Strasbourg's 2006 relegation, Farnerud moved to VfB Stuttgart in Germany, on a four-year deal. He was used sporadically over the course of two Bundesliga campaigns, appearing nine times for the 2007 champions.On 8 July 2008, Farnerud signed with the Danish Superliga club Brøndby.On 18 January 2011, Farnerud changed clubs and countries again, joining Young Boys from Switzerland for an undisclosed fee until 2014. He made his Super League debut on 13 February in the 4–2 victory over Zürich, and on 16 April he also netted twice for the hosts against Bellinzona (4–0).On 18 June 2013, Farnerud was signed by Italian side Torino for €1.8 million on a three-year contract. He made his official debut on 17 August, in a Coppa Italia tie against Pescara which ended in a 1–2 loss. On 20 October he scored his first goal in Serie A, opening the scoreline in an eventual 3–3 home draw to Inter Milan.After a difficult start to the season, in which he was often benched, Farnerud became a regular and consistent performer for "Toro", netting again in the 14th round against Genoa and two days later against Udinese.On 9 August 2016, Farnerud returned to his native country, signing a long-term deal with BK Häcken and re-joining his childhood friend Rasmus Lindgren at his new club. He played 11 matches and scored three goals in his debut campaign, and went to provide eight assists during his spell before attracting a serious knee injury in a fixture against IK Sirius on 22 July 2017; due to his recurrent physical ailments, he chose to leave by mutual consent in November.In October 2018, Farnerud joined Helsingborgs IF ahead of the upcoming season. In January 2020, following his release, he trialled with 3. Liga team SG Sonnenhof Großaspach.On 14 May 2020, Farnerud signed with IFK Göteborg. He scored the winning goal in the 2020 Svenska Cupen final when Göteborg beat Malmö FF 2–1 in overtime.After appearing for all the Swedish national youth teams, Farnerud became a permanent fixture in the under-21s, with whom he participated in the 2004 UEFA European Championship. He won his first cap for the full side on 16 February 2003 at age 18, in a King's Cup fixture against Qatar; four days later, in the same competition, he scored his first goal to help to a 2–0 defeat of Thailand.On 21 March 2015, after more than five years of absence, Farnerud was called by manager Erik Hamrén for a Euro 2016 qualifier against Moldova and a friendly with Iran.Farnerud's older brother, Pontus, was also a footballer. He too was a midfielder and a Swedish international.International goalsStuttgartStrasbourgIFK GöteborgSweden	[ "VfB Stuttgart II", "BSC Young Boys", "Torino F.C.", "Landskrona BoIS", "Sweden national under-16 football team", "VfB Stuttgart", "Sweden national under-19 football team", "Brøndby IF" ]
Which team did Alexander Farnerud play for in 14/11/2005?	November 14, 2005	{ "text": [ "Sweden national under-21 football team", "Sweden national association football team", "RC Strasbourg" ] }	L2_Q1341836_P54_5	Alexander Farnerud plays for Brøndby IF from Jan, 2008 to Jan, 2011. Alexander Farnerud plays for Sweden national under-16 football team from Jan, 1999 to Jan, 2001. Alexander Farnerud plays for VfB Stuttgart II from Jan, 2006 to Jan, 2008. Alexander Farnerud plays for Torino F.C. from Jan, 2013 to Dec, 2022. Alexander Farnerud plays for VfB Stuttgart from Jan, 2006 to Jan, 2008. Alexander Farnerud plays for Sweden national association football team from Jan, 2003 to Jan, 2010. Alexander Farnerud plays for BSC Young Boys from Jan, 2011 to Jan, 2013. Alexander Farnerud plays for Sweden national under-21 football team from Jan, 2002 to Jan, 2006. Alexander Farnerud plays for Sweden national under-19 football team from Jan, 2001 to Jan, 2002. Alexander Farnerud plays for RC Strasbourg from Jan, 2004 to Jan, 2006. Alexander Farnerud plays for Landskrona BoIS from Jan, 2002 to Jan, 2003.	Alexander FarnerudAlexander Hans Christian Farnerud (born 1 May 1984) is a Swedish professional footballer who plays as attacking midfielder. Starting out at Landskrona BoIS in the early 2000s, he has gone on to represent clubs in France, Germany, Denmark, Switzerland, and Italy before returning to his native Sweden in 2016. A full international between 2003 and 2010, he won eight caps and scored two goals for the Sweden national team. Born in Landskrona, Farnerud made his professional debut with Landskrona BoIS. He scored in one of his first Allsvenskan matches, a 2–1 home win against reigning champions Hammarby.On 15 November 2003, Farnerud was bought by France's Strasbourg, being an automatic first-choice in his two-and-a-half-year spell. In his first and third seasons in Ligue 1, he played alongside older brother Pontus who was first loaned by Monaco, then acquired.Upon Strasbourg's 2006 relegation, Farnerud moved to VfB Stuttgart in Germany, on a four-year deal. He was used sporadically over the course of two Bundesliga campaigns, appearing nine times for the 2007 champions.On 8 July 2008, Farnerud signed with the Danish Superliga club Brøndby.On 18 January 2011, Farnerud changed clubs and countries again, joining Young Boys from Switzerland for an undisclosed fee until 2014. He made his Super League debut on 13 February in the 4–2 victory over Zürich, and on 16 April he also netted twice for the hosts against Bellinzona (4–0).On 18 June 2013, Farnerud was signed by Italian side Torino for €1.8 million on a three-year contract. He made his official debut on 17 August, in a Coppa Italia tie against Pescara which ended in a 1–2 loss. On 20 October he scored his first goal in Serie A, opening the scoreline in an eventual 3–3 home draw to Inter Milan.After a difficult start to the season, in which he was often benched, Farnerud became a regular and consistent performer for "Toro", netting again in the 14th round against Genoa and two days later against Udinese.On 9 August 2016, Farnerud returned to his native country, signing a long-term deal with BK Häcken and re-joining his childhood friend Rasmus Lindgren at his new club. He played 11 matches and scored three goals in his debut campaign, and went to provide eight assists during his spell before attracting a serious knee injury in a fixture against IK Sirius on 22 July 2017; due to his recurrent physical ailments, he chose to leave by mutual consent in November.In October 2018, Farnerud joined Helsingborgs IF ahead of the upcoming season. In January 2020, following his release, he trialled with 3. Liga team SG Sonnenhof Großaspach.On 14 May 2020, Farnerud signed with IFK Göteborg. He scored the winning goal in the 2020 Svenska Cupen final when Göteborg beat Malmö FF 2–1 in overtime.After appearing for all the Swedish national youth teams, Farnerud became a permanent fixture in the under-21s, with whom he participated in the 2004 UEFA European Championship. He won his first cap for the full side on 16 February 2003 at age 18, in a King's Cup fixture against Qatar; four days later, in the same competition, he scored his first goal to help to a 2–0 defeat of Thailand.On 21 March 2015, after more than five years of absence, Farnerud was called by manager Erik Hamrén for a Euro 2016 qualifier against Moldova and a friendly with Iran.Farnerud's older brother, Pontus, was also a footballer. He too was a midfielder and a Swedish international.International goalsStuttgartStrasbourgIFK GöteborgSweden	[ "VfB Stuttgart II", "BSC Young Boys", "Torino F.C.", "Landskrona BoIS", "Sweden national under-16 football team", "VfB Stuttgart", "Sweden national under-19 football team", "Brøndby IF" ]
Which team did Alexander Farnerud play for in Nov 14, 2005?	November 14, 2005	{ "text": [ "Sweden national under-21 football team", "Sweden national association football team", "RC Strasbourg" ] }	L2_Q1341836_P54_5	Alexander Farnerud plays for Brøndby IF from Jan, 2008 to Jan, 2011. Alexander Farnerud plays for Sweden national under-16 football team from Jan, 1999 to Jan, 2001. Alexander Farnerud plays for VfB Stuttgart II from Jan, 2006 to Jan, 2008. Alexander Farnerud plays for Torino F.C. from Jan, 2013 to Dec, 2022. Alexander Farnerud plays for VfB Stuttgart from Jan, 2006 to Jan, 2008. Alexander Farnerud plays for Sweden national association football team from Jan, 2003 to Jan, 2010. Alexander Farnerud plays for BSC Young Boys from Jan, 2011 to Jan, 2013. Alexander Farnerud plays for Sweden national under-21 football team from Jan, 2002 to Jan, 2006. Alexander Farnerud plays for Sweden national under-19 football team from Jan, 2001 to Jan, 2002. Alexander Farnerud plays for RC Strasbourg from Jan, 2004 to Jan, 2006. Alexander Farnerud plays for Landskrona BoIS from Jan, 2002 to Jan, 2003.	Alexander FarnerudAlexander Hans Christian Farnerud (born 1 May 1984) is a Swedish professional footballer who plays as attacking midfielder. Starting out at Landskrona BoIS in the early 2000s, he has gone on to represent clubs in France, Germany, Denmark, Switzerland, and Italy before returning to his native Sweden in 2016. A full international between 2003 and 2010, he won eight caps and scored two goals for the Sweden national team. Born in Landskrona, Farnerud made his professional debut with Landskrona BoIS. He scored in one of his first Allsvenskan matches, a 2–1 home win against reigning champions Hammarby.On 15 November 2003, Farnerud was bought by France's Strasbourg, being an automatic first-choice in his two-and-a-half-year spell. In his first and third seasons in Ligue 1, he played alongside older brother Pontus who was first loaned by Monaco, then acquired.Upon Strasbourg's 2006 relegation, Farnerud moved to VfB Stuttgart in Germany, on a four-year deal. He was used sporadically over the course of two Bundesliga campaigns, appearing nine times for the 2007 champions.On 8 July 2008, Farnerud signed with the Danish Superliga club Brøndby.On 18 January 2011, Farnerud changed clubs and countries again, joining Young Boys from Switzerland for an undisclosed fee until 2014. He made his Super League debut on 13 February in the 4–2 victory over Zürich, and on 16 April he also netted twice for the hosts against Bellinzona (4–0).On 18 June 2013, Farnerud was signed by Italian side Torino for €1.8 million on a three-year contract. He made his official debut on 17 August, in a Coppa Italia tie against Pescara which ended in a 1–2 loss. On 20 October he scored his first goal in Serie A, opening the scoreline in an eventual 3–3 home draw to Inter Milan.After a difficult start to the season, in which he was often benched, Farnerud became a regular and consistent performer for "Toro", netting again in the 14th round against Genoa and two days later against Udinese.On 9 August 2016, Farnerud returned to his native country, signing a long-term deal with BK Häcken and re-joining his childhood friend Rasmus Lindgren at his new club. He played 11 matches and scored three goals in his debut campaign, and went to provide eight assists during his spell before attracting a serious knee injury in a fixture against IK Sirius on 22 July 2017; due to his recurrent physical ailments, he chose to leave by mutual consent in November.In October 2018, Farnerud joined Helsingborgs IF ahead of the upcoming season. In January 2020, following his release, he trialled with 3. Liga team SG Sonnenhof Großaspach.On 14 May 2020, Farnerud signed with IFK Göteborg. He scored the winning goal in the 2020 Svenska Cupen final when Göteborg beat Malmö FF 2–1 in overtime.After appearing for all the Swedish national youth teams, Farnerud became a permanent fixture in the under-21s, with whom he participated in the 2004 UEFA European Championship. He won his first cap for the full side on 16 February 2003 at age 18, in a King's Cup fixture against Qatar; four days later, in the same competition, he scored his first goal to help to a 2–0 defeat of Thailand.On 21 March 2015, after more than five years of absence, Farnerud was called by manager Erik Hamrén for a Euro 2016 qualifier against Moldova and a friendly with Iran.Farnerud's older brother, Pontus, was also a footballer. He too was a midfielder and a Swedish international.International goalsStuttgartStrasbourgIFK GöteborgSweden	[ "VfB Stuttgart II", "BSC Young Boys", "Torino F.C.", "Landskrona BoIS", "Sweden national under-16 football team", "VfB Stuttgart", "Sweden national under-19 football team", "Brøndby IF" ]
Which team did Alexander Farnerud play for in 11/14/2005?	November 14, 2005	{ "text": [ "Sweden national under-21 football team", "Sweden national association football team", "RC Strasbourg" ] }	L2_Q1341836_P54_5	Alexander Farnerud plays for Brøndby IF from Jan, 2008 to Jan, 2011. Alexander Farnerud plays for Sweden national under-16 football team from Jan, 1999 to Jan, 2001. Alexander Farnerud plays for VfB Stuttgart II from Jan, 2006 to Jan, 2008. Alexander Farnerud plays for Torino F.C. from Jan, 2013 to Dec, 2022. Alexander Farnerud plays for VfB Stuttgart from Jan, 2006 to Jan, 2008. Alexander Farnerud plays for Sweden national association football team from Jan, 2003 to Jan, 2010. Alexander Farnerud plays for BSC Young Boys from Jan, 2011 to Jan, 2013. Alexander Farnerud plays for Sweden national under-21 football team from Jan, 2002 to Jan, 2006. Alexander Farnerud plays for Sweden national under-19 football team from Jan, 2001 to Jan, 2002. Alexander Farnerud plays for RC Strasbourg from Jan, 2004 to Jan, 2006. Alexander Farnerud plays for Landskrona BoIS from Jan, 2002 to Jan, 2003.	Alexander FarnerudAlexander Hans Christian Farnerud (born 1 May 1984) is a Swedish professional footballer who plays as attacking midfielder. Starting out at Landskrona BoIS in the early 2000s, he has gone on to represent clubs in France, Germany, Denmark, Switzerland, and Italy before returning to his native Sweden in 2016. A full international between 2003 and 2010, he won eight caps and scored two goals for the Sweden national team. Born in Landskrona, Farnerud made his professional debut with Landskrona BoIS. He scored in one of his first Allsvenskan matches, a 2–1 home win against reigning champions Hammarby.On 15 November 2003, Farnerud was bought by France's Strasbourg, being an automatic first-choice in his two-and-a-half-year spell. In his first and third seasons in Ligue 1, he played alongside older brother Pontus who was first loaned by Monaco, then acquired.Upon Strasbourg's 2006 relegation, Farnerud moved to VfB Stuttgart in Germany, on a four-year deal. He was used sporadically over the course of two Bundesliga campaigns, appearing nine times for the 2007 champions.On 8 July 2008, Farnerud signed with the Danish Superliga club Brøndby.On 18 January 2011, Farnerud changed clubs and countries again, joining Young Boys from Switzerland for an undisclosed fee until 2014. He made his Super League debut on 13 February in the 4–2 victory over Zürich, and on 16 April he also netted twice for the hosts against Bellinzona (4–0).On 18 June 2013, Farnerud was signed by Italian side Torino for €1.8 million on a three-year contract. He made his official debut on 17 August, in a Coppa Italia tie against Pescara which ended in a 1–2 loss. On 20 October he scored his first goal in Serie A, opening the scoreline in an eventual 3–3 home draw to Inter Milan.After a difficult start to the season, in which he was often benched, Farnerud became a regular and consistent performer for "Toro", netting again in the 14th round against Genoa and two days later against Udinese.On 9 August 2016, Farnerud returned to his native country, signing a long-term deal with BK Häcken and re-joining his childhood friend Rasmus Lindgren at his new club. He played 11 matches and scored three goals in his debut campaign, and went to provide eight assists during his spell before attracting a serious knee injury in a fixture against IK Sirius on 22 July 2017; due to his recurrent physical ailments, he chose to leave by mutual consent in November.In October 2018, Farnerud joined Helsingborgs IF ahead of the upcoming season. In January 2020, following his release, he trialled with 3. Liga team SG Sonnenhof Großaspach.On 14 May 2020, Farnerud signed with IFK Göteborg. He scored the winning goal in the 2020 Svenska Cupen final when Göteborg beat Malmö FF 2–1 in overtime.After appearing for all the Swedish national youth teams, Farnerud became a permanent fixture in the under-21s, with whom he participated in the 2004 UEFA European Championship. He won his first cap for the full side on 16 February 2003 at age 18, in a King's Cup fixture against Qatar; four days later, in the same competition, he scored his first goal to help to a 2–0 defeat of Thailand.On 21 March 2015, after more than five years of absence, Farnerud was called by manager Erik Hamrén for a Euro 2016 qualifier against Moldova and a friendly with Iran.Farnerud's older brother, Pontus, was also a footballer. He too was a midfielder and a Swedish international.International goalsStuttgartStrasbourgIFK GöteborgSweden	[ "VfB Stuttgart II", "BSC Young Boys", "Torino F.C.", "Landskrona BoIS", "Sweden national under-16 football team", "VfB Stuttgart", "Sweden national under-19 football team", "Brøndby IF" ]
Which team did Alexander Farnerud play for in 14-Nov-200514-November-2005?	November 14, 2005	{ "text": [ "Sweden national under-21 football team", "Sweden national association football team", "RC Strasbourg" ] }	L2_Q1341836_P54_5	Alexander Farnerud plays for Brøndby IF from Jan, 2008 to Jan, 2011. Alexander Farnerud plays for Sweden national under-16 football team from Jan, 1999 to Jan, 2001. Alexander Farnerud plays for VfB Stuttgart II from Jan, 2006 to Jan, 2008. Alexander Farnerud plays for Torino F.C. from Jan, 2013 to Dec, 2022. Alexander Farnerud plays for VfB Stuttgart from Jan, 2006 to Jan, 2008. Alexander Farnerud plays for Sweden national association football team from Jan, 2003 to Jan, 2010. Alexander Farnerud plays for BSC Young Boys from Jan, 2011 to Jan, 2013. Alexander Farnerud plays for Sweden national under-21 football team from Jan, 2002 to Jan, 2006. Alexander Farnerud plays for Sweden national under-19 football team from Jan, 2001 to Jan, 2002. Alexander Farnerud plays for RC Strasbourg from Jan, 2004 to Jan, 2006. Alexander Farnerud plays for Landskrona BoIS from Jan, 2002 to Jan, 2003.	Alexander FarnerudAlexander Hans Christian Farnerud (born 1 May 1984) is a Swedish professional footballer who plays as attacking midfielder. Starting out at Landskrona BoIS in the early 2000s, he has gone on to represent clubs in France, Germany, Denmark, Switzerland, and Italy before returning to his native Sweden in 2016. A full international between 2003 and 2010, he won eight caps and scored two goals for the Sweden national team. Born in Landskrona, Farnerud made his professional debut with Landskrona BoIS. He scored in one of his first Allsvenskan matches, a 2–1 home win against reigning champions Hammarby.On 15 November 2003, Farnerud was bought by France's Strasbourg, being an automatic first-choice in his two-and-a-half-year spell. In his first and third seasons in Ligue 1, he played alongside older brother Pontus who was first loaned by Monaco, then acquired.Upon Strasbourg's 2006 relegation, Farnerud moved to VfB Stuttgart in Germany, on a four-year deal. He was used sporadically over the course of two Bundesliga campaigns, appearing nine times for the 2007 champions.On 8 July 2008, Farnerud signed with the Danish Superliga club Brøndby.On 18 January 2011, Farnerud changed clubs and countries again, joining Young Boys from Switzerland for an undisclosed fee until 2014. He made his Super League debut on 13 February in the 4–2 victory over Zürich, and on 16 April he also netted twice for the hosts against Bellinzona (4–0).On 18 June 2013, Farnerud was signed by Italian side Torino for €1.8 million on a three-year contract. He made his official debut on 17 August, in a Coppa Italia tie against Pescara which ended in a 1–2 loss. On 20 October he scored his first goal in Serie A, opening the scoreline in an eventual 3–3 home draw to Inter Milan.After a difficult start to the season, in which he was often benched, Farnerud became a regular and consistent performer for "Toro", netting again in the 14th round against Genoa and two days later against Udinese.On 9 August 2016, Farnerud returned to his native country, signing a long-term deal with BK Häcken and re-joining his childhood friend Rasmus Lindgren at his new club. He played 11 matches and scored three goals in his debut campaign, and went to provide eight assists during his spell before attracting a serious knee injury in a fixture against IK Sirius on 22 July 2017; due to his recurrent physical ailments, he chose to leave by mutual consent in November.In October 2018, Farnerud joined Helsingborgs IF ahead of the upcoming season. In January 2020, following his release, he trialled with 3. Liga team SG Sonnenhof Großaspach.On 14 May 2020, Farnerud signed with IFK Göteborg. He scored the winning goal in the 2020 Svenska Cupen final when Göteborg beat Malmö FF 2–1 in overtime.After appearing for all the Swedish national youth teams, Farnerud became a permanent fixture in the under-21s, with whom he participated in the 2004 UEFA European Championship. He won his first cap for the full side on 16 February 2003 at age 18, in a King's Cup fixture against Qatar; four days later, in the same competition, he scored his first goal to help to a 2–0 defeat of Thailand.On 21 March 2015, after more than five years of absence, Farnerud was called by manager Erik Hamrén for a Euro 2016 qualifier against Moldova and a friendly with Iran.Farnerud's older brother, Pontus, was also a footballer. He too was a midfielder and a Swedish international.International goalsStuttgartStrasbourgIFK GöteborgSweden	[ "VfB Stuttgart II", "BSC Young Boys", "Torino F.C.", "Landskrona BoIS", "Sweden national under-16 football team", "VfB Stuttgart", "Sweden national under-19 football team", "Brøndby IF" ]
Who was the head of Belgium in May, 2020?	May 28, 2020	{ "text": [ "Sophie Wilmès" ] }	L2_Q31_P6_1	Charles Michel is the head of the government of Belgium from Oct, 2014 to Oct, 2019. Alexander De Croo is the head of the government of Belgium from Oct, 2020 to Dec, 2022. Sophie Wilmès is the head of the government of Belgium from Oct, 2019 to Oct, 2020.	BelgiumBelgium ( ; ; ), officially the Kingdom of Belgium, is a country in Western Europe. It is bordered by the Netherlands to the north, Germany to the east, Luxembourg to the southeast, France to the southwest, and the North Sea to the northwest. It covers an area of and has a population of more than 11.5 million, making it the 22nd most densely populated country in the world and the 6th most densely populated country in Europe, with a density of . The capital and largest city is Brussels; other major cities are Antwerp, Ghent, Charleroi, Liège, Bruges, Namur, and Leuven.Belgium is a sovereign state and a federal constitutional monarchy with a parliamentary system. Its institutional organization is complex and is structured on both regional and linguistic grounds. It is divided into three highly autonomous regions: the Flemish Region (Flanders) in the north, the Walloon Region (Wallonia) in the south, and the Brussels-Capital Region. Brussels is the smallest and most densely populated region, as well as the richest region in terms of GDP per capita.Belgium is home to two main linguistic communities: the Dutch-speaking Flemish Community, which constitutes about 60 percent of the population, and the French-speaking Community, which constitutes about 40 percent of the population. A small German-speaking Community, numbering around one percent, exists in the East Cantons. The Brussels-Capital Region is officially bilingual in French and Dutch, although French is the dominant language. Belgium's linguistic diversity and related political conflicts are reflected in its complex system of governance, made up of six different governments.The country as it exists today was established following the 1830 Belgian Revolution, when it seceded from the Netherlands, which had itself only existed since 1815. The name chosen for the new state is derived from the Latin word "Belgium", used in Julius Caesar's "Gallic Wars", to describe a nearby region in the period around 55 BCE. Belgium is part of an area known as the Low Countries, historically a somewhat larger region than the Benelux group of states, as it also included parts of northern France. Since the Middle Ages, its central location near several major rivers has meant that the area has been relatively prosperous, connected commercially and politically to its bigger neighbours. Belgium has unfortunately also been the battleground of European powers, earning the moniker the "Battlefield of Europe", a reputation strengthened in the 20th century by both world wars. Belgium participated in the Industrial Revolution and, during the course of the 20th century, possessed a number of colonies in Africa. Between 1888 and 1908, Leopold II, king of Belgium, perpetrated one of the largest massacres in human history in Congo Free State, which was his private estate, and not yet a colony of Belgium. Estimates of the death toll are disputed but millions of people, a significant part of the population, died for the sake of rubber and ivory exports.The second half of the 20th century was marked by rising tensions between the Dutch-speaking and the French-speaking citizens fuelled by differences in language and culture and the unequal economic development of Flanders and Wallonia. This continuing antagonism has led to several far-reaching reforms, resulting in a transition from a unitary to a federal arrangement during the period from 1970 to 1993. Despite the reforms, tensions between the groups have remained, if not increased; there is significant separatism particularly among the Flemish; controversial language laws exist such as the municipalities with language facilities; and the formation of a coalition government took 18 months following the June 2010 federal election, a world record. Unemployment in Wallonia is more than double that of Flanders, which boomed after the war.Belgium is one of the six founding countries of the European Union and its capital, Brussels, hosts the official seats of the European Commission, the Council of the European Union, and the European Council, as well as one of two seats of the European Parliament (the other being Strasbourg). Belgium is also a founding member of the Eurozone, NATO, OECD, and WTO, and a part of the trilateral Benelux Union and the Schengen Area. Brussels hosts the headquarters of many major international organizations such as NATO.Belgium is a developed country, with an advanced high-income economy. It has very high standards of living, quality of life, healthcare, education, and is categorized as "very high" in the Human Development Index. It also ranks as one of the safest or most peaceful countries in the world.The "Belgae" were the inhabitants of the northernmost part of Gaul, which was much bigger than modern Belgium. Caesar used the Latin word ""Belgium"", to refer to their country within northern Gaul, which was a region now in northern France. Modern Belgium corresponds to the lands of the Morini, Menapii, Nervii, Germani Cisrhenani, Aduatuci, and, around Arlon, a part of the country of the Treveri. All of these except the Treveri formed a less Celtic-influenced "transition zone", north of the area Caesar treated as "Belgium".After Caesar's conquests, "Gallia Belgica" came to be the Latin name of a large Roman province covering most of Northern Gaul, including the Treveri. Areas closer to the lower Rhine frontier, including the eastern part of modern Belgium, eventually became part of the frontier province of "Germania Inferior", which interacted with Germanic tribes outside the empire. At the time when central government collapsed in the Western Roman Empire, the Roman provinces of Belgica and Germania were inhabited by a mix of a Romanized population and Germanic-speaking Franks who came to dominate the military and political class.During the 5th century, the area came under the rule of the Frankish Merovingian kings, who were probably first established in what is northern France. During the 8th century, the kingdom of the Franks came to be ruled by the Carolingian Dynasty, whose centre of power was around the area which is now eastern Belgium. The frankish kingdom had been divided up in many ways, but the Treaty of Verdun in 843 divided the Carolingian Empire into three kingdoms, whose borders had a lasting impact on medieval political boundaries. Most of modern Belgium was in the Middle Kingdom, later known as Lotharingia, but the coastal county of Flanders, west of the Scheldt, became part of West Francia, the predecessor of France. In 870 in the Treaty of Meerssen, modern Belgium lands all became part of the western kingdom for a period, but in 880 in the Treaty of Ribemont, Lotharingia returned to the lasting control of the Holy Roman Emperor. The lordships and bishoprics along the "March" (frontier) between the two great kingdoms maintained important connections between each other. The county of Flanders expanded over the Scheldt into the empire, and during several periods was ruled by the same lords as the county of Hainaut. In the 13th and 14th centuries, the cloth industry and commerce boomed especially in the County of Flanders and it became one of the richest areas in Europe. This prosperity played a role in conflicts between Flanders and the king of France. Famously, Flemish militias scored a surprise victory at the Battle of the Golden Spurs against a strong force of mounted knights in 1302, but France soon regained control of the rebellious province.In the 15th century, the Duke of Burgundy in France took control of Flanders, and from there they proceeded to unite much of what is now the Benelux, the so-called Burgundian Netherlands. "Belgium" and "Flanders" were the first two common names used for the Burgundian Netherlands which was the predecessor of the Austrian Netherlands, the predecessor of modern Belgium. The union, technically stretching between two kingdoms, gave the area economic and political stability which led to an even greater prosperity and artistic creation.Born in Belgium, the Habsburg Emperor Charles V was heir of the Burgundians, but also of the royal families of Austria, Castile and Aragon. With the Pragmatic Sanction of 1549 he gave the Seventeen Provinces more legitimacy as a stable entity, rather than just a temporary personal union. He also increased the influence of these Netherlands over the Prince-Bishopric of Liège, which continued to exist as a large semi-independent enclave.The Eighty Years' War (1568–1648), was triggered by the Spanish government's policy towards protestantism, which was becoming popular in the Low Countries. The rebellious northern United Provinces ("Belgica Foederata" in Latin, the "Federated Netherlands") eventually separated from the Southern Netherlands ("Belgica Regia", the "Royal Netherlands"). The latter were ruled successively by the Spanish (Spanish Netherlands) and the Austrian Habsburgs (Austrian Netherlands) and comprised most of modern Belgium. This was the theatre of several more protracted conflicts during much of the 17th and 18th centuries involving France, including the Franco-Dutch War (1672–1678), the Nine Years' War (1688–1697), the War of the Spanish Succession (1701–1714), and part of the War of the Austrian Succession (1740–1748).Following the , the Low Countriesincluding territories that were never nominally under Habsburg rule, such as the Prince-Bishopric of Liègewere annexed by the French First Republic, ending Austrian rule in the region. A reunification of the Low Countries as the United Kingdom of the Netherlands occurred at the dissolution of the First French Empire in 1814, after the abdication of Napoleon.In 1830, the Belgian Revolution led to the separation of the Southern Provinces from the Netherlands and to the establishment of a Catholic and bourgeois, officially French-speaking and neutral, independent Belgium under a provisional government and a national congress. Since the installation of Leopold I as king on 1831, now celebrated as Belgium's National Day, Belgium has been a constitutional monarchy and parliamentary democracy, with a laicist constitution based on the Napoleonic code. Although the franchise was initially restricted, universal suffrage for men was introduced after the general strike of 1893 (with plural voting until 1919) and for women in 1949.The main political parties of the 19th century were the Catholic Party and the Liberal Party, with the Belgian Labour Party emerging towards the end of the 19th century. French was originally the single official language adopted by the nobility and the bourgeoisie. It progressively lost its overall importance as Dutch became recognized as well. This recognition became official in 1898, and in 1967, the parliament accepted a Dutch version of the Constitution.The Berlin Conference of 1885 ceded control of the Congo Free State to King Leopold II as his private possession. From around 1900 there was growing international concern for the extreme and savage treatment of the Congolese population under Leopold II, for whom the Congo was primarily a source of revenue from ivory and rubber production. Many Congolese were killed by Leopold's agents for failing to meet production quotas for ivory and rubber. In 1908, this outcry led the Belgian state to assume responsibility for the government of the colony, henceforth called the Belgian Congo. A Belgian commission in 1919 estimated that Congo's population was half what it was in 1879.Germany invaded Belgium in August 1914 as part of the Schlieffen Plan to attack France, and much of the Western Front fighting of World War I occurred in western parts of the country. The opening months of the war were known as the Rape of Belgium due to German excesses. Belgium assumed control of the German colonies of Ruanda-Urundi (modern-day Rwanda and Burundi) during the war, and in 1924 the League of Nations mandated them to Belgium. In the aftermath of the First World War, Belgium annexed the Prussian districts of Eupen and Malmedy in 1925, thereby causing the presence of a German-speaking minority.German forces again invaded the country in May 1940, and 40,690 Belgians, over half of them Jews, were killed during the subsequent occupation and The Holocaust. From September 1944 to February 1945 the Allies liberated Belgium. After World War II, a general strike forced King Leopold III to abdicate in 1951, since many Belgians felt he had collaborated with Germany during the war. The Belgian Congo gained independence in 1960 during the Congo Crisis; Ruanda-Urundi followed with its independence two years later. Belgium joined NATO as a founding member and formed the Benelux group of nations with the Netherlands and Luxembourg.Belgium became one of the six founding members of the European Coal and Steel Community in 1951 and of the European Atomic Energy Community and European Economic Community, established in 1957. The latter has now become the European Union, for which Belgium hosts major administrations and institutions, including the European Commission, the Council of the European Union and the extraordinary and committee sessions of the European Parliament.In the early 1990s, Belgium saw several large corruption scandals notably surrounding Marc Dutroux, Andre Cools, the Dioxin Affair, Agusta Scandal and Murder of Karel Van Noppen.Belgium shares borders with France (), Germany (), Luxembourg () and the Netherlands (). Its total surface, including water area, is . Before 2018, its total area was believed to be . However, when the country's statistics were measured in 2018, a new calculation method was used. Unlike previous calculations, this one included the area from the coast to the low-water line, revealing the country to be larger in surface area than previously thought. Its land area alone is 30,278 km. It lies between latitudes 49°30' and 51°30' N, and longitudes 2°33' and 6°24' E.Belgium has three main geographical regions; the coastal plain in the northwest and the central plateau both belong to the Anglo-Belgian Basin, and the Ardennes uplands in the southeast to the Hercynian orogenic belt. The Paris Basin reaches a small fourth area at Belgium's southernmost tip, Belgian Lorraine.The coastal plain consists mainly of sand dunes and polders. Further inland lies a smooth, slowly rising landscape irrigated by numerous waterways, with fertile valleys and the northeastern sandy plain of the Campine ("Kempen"). The thickly forested hills and plateaus of the Ardennes are more rugged and rocky with caves and small gorges. Extending westward into France, this area is eastwardly connected to the Eifel in Germany by the High Fens plateau, on which the Signal de Botrange forms the country's highest point at .The climate is maritime temperate with significant precipitation in all seasons (Köppen climate classification: "Cfb"), like most of northwest Europe. The average temperature is lowest in January at and highest in July at . The average precipitation per month varies between for February and April, to for July. Averages for the years 2000 to 2006 show daily temperature minimums of and maximums of and monthly rainfall of ; these are about 1 °C and nearly 10 millimetres above last century's normal values, respectively.Phytogeographically, Belgium is shared between the Atlantic European and Central European provinces of the Circumboreal Region within the Boreal Kingdom. According to the World Wide Fund for Nature, the territory of Belgium belongs to the terrestrial ecoregions of Atlantic mixed forests and Western European broadleaf forests. Belgium had a 2018 Forest Landscape Integrity Index mean score of 1.36/10, ranking it 163rd globally out of 172 countries.The territory of Belgium is divided into three Regions, two of which, the Flemish Region and Walloon Region, are in turn subdivided into provinces; the third Region, the Brussels Capital Region, is neither a province nor a part of a province.Belgium is a constitutional, popular monarchy and a federal parliamentary democracy. The bicameral federal parliament is composed of a Senate and a Chamber of Representatives. The former is made up of 50 senators appointed by the parliaments of the communities and regions and 10 co-opted senators. Prior to 2014, most of the Senate's members were directly elected. The Chamber's 150 representatives are elected under a proportional voting system from 11 electoral districts. Belgium has compulsory voting and thus maintains one of the highest rates of voter turnout in the world.The King (currently Philippe) is the head of state, though with limited prerogatives. He appoints ministers, including a Prime Minister, that have the confidence of the Chamber of Representatives to form the federal government. The Council of Ministers is composed of no more than fifteen members. With the possible exception of the Prime Minister, the Council of Ministers is composed of an equal number of Dutch-speaking members and French-speaking members.The judicial system is based on civil law and originates from the Napoleonic code. The Court of Cassation is the court of last resort, with the courts of appeal one level below.Belgium's political institutions are complex; most political power is organized around the need to represent the main cultural communities.Since about 1970, the significant national Belgian political parties have split into distinct components that mainly represent the political and linguistic interests of these communities.The major parties in each community, though close to the political center, belong to three main groups: Christian Democrats, Liberals, and Social Democrats.Further notable parties came into being well after the middle of last century, mainly around linguistic, nationalist, or environmental themes and recently smaller ones of some specific liberal nature.A string of Christian Democrat coalition governments from 1958 was broken in 1999 after the first dioxin crisis, a major food contamination scandal. A "rainbow coalition" emerged from six parties: the Flemish and the French-speaking Liberals, Social Democrats and Greens. Later, a "purple coalition" of Liberals and Social Democrats formed after the Greens lost most of their seats in the 2003 election.The government led by Prime Minister Guy Verhofstadt from 1999 to 2007 achieved a balanced budget, some tax reforms, a labor-market reform, scheduled nuclear phase-out and instigated legislation allowing more stringent war crime and more lenient soft drug usage prosecution. Restrictions on withholding euthanasia were reduced and same-sex marriage legalized. The government promoted active diplomacy in Africa and opposed the invasion of Iraq. It is the only country that does not have age restrictions on euthanasia.Verhofstadt's coalition fared badly in the June 2007 elections. For more than a year, the country experienced a political crisis. This crisis was such that many observers speculated on a possible partition of Belgium. From 2007 until 2008 the temporary Verhofstadt III Government was in office. This coalition of the Flemish and Francophone Christian Democrats, the Flemish and Francophone Liberals together with the Francophone Social Democrats was an interim government until 2008.On that day a new government, led by Flemish Christian Democrat Yves Leterme, the actual winner of the federal elections of , was sworn in by the king. On 2008 Leterme announced the resignation of the cabinet to the king, as no progress in constitutional reforms had been made.In December 2008, he once more offered his resignation to the king after a crisis surrounding the sale of Fortis to BNP Paribas. At this juncture, his resignation was accepted and Christian Democratic and Flemish Herman Van Rompuy was sworn in as Prime Minister on 2008.After Herman Van Rompuy was designated the first permanent President of the European Council on 2009, he offered the resignation of his government to King Albert II on 2009. A few hours later, the new government under Prime Minister Yves Leterme was sworn in. On 2010, Leterme again offered the resignation of his cabinet to the king after one of the coalition partners, the OpenVLD, withdrew from the government, and on 2010 King Albert officially accepted the resignation.The Parliamentary elections in Belgium on 2010 saw the Flemish nationalist N-VA become the largest party in Flanders, and the Socialist Party PS the largest party in Wallonia. Until December 2011, Belgium was governed by Leterme's caretaker government awaiting the end of the deadlocked negotiations for formation of a new government. By 30 March 2011, this set a new world record for the elapsed time without an official government, previously held by war-torn Iraq. Finally, in December 2011 the Di Rupo Government led by Walloon socialist Prime Minister Elio Di Rupo was sworn in.The 2014 federal election (coinciding with the regional elections) resulted in a further electoral gain for the Flemish nationalist N-VA, although the incumbent coalition (composed of Flemish and French-speaking Social Democrats, Liberals, and Christian Democrats) maintains a solid majority in Parliament and in all electoral constituencies. On 22 July 2014, King Philippe nominated Charles Michel (MR) and Kris Peeters (CD&V) to lead the formation of a new federal cabinet composed of the Flemish parties N-VA, CD&V, Open Vld and the French-speaking MR, which resulted in the Michel Government. It was the first time N-VA was part of the federal cabinet, while the French-speaking side was represented only by the MR, which achieved a minority of the public votes in Wallonia.In May 2019 federal elections in the Flemish-speaking northern region of Flanders far-right Vlaams Belang party made major gains. In the French-speaking southern area of Wallonia the Socialists were strong. The moderate Flemish nationalist party the N-VA remained the largest party in parliament.In July 2019 prime minister Charles Michel was selected to hold the post of President of the European Council. His successor Sophie Wilmès was Belgium's first female prime minister. She led the caretaker government since October 2019. The Flemish Liberal party politician Alexander De Croo became new prime minister in October 2020. The parties had agreed on federal government 16 months after the elections.Following a usage which can be traced back to the Burgundian and Habsburg courts, in the 19th century it was necessary to speak French to belong to the governing upper class, and those who could only speak Dutch were effectively second-class citizens. Late that century, and continuing into the 20th century, Flemish movements evolved to counter this situation.While the people in Southern Belgium spoke French or dialects of French, and most Brusselers adopted French as their first language, the Flemings refused to do so and succeeded progressively in making Dutch an equal language in the education system. Following World War II, Belgian politics became increasingly dominated by the autonomy of its two main linguistic communities. Intercommunal tensions rose and the constitution was amended to minimize the potential for conflict.Based on the four language areas defined in 1962–63 (the Dutch, bilingual, French and German language areas), consecutive revisions of the country's constitution in 1970, 1980, 1988 and 1993 established a unique form of a federal state with segregated political power into three levels:The constitutional language areas determine the official languages in their municipalities, as well as the geographical limits of the empowered institutions for specific matters. Although this would allow for seven parliaments and governments when the Communities and Regions were created in 1980, Flemish politicians decided to merge both. Thus the Flemings just have one single institutional body of parliament and government is empowered for all except federal and specific municipal matters.The overlapping boundaries of the Regions and Communities have created two notable peculiarities: the territory of the Brussels-Capital Region (which came into existence nearly a decade after the other regions) is included in both the Flemish and French Communities, and the territory of the German-speaking Community lies wholly within the Walloon Region. Conflicts about jurisdiction between the bodies are resolved by the Constitutional Court of Belgium. The structure is intended as a compromise to allow different cultures to live together peacefully.The Federal State's authority includes justice, defense, federal police, social security, nuclear energy, monetary policy and public debt, and other aspects of public finances. State-owned companies include the Belgian Post Group and Belgian Railways. The Federal Government is responsible for the obligations of Belgium and its federalized institutions towards the European Union and NATO. It controls substantial parts of public health, home affairs and foreign affairs. The budget—without the debt—controlled by the federal government amounts to about 50% of the national fiscal income. The federal government employs around 12% of the civil servants.Communities exercise their authority only within linguistically determined geographical boundaries, originally oriented towards the individuals of a Community's language: culture (including audiovisual media), education and the use of the relevant language. Extensions to personal matters less directly connected with language comprise health policy (curative and preventive medicine) and assistance to individuals (protection of youth, social welfare, aid to families, immigrant assistance services, and so on.).Regions have authority in fields that can be broadly associated with their territory. These include economy, employment, agriculture, water policy, housing, public works, energy, transport, the environment, town and country planning, nature conservation, credit and foreign trade. They supervise the provinces, municipalities and intercommunal utility companies.In several fields, the different levels each have their own say on specifics. With education, for instance, the autonomy of the Communities neither includes decisions about the compulsory aspect nor allows for setting minimum requirements for awarding qualifications, which remain federal matters. Each level of government can be involved in scientific research and international relations associated with its powers. The treaty-making power of the Regions' and Communities' Governments is the broadest of all the Federating units of all the Federations all over the world.Because of its location at the crossroads of Western Europe, Belgium has historically been the route of invading armies from its larger neighbors. With virtually defenseless borders, Belgium has traditionally sought to avoid domination by the more powerful nations which surround it through a policy of mediation. The Belgians have been strong advocates of European integration. Both the European Union and NATO are headquartered in Belgium.The Belgian Armed Forces have about 47,000 active troops. In 2019, Belgium's defense budget totaled €4.303 billion ($4.921 billion) representing .93% of its GDP. They are organized into one unified structure which consists of four main components: Land Component, or the Army; Air Component, or the Air Force; Marine Component, or the Navy; Medical Component. The operational commands of the four components are subordinate to the Staff Department for Operations and Training of the Ministry of Defense, which is headed by the Assistant Chief of Staff Operations and Training, and to the Chief of Defense.The effects of the Second World War made collective security a priority for Belgian foreign policy. In March 1948 Belgium signed the Treaty of Brussels and then joined NATO in 1948. However, the integration of the armed forces into NATO did not begin until after the Korean War. The Belgians, along with the Luxembourg government, sent a detachment of battalion strength to fight in Korea known as the Belgian United Nations Command. This mission was the first in a long line of UN missions which the Belgians supported. Currently, the Belgian Marine Component is working closely together with the Dutch Navy under the command of the Admiral Benelux.Belgium's strongly globalized economy and its transport infrastructure are integrated with the rest of Europe. Its location at the heart of a highly industrialized region helped make it the world's 15th largest trading nation in 2007. The economy is characterized by a highly productive work force, high GNP and high exports per capita. Belgium's main imports are raw materials, machinery and equipment, chemicals, raw diamonds, pharmaceuticals, foodstuffs, transportation equipment, and oil products. Its main exports are machinery and equipment, chemicals, finished diamonds, metals and metal products, and foodstuffs.The Belgian economy is heavily service-oriented and shows a dual nature: a dynamic Flemish economy and a Walloon economy that lags behind. One of the founding members of the European Union, Belgium strongly supports an open economy and the extension of the powers of EU institutions to integrate member economies. Since 1922, through the Belgium-Luxembourg Economic Union, Belgium and Luxembourg have been a single trade market with customs and currency union.Belgium was the first continental European country to undergo the Industrial Revolution, in the early 19th century. Areas in Liège Province and around Charleroi rapidly developed mining and steelmaking, which flourished until the mid-20th century in the Sambre and Meuse valley and made Belgium one of the three most industrialized nations in the world from 1830 to 1910. However, by the 1840s the textile industry of Flanders was in severe crisis, and the region experienced famine from 1846 to 1850.After World War II, Ghent and Antwerp experienced a rapid expansion of the chemical and petroleum industries. The 1973 and 1979 oil crises sent the economy into a recession; it was particularly prolonged in Wallonia, where the steel industry had become less competitive and experienced a serious decline. In the 1980s and 1990s, the economic center of the country continued to shift northwards and is now concentrated in the populous Flemish Diamond area.By the end of the 1980s, Belgian macroeconomic policies had resulted in a cumulative government debt of about 120% of GDP. , the budget was balanced and public debt was equal to 90.30% of GDP. In 2005 and 2006, real GDP growth rates of 1.5% and 3.0%, respectively, were slightly above the average for the Euro area. Unemployment rates of 8.4% in 2005 and 8.2% in 2006 were close to the area average. By , this had grown to 8.5% compared to an average rate of 9.6% for the European Union as a whole (EU 27). From 1832 until 2002, Belgium's currency was the Belgian franc. Belgium switched to the euro in 2002, with the first sets of euro coins being minted in 1999. The standard Belgian euro coins designated for circulation show the portrait of the monarch (first King Albert II, since 2013 King Philippe).Despite an 18% decrease observed from 1970 to 1999, Belgium still had in 1999 the highest rail network density within the European Union with 113.8 km/1 000 km. On the other hand, the same period, 1970–1999, has seen a huge growth (+56%) of the motorway network. In 1999, the density of km motorways per 1000 km and 1000 inhabitants amounted to 55.1 and 16.5 respectively and were significantly superior to the EU's means of 13.7 and 15.9.From a biological resource perspective, Belgium has a low endowment: Belgium's biocapacity adds up to only 0.8 global hectares in 2016, just about half of the 1.6 global hectares of biocapacity available per person worldwide. In contrast, in 2016, Belgians used on average 6.3 global hectares of biocapacity - their ecological footprint of consumption. This means they required about eight times as much biocapacity as Belgium contains. As a result, Belgium was running a biocapacity deficit of 5.5 global hectares per person in 2016.Belgium experiences some of the most congested traffic in Europe. In 2010, commuters to the cities of Brussels and Antwerp spent respectively 65 and 64 hours a year in traffic jams. Like in most small European countries, more than 80% of the airways traffic is handled by a single airport, the Brussels Airport. The ports of Antwerp and Zeebrugge (Bruges) share more than 80% of Belgian maritime traffic, Antwerp being the second European harbor with a gross weight of goods handled of 115 988 000 t in 2000 after a growth of 10.9% over the preceding five years. In 2016, the port of Antwerp handled 214 million tons after a year-on-year growth of 2.7%.There is a large economic gap between Flanders and Wallonia. Wallonia was historically wealthy compared to Flanders, mostly due to its heavy industries, but the decline of the steel industry post-World War II led to the region's rapid decline, whereas Flanders rose swiftly. Since then, Flanders has been prosperous, among the wealthiest regions in Europe, whereas Wallonia has been languishing. As of 2007, the unemployment rate of Wallonia is over double that of Flanders. The divide has played a key part in the tensions between the Flemish and Walloons in addition to the already-existing language divide. Pro-independence movements have gained high popularity in Flanders as a consequence. The separatist New Flemish Alliance (N-VA) party, for instance, is the largest party in Belgium.Contributions to the development of science and technology have appeared throughout the country's history. The 16th century Early Modern flourishing of Western Europe included cartographer Gerardus Mercator, anatomist Andreas Vesalius, herbalist Rembert Dodoens and mathematician Simon Stevin among the most influential scientists.Chemist Ernest Solvay and engineer Zenobe Gramme (École industrielle de Liège) gave their names to the Solvay process and the Gramme dynamo, respectively, in the 1860s. Bakelite was developed in 1907–1909 by Leo Baekeland. Ernest Solvay also acted as a major philanthropist and gave its name to the Solvay Institute of Sociology, the Solvay Brussels School of Economics and Management and the International Solvay Institutes for Physics and Chemistry which are now part of the Université libre de Bruxelles. In 1911, he started a series of conferences, the Solvay Conferences on Physics and Chemistry, which have had a deep impact on the evolution of quantum physics and chemistry. A major contribution to fundamental science was also due to a Belgian, Monsignor Georges Lemaître (Catholic University of Louvain), who is credited with proposing the Big Bang theory of the origin of the universe in 1927.Three Nobel Prizes in Physiology or Medicine were awarded to Belgians: Jules Bordet (Université libre de Bruxelles) in 1919, Corneille Heymans (University of Ghent) in 1938 and Albert Claude (Université libre de Bruxelles) together with Christian de Duve (Université catholique de Louvain) in 1974. François Englert (Université libre de Bruxelles) was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics in 2013. Ilya Prigogine (Université libre de Bruxelles) was awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1977. Two Belgian mathematicians have been awarded the Fields Medal: Pierre Deligne in 1978 and Jean Bourgain in 1994.As of 1 January 2020, the total population of Belgium according to its population register was 11,492,641. The population density of Belgium is as of January 2019, making it the 22nd most densely populated country in the world, and the 6th most densely populated country in Europe. The most densely populated province is Antwerp, the least densely populated province is Luxembourg. As of January 2019, the Flemish Region had a population of 6,589,069 (57.6% of Belgium), its most populous cities being Antwerp (523,248), Ghent (260,341) and Bruges (118,284). Wallonia had a population of 3,633,795 (31.8% of Belgium) with Charleroi (201,816), Liège (197,355) and Namur (110,939), its most populous cities. The Brussels-Capital Region has 1,208,542 inhabitants (10.6% of Belgium) in the 19 municipalities, three of which have over 100,000 residents.In 2017 the average total fertility rate (TFR) across Belgium was 1.64 children per woman, below the replacement rate of 2.1, it remains considerably below the high of 4.87 children born per woman in 1873. Belgium subsequently has one of the oldest populations in the world, with the average age of 41.6 years., nearly 92% of the population had Belgian citizenship, and other European Union member citizens account for around 6%. The prevalent foreign nationals were Italian (171,918), French (125,061), Dutch (116,970), Moroccan (80,579), Portuguese (43,509), Spanish (42,765), Turkish (39,419) and German (37,621). In 2007, there were 1.38 million foreign-born residents in Belgium, corresponding to 12.9% of the total population. Of these, 685,000 (6.4%) were born outside the EU and 695,000 (6.5%) were born in another EU Member State.At the beginning of 2012, people of foreign background and their descendants were estimated to have formed around 25% of the total population i.e. 2.8 million "new Belgians". Of these new Belgians, 1,200,000 are of European ancestry and 1,350,000 are from non-Western countries (most of them from Morocco, Turkey, and the DR Congo). Since the modification of the Belgian nationality law in 1984 more than 1.3 million migrants have acquired Belgian citizenship. The largest group of immigrants and their descendants in Belgium are Moroccans. 89.2% of inhabitants of Turkish origin have been naturalized, as have 88.4% of people of Moroccan background, 75.4% of Italians, 56.2% of the French and 47.8% of Dutch people.Belgium has three official languages: Dutch, French and German. A number of non-official minority languages are spoken as well.As no census exists, there are no official statistical data regarding the distribution or usage of Belgium's three official languages or their dialects. However, various criteria, including the language(s) of parents, of education, or the second-language status of foreign born, may provide suggested figures. An estimated 60% of the Belgian population are native speakers of Dutch (often referred to as Flemish), and 40% of the population speaks French natively. French-speaking Belgians are often referred to as Walloons, although the French speakers in Brussels are not Walloons.The total number of native Dutch speakers is estimated to be about 6.23 million, concentrated in the northern Flanders region, while native French speakers number 3.32 million in Wallonia and an estimated 870,000 (or 85%) in the officially bilingual Brussels-Capital Region. The German-speaking Community is made up of 73,000 people in the east of the Walloon Region; around 10,000 German and 60,000 Belgian nationals are speakers of German. Roughly 23,000 more German speakers live in municipalities near the official Community.Both Belgian Dutch and Belgian French have minor differences in vocabulary and semantic nuances from the varieties spoken respectively in the Netherlands and France. Many Flemish people still speak dialects of Dutch in their local environment. Walloon, considered either as a dialect of French or a distinct Romance language, is now only understood and spoken occasionally, mostly by elderly people. Walloon is divided into four dialects, which along with those of Picard, are rarely used in public life and have largely been replaced by French.Since the country's independence, Roman Catholicism has had an important role in Belgium's politics. However Belgium is largely a secular country as the constitution provides for freedom of religion, and the government generally respects this right in practice. During the reigns of Albert I and Baudouin, the Belgian royal family had a reputation of deeply rooted Catholicism.Roman Catholicism has traditionally been Belgium's majority religion; being especially strong in Flanders. However, by 2009 Sunday church attendance was 5% for Belgium in total; 3% in Brussels, and 5.4% in Flanders. Church attendance in 2009 in Belgium was roughly half of the Sunday church attendance in 1998 (11% for the total of Belgium in 1998). Despite the drop in church attendance, Catholic identity nevertheless remains an important part of Belgium's culture.According to the Eurobarometer 2010, 37% of Belgian citizens responded that they believe there is a God. 31% answered that they believe there is some sort of spirit or life-force. 27% answered that they do not believe there is any sort of spirit, God, or life-force. 5% did not respond. According to the Eurobarometer 2015, 60.7% of the total population of Belgium adhered to Christianity, with Roman Catholicism being the largest denomination with 52.9%. Protestants comprised 2.1% and Orthodox Christians were the 1.6% of the total. Non-religious people comprised 32.0% of the population and were divided between atheists (14.9%) and agnostics (17.1%). A further 5.2% of the population was Muslim and 2.1% were believers in other religions. The same survey held in 2012 found that Christianity was the largest religion in Belgium, accounting for 65% of Belgians.Symbolically and materially, the Roman Catholic Church remains in a favorable position. Belgium officially recognizes three religions: Christianity (Catholic, Protestantism, Orthodox churches and Anglicanism), Islam and Judaism.In the early 2000s, there were approximately 42,000 Jews in Belgium. The Jewish Community of Antwerp (numbering some 18,000) is one of the largest in Europe, and one of the last places in the world where Yiddish is the primary language of a large Jewish community (mirroring certain Orthodox and Hasidic communities in New York, New Jersey, and Israel). In addition, most Jewish children in Antwerp receive a Jewish education. There are several Jewish newspapers and more than 45 active synagogues (30 of which are in Antwerp) in the country.A 2006 inquiry in Flanders, considered to be a more religious region than Wallonia, showed that 55% considered themselves religious and that 36% believed that God created the universe. On the other hand, Wallonia has become one of Europe's most secular/least religious regions. Most of the French-speaking region's population does not consider religion an important part of their lives, and as much as 45% of the population identifies as irreligious. This is particularly the case in eastern Wallonia and areas along the French border.A 2008 estimate found that approximately 6% of the Belgian population (628,751 people) is Muslim. Muslims constitute 23.6% of the population of Brussels, 4.9% of Wallonia and 5.1% of Flanders. The majority of Belgian Muslims live in the major cities, such as Antwerp, Brussels and Charleroi. The largest group of immigrants in Belgium are Moroccans, with 400,000 people. The Turks are the third largest group, and the second largest Muslim ethnic group, numbering 220,000.The Belgians enjoy good health. According to 2012 estimates, the average life expectancy is 79.65 years. Since 1960, life expectancy has, in line with the European average, grown by two months per year. Death in Belgium is mainly due to heart and vascular disorders, neoplasms, disorders of the respiratory system and unnatural causes of death (accidents, suicide). Non-natural causes of death and cancer are the most common causes of death for females up to age 24 and males up to age 44.Healthcare in Belgium is financed through both social security contributions and taxation. Health insurance is compulsory. Health care is delivered by a mixed public and private system of independent medical practitioners and public, university and semi-private hospitals. Health care service are payable by the patient and reimbursed later by health insurance institutions, but for ineligible categories (of patients and services) so-called 3rd party payment systems exist. The Belgian health care system is supervised and financed by the federal government, the Flemish and Walloon Regional governments; and the German Community also has (indirect) oversight and responsibilities.For the first time in Belgian history, the first child was euthanized following the 2-year mark of the removal of the euthanization age restrictions. The child had been euthanized due to an incurable disease that was inflicted upon the child. Although there may have been some support for the euthanization there is a possibility of controversy due to the issue revolving around the subject of assisted suicide. Excluding assisted suicide, Belgium has the highest suicide rate in Western Europe and one of the highest suicide rates in the developed world (exceeded only by Lithuania, South Korea, and Latvia).Education is compulsory from 6 to 18 years of age for Belgians. Among OECD countries in 2002, Belgium had the third highest proportion of 18- to 21-year-olds enrolled in postsecondary education, at 42%. Though an estimated 99% of the adult population is literate, concern is rising over functional illiteracy. The Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA), coordinated by the OECD, currently ranks Belgium's education as the 19th best in the world, being significantly higher than the OECD average. Education being organized separately by each, the Flemish Community scores noticeably above the French and German-speaking Communities.Mirroring the dual structure of the 19th-century Belgian political landscape, characterized by the Liberal and the Catholic parties, the educational system is segregated within a secular and a religious segment. The secular branch of schooling is controlled by the communities, the provinces, or the municipalities, while religious, mainly Catholic branch education, is organized by religious authorities, although subsidized and supervised by the communities.Despite its political and linguistic divisions, the region corresponding to today's Belgium has seen the flourishing of major artistic movements that have had tremendous influence on European art and culture. Nowadays, to a certain extent, cultural life is concentrated within each language Community, and a variety of barriers have made a shared cultural sphere less pronounced. Since the 1970s, there are no bilingual universities or colleges in the country except the Royal Military Academy and the Antwerp Maritime Academy.Contributions to painting and architecture have been especially rich. The Mosan art, the Early Netherlandish, the Flemish Renaissance and Baroque painting and major examples of Romanesque, Gothic, Renaissance and Baroque architecture are milestones in the history of art. While the 15th century's art in the Low Countries is dominated by the religious paintings of Jan van Eyck and Rogier van der Weyden, the 16th century is characterized by a broader panel of styles such as Peter Breughel's landscape paintings and Lambert Lombard's representation of the antique. Though the Baroque style of Peter Paul Rubens and Anthony van Dyck flourished in the early 17th century in the Southern Netherlands, it gradually declined thereafter.During the 19th and 20th centuries many original romantic, expressionist and surrealist Belgian painters emerged, including James Ensor and other artists belonging to the Les XX group, Constant Permeke, Paul Delvaux and René Magritte. The avant-garde CoBrA movement appeared in the 1950s, while the sculptor Panamarenko remains a remarkable figure in contemporary art. Multidisciplinary artists Jan Fabre, Wim Delvoye and the painter Luc Tuymans are other internationally renowned figures on the contemporary art scene.Belgian contributions to architecture also continued into the 19th and 20th centuries, including the work of Victor Horta and Henry van de Velde, who were major initiators of the Art Nouveau style.The vocal music of the Franco-Flemish School developed in the southern part of the Low Countries and was an important contribution to Renaissance culture. In the 19th and 20th centuries, there was an emergence of major violinists, such as Henri Vieuxtemps, Eugène Ysaÿe and Arthur Grumiaux, while Adolphe Sax invented the saxophone in 1846. The composer César Franck was born in Liège in 1822. Contemporary popular music in Belgium is also of repute. Jazz musician Toots Thielemans and singer Jacques Brel have achieved global fame. Nowadays, singer Stromae has been a musical revelation in Europe and beyond, having great success. In rock/pop music, Telex, Front 242, K's Choice, Hooverphonic, Zap Mama, Soulwax and dEUS are well known. In the heavy metal scene, bands like Machiavel, Channel Zero and Enthroned have a worldwide fan-base.Belgium has produced several well-known authors, including the poets Emile Verhaeren, Guido Gezelle, Robert Goffin and novelists Hendrik Conscience, Stijn Streuvels, Georges Simenon, Suzanne Lilar, Hugo Claus and Amélie Nothomb. The poet and playwright Maurice Maeterlinck won the Nobel Prize in literature in 1911. "The Adventures of Tintin" by Hergé is the best known of Franco-Belgian comics, but many other major authors, including Peyo ("The Smurfs"), André Franquin ("Gaston Lagaffe"), Dupa ("Cubitus"), Morris ("Lucky Luke"), Greg ("Achille Talon"), Lambil ("Les Tuniques Bleues"), Edgar P. Jacobs and Willy Vandersteen brought the Belgian cartoon strip industry a worldwide fame. Additionally, famous crime author Agatha Christie created the character Hercule Poirot, a Belgian detective, who has served as a protagonist in a number of her acclaimed mystery novels.Belgian cinema has brought a number of mainly Flemish novels to life on-screen. Other Belgian directors include André Delvaux, Stijn Coninx, Luc and Jean-Pierre Dardenne; well-known actors include Jean-Claude Van Damme, Jan Decleir and Marie Gillain; and successful films include "Bullhead, Man Bites Dog" and "The Alzheimer Affair".Belgium is also home to a number of successful fashion designers . For instance, in the 1980s, Antwerp's Royal Academy of Fine Arts produced important fashion trendsetters, known as the Antwerp Six.Folklore plays a major role in Belgium's cultural life: the country has a comparatively high number of processions, cavalcades, parades, " and 'ducasses', 'kermesse' and other local festivals, nearly always with an originally religious or mythological background. The Carnival of Binche with its famous Gilles and the 'Processional Giants and Dragons' of Ath, Brussels, Dendermonde, Mechelen and Mons are recognized by UNESCO as Masterpieces of the Oral and Intangible Heritage of Humanity.Other examples are the Carnival of Aalst; the still very religious processions of the Holy Blood in Bruges, Virga Jesse Basilica in Hasselt and Basilica of Our Lady of Hanswijk in Mechelen; festival in Liège; and the Walloon festival in Namur. Originated in 1832 and revived in the 1960s, the Gentse Feesten have become a modern tradition. A major non-official holiday is the Saint Nicholas Day, a festivity for children and, in Liège, for students.Many highly ranked Belgian restaurants can be found in the most influential restaurant guides, such as the Michelin Guide. Belgium is famous for beer, chocolate, waffles and french fries with mayonnaise. Contrary to their name, french fries are claimed to have originated in Belgium, although their exact place of origin is uncertain. The national dishes are "steak and fries with salad", and "mussels with fries".Brands of Belgian chocolate and pralines, like Côte d'Or, Neuhaus, Leonidas and Godiva are famous, as well as independent producers such as Burie and Del Rey in Antwerp and Mary's in Brussels. Belgium produces over 1100 varieties of beer. The Trappist beer of the Abbey of Westvleteren has repeatedly been rated the world's best beer.The biggest brewer in the world by volume is Anheuser-Busch InBev, based in Leuven.Since the 1970s, sports clubs and federations are organized separately within each language community. Association football is the most popular sport in both parts of Belgium; also very popular are cycling, tennis, swimming, judo and basketball.The Belgium national football team have been on the top spot of the FIFA World Rankings ever since September 2018 (first time reached this rank in November 2015). Since the 1990s, the team have been the world's number one for the most years in history, only behind the records of Brazil and Spain. The team's golden generations with the world class players in the squad, namely Eden Hazard, Kevin De Bruyne, Jean-Marie Pfaff, Jan Ceulemans achieved the bronze medals at World Cup 2018, and silver medals at Euro 1980. Belgium hosted the Euro 1972, and co-hosted the Euro 2000 with the Netherlands.Belgians hold the most Tour de France victories of any country except France. They have also the most victories on the UCI Road World Championships. Philippe Gilbert is the 2012 world champion. Another modern well-known Belgian cyclist is Tom Boonen. With five victories in the Tour de France and numerous other cycling records, Belgian cyclist Eddy Merckx is regarded as one of the greatest cyclists of all time.Kim Clijsters and Justine Henin both were Player of the Year in the Women's Tennis Association as they were ranked the number one female tennis player.The Spa-Francorchamps motor-racing circuit hosts the Formula One World Championship Belgian Grand Prix. The Belgian driver, Jacky Ickx, won eight Grands Prix and six 24 Hours of Le Mans and finished twice as runner-up in the Formula One World Championship. Belgium also has a strong reputation in, motocross with the riders Joël Robert, Roger De Coster, Georges Jobé, Eric Geboers and Stefan Everts among others. Sporting events annually held in Belgium include the Memorial Van Damme athletics competition, the Belgian Grand Prix Formula One, and a number of classic cycle races such as the Tour of Flanders and Liège–Bastogne–Liège. The 1920 Summer Olympics were held in Antwerp. The 1977 European Basketball Championship was held in Liège and Ostend.	[ "Charles Michel", "Alexander De Croo" ]
Who was the head of Belgium in 2020-05-28?	May 28, 2020	{ "text": [ "Sophie Wilmès" ] }	L2_Q31_P6_1	Charles Michel is the head of the government of Belgium from Oct, 2014 to Oct, 2019. Alexander De Croo is the head of the government of Belgium from Oct, 2020 to Dec, 2022. Sophie Wilmès is the head of the government of Belgium from Oct, 2019 to Oct, 2020.	BelgiumBelgium ( ; ; ), officially the Kingdom of Belgium, is a country in Western Europe. It is bordered by the Netherlands to the north, Germany to the east, Luxembourg to the southeast, France to the southwest, and the North Sea to the northwest. It covers an area of and has a population of more than 11.5 million, making it the 22nd most densely populated country in the world and the 6th most densely populated country in Europe, with a density of . The capital and largest city is Brussels; other major cities are Antwerp, Ghent, Charleroi, Liège, Bruges, Namur, and Leuven.Belgium is a sovereign state and a federal constitutional monarchy with a parliamentary system. Its institutional organization is complex and is structured on both regional and linguistic grounds. It is divided into three highly autonomous regions: the Flemish Region (Flanders) in the north, the Walloon Region (Wallonia) in the south, and the Brussels-Capital Region. Brussels is the smallest and most densely populated region, as well as the richest region in terms of GDP per capita.Belgium is home to two main linguistic communities: the Dutch-speaking Flemish Community, which constitutes about 60 percent of the population, and the French-speaking Community, which constitutes about 40 percent of the population. A small German-speaking Community, numbering around one percent, exists in the East Cantons. The Brussels-Capital Region is officially bilingual in French and Dutch, although French is the dominant language. Belgium's linguistic diversity and related political conflicts are reflected in its complex system of governance, made up of six different governments.The country as it exists today was established following the 1830 Belgian Revolution, when it seceded from the Netherlands, which had itself only existed since 1815. The name chosen for the new state is derived from the Latin word "Belgium", used in Julius Caesar's "Gallic Wars", to describe a nearby region in the period around 55 BCE. Belgium is part of an area known as the Low Countries, historically a somewhat larger region than the Benelux group of states, as it also included parts of northern France. Since the Middle Ages, its central location near several major rivers has meant that the area has been relatively prosperous, connected commercially and politically to its bigger neighbours. Belgium has unfortunately also been the battleground of European powers, earning the moniker the "Battlefield of Europe", a reputation strengthened in the 20th century by both world wars. Belgium participated in the Industrial Revolution and, during the course of the 20th century, possessed a number of colonies in Africa. Between 1888 and 1908, Leopold II, king of Belgium, perpetrated one of the largest massacres in human history in Congo Free State, which was his private estate, and not yet a colony of Belgium. Estimates of the death toll are disputed but millions of people, a significant part of the population, died for the sake of rubber and ivory exports.The second half of the 20th century was marked by rising tensions between the Dutch-speaking and the French-speaking citizens fuelled by differences in language and culture and the unequal economic development of Flanders and Wallonia. This continuing antagonism has led to several far-reaching reforms, resulting in a transition from a unitary to a federal arrangement during the period from 1970 to 1993. Despite the reforms, tensions between the groups have remained, if not increased; there is significant separatism particularly among the Flemish; controversial language laws exist such as the municipalities with language facilities; and the formation of a coalition government took 18 months following the June 2010 federal election, a world record. Unemployment in Wallonia is more than double that of Flanders, which boomed after the war.Belgium is one of the six founding countries of the European Union and its capital, Brussels, hosts the official seats of the European Commission, the Council of the European Union, and the European Council, as well as one of two seats of the European Parliament (the other being Strasbourg). Belgium is also a founding member of the Eurozone, NATO, OECD, and WTO, and a part of the trilateral Benelux Union and the Schengen Area. Brussels hosts the headquarters of many major international organizations such as NATO.Belgium is a developed country, with an advanced high-income economy. It has very high standards of living, quality of life, healthcare, education, and is categorized as "very high" in the Human Development Index. It also ranks as one of the safest or most peaceful countries in the world.The "Belgae" were the inhabitants of the northernmost part of Gaul, which was much bigger than modern Belgium. Caesar used the Latin word ""Belgium"", to refer to their country within northern Gaul, which was a region now in northern France. Modern Belgium corresponds to the lands of the Morini, Menapii, Nervii, Germani Cisrhenani, Aduatuci, and, around Arlon, a part of the country of the Treveri. All of these except the Treveri formed a less Celtic-influenced "transition zone", north of the area Caesar treated as "Belgium".After Caesar's conquests, "Gallia Belgica" came to be the Latin name of a large Roman province covering most of Northern Gaul, including the Treveri. Areas closer to the lower Rhine frontier, including the eastern part of modern Belgium, eventually became part of the frontier province of "Germania Inferior", which interacted with Germanic tribes outside the empire. At the time when central government collapsed in the Western Roman Empire, the Roman provinces of Belgica and Germania were inhabited by a mix of a Romanized population and Germanic-speaking Franks who came to dominate the military and political class.During the 5th century, the area came under the rule of the Frankish Merovingian kings, who were probably first established in what is northern France. During the 8th century, the kingdom of the Franks came to be ruled by the Carolingian Dynasty, whose centre of power was around the area which is now eastern Belgium. The frankish kingdom had been divided up in many ways, but the Treaty of Verdun in 843 divided the Carolingian Empire into three kingdoms, whose borders had a lasting impact on medieval political boundaries. Most of modern Belgium was in the Middle Kingdom, later known as Lotharingia, but the coastal county of Flanders, west of the Scheldt, became part of West Francia, the predecessor of France. In 870 in the Treaty of Meerssen, modern Belgium lands all became part of the western kingdom for a period, but in 880 in the Treaty of Ribemont, Lotharingia returned to the lasting control of the Holy Roman Emperor. The lordships and bishoprics along the "March" (frontier) between the two great kingdoms maintained important connections between each other. The county of Flanders expanded over the Scheldt into the empire, and during several periods was ruled by the same lords as the county of Hainaut. In the 13th and 14th centuries, the cloth industry and commerce boomed especially in the County of Flanders and it became one of the richest areas in Europe. This prosperity played a role in conflicts between Flanders and the king of France. Famously, Flemish militias scored a surprise victory at the Battle of the Golden Spurs against a strong force of mounted knights in 1302, but France soon regained control of the rebellious province.In the 15th century, the Duke of Burgundy in France took control of Flanders, and from there they proceeded to unite much of what is now the Benelux, the so-called Burgundian Netherlands. "Belgium" and "Flanders" were the first two common names used for the Burgundian Netherlands which was the predecessor of the Austrian Netherlands, the predecessor of modern Belgium. The union, technically stretching between two kingdoms, gave the area economic and political stability which led to an even greater prosperity and artistic creation.Born in Belgium, the Habsburg Emperor Charles V was heir of the Burgundians, but also of the royal families of Austria, Castile and Aragon. With the Pragmatic Sanction of 1549 he gave the Seventeen Provinces more legitimacy as a stable entity, rather than just a temporary personal union. He also increased the influence of these Netherlands over the Prince-Bishopric of Liège, which continued to exist as a large semi-independent enclave.The Eighty Years' War (1568–1648), was triggered by the Spanish government's policy towards protestantism, which was becoming popular in the Low Countries. The rebellious northern United Provinces ("Belgica Foederata" in Latin, the "Federated Netherlands") eventually separated from the Southern Netherlands ("Belgica Regia", the "Royal Netherlands"). The latter were ruled successively by the Spanish (Spanish Netherlands) and the Austrian Habsburgs (Austrian Netherlands) and comprised most of modern Belgium. This was the theatre of several more protracted conflicts during much of the 17th and 18th centuries involving France, including the Franco-Dutch War (1672–1678), the Nine Years' War (1688–1697), the War of the Spanish Succession (1701–1714), and part of the War of the Austrian Succession (1740–1748).Following the , the Low Countriesincluding territories that were never nominally under Habsburg rule, such as the Prince-Bishopric of Liègewere annexed by the French First Republic, ending Austrian rule in the region. A reunification of the Low Countries as the United Kingdom of the Netherlands occurred at the dissolution of the First French Empire in 1814, after the abdication of Napoleon.In 1830, the Belgian Revolution led to the separation of the Southern Provinces from the Netherlands and to the establishment of a Catholic and bourgeois, officially French-speaking and neutral, independent Belgium under a provisional government and a national congress. Since the installation of Leopold I as king on 1831, now celebrated as Belgium's National Day, Belgium has been a constitutional monarchy and parliamentary democracy, with a laicist constitution based on the Napoleonic code. Although the franchise was initially restricted, universal suffrage for men was introduced after the general strike of 1893 (with plural voting until 1919) and for women in 1949.The main political parties of the 19th century were the Catholic Party and the Liberal Party, with the Belgian Labour Party emerging towards the end of the 19th century. French was originally the single official language adopted by the nobility and the bourgeoisie. It progressively lost its overall importance as Dutch became recognized as well. This recognition became official in 1898, and in 1967, the parliament accepted a Dutch version of the Constitution.The Berlin Conference of 1885 ceded control of the Congo Free State to King Leopold II as his private possession. From around 1900 there was growing international concern for the extreme and savage treatment of the Congolese population under Leopold II, for whom the Congo was primarily a source of revenue from ivory and rubber production. Many Congolese were killed by Leopold's agents for failing to meet production quotas for ivory and rubber. In 1908, this outcry led the Belgian state to assume responsibility for the government of the colony, henceforth called the Belgian Congo. A Belgian commission in 1919 estimated that Congo's population was half what it was in 1879.Germany invaded Belgium in August 1914 as part of the Schlieffen Plan to attack France, and much of the Western Front fighting of World War I occurred in western parts of the country. The opening months of the war were known as the Rape of Belgium due to German excesses. Belgium assumed control of the German colonies of Ruanda-Urundi (modern-day Rwanda and Burundi) during the war, and in 1924 the League of Nations mandated them to Belgium. In the aftermath of the First World War, Belgium annexed the Prussian districts of Eupen and Malmedy in 1925, thereby causing the presence of a German-speaking minority.German forces again invaded the country in May 1940, and 40,690 Belgians, over half of them Jews, were killed during the subsequent occupation and The Holocaust. From September 1944 to February 1945 the Allies liberated Belgium. After World War II, a general strike forced King Leopold III to abdicate in 1951, since many Belgians felt he had collaborated with Germany during the war. The Belgian Congo gained independence in 1960 during the Congo Crisis; Ruanda-Urundi followed with its independence two years later. Belgium joined NATO as a founding member and formed the Benelux group of nations with the Netherlands and Luxembourg.Belgium became one of the six founding members of the European Coal and Steel Community in 1951 and of the European Atomic Energy Community and European Economic Community, established in 1957. The latter has now become the European Union, for which Belgium hosts major administrations and institutions, including the European Commission, the Council of the European Union and the extraordinary and committee sessions of the European Parliament.In the early 1990s, Belgium saw several large corruption scandals notably surrounding Marc Dutroux, Andre Cools, the Dioxin Affair, Agusta Scandal and Murder of Karel Van Noppen.Belgium shares borders with France (), Germany (), Luxembourg () and the Netherlands (). Its total surface, including water area, is . Before 2018, its total area was believed to be . However, when the country's statistics were measured in 2018, a new calculation method was used. Unlike previous calculations, this one included the area from the coast to the low-water line, revealing the country to be larger in surface area than previously thought. Its land area alone is 30,278 km. It lies between latitudes 49°30' and 51°30' N, and longitudes 2°33' and 6°24' E.Belgium has three main geographical regions; the coastal plain in the northwest and the central plateau both belong to the Anglo-Belgian Basin, and the Ardennes uplands in the southeast to the Hercynian orogenic belt. The Paris Basin reaches a small fourth area at Belgium's southernmost tip, Belgian Lorraine.The coastal plain consists mainly of sand dunes and polders. Further inland lies a smooth, slowly rising landscape irrigated by numerous waterways, with fertile valleys and the northeastern sandy plain of the Campine ("Kempen"). The thickly forested hills and plateaus of the Ardennes are more rugged and rocky with caves and small gorges. Extending westward into France, this area is eastwardly connected to the Eifel in Germany by the High Fens plateau, on which the Signal de Botrange forms the country's highest point at .The climate is maritime temperate with significant precipitation in all seasons (Köppen climate classification: "Cfb"), like most of northwest Europe. The average temperature is lowest in January at and highest in July at . The average precipitation per month varies between for February and April, to for July. Averages for the years 2000 to 2006 show daily temperature minimums of and maximums of and monthly rainfall of ; these are about 1 °C and nearly 10 millimetres above last century's normal values, respectively.Phytogeographically, Belgium is shared between the Atlantic European and Central European provinces of the Circumboreal Region within the Boreal Kingdom. According to the World Wide Fund for Nature, the territory of Belgium belongs to the terrestrial ecoregions of Atlantic mixed forests and Western European broadleaf forests. Belgium had a 2018 Forest Landscape Integrity Index mean score of 1.36/10, ranking it 163rd globally out of 172 countries.The territory of Belgium is divided into three Regions, two of which, the Flemish Region and Walloon Region, are in turn subdivided into provinces; the third Region, the Brussels Capital Region, is neither a province nor a part of a province.Belgium is a constitutional, popular monarchy and a federal parliamentary democracy. The bicameral federal parliament is composed of a Senate and a Chamber of Representatives. The former is made up of 50 senators appointed by the parliaments of the communities and regions and 10 co-opted senators. Prior to 2014, most of the Senate's members were directly elected. The Chamber's 150 representatives are elected under a proportional voting system from 11 electoral districts. Belgium has compulsory voting and thus maintains one of the highest rates of voter turnout in the world.The King (currently Philippe) is the head of state, though with limited prerogatives. He appoints ministers, including a Prime Minister, that have the confidence of the Chamber of Representatives to form the federal government. The Council of Ministers is composed of no more than fifteen members. With the possible exception of the Prime Minister, the Council of Ministers is composed of an equal number of Dutch-speaking members and French-speaking members.The judicial system is based on civil law and originates from the Napoleonic code. The Court of Cassation is the court of last resort, with the courts of appeal one level below.Belgium's political institutions are complex; most political power is organized around the need to represent the main cultural communities.Since about 1970, the significant national Belgian political parties have split into distinct components that mainly represent the political and linguistic interests of these communities.The major parties in each community, though close to the political center, belong to three main groups: Christian Democrats, Liberals, and Social Democrats.Further notable parties came into being well after the middle of last century, mainly around linguistic, nationalist, or environmental themes and recently smaller ones of some specific liberal nature.A string of Christian Democrat coalition governments from 1958 was broken in 1999 after the first dioxin crisis, a major food contamination scandal. A "rainbow coalition" emerged from six parties: the Flemish and the French-speaking Liberals, Social Democrats and Greens. Later, a "purple coalition" of Liberals and Social Democrats formed after the Greens lost most of their seats in the 2003 election.The government led by Prime Minister Guy Verhofstadt from 1999 to 2007 achieved a balanced budget, some tax reforms, a labor-market reform, scheduled nuclear phase-out and instigated legislation allowing more stringent war crime and more lenient soft drug usage prosecution. Restrictions on withholding euthanasia were reduced and same-sex marriage legalized. The government promoted active diplomacy in Africa and opposed the invasion of Iraq. It is the only country that does not have age restrictions on euthanasia.Verhofstadt's coalition fared badly in the June 2007 elections. For more than a year, the country experienced a political crisis. This crisis was such that many observers speculated on a possible partition of Belgium. From 2007 until 2008 the temporary Verhofstadt III Government was in office. This coalition of the Flemish and Francophone Christian Democrats, the Flemish and Francophone Liberals together with the Francophone Social Democrats was an interim government until 2008.On that day a new government, led by Flemish Christian Democrat Yves Leterme, the actual winner of the federal elections of , was sworn in by the king. On 2008 Leterme announced the resignation of the cabinet to the king, as no progress in constitutional reforms had been made.In December 2008, he once more offered his resignation to the king after a crisis surrounding the sale of Fortis to BNP Paribas. At this juncture, his resignation was accepted and Christian Democratic and Flemish Herman Van Rompuy was sworn in as Prime Minister on 2008.After Herman Van Rompuy was designated the first permanent President of the European Council on 2009, he offered the resignation of his government to King Albert II on 2009. A few hours later, the new government under Prime Minister Yves Leterme was sworn in. On 2010, Leterme again offered the resignation of his cabinet to the king after one of the coalition partners, the OpenVLD, withdrew from the government, and on 2010 King Albert officially accepted the resignation.The Parliamentary elections in Belgium on 2010 saw the Flemish nationalist N-VA become the largest party in Flanders, and the Socialist Party PS the largest party in Wallonia. Until December 2011, Belgium was governed by Leterme's caretaker government awaiting the end of the deadlocked negotiations for formation of a new government. By 30 March 2011, this set a new world record for the elapsed time without an official government, previously held by war-torn Iraq. Finally, in December 2011 the Di Rupo Government led by Walloon socialist Prime Minister Elio Di Rupo was sworn in.The 2014 federal election (coinciding with the regional elections) resulted in a further electoral gain for the Flemish nationalist N-VA, although the incumbent coalition (composed of Flemish and French-speaking Social Democrats, Liberals, and Christian Democrats) maintains a solid majority in Parliament and in all electoral constituencies. On 22 July 2014, King Philippe nominated Charles Michel (MR) and Kris Peeters (CD&V) to lead the formation of a new federal cabinet composed of the Flemish parties N-VA, CD&V, Open Vld and the French-speaking MR, which resulted in the Michel Government. It was the first time N-VA was part of the federal cabinet, while the French-speaking side was represented only by the MR, which achieved a minority of the public votes in Wallonia.In May 2019 federal elections in the Flemish-speaking northern region of Flanders far-right Vlaams Belang party made major gains. In the French-speaking southern area of Wallonia the Socialists were strong. The moderate Flemish nationalist party the N-VA remained the largest party in parliament.In July 2019 prime minister Charles Michel was selected to hold the post of President of the European Council. His successor Sophie Wilmès was Belgium's first female prime minister. She led the caretaker government since October 2019. The Flemish Liberal party politician Alexander De Croo became new prime minister in October 2020. The parties had agreed on federal government 16 months after the elections.Following a usage which can be traced back to the Burgundian and Habsburg courts, in the 19th century it was necessary to speak French to belong to the governing upper class, and those who could only speak Dutch were effectively second-class citizens. Late that century, and continuing into the 20th century, Flemish movements evolved to counter this situation.While the people in Southern Belgium spoke French or dialects of French, and most Brusselers adopted French as their first language, the Flemings refused to do so and succeeded progressively in making Dutch an equal language in the education system. Following World War II, Belgian politics became increasingly dominated by the autonomy of its two main linguistic communities. Intercommunal tensions rose and the constitution was amended to minimize the potential for conflict.Based on the four language areas defined in 1962–63 (the Dutch, bilingual, French and German language areas), consecutive revisions of the country's constitution in 1970, 1980, 1988 and 1993 established a unique form of a federal state with segregated political power into three levels:The constitutional language areas determine the official languages in their municipalities, as well as the geographical limits of the empowered institutions for specific matters. Although this would allow for seven parliaments and governments when the Communities and Regions were created in 1980, Flemish politicians decided to merge both. Thus the Flemings just have one single institutional body of parliament and government is empowered for all except federal and specific municipal matters.The overlapping boundaries of the Regions and Communities have created two notable peculiarities: the territory of the Brussels-Capital Region (which came into existence nearly a decade after the other regions) is included in both the Flemish and French Communities, and the territory of the German-speaking Community lies wholly within the Walloon Region. Conflicts about jurisdiction between the bodies are resolved by the Constitutional Court of Belgium. The structure is intended as a compromise to allow different cultures to live together peacefully.The Federal State's authority includes justice, defense, federal police, social security, nuclear energy, monetary policy and public debt, and other aspects of public finances. State-owned companies include the Belgian Post Group and Belgian Railways. The Federal Government is responsible for the obligations of Belgium and its federalized institutions towards the European Union and NATO. It controls substantial parts of public health, home affairs and foreign affairs. The budget—without the debt—controlled by the federal government amounts to about 50% of the national fiscal income. The federal government employs around 12% of the civil servants.Communities exercise their authority only within linguistically determined geographical boundaries, originally oriented towards the individuals of a Community's language: culture (including audiovisual media), education and the use of the relevant language. Extensions to personal matters less directly connected with language comprise health policy (curative and preventive medicine) and assistance to individuals (protection of youth, social welfare, aid to families, immigrant assistance services, and so on.).Regions have authority in fields that can be broadly associated with their territory. These include economy, employment, agriculture, water policy, housing, public works, energy, transport, the environment, town and country planning, nature conservation, credit and foreign trade. They supervise the provinces, municipalities and intercommunal utility companies.In several fields, the different levels each have their own say on specifics. With education, for instance, the autonomy of the Communities neither includes decisions about the compulsory aspect nor allows for setting minimum requirements for awarding qualifications, which remain federal matters. Each level of government can be involved in scientific research and international relations associated with its powers. The treaty-making power of the Regions' and Communities' Governments is the broadest of all the Federating units of all the Federations all over the world.Because of its location at the crossroads of Western Europe, Belgium has historically been the route of invading armies from its larger neighbors. With virtually defenseless borders, Belgium has traditionally sought to avoid domination by the more powerful nations which surround it through a policy of mediation. The Belgians have been strong advocates of European integration. Both the European Union and NATO are headquartered in Belgium.The Belgian Armed Forces have about 47,000 active troops. In 2019, Belgium's defense budget totaled €4.303 billion ($4.921 billion) representing .93% of its GDP. They are organized into one unified structure which consists of four main components: Land Component, or the Army; Air Component, or the Air Force; Marine Component, or the Navy; Medical Component. The operational commands of the four components are subordinate to the Staff Department for Operations and Training of the Ministry of Defense, which is headed by the Assistant Chief of Staff Operations and Training, and to the Chief of Defense.The effects of the Second World War made collective security a priority for Belgian foreign policy. In March 1948 Belgium signed the Treaty of Brussels and then joined NATO in 1948. However, the integration of the armed forces into NATO did not begin until after the Korean War. The Belgians, along with the Luxembourg government, sent a detachment of battalion strength to fight in Korea known as the Belgian United Nations Command. This mission was the first in a long line of UN missions which the Belgians supported. Currently, the Belgian Marine Component is working closely together with the Dutch Navy under the command of the Admiral Benelux.Belgium's strongly globalized economy and its transport infrastructure are integrated with the rest of Europe. Its location at the heart of a highly industrialized region helped make it the world's 15th largest trading nation in 2007. The economy is characterized by a highly productive work force, high GNP and high exports per capita. Belgium's main imports are raw materials, machinery and equipment, chemicals, raw diamonds, pharmaceuticals, foodstuffs, transportation equipment, and oil products. Its main exports are machinery and equipment, chemicals, finished diamonds, metals and metal products, and foodstuffs.The Belgian economy is heavily service-oriented and shows a dual nature: a dynamic Flemish economy and a Walloon economy that lags behind. One of the founding members of the European Union, Belgium strongly supports an open economy and the extension of the powers of EU institutions to integrate member economies. Since 1922, through the Belgium-Luxembourg Economic Union, Belgium and Luxembourg have been a single trade market with customs and currency union.Belgium was the first continental European country to undergo the Industrial Revolution, in the early 19th century. Areas in Liège Province and around Charleroi rapidly developed mining and steelmaking, which flourished until the mid-20th century in the Sambre and Meuse valley and made Belgium one of the three most industrialized nations in the world from 1830 to 1910. However, by the 1840s the textile industry of Flanders was in severe crisis, and the region experienced famine from 1846 to 1850.After World War II, Ghent and Antwerp experienced a rapid expansion of the chemical and petroleum industries. The 1973 and 1979 oil crises sent the economy into a recession; it was particularly prolonged in Wallonia, where the steel industry had become less competitive and experienced a serious decline. In the 1980s and 1990s, the economic center of the country continued to shift northwards and is now concentrated in the populous Flemish Diamond area.By the end of the 1980s, Belgian macroeconomic policies had resulted in a cumulative government debt of about 120% of GDP. , the budget was balanced and public debt was equal to 90.30% of GDP. In 2005 and 2006, real GDP growth rates of 1.5% and 3.0%, respectively, were slightly above the average for the Euro area. Unemployment rates of 8.4% in 2005 and 8.2% in 2006 were close to the area average. By , this had grown to 8.5% compared to an average rate of 9.6% for the European Union as a whole (EU 27). From 1832 until 2002, Belgium's currency was the Belgian franc. Belgium switched to the euro in 2002, with the first sets of euro coins being minted in 1999. The standard Belgian euro coins designated for circulation show the portrait of the monarch (first King Albert II, since 2013 King Philippe).Despite an 18% decrease observed from 1970 to 1999, Belgium still had in 1999 the highest rail network density within the European Union with 113.8 km/1 000 km. On the other hand, the same period, 1970–1999, has seen a huge growth (+56%) of the motorway network. In 1999, the density of km motorways per 1000 km and 1000 inhabitants amounted to 55.1 and 16.5 respectively and were significantly superior to the EU's means of 13.7 and 15.9.From a biological resource perspective, Belgium has a low endowment: Belgium's biocapacity adds up to only 0.8 global hectares in 2016, just about half of the 1.6 global hectares of biocapacity available per person worldwide. In contrast, in 2016, Belgians used on average 6.3 global hectares of biocapacity - their ecological footprint of consumption. This means they required about eight times as much biocapacity as Belgium contains. As a result, Belgium was running a biocapacity deficit of 5.5 global hectares per person in 2016.Belgium experiences some of the most congested traffic in Europe. In 2010, commuters to the cities of Brussels and Antwerp spent respectively 65 and 64 hours a year in traffic jams. Like in most small European countries, more than 80% of the airways traffic is handled by a single airport, the Brussels Airport. The ports of Antwerp and Zeebrugge (Bruges) share more than 80% of Belgian maritime traffic, Antwerp being the second European harbor with a gross weight of goods handled of 115 988 000 t in 2000 after a growth of 10.9% over the preceding five years. In 2016, the port of Antwerp handled 214 million tons after a year-on-year growth of 2.7%.There is a large economic gap between Flanders and Wallonia. Wallonia was historically wealthy compared to Flanders, mostly due to its heavy industries, but the decline of the steel industry post-World War II led to the region's rapid decline, whereas Flanders rose swiftly. Since then, Flanders has been prosperous, among the wealthiest regions in Europe, whereas Wallonia has been languishing. As of 2007, the unemployment rate of Wallonia is over double that of Flanders. The divide has played a key part in the tensions between the Flemish and Walloons in addition to the already-existing language divide. Pro-independence movements have gained high popularity in Flanders as a consequence. The separatist New Flemish Alliance (N-VA) party, for instance, is the largest party in Belgium.Contributions to the development of science and technology have appeared throughout the country's history. The 16th century Early Modern flourishing of Western Europe included cartographer Gerardus Mercator, anatomist Andreas Vesalius, herbalist Rembert Dodoens and mathematician Simon Stevin among the most influential scientists.Chemist Ernest Solvay and engineer Zenobe Gramme (École industrielle de Liège) gave their names to the Solvay process and the Gramme dynamo, respectively, in the 1860s. Bakelite was developed in 1907–1909 by Leo Baekeland. Ernest Solvay also acted as a major philanthropist and gave its name to the Solvay Institute of Sociology, the Solvay Brussels School of Economics and Management and the International Solvay Institutes for Physics and Chemistry which are now part of the Université libre de Bruxelles. In 1911, he started a series of conferences, the Solvay Conferences on Physics and Chemistry, which have had a deep impact on the evolution of quantum physics and chemistry. A major contribution to fundamental science was also due to a Belgian, Monsignor Georges Lemaître (Catholic University of Louvain), who is credited with proposing the Big Bang theory of the origin of the universe in 1927.Three Nobel Prizes in Physiology or Medicine were awarded to Belgians: Jules Bordet (Université libre de Bruxelles) in 1919, Corneille Heymans (University of Ghent) in 1938 and Albert Claude (Université libre de Bruxelles) together with Christian de Duve (Université catholique de Louvain) in 1974. François Englert (Université libre de Bruxelles) was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics in 2013. Ilya Prigogine (Université libre de Bruxelles) was awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1977. Two Belgian mathematicians have been awarded the Fields Medal: Pierre Deligne in 1978 and Jean Bourgain in 1994.As of 1 January 2020, the total population of Belgium according to its population register was 11,492,641. The population density of Belgium is as of January 2019, making it the 22nd most densely populated country in the world, and the 6th most densely populated country in Europe. The most densely populated province is Antwerp, the least densely populated province is Luxembourg. As of January 2019, the Flemish Region had a population of 6,589,069 (57.6% of Belgium), its most populous cities being Antwerp (523,248), Ghent (260,341) and Bruges (118,284). Wallonia had a population of 3,633,795 (31.8% of Belgium) with Charleroi (201,816), Liège (197,355) and Namur (110,939), its most populous cities. The Brussels-Capital Region has 1,208,542 inhabitants (10.6% of Belgium) in the 19 municipalities, three of which have over 100,000 residents.In 2017 the average total fertility rate (TFR) across Belgium was 1.64 children per woman, below the replacement rate of 2.1, it remains considerably below the high of 4.87 children born per woman in 1873. Belgium subsequently has one of the oldest populations in the world, with the average age of 41.6 years., nearly 92% of the population had Belgian citizenship, and other European Union member citizens account for around 6%. The prevalent foreign nationals were Italian (171,918), French (125,061), Dutch (116,970), Moroccan (80,579), Portuguese (43,509), Spanish (42,765), Turkish (39,419) and German (37,621). In 2007, there were 1.38 million foreign-born residents in Belgium, corresponding to 12.9% of the total population. Of these, 685,000 (6.4%) were born outside the EU and 695,000 (6.5%) were born in another EU Member State.At the beginning of 2012, people of foreign background and their descendants were estimated to have formed around 25% of the total population i.e. 2.8 million "new Belgians". Of these new Belgians, 1,200,000 are of European ancestry and 1,350,000 are from non-Western countries (most of them from Morocco, Turkey, and the DR Congo). Since the modification of the Belgian nationality law in 1984 more than 1.3 million migrants have acquired Belgian citizenship. The largest group of immigrants and their descendants in Belgium are Moroccans. 89.2% of inhabitants of Turkish origin have been naturalized, as have 88.4% of people of Moroccan background, 75.4% of Italians, 56.2% of the French and 47.8% of Dutch people.Belgium has three official languages: Dutch, French and German. A number of non-official minority languages are spoken as well.As no census exists, there are no official statistical data regarding the distribution or usage of Belgium's three official languages or their dialects. However, various criteria, including the language(s) of parents, of education, or the second-language status of foreign born, may provide suggested figures. An estimated 60% of the Belgian population are native speakers of Dutch (often referred to as Flemish), and 40% of the population speaks French natively. French-speaking Belgians are often referred to as Walloons, although the French speakers in Brussels are not Walloons.The total number of native Dutch speakers is estimated to be about 6.23 million, concentrated in the northern Flanders region, while native French speakers number 3.32 million in Wallonia and an estimated 870,000 (or 85%) in the officially bilingual Brussels-Capital Region. The German-speaking Community is made up of 73,000 people in the east of the Walloon Region; around 10,000 German and 60,000 Belgian nationals are speakers of German. Roughly 23,000 more German speakers live in municipalities near the official Community.Both Belgian Dutch and Belgian French have minor differences in vocabulary and semantic nuances from the varieties spoken respectively in the Netherlands and France. Many Flemish people still speak dialects of Dutch in their local environment. Walloon, considered either as a dialect of French or a distinct Romance language, is now only understood and spoken occasionally, mostly by elderly people. Walloon is divided into four dialects, which along with those of Picard, are rarely used in public life and have largely been replaced by French.Since the country's independence, Roman Catholicism has had an important role in Belgium's politics. However Belgium is largely a secular country as the constitution provides for freedom of religion, and the government generally respects this right in practice. During the reigns of Albert I and Baudouin, the Belgian royal family had a reputation of deeply rooted Catholicism.Roman Catholicism has traditionally been Belgium's majority religion; being especially strong in Flanders. However, by 2009 Sunday church attendance was 5% for Belgium in total; 3% in Brussels, and 5.4% in Flanders. Church attendance in 2009 in Belgium was roughly half of the Sunday church attendance in 1998 (11% for the total of Belgium in 1998). Despite the drop in church attendance, Catholic identity nevertheless remains an important part of Belgium's culture.According to the Eurobarometer 2010, 37% of Belgian citizens responded that they believe there is a God. 31% answered that they believe there is some sort of spirit or life-force. 27% answered that they do not believe there is any sort of spirit, God, or life-force. 5% did not respond. According to the Eurobarometer 2015, 60.7% of the total population of Belgium adhered to Christianity, with Roman Catholicism being the largest denomination with 52.9%. Protestants comprised 2.1% and Orthodox Christians were the 1.6% of the total. Non-religious people comprised 32.0% of the population and were divided between atheists (14.9%) and agnostics (17.1%). A further 5.2% of the population was Muslim and 2.1% were believers in other religions. The same survey held in 2012 found that Christianity was the largest religion in Belgium, accounting for 65% of Belgians.Symbolically and materially, the Roman Catholic Church remains in a favorable position. Belgium officially recognizes three religions: Christianity (Catholic, Protestantism, Orthodox churches and Anglicanism), Islam and Judaism.In the early 2000s, there were approximately 42,000 Jews in Belgium. The Jewish Community of Antwerp (numbering some 18,000) is one of the largest in Europe, and one of the last places in the world where Yiddish is the primary language of a large Jewish community (mirroring certain Orthodox and Hasidic communities in New York, New Jersey, and Israel). In addition, most Jewish children in Antwerp receive a Jewish education. There are several Jewish newspapers and more than 45 active synagogues (30 of which are in Antwerp) in the country.A 2006 inquiry in Flanders, considered to be a more religious region than Wallonia, showed that 55% considered themselves religious and that 36% believed that God created the universe. On the other hand, Wallonia has become one of Europe's most secular/least religious regions. Most of the French-speaking region's population does not consider religion an important part of their lives, and as much as 45% of the population identifies as irreligious. This is particularly the case in eastern Wallonia and areas along the French border.A 2008 estimate found that approximately 6% of the Belgian population (628,751 people) is Muslim. Muslims constitute 23.6% of the population of Brussels, 4.9% of Wallonia and 5.1% of Flanders. The majority of Belgian Muslims live in the major cities, such as Antwerp, Brussels and Charleroi. The largest group of immigrants in Belgium are Moroccans, with 400,000 people. The Turks are the third largest group, and the second largest Muslim ethnic group, numbering 220,000.The Belgians enjoy good health. According to 2012 estimates, the average life expectancy is 79.65 years. Since 1960, life expectancy has, in line with the European average, grown by two months per year. Death in Belgium is mainly due to heart and vascular disorders, neoplasms, disorders of the respiratory system and unnatural causes of death (accidents, suicide). Non-natural causes of death and cancer are the most common causes of death for females up to age 24 and males up to age 44.Healthcare in Belgium is financed through both social security contributions and taxation. Health insurance is compulsory. Health care is delivered by a mixed public and private system of independent medical practitioners and public, university and semi-private hospitals. Health care service are payable by the patient and reimbursed later by health insurance institutions, but for ineligible categories (of patients and services) so-called 3rd party payment systems exist. The Belgian health care system is supervised and financed by the federal government, the Flemish and Walloon Regional governments; and the German Community also has (indirect) oversight and responsibilities.For the first time in Belgian history, the first child was euthanized following the 2-year mark of the removal of the euthanization age restrictions. The child had been euthanized due to an incurable disease that was inflicted upon the child. Although there may have been some support for the euthanization there is a possibility of controversy due to the issue revolving around the subject of assisted suicide. Excluding assisted suicide, Belgium has the highest suicide rate in Western Europe and one of the highest suicide rates in the developed world (exceeded only by Lithuania, South Korea, and Latvia).Education is compulsory from 6 to 18 years of age for Belgians. Among OECD countries in 2002, Belgium had the third highest proportion of 18- to 21-year-olds enrolled in postsecondary education, at 42%. Though an estimated 99% of the adult population is literate, concern is rising over functional illiteracy. The Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA), coordinated by the OECD, currently ranks Belgium's education as the 19th best in the world, being significantly higher than the OECD average. Education being organized separately by each, the Flemish Community scores noticeably above the French and German-speaking Communities.Mirroring the dual structure of the 19th-century Belgian political landscape, characterized by the Liberal and the Catholic parties, the educational system is segregated within a secular and a religious segment. The secular branch of schooling is controlled by the communities, the provinces, or the municipalities, while religious, mainly Catholic branch education, is organized by religious authorities, although subsidized and supervised by the communities.Despite its political and linguistic divisions, the region corresponding to today's Belgium has seen the flourishing of major artistic movements that have had tremendous influence on European art and culture. Nowadays, to a certain extent, cultural life is concentrated within each language Community, and a variety of barriers have made a shared cultural sphere less pronounced. Since the 1970s, there are no bilingual universities or colleges in the country except the Royal Military Academy and the Antwerp Maritime Academy.Contributions to painting and architecture have been especially rich. The Mosan art, the Early Netherlandish, the Flemish Renaissance and Baroque painting and major examples of Romanesque, Gothic, Renaissance and Baroque architecture are milestones in the history of art. While the 15th century's art in the Low Countries is dominated by the religious paintings of Jan van Eyck and Rogier van der Weyden, the 16th century is characterized by a broader panel of styles such as Peter Breughel's landscape paintings and Lambert Lombard's representation of the antique. Though the Baroque style of Peter Paul Rubens and Anthony van Dyck flourished in the early 17th century in the Southern Netherlands, it gradually declined thereafter.During the 19th and 20th centuries many original romantic, expressionist and surrealist Belgian painters emerged, including James Ensor and other artists belonging to the Les XX group, Constant Permeke, Paul Delvaux and René Magritte. The avant-garde CoBrA movement appeared in the 1950s, while the sculptor Panamarenko remains a remarkable figure in contemporary art. Multidisciplinary artists Jan Fabre, Wim Delvoye and the painter Luc Tuymans are other internationally renowned figures on the contemporary art scene.Belgian contributions to architecture also continued into the 19th and 20th centuries, including the work of Victor Horta and Henry van de Velde, who were major initiators of the Art Nouveau style.The vocal music of the Franco-Flemish School developed in the southern part of the Low Countries and was an important contribution to Renaissance culture. In the 19th and 20th centuries, there was an emergence of major violinists, such as Henri Vieuxtemps, Eugène Ysaÿe and Arthur Grumiaux, while Adolphe Sax invented the saxophone in 1846. The composer César Franck was born in Liège in 1822. Contemporary popular music in Belgium is also of repute. Jazz musician Toots Thielemans and singer Jacques Brel have achieved global fame. Nowadays, singer Stromae has been a musical revelation in Europe and beyond, having great success. In rock/pop music, Telex, Front 242, K's Choice, Hooverphonic, Zap Mama, Soulwax and dEUS are well known. In the heavy metal scene, bands like Machiavel, Channel Zero and Enthroned have a worldwide fan-base.Belgium has produced several well-known authors, including the poets Emile Verhaeren, Guido Gezelle, Robert Goffin and novelists Hendrik Conscience, Stijn Streuvels, Georges Simenon, Suzanne Lilar, Hugo Claus and Amélie Nothomb. The poet and playwright Maurice Maeterlinck won the Nobel Prize in literature in 1911. "The Adventures of Tintin" by Hergé is the best known of Franco-Belgian comics, but many other major authors, including Peyo ("The Smurfs"), André Franquin ("Gaston Lagaffe"), Dupa ("Cubitus"), Morris ("Lucky Luke"), Greg ("Achille Talon"), Lambil ("Les Tuniques Bleues"), Edgar P. Jacobs and Willy Vandersteen brought the Belgian cartoon strip industry a worldwide fame. Additionally, famous crime author Agatha Christie created the character Hercule Poirot, a Belgian detective, who has served as a protagonist in a number of her acclaimed mystery novels.Belgian cinema has brought a number of mainly Flemish novels to life on-screen. Other Belgian directors include André Delvaux, Stijn Coninx, Luc and Jean-Pierre Dardenne; well-known actors include Jean-Claude Van Damme, Jan Decleir and Marie Gillain; and successful films include "Bullhead, Man Bites Dog" and "The Alzheimer Affair".Belgium is also home to a number of successful fashion designers . For instance, in the 1980s, Antwerp's Royal Academy of Fine Arts produced important fashion trendsetters, known as the Antwerp Six.Folklore plays a major role in Belgium's cultural life: the country has a comparatively high number of processions, cavalcades, parades, " and 'ducasses', 'kermesse' and other local festivals, nearly always with an originally religious or mythological background. The Carnival of Binche with its famous Gilles and the 'Processional Giants and Dragons' of Ath, Brussels, Dendermonde, Mechelen and Mons are recognized by UNESCO as Masterpieces of the Oral and Intangible Heritage of Humanity.Other examples are the Carnival of Aalst; the still very religious processions of the Holy Blood in Bruges, Virga Jesse Basilica in Hasselt and Basilica of Our Lady of Hanswijk in Mechelen; festival in Liège; and the Walloon festival in Namur. Originated in 1832 and revived in the 1960s, the Gentse Feesten have become a modern tradition. A major non-official holiday is the Saint Nicholas Day, a festivity for children and, in Liège, for students.Many highly ranked Belgian restaurants can be found in the most influential restaurant guides, such as the Michelin Guide. Belgium is famous for beer, chocolate, waffles and french fries with mayonnaise. Contrary to their name, french fries are claimed to have originated in Belgium, although their exact place of origin is uncertain. The national dishes are "steak and fries with salad", and "mussels with fries".Brands of Belgian chocolate and pralines, like Côte d'Or, Neuhaus, Leonidas and Godiva are famous, as well as independent producers such as Burie and Del Rey in Antwerp and Mary's in Brussels. Belgium produces over 1100 varieties of beer. The Trappist beer of the Abbey of Westvleteren has repeatedly been rated the world's best beer.The biggest brewer in the world by volume is Anheuser-Busch InBev, based in Leuven.Since the 1970s, sports clubs and federations are organized separately within each language community. Association football is the most popular sport in both parts of Belgium; also very popular are cycling, tennis, swimming, judo and basketball.The Belgium national football team have been on the top spot of the FIFA World Rankings ever since September 2018 (first time reached this rank in November 2015). Since the 1990s, the team have been the world's number one for the most years in history, only behind the records of Brazil and Spain. The team's golden generations with the world class players in the squad, namely Eden Hazard, Kevin De Bruyne, Jean-Marie Pfaff, Jan Ceulemans achieved the bronze medals at World Cup 2018, and silver medals at Euro 1980. Belgium hosted the Euro 1972, and co-hosted the Euro 2000 with the Netherlands.Belgians hold the most Tour de France victories of any country except France. They have also the most victories on the UCI Road World Championships. Philippe Gilbert is the 2012 world champion. Another modern well-known Belgian cyclist is Tom Boonen. With five victories in the Tour de France and numerous other cycling records, Belgian cyclist Eddy Merckx is regarded as one of the greatest cyclists of all time.Kim Clijsters and Justine Henin both were Player of the Year in the Women's Tennis Association as they were ranked the number one female tennis player.The Spa-Francorchamps motor-racing circuit hosts the Formula One World Championship Belgian Grand Prix. The Belgian driver, Jacky Ickx, won eight Grands Prix and six 24 Hours of Le Mans and finished twice as runner-up in the Formula One World Championship. Belgium also has a strong reputation in, motocross with the riders Joël Robert, Roger De Coster, Georges Jobé, Eric Geboers and Stefan Everts among others. Sporting events annually held in Belgium include the Memorial Van Damme athletics competition, the Belgian Grand Prix Formula One, and a number of classic cycle races such as the Tour of Flanders and Liège–Bastogne–Liège. The 1920 Summer Olympics were held in Antwerp. The 1977 European Basketball Championship was held in Liège and Ostend.	[ "Charles Michel", "Alexander De Croo" ]
Who was the head of Belgium in 28/05/2020?	May 28, 2020	{ "text": [ "Sophie Wilmès" ] }	L2_Q31_P6_1	Charles Michel is the head of the government of Belgium from Oct, 2014 to Oct, 2019. Alexander De Croo is the head of the government of Belgium from Oct, 2020 to Dec, 2022. Sophie Wilmès is the head of the government of Belgium from Oct, 2019 to Oct, 2020.	BelgiumBelgium ( ; ; ), officially the Kingdom of Belgium, is a country in Western Europe. It is bordered by the Netherlands to the north, Germany to the east, Luxembourg to the southeast, France to the southwest, and the North Sea to the northwest. It covers an area of and has a population of more than 11.5 million, making it the 22nd most densely populated country in the world and the 6th most densely populated country in Europe, with a density of . The capital and largest city is Brussels; other major cities are Antwerp, Ghent, Charleroi, Liège, Bruges, Namur, and Leuven.Belgium is a sovereign state and a federal constitutional monarchy with a parliamentary system. Its institutional organization is complex and is structured on both regional and linguistic grounds. It is divided into three highly autonomous regions: the Flemish Region (Flanders) in the north, the Walloon Region (Wallonia) in the south, and the Brussels-Capital Region. Brussels is the smallest and most densely populated region, as well as the richest region in terms of GDP per capita.Belgium is home to two main linguistic communities: the Dutch-speaking Flemish Community, which constitutes about 60 percent of the population, and the French-speaking Community, which constitutes about 40 percent of the population. A small German-speaking Community, numbering around one percent, exists in the East Cantons. The Brussels-Capital Region is officially bilingual in French and Dutch, although French is the dominant language. Belgium's linguistic diversity and related political conflicts are reflected in its complex system of governance, made up of six different governments.The country as it exists today was established following the 1830 Belgian Revolution, when it seceded from the Netherlands, which had itself only existed since 1815. The name chosen for the new state is derived from the Latin word "Belgium", used in Julius Caesar's "Gallic Wars", to describe a nearby region in the period around 55 BCE. Belgium is part of an area known as the Low Countries, historically a somewhat larger region than the Benelux group of states, as it also included parts of northern France. Since the Middle Ages, its central location near several major rivers has meant that the area has been relatively prosperous, connected commercially and politically to its bigger neighbours. Belgium has unfortunately also been the battleground of European powers, earning the moniker the "Battlefield of Europe", a reputation strengthened in the 20th century by both world wars. Belgium participated in the Industrial Revolution and, during the course of the 20th century, possessed a number of colonies in Africa. Between 1888 and 1908, Leopold II, king of Belgium, perpetrated one of the largest massacres in human history in Congo Free State, which was his private estate, and not yet a colony of Belgium. Estimates of the death toll are disputed but millions of people, a significant part of the population, died for the sake of rubber and ivory exports.The second half of the 20th century was marked by rising tensions between the Dutch-speaking and the French-speaking citizens fuelled by differences in language and culture and the unequal economic development of Flanders and Wallonia. This continuing antagonism has led to several far-reaching reforms, resulting in a transition from a unitary to a federal arrangement during the period from 1970 to 1993. Despite the reforms, tensions between the groups have remained, if not increased; there is significant separatism particularly among the Flemish; controversial language laws exist such as the municipalities with language facilities; and the formation of a coalition government took 18 months following the June 2010 federal election, a world record. Unemployment in Wallonia is more than double that of Flanders, which boomed after the war.Belgium is one of the six founding countries of the European Union and its capital, Brussels, hosts the official seats of the European Commission, the Council of the European Union, and the European Council, as well as one of two seats of the European Parliament (the other being Strasbourg). Belgium is also a founding member of the Eurozone, NATO, OECD, and WTO, and a part of the trilateral Benelux Union and the Schengen Area. Brussels hosts the headquarters of many major international organizations such as NATO.Belgium is a developed country, with an advanced high-income economy. It has very high standards of living, quality of life, healthcare, education, and is categorized as "very high" in the Human Development Index. It also ranks as one of the safest or most peaceful countries in the world.The "Belgae" were the inhabitants of the northernmost part of Gaul, which was much bigger than modern Belgium. Caesar used the Latin word ""Belgium"", to refer to their country within northern Gaul, which was a region now in northern France. Modern Belgium corresponds to the lands of the Morini, Menapii, Nervii, Germani Cisrhenani, Aduatuci, and, around Arlon, a part of the country of the Treveri. All of these except the Treveri formed a less Celtic-influenced "transition zone", north of the area Caesar treated as "Belgium".After Caesar's conquests, "Gallia Belgica" came to be the Latin name of a large Roman province covering most of Northern Gaul, including the Treveri. Areas closer to the lower Rhine frontier, including the eastern part of modern Belgium, eventually became part of the frontier province of "Germania Inferior", which interacted with Germanic tribes outside the empire. At the time when central government collapsed in the Western Roman Empire, the Roman provinces of Belgica and Germania were inhabited by a mix of a Romanized population and Germanic-speaking Franks who came to dominate the military and political class.During the 5th century, the area came under the rule of the Frankish Merovingian kings, who were probably first established in what is northern France. During the 8th century, the kingdom of the Franks came to be ruled by the Carolingian Dynasty, whose centre of power was around the area which is now eastern Belgium. The frankish kingdom had been divided up in many ways, but the Treaty of Verdun in 843 divided the Carolingian Empire into three kingdoms, whose borders had a lasting impact on medieval political boundaries. Most of modern Belgium was in the Middle Kingdom, later known as Lotharingia, but the coastal county of Flanders, west of the Scheldt, became part of West Francia, the predecessor of France. In 870 in the Treaty of Meerssen, modern Belgium lands all became part of the western kingdom for a period, but in 880 in the Treaty of Ribemont, Lotharingia returned to the lasting control of the Holy Roman Emperor. The lordships and bishoprics along the "March" (frontier) between the two great kingdoms maintained important connections between each other. The county of Flanders expanded over the Scheldt into the empire, and during several periods was ruled by the same lords as the county of Hainaut. In the 13th and 14th centuries, the cloth industry and commerce boomed especially in the County of Flanders and it became one of the richest areas in Europe. This prosperity played a role in conflicts between Flanders and the king of France. Famously, Flemish militias scored a surprise victory at the Battle of the Golden Spurs against a strong force of mounted knights in 1302, but France soon regained control of the rebellious province.In the 15th century, the Duke of Burgundy in France took control of Flanders, and from there they proceeded to unite much of what is now the Benelux, the so-called Burgundian Netherlands. "Belgium" and "Flanders" were the first two common names used for the Burgundian Netherlands which was the predecessor of the Austrian Netherlands, the predecessor of modern Belgium. The union, technically stretching between two kingdoms, gave the area economic and political stability which led to an even greater prosperity and artistic creation.Born in Belgium, the Habsburg Emperor Charles V was heir of the Burgundians, but also of the royal families of Austria, Castile and Aragon. With the Pragmatic Sanction of 1549 he gave the Seventeen Provinces more legitimacy as a stable entity, rather than just a temporary personal union. He also increased the influence of these Netherlands over the Prince-Bishopric of Liège, which continued to exist as a large semi-independent enclave.The Eighty Years' War (1568–1648), was triggered by the Spanish government's policy towards protestantism, which was becoming popular in the Low Countries. The rebellious northern United Provinces ("Belgica Foederata" in Latin, the "Federated Netherlands") eventually separated from the Southern Netherlands ("Belgica Regia", the "Royal Netherlands"). The latter were ruled successively by the Spanish (Spanish Netherlands) and the Austrian Habsburgs (Austrian Netherlands) and comprised most of modern Belgium. This was the theatre of several more protracted conflicts during much of the 17th and 18th centuries involving France, including the Franco-Dutch War (1672–1678), the Nine Years' War (1688–1697), the War of the Spanish Succession (1701–1714), and part of the War of the Austrian Succession (1740–1748).Following the , the Low Countriesincluding territories that were never nominally under Habsburg rule, such as the Prince-Bishopric of Liègewere annexed by the French First Republic, ending Austrian rule in the region. A reunification of the Low Countries as the United Kingdom of the Netherlands occurred at the dissolution of the First French Empire in 1814, after the abdication of Napoleon.In 1830, the Belgian Revolution led to the separation of the Southern Provinces from the Netherlands and to the establishment of a Catholic and bourgeois, officially French-speaking and neutral, independent Belgium under a provisional government and a national congress. Since the installation of Leopold I as king on 1831, now celebrated as Belgium's National Day, Belgium has been a constitutional monarchy and parliamentary democracy, with a laicist constitution based on the Napoleonic code. Although the franchise was initially restricted, universal suffrage for men was introduced after the general strike of 1893 (with plural voting until 1919) and for women in 1949.The main political parties of the 19th century were the Catholic Party and the Liberal Party, with the Belgian Labour Party emerging towards the end of the 19th century. French was originally the single official language adopted by the nobility and the bourgeoisie. It progressively lost its overall importance as Dutch became recognized as well. This recognition became official in 1898, and in 1967, the parliament accepted a Dutch version of the Constitution.The Berlin Conference of 1885 ceded control of the Congo Free State to King Leopold II as his private possession. From around 1900 there was growing international concern for the extreme and savage treatment of the Congolese population under Leopold II, for whom the Congo was primarily a source of revenue from ivory and rubber production. Many Congolese were killed by Leopold's agents for failing to meet production quotas for ivory and rubber. In 1908, this outcry led the Belgian state to assume responsibility for the government of the colony, henceforth called the Belgian Congo. A Belgian commission in 1919 estimated that Congo's population was half what it was in 1879.Germany invaded Belgium in August 1914 as part of the Schlieffen Plan to attack France, and much of the Western Front fighting of World War I occurred in western parts of the country. The opening months of the war were known as the Rape of Belgium due to German excesses. Belgium assumed control of the German colonies of Ruanda-Urundi (modern-day Rwanda and Burundi) during the war, and in 1924 the League of Nations mandated them to Belgium. In the aftermath of the First World War, Belgium annexed the Prussian districts of Eupen and Malmedy in 1925, thereby causing the presence of a German-speaking minority.German forces again invaded the country in May 1940, and 40,690 Belgians, over half of them Jews, were killed during the subsequent occupation and The Holocaust. From September 1944 to February 1945 the Allies liberated Belgium. After World War II, a general strike forced King Leopold III to abdicate in 1951, since many Belgians felt he had collaborated with Germany during the war. The Belgian Congo gained independence in 1960 during the Congo Crisis; Ruanda-Urundi followed with its independence two years later. Belgium joined NATO as a founding member and formed the Benelux group of nations with the Netherlands and Luxembourg.Belgium became one of the six founding members of the European Coal and Steel Community in 1951 and of the European Atomic Energy Community and European Economic Community, established in 1957. The latter has now become the European Union, for which Belgium hosts major administrations and institutions, including the European Commission, the Council of the European Union and the extraordinary and committee sessions of the European Parliament.In the early 1990s, Belgium saw several large corruption scandals notably surrounding Marc Dutroux, Andre Cools, the Dioxin Affair, Agusta Scandal and Murder of Karel Van Noppen.Belgium shares borders with France (), Germany (), Luxembourg () and the Netherlands (). Its total surface, including water area, is . Before 2018, its total area was believed to be . However, when the country's statistics were measured in 2018, a new calculation method was used. Unlike previous calculations, this one included the area from the coast to the low-water line, revealing the country to be larger in surface area than previously thought. Its land area alone is 30,278 km. It lies between latitudes 49°30' and 51°30' N, and longitudes 2°33' and 6°24' E.Belgium has three main geographical regions; the coastal plain in the northwest and the central plateau both belong to the Anglo-Belgian Basin, and the Ardennes uplands in the southeast to the Hercynian orogenic belt. The Paris Basin reaches a small fourth area at Belgium's southernmost tip, Belgian Lorraine.The coastal plain consists mainly of sand dunes and polders. Further inland lies a smooth, slowly rising landscape irrigated by numerous waterways, with fertile valleys and the northeastern sandy plain of the Campine ("Kempen"). The thickly forested hills and plateaus of the Ardennes are more rugged and rocky with caves and small gorges. Extending westward into France, this area is eastwardly connected to the Eifel in Germany by the High Fens plateau, on which the Signal de Botrange forms the country's highest point at .The climate is maritime temperate with significant precipitation in all seasons (Köppen climate classification: "Cfb"), like most of northwest Europe. The average temperature is lowest in January at and highest in July at . The average precipitation per month varies between for February and April, to for July. Averages for the years 2000 to 2006 show daily temperature minimums of and maximums of and monthly rainfall of ; these are about 1 °C and nearly 10 millimetres above last century's normal values, respectively.Phytogeographically, Belgium is shared between the Atlantic European and Central European provinces of the Circumboreal Region within the Boreal Kingdom. According to the World Wide Fund for Nature, the territory of Belgium belongs to the terrestrial ecoregions of Atlantic mixed forests and Western European broadleaf forests. Belgium had a 2018 Forest Landscape Integrity Index mean score of 1.36/10, ranking it 163rd globally out of 172 countries.The territory of Belgium is divided into three Regions, two of which, the Flemish Region and Walloon Region, are in turn subdivided into provinces; the third Region, the Brussels Capital Region, is neither a province nor a part of a province.Belgium is a constitutional, popular monarchy and a federal parliamentary democracy. The bicameral federal parliament is composed of a Senate and a Chamber of Representatives. The former is made up of 50 senators appointed by the parliaments of the communities and regions and 10 co-opted senators. Prior to 2014, most of the Senate's members were directly elected. The Chamber's 150 representatives are elected under a proportional voting system from 11 electoral districts. Belgium has compulsory voting and thus maintains one of the highest rates of voter turnout in the world.The King (currently Philippe) is the head of state, though with limited prerogatives. He appoints ministers, including a Prime Minister, that have the confidence of the Chamber of Representatives to form the federal government. The Council of Ministers is composed of no more than fifteen members. With the possible exception of the Prime Minister, the Council of Ministers is composed of an equal number of Dutch-speaking members and French-speaking members.The judicial system is based on civil law and originates from the Napoleonic code. The Court of Cassation is the court of last resort, with the courts of appeal one level below.Belgium's political institutions are complex; most political power is organized around the need to represent the main cultural communities.Since about 1970, the significant national Belgian political parties have split into distinct components that mainly represent the political and linguistic interests of these communities.The major parties in each community, though close to the political center, belong to three main groups: Christian Democrats, Liberals, and Social Democrats.Further notable parties came into being well after the middle of last century, mainly around linguistic, nationalist, or environmental themes and recently smaller ones of some specific liberal nature.A string of Christian Democrat coalition governments from 1958 was broken in 1999 after the first dioxin crisis, a major food contamination scandal. A "rainbow coalition" emerged from six parties: the Flemish and the French-speaking Liberals, Social Democrats and Greens. Later, a "purple coalition" of Liberals and Social Democrats formed after the Greens lost most of their seats in the 2003 election.The government led by Prime Minister Guy Verhofstadt from 1999 to 2007 achieved a balanced budget, some tax reforms, a labor-market reform, scheduled nuclear phase-out and instigated legislation allowing more stringent war crime and more lenient soft drug usage prosecution. Restrictions on withholding euthanasia were reduced and same-sex marriage legalized. The government promoted active diplomacy in Africa and opposed the invasion of Iraq. It is the only country that does not have age restrictions on euthanasia.Verhofstadt's coalition fared badly in the June 2007 elections. For more than a year, the country experienced a political crisis. This crisis was such that many observers speculated on a possible partition of Belgium. From 2007 until 2008 the temporary Verhofstadt III Government was in office. This coalition of the Flemish and Francophone Christian Democrats, the Flemish and Francophone Liberals together with the Francophone Social Democrats was an interim government until 2008.On that day a new government, led by Flemish Christian Democrat Yves Leterme, the actual winner of the federal elections of , was sworn in by the king. On 2008 Leterme announced the resignation of the cabinet to the king, as no progress in constitutional reforms had been made.In December 2008, he once more offered his resignation to the king after a crisis surrounding the sale of Fortis to BNP Paribas. At this juncture, his resignation was accepted and Christian Democratic and Flemish Herman Van Rompuy was sworn in as Prime Minister on 2008.After Herman Van Rompuy was designated the first permanent President of the European Council on 2009, he offered the resignation of his government to King Albert II on 2009. A few hours later, the new government under Prime Minister Yves Leterme was sworn in. On 2010, Leterme again offered the resignation of his cabinet to the king after one of the coalition partners, the OpenVLD, withdrew from the government, and on 2010 King Albert officially accepted the resignation.The Parliamentary elections in Belgium on 2010 saw the Flemish nationalist N-VA become the largest party in Flanders, and the Socialist Party PS the largest party in Wallonia. Until December 2011, Belgium was governed by Leterme's caretaker government awaiting the end of the deadlocked negotiations for formation of a new government. By 30 March 2011, this set a new world record for the elapsed time without an official government, previously held by war-torn Iraq. Finally, in December 2011 the Di Rupo Government led by Walloon socialist Prime Minister Elio Di Rupo was sworn in.The 2014 federal election (coinciding with the regional elections) resulted in a further electoral gain for the Flemish nationalist N-VA, although the incumbent coalition (composed of Flemish and French-speaking Social Democrats, Liberals, and Christian Democrats) maintains a solid majority in Parliament and in all electoral constituencies. On 22 July 2014, King Philippe nominated Charles Michel (MR) and Kris Peeters (CD&V) to lead the formation of a new federal cabinet composed of the Flemish parties N-VA, CD&V, Open Vld and the French-speaking MR, which resulted in the Michel Government. It was the first time N-VA was part of the federal cabinet, while the French-speaking side was represented only by the MR, which achieved a minority of the public votes in Wallonia.In May 2019 federal elections in the Flemish-speaking northern region of Flanders far-right Vlaams Belang party made major gains. In the French-speaking southern area of Wallonia the Socialists were strong. The moderate Flemish nationalist party the N-VA remained the largest party in parliament.In July 2019 prime minister Charles Michel was selected to hold the post of President of the European Council. His successor Sophie Wilmès was Belgium's first female prime minister. She led the caretaker government since October 2019. The Flemish Liberal party politician Alexander De Croo became new prime minister in October 2020. The parties had agreed on federal government 16 months after the elections.Following a usage which can be traced back to the Burgundian and Habsburg courts, in the 19th century it was necessary to speak French to belong to the governing upper class, and those who could only speak Dutch were effectively second-class citizens. Late that century, and continuing into the 20th century, Flemish movements evolved to counter this situation.While the people in Southern Belgium spoke French or dialects of French, and most Brusselers adopted French as their first language, the Flemings refused to do so and succeeded progressively in making Dutch an equal language in the education system. Following World War II, Belgian politics became increasingly dominated by the autonomy of its two main linguistic communities. Intercommunal tensions rose and the constitution was amended to minimize the potential for conflict.Based on the four language areas defined in 1962–63 (the Dutch, bilingual, French and German language areas), consecutive revisions of the country's constitution in 1970, 1980, 1988 and 1993 established a unique form of a federal state with segregated political power into three levels:The constitutional language areas determine the official languages in their municipalities, as well as the geographical limits of the empowered institutions for specific matters. Although this would allow for seven parliaments and governments when the Communities and Regions were created in 1980, Flemish politicians decided to merge both. Thus the Flemings just have one single institutional body of parliament and government is empowered for all except federal and specific municipal matters.The overlapping boundaries of the Regions and Communities have created two notable peculiarities: the territory of the Brussels-Capital Region (which came into existence nearly a decade after the other regions) is included in both the Flemish and French Communities, and the territory of the German-speaking Community lies wholly within the Walloon Region. Conflicts about jurisdiction between the bodies are resolved by the Constitutional Court of Belgium. The structure is intended as a compromise to allow different cultures to live together peacefully.The Federal State's authority includes justice, defense, federal police, social security, nuclear energy, monetary policy and public debt, and other aspects of public finances. State-owned companies include the Belgian Post Group and Belgian Railways. The Federal Government is responsible for the obligations of Belgium and its federalized institutions towards the European Union and NATO. It controls substantial parts of public health, home affairs and foreign affairs. The budget—without the debt—controlled by the federal government amounts to about 50% of the national fiscal income. The federal government employs around 12% of the civil servants.Communities exercise their authority only within linguistically determined geographical boundaries, originally oriented towards the individuals of a Community's language: culture (including audiovisual media), education and the use of the relevant language. Extensions to personal matters less directly connected with language comprise health policy (curative and preventive medicine) and assistance to individuals (protection of youth, social welfare, aid to families, immigrant assistance services, and so on.).Regions have authority in fields that can be broadly associated with their territory. These include economy, employment, agriculture, water policy, housing, public works, energy, transport, the environment, town and country planning, nature conservation, credit and foreign trade. They supervise the provinces, municipalities and intercommunal utility companies.In several fields, the different levels each have their own say on specifics. With education, for instance, the autonomy of the Communities neither includes decisions about the compulsory aspect nor allows for setting minimum requirements for awarding qualifications, which remain federal matters. Each level of government can be involved in scientific research and international relations associated with its powers. The treaty-making power of the Regions' and Communities' Governments is the broadest of all the Federating units of all the Federations all over the world.Because of its location at the crossroads of Western Europe, Belgium has historically been the route of invading armies from its larger neighbors. With virtually defenseless borders, Belgium has traditionally sought to avoid domination by the more powerful nations which surround it through a policy of mediation. The Belgians have been strong advocates of European integration. Both the European Union and NATO are headquartered in Belgium.The Belgian Armed Forces have about 47,000 active troops. In 2019, Belgium's defense budget totaled €4.303 billion ($4.921 billion) representing .93% of its GDP. They are organized into one unified structure which consists of four main components: Land Component, or the Army; Air Component, or the Air Force; Marine Component, or the Navy; Medical Component. The operational commands of the four components are subordinate to the Staff Department for Operations and Training of the Ministry of Defense, which is headed by the Assistant Chief of Staff Operations and Training, and to the Chief of Defense.The effects of the Second World War made collective security a priority for Belgian foreign policy. In March 1948 Belgium signed the Treaty of Brussels and then joined NATO in 1948. However, the integration of the armed forces into NATO did not begin until after the Korean War. The Belgians, along with the Luxembourg government, sent a detachment of battalion strength to fight in Korea known as the Belgian United Nations Command. This mission was the first in a long line of UN missions which the Belgians supported. Currently, the Belgian Marine Component is working closely together with the Dutch Navy under the command of the Admiral Benelux.Belgium's strongly globalized economy and its transport infrastructure are integrated with the rest of Europe. Its location at the heart of a highly industrialized region helped make it the world's 15th largest trading nation in 2007. The economy is characterized by a highly productive work force, high GNP and high exports per capita. Belgium's main imports are raw materials, machinery and equipment, chemicals, raw diamonds, pharmaceuticals, foodstuffs, transportation equipment, and oil products. Its main exports are machinery and equipment, chemicals, finished diamonds, metals and metal products, and foodstuffs.The Belgian economy is heavily service-oriented and shows a dual nature: a dynamic Flemish economy and a Walloon economy that lags behind. One of the founding members of the European Union, Belgium strongly supports an open economy and the extension of the powers of EU institutions to integrate member economies. Since 1922, through the Belgium-Luxembourg Economic Union, Belgium and Luxembourg have been a single trade market with customs and currency union.Belgium was the first continental European country to undergo the Industrial Revolution, in the early 19th century. Areas in Liège Province and around Charleroi rapidly developed mining and steelmaking, which flourished until the mid-20th century in the Sambre and Meuse valley and made Belgium one of the three most industrialized nations in the world from 1830 to 1910. However, by the 1840s the textile industry of Flanders was in severe crisis, and the region experienced famine from 1846 to 1850.After World War II, Ghent and Antwerp experienced a rapid expansion of the chemical and petroleum industries. The 1973 and 1979 oil crises sent the economy into a recession; it was particularly prolonged in Wallonia, where the steel industry had become less competitive and experienced a serious decline. In the 1980s and 1990s, the economic center of the country continued to shift northwards and is now concentrated in the populous Flemish Diamond area.By the end of the 1980s, Belgian macroeconomic policies had resulted in a cumulative government debt of about 120% of GDP. , the budget was balanced and public debt was equal to 90.30% of GDP. In 2005 and 2006, real GDP growth rates of 1.5% and 3.0%, respectively, were slightly above the average for the Euro area. Unemployment rates of 8.4% in 2005 and 8.2% in 2006 were close to the area average. By , this had grown to 8.5% compared to an average rate of 9.6% for the European Union as a whole (EU 27). From 1832 until 2002, Belgium's currency was the Belgian franc. Belgium switched to the euro in 2002, with the first sets of euro coins being minted in 1999. The standard Belgian euro coins designated for circulation show the portrait of the monarch (first King Albert II, since 2013 King Philippe).Despite an 18% decrease observed from 1970 to 1999, Belgium still had in 1999 the highest rail network density within the European Union with 113.8 km/1 000 km. On the other hand, the same period, 1970–1999, has seen a huge growth (+56%) of the motorway network. In 1999, the density of km motorways per 1000 km and 1000 inhabitants amounted to 55.1 and 16.5 respectively and were significantly superior to the EU's means of 13.7 and 15.9.From a biological resource perspective, Belgium has a low endowment: Belgium's biocapacity adds up to only 0.8 global hectares in 2016, just about half of the 1.6 global hectares of biocapacity available per person worldwide. In contrast, in 2016, Belgians used on average 6.3 global hectares of biocapacity - their ecological footprint of consumption. This means they required about eight times as much biocapacity as Belgium contains. As a result, Belgium was running a biocapacity deficit of 5.5 global hectares per person in 2016.Belgium experiences some of the most congested traffic in Europe. In 2010, commuters to the cities of Brussels and Antwerp spent respectively 65 and 64 hours a year in traffic jams. Like in most small European countries, more than 80% of the airways traffic is handled by a single airport, the Brussels Airport. The ports of Antwerp and Zeebrugge (Bruges) share more than 80% of Belgian maritime traffic, Antwerp being the second European harbor with a gross weight of goods handled of 115 988 000 t in 2000 after a growth of 10.9% over the preceding five years. In 2016, the port of Antwerp handled 214 million tons after a year-on-year growth of 2.7%.There is a large economic gap between Flanders and Wallonia. Wallonia was historically wealthy compared to Flanders, mostly due to its heavy industries, but the decline of the steel industry post-World War II led to the region's rapid decline, whereas Flanders rose swiftly. Since then, Flanders has been prosperous, among the wealthiest regions in Europe, whereas Wallonia has been languishing. As of 2007, the unemployment rate of Wallonia is over double that of Flanders. The divide has played a key part in the tensions between the Flemish and Walloons in addition to the already-existing language divide. Pro-independence movements have gained high popularity in Flanders as a consequence. The separatist New Flemish Alliance (N-VA) party, for instance, is the largest party in Belgium.Contributions to the development of science and technology have appeared throughout the country's history. The 16th century Early Modern flourishing of Western Europe included cartographer Gerardus Mercator, anatomist Andreas Vesalius, herbalist Rembert Dodoens and mathematician Simon Stevin among the most influential scientists.Chemist Ernest Solvay and engineer Zenobe Gramme (École industrielle de Liège) gave their names to the Solvay process and the Gramme dynamo, respectively, in the 1860s. Bakelite was developed in 1907–1909 by Leo Baekeland. Ernest Solvay also acted as a major philanthropist and gave its name to the Solvay Institute of Sociology, the Solvay Brussels School of Economics and Management and the International Solvay Institutes for Physics and Chemistry which are now part of the Université libre de Bruxelles. In 1911, he started a series of conferences, the Solvay Conferences on Physics and Chemistry, which have had a deep impact on the evolution of quantum physics and chemistry. A major contribution to fundamental science was also due to a Belgian, Monsignor Georges Lemaître (Catholic University of Louvain), who is credited with proposing the Big Bang theory of the origin of the universe in 1927.Three Nobel Prizes in Physiology or Medicine were awarded to Belgians: Jules Bordet (Université libre de Bruxelles) in 1919, Corneille Heymans (University of Ghent) in 1938 and Albert Claude (Université libre de Bruxelles) together with Christian de Duve (Université catholique de Louvain) in 1974. François Englert (Université libre de Bruxelles) was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics in 2013. Ilya Prigogine (Université libre de Bruxelles) was awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1977. Two Belgian mathematicians have been awarded the Fields Medal: Pierre Deligne in 1978 and Jean Bourgain in 1994.As of 1 January 2020, the total population of Belgium according to its population register was 11,492,641. The population density of Belgium is as of January 2019, making it the 22nd most densely populated country in the world, and the 6th most densely populated country in Europe. The most densely populated province is Antwerp, the least densely populated province is Luxembourg. As of January 2019, the Flemish Region had a population of 6,589,069 (57.6% of Belgium), its most populous cities being Antwerp (523,248), Ghent (260,341) and Bruges (118,284). Wallonia had a population of 3,633,795 (31.8% of Belgium) with Charleroi (201,816), Liège (197,355) and Namur (110,939), its most populous cities. The Brussels-Capital Region has 1,208,542 inhabitants (10.6% of Belgium) in the 19 municipalities, three of which have over 100,000 residents.In 2017 the average total fertility rate (TFR) across Belgium was 1.64 children per woman, below the replacement rate of 2.1, it remains considerably below the high of 4.87 children born per woman in 1873. Belgium subsequently has one of the oldest populations in the world, with the average age of 41.6 years., nearly 92% of the population had Belgian citizenship, and other European Union member citizens account for around 6%. The prevalent foreign nationals were Italian (171,918), French (125,061), Dutch (116,970), Moroccan (80,579), Portuguese (43,509), Spanish (42,765), Turkish (39,419) and German (37,621). In 2007, there were 1.38 million foreign-born residents in Belgium, corresponding to 12.9% of the total population. Of these, 685,000 (6.4%) were born outside the EU and 695,000 (6.5%) were born in another EU Member State.At the beginning of 2012, people of foreign background and their descendants were estimated to have formed around 25% of the total population i.e. 2.8 million "new Belgians". Of these new Belgians, 1,200,000 are of European ancestry and 1,350,000 are from non-Western countries (most of them from Morocco, Turkey, and the DR Congo). Since the modification of the Belgian nationality law in 1984 more than 1.3 million migrants have acquired Belgian citizenship. The largest group of immigrants and their descendants in Belgium are Moroccans. 89.2% of inhabitants of Turkish origin have been naturalized, as have 88.4% of people of Moroccan background, 75.4% of Italians, 56.2% of the French and 47.8% of Dutch people.Belgium has three official languages: Dutch, French and German. A number of non-official minority languages are spoken as well.As no census exists, there are no official statistical data regarding the distribution or usage of Belgium's three official languages or their dialects. However, various criteria, including the language(s) of parents, of education, or the second-language status of foreign born, may provide suggested figures. An estimated 60% of the Belgian population are native speakers of Dutch (often referred to as Flemish), and 40% of the population speaks French natively. French-speaking Belgians are often referred to as Walloons, although the French speakers in Brussels are not Walloons.The total number of native Dutch speakers is estimated to be about 6.23 million, concentrated in the northern Flanders region, while native French speakers number 3.32 million in Wallonia and an estimated 870,000 (or 85%) in the officially bilingual Brussels-Capital Region. The German-speaking Community is made up of 73,000 people in the east of the Walloon Region; around 10,000 German and 60,000 Belgian nationals are speakers of German. Roughly 23,000 more German speakers live in municipalities near the official Community.Both Belgian Dutch and Belgian French have minor differences in vocabulary and semantic nuances from the varieties spoken respectively in the Netherlands and France. Many Flemish people still speak dialects of Dutch in their local environment. Walloon, considered either as a dialect of French or a distinct Romance language, is now only understood and spoken occasionally, mostly by elderly people. Walloon is divided into four dialects, which along with those of Picard, are rarely used in public life and have largely been replaced by French.Since the country's independence, Roman Catholicism has had an important role in Belgium's politics. However Belgium is largely a secular country as the constitution provides for freedom of religion, and the government generally respects this right in practice. During the reigns of Albert I and Baudouin, the Belgian royal family had a reputation of deeply rooted Catholicism.Roman Catholicism has traditionally been Belgium's majority religion; being especially strong in Flanders. However, by 2009 Sunday church attendance was 5% for Belgium in total; 3% in Brussels, and 5.4% in Flanders. Church attendance in 2009 in Belgium was roughly half of the Sunday church attendance in 1998 (11% for the total of Belgium in 1998). Despite the drop in church attendance, Catholic identity nevertheless remains an important part of Belgium's culture.According to the Eurobarometer 2010, 37% of Belgian citizens responded that they believe there is a God. 31% answered that they believe there is some sort of spirit or life-force. 27% answered that they do not believe there is any sort of spirit, God, or life-force. 5% did not respond. According to the Eurobarometer 2015, 60.7% of the total population of Belgium adhered to Christianity, with Roman Catholicism being the largest denomination with 52.9%. Protestants comprised 2.1% and Orthodox Christians were the 1.6% of the total. Non-religious people comprised 32.0% of the population and were divided between atheists (14.9%) and agnostics (17.1%). A further 5.2% of the population was Muslim and 2.1% were believers in other religions. The same survey held in 2012 found that Christianity was the largest religion in Belgium, accounting for 65% of Belgians.Symbolically and materially, the Roman Catholic Church remains in a favorable position. Belgium officially recognizes three religions: Christianity (Catholic, Protestantism, Orthodox churches and Anglicanism), Islam and Judaism.In the early 2000s, there were approximately 42,000 Jews in Belgium. The Jewish Community of Antwerp (numbering some 18,000) is one of the largest in Europe, and one of the last places in the world where Yiddish is the primary language of a large Jewish community (mirroring certain Orthodox and Hasidic communities in New York, New Jersey, and Israel). In addition, most Jewish children in Antwerp receive a Jewish education. There are several Jewish newspapers and more than 45 active synagogues (30 of which are in Antwerp) in the country.A 2006 inquiry in Flanders, considered to be a more religious region than Wallonia, showed that 55% considered themselves religious and that 36% believed that God created the universe. On the other hand, Wallonia has become one of Europe's most secular/least religious regions. Most of the French-speaking region's population does not consider religion an important part of their lives, and as much as 45% of the population identifies as irreligious. This is particularly the case in eastern Wallonia and areas along the French border.A 2008 estimate found that approximately 6% of the Belgian population (628,751 people) is Muslim. Muslims constitute 23.6% of the population of Brussels, 4.9% of Wallonia and 5.1% of Flanders. The majority of Belgian Muslims live in the major cities, such as Antwerp, Brussels and Charleroi. The largest group of immigrants in Belgium are Moroccans, with 400,000 people. The Turks are the third largest group, and the second largest Muslim ethnic group, numbering 220,000.The Belgians enjoy good health. According to 2012 estimates, the average life expectancy is 79.65 years. Since 1960, life expectancy has, in line with the European average, grown by two months per year. Death in Belgium is mainly due to heart and vascular disorders, neoplasms, disorders of the respiratory system and unnatural causes of death (accidents, suicide). Non-natural causes of death and cancer are the most common causes of death for females up to age 24 and males up to age 44.Healthcare in Belgium is financed through both social security contributions and taxation. Health insurance is compulsory. Health care is delivered by a mixed public and private system of independent medical practitioners and public, university and semi-private hospitals. Health care service are payable by the patient and reimbursed later by health insurance institutions, but for ineligible categories (of patients and services) so-called 3rd party payment systems exist. The Belgian health care system is supervised and financed by the federal government, the Flemish and Walloon Regional governments; and the German Community also has (indirect) oversight and responsibilities.For the first time in Belgian history, the first child was euthanized following the 2-year mark of the removal of the euthanization age restrictions. The child had been euthanized due to an incurable disease that was inflicted upon the child. Although there may have been some support for the euthanization there is a possibility of controversy due to the issue revolving around the subject of assisted suicide. Excluding assisted suicide, Belgium has the highest suicide rate in Western Europe and one of the highest suicide rates in the developed world (exceeded only by Lithuania, South Korea, and Latvia).Education is compulsory from 6 to 18 years of age for Belgians. Among OECD countries in 2002, Belgium had the third highest proportion of 18- to 21-year-olds enrolled in postsecondary education, at 42%. Though an estimated 99% of the adult population is literate, concern is rising over functional illiteracy. The Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA), coordinated by the OECD, currently ranks Belgium's education as the 19th best in the world, being significantly higher than the OECD average. Education being organized separately by each, the Flemish Community scores noticeably above the French and German-speaking Communities.Mirroring the dual structure of the 19th-century Belgian political landscape, characterized by the Liberal and the Catholic parties, the educational system is segregated within a secular and a religious segment. The secular branch of schooling is controlled by the communities, the provinces, or the municipalities, while religious, mainly Catholic branch education, is organized by religious authorities, although subsidized and supervised by the communities.Despite its political and linguistic divisions, the region corresponding to today's Belgium has seen the flourishing of major artistic movements that have had tremendous influence on European art and culture. Nowadays, to a certain extent, cultural life is concentrated within each language Community, and a variety of barriers have made a shared cultural sphere less pronounced. Since the 1970s, there are no bilingual universities or colleges in the country except the Royal Military Academy and the Antwerp Maritime Academy.Contributions to painting and architecture have been especially rich. The Mosan art, the Early Netherlandish, the Flemish Renaissance and Baroque painting and major examples of Romanesque, Gothic, Renaissance and Baroque architecture are milestones in the history of art. While the 15th century's art in the Low Countries is dominated by the religious paintings of Jan van Eyck and Rogier van der Weyden, the 16th century is characterized by a broader panel of styles such as Peter Breughel's landscape paintings and Lambert Lombard's representation of the antique. Though the Baroque style of Peter Paul Rubens and Anthony van Dyck flourished in the early 17th century in the Southern Netherlands, it gradually declined thereafter.During the 19th and 20th centuries many original romantic, expressionist and surrealist Belgian painters emerged, including James Ensor and other artists belonging to the Les XX group, Constant Permeke, Paul Delvaux and René Magritte. The avant-garde CoBrA movement appeared in the 1950s, while the sculptor Panamarenko remains a remarkable figure in contemporary art. Multidisciplinary artists Jan Fabre, Wim Delvoye and the painter Luc Tuymans are other internationally renowned figures on the contemporary art scene.Belgian contributions to architecture also continued into the 19th and 20th centuries, including the work of Victor Horta and Henry van de Velde, who were major initiators of the Art Nouveau style.The vocal music of the Franco-Flemish School developed in the southern part of the Low Countries and was an important contribution to Renaissance culture. In the 19th and 20th centuries, there was an emergence of major violinists, such as Henri Vieuxtemps, Eugène Ysaÿe and Arthur Grumiaux, while Adolphe Sax invented the saxophone in 1846. The composer César Franck was born in Liège in 1822. Contemporary popular music in Belgium is also of repute. Jazz musician Toots Thielemans and singer Jacques Brel have achieved global fame. Nowadays, singer Stromae has been a musical revelation in Europe and beyond, having great success. In rock/pop music, Telex, Front 242, K's Choice, Hooverphonic, Zap Mama, Soulwax and dEUS are well known. In the heavy metal scene, bands like Machiavel, Channel Zero and Enthroned have a worldwide fan-base.Belgium has produced several well-known authors, including the poets Emile Verhaeren, Guido Gezelle, Robert Goffin and novelists Hendrik Conscience, Stijn Streuvels, Georges Simenon, Suzanne Lilar, Hugo Claus and Amélie Nothomb. The poet and playwright Maurice Maeterlinck won the Nobel Prize in literature in 1911. "The Adventures of Tintin" by Hergé is the best known of Franco-Belgian comics, but many other major authors, including Peyo ("The Smurfs"), André Franquin ("Gaston Lagaffe"), Dupa ("Cubitus"), Morris ("Lucky Luke"), Greg ("Achille Talon"), Lambil ("Les Tuniques Bleues"), Edgar P. Jacobs and Willy Vandersteen brought the Belgian cartoon strip industry a worldwide fame. Additionally, famous crime author Agatha Christie created the character Hercule Poirot, a Belgian detective, who has served as a protagonist in a number of her acclaimed mystery novels.Belgian cinema has brought a number of mainly Flemish novels to life on-screen. Other Belgian directors include André Delvaux, Stijn Coninx, Luc and Jean-Pierre Dardenne; well-known actors include Jean-Claude Van Damme, Jan Decleir and Marie Gillain; and successful films include "Bullhead, Man Bites Dog" and "The Alzheimer Affair".Belgium is also home to a number of successful fashion designers . For instance, in the 1980s, Antwerp's Royal Academy of Fine Arts produced important fashion trendsetters, known as the Antwerp Six.Folklore plays a major role in Belgium's cultural life: the country has a comparatively high number of processions, cavalcades, parades, " and 'ducasses', 'kermesse' and other local festivals, nearly always with an originally religious or mythological background. The Carnival of Binche with its famous Gilles and the 'Processional Giants and Dragons' of Ath, Brussels, Dendermonde, Mechelen and Mons are recognized by UNESCO as Masterpieces of the Oral and Intangible Heritage of Humanity.Other examples are the Carnival of Aalst; the still very religious processions of the Holy Blood in Bruges, Virga Jesse Basilica in Hasselt and Basilica of Our Lady of Hanswijk in Mechelen; festival in Liège; and the Walloon festival in Namur. Originated in 1832 and revived in the 1960s, the Gentse Feesten have become a modern tradition. A major non-official holiday is the Saint Nicholas Day, a festivity for children and, in Liège, for students.Many highly ranked Belgian restaurants can be found in the most influential restaurant guides, such as the Michelin Guide. Belgium is famous for beer, chocolate, waffles and french fries with mayonnaise. Contrary to their name, french fries are claimed to have originated in Belgium, although their exact place of origin is uncertain. The national dishes are "steak and fries with salad", and "mussels with fries".Brands of Belgian chocolate and pralines, like Côte d'Or, Neuhaus, Leonidas and Godiva are famous, as well as independent producers such as Burie and Del Rey in Antwerp and Mary's in Brussels. Belgium produces over 1100 varieties of beer. The Trappist beer of the Abbey of Westvleteren has repeatedly been rated the world's best beer.The biggest brewer in the world by volume is Anheuser-Busch InBev, based in Leuven.Since the 1970s, sports clubs and federations are organized separately within each language community. Association football is the most popular sport in both parts of Belgium; also very popular are cycling, tennis, swimming, judo and basketball.The Belgium national football team have been on the top spot of the FIFA World Rankings ever since September 2018 (first time reached this rank in November 2015). Since the 1990s, the team have been the world's number one for the most years in history, only behind the records of Brazil and Spain. The team's golden generations with the world class players in the squad, namely Eden Hazard, Kevin De Bruyne, Jean-Marie Pfaff, Jan Ceulemans achieved the bronze medals at World Cup 2018, and silver medals at Euro 1980. Belgium hosted the Euro 1972, and co-hosted the Euro 2000 with the Netherlands.Belgians hold the most Tour de France victories of any country except France. They have also the most victories on the UCI Road World Championships. Philippe Gilbert is the 2012 world champion. Another modern well-known Belgian cyclist is Tom Boonen. With five victories in the Tour de France and numerous other cycling records, Belgian cyclist Eddy Merckx is regarded as one of the greatest cyclists of all time.Kim Clijsters and Justine Henin both were Player of the Year in the Women's Tennis Association as they were ranked the number one female tennis player.The Spa-Francorchamps motor-racing circuit hosts the Formula One World Championship Belgian Grand Prix. The Belgian driver, Jacky Ickx, won eight Grands Prix and six 24 Hours of Le Mans and finished twice as runner-up in the Formula One World Championship. Belgium also has a strong reputation in, motocross with the riders Joël Robert, Roger De Coster, Georges Jobé, Eric Geboers and Stefan Everts among others. Sporting events annually held in Belgium include the Memorial Van Damme athletics competition, the Belgian Grand Prix Formula One, and a number of classic cycle races such as the Tour of Flanders and Liège–Bastogne–Liège. The 1920 Summer Olympics were held in Antwerp. The 1977 European Basketball Championship was held in Liège and Ostend.	[ "Charles Michel", "Alexander De Croo" ]
Who was the head of Belgium in May 28, 2020?	May 28, 2020	{ "text": [ "Sophie Wilmès" ] }	L2_Q31_P6_1	Charles Michel is the head of the government of Belgium from Oct, 2014 to Oct, 2019. Alexander De Croo is the head of the government of Belgium from Oct, 2020 to Dec, 2022. Sophie Wilmès is the head of the government of Belgium from Oct, 2019 to Oct, 2020.	BelgiumBelgium ( ; ; ), officially the Kingdom of Belgium, is a country in Western Europe. It is bordered by the Netherlands to the north, Germany to the east, Luxembourg to the southeast, France to the southwest, and the North Sea to the northwest. It covers an area of and has a population of more than 11.5 million, making it the 22nd most densely populated country in the world and the 6th most densely populated country in Europe, with a density of . The capital and largest city is Brussels; other major cities are Antwerp, Ghent, Charleroi, Liège, Bruges, Namur, and Leuven.Belgium is a sovereign state and a federal constitutional monarchy with a parliamentary system. Its institutional organization is complex and is structured on both regional and linguistic grounds. It is divided into three highly autonomous regions: the Flemish Region (Flanders) in the north, the Walloon Region (Wallonia) in the south, and the Brussels-Capital Region. Brussels is the smallest and most densely populated region, as well as the richest region in terms of GDP per capita.Belgium is home to two main linguistic communities: the Dutch-speaking Flemish Community, which constitutes about 60 percent of the population, and the French-speaking Community, which constitutes about 40 percent of the population. A small German-speaking Community, numbering around one percent, exists in the East Cantons. The Brussels-Capital Region is officially bilingual in French and Dutch, although French is the dominant language. Belgium's linguistic diversity and related political conflicts are reflected in its complex system of governance, made up of six different governments.The country as it exists today was established following the 1830 Belgian Revolution, when it seceded from the Netherlands, which had itself only existed since 1815. The name chosen for the new state is derived from the Latin word "Belgium", used in Julius Caesar's "Gallic Wars", to describe a nearby region in the period around 55 BCE. Belgium is part of an area known as the Low Countries, historically a somewhat larger region than the Benelux group of states, as it also included parts of northern France. Since the Middle Ages, its central location near several major rivers has meant that the area has been relatively prosperous, connected commercially and politically to its bigger neighbours. Belgium has unfortunately also been the battleground of European powers, earning the moniker the "Battlefield of Europe", a reputation strengthened in the 20th century by both world wars. Belgium participated in the Industrial Revolution and, during the course of the 20th century, possessed a number of colonies in Africa. Between 1888 and 1908, Leopold II, king of Belgium, perpetrated one of the largest massacres in human history in Congo Free State, which was his private estate, and not yet a colony of Belgium. Estimates of the death toll are disputed but millions of people, a significant part of the population, died for the sake of rubber and ivory exports.The second half of the 20th century was marked by rising tensions between the Dutch-speaking and the French-speaking citizens fuelled by differences in language and culture and the unequal economic development of Flanders and Wallonia. This continuing antagonism has led to several far-reaching reforms, resulting in a transition from a unitary to a federal arrangement during the period from 1970 to 1993. Despite the reforms, tensions between the groups have remained, if not increased; there is significant separatism particularly among the Flemish; controversial language laws exist such as the municipalities with language facilities; and the formation of a coalition government took 18 months following the June 2010 federal election, a world record. Unemployment in Wallonia is more than double that of Flanders, which boomed after the war.Belgium is one of the six founding countries of the European Union and its capital, Brussels, hosts the official seats of the European Commission, the Council of the European Union, and the European Council, as well as one of two seats of the European Parliament (the other being Strasbourg). Belgium is also a founding member of the Eurozone, NATO, OECD, and WTO, and a part of the trilateral Benelux Union and the Schengen Area. Brussels hosts the headquarters of many major international organizations such as NATO.Belgium is a developed country, with an advanced high-income economy. It has very high standards of living, quality of life, healthcare, education, and is categorized as "very high" in the Human Development Index. It also ranks as one of the safest or most peaceful countries in the world.The "Belgae" were the inhabitants of the northernmost part of Gaul, which was much bigger than modern Belgium. Caesar used the Latin word ""Belgium"", to refer to their country within northern Gaul, which was a region now in northern France. Modern Belgium corresponds to the lands of the Morini, Menapii, Nervii, Germani Cisrhenani, Aduatuci, and, around Arlon, a part of the country of the Treveri. All of these except the Treveri formed a less Celtic-influenced "transition zone", north of the area Caesar treated as "Belgium".After Caesar's conquests, "Gallia Belgica" came to be the Latin name of a large Roman province covering most of Northern Gaul, including the Treveri. Areas closer to the lower Rhine frontier, including the eastern part of modern Belgium, eventually became part of the frontier province of "Germania Inferior", which interacted with Germanic tribes outside the empire. At the time when central government collapsed in the Western Roman Empire, the Roman provinces of Belgica and Germania were inhabited by a mix of a Romanized population and Germanic-speaking Franks who came to dominate the military and political class.During the 5th century, the area came under the rule of the Frankish Merovingian kings, who were probably first established in what is northern France. During the 8th century, the kingdom of the Franks came to be ruled by the Carolingian Dynasty, whose centre of power was around the area which is now eastern Belgium. The frankish kingdom had been divided up in many ways, but the Treaty of Verdun in 843 divided the Carolingian Empire into three kingdoms, whose borders had a lasting impact on medieval political boundaries. Most of modern Belgium was in the Middle Kingdom, later known as Lotharingia, but the coastal county of Flanders, west of the Scheldt, became part of West Francia, the predecessor of France. In 870 in the Treaty of Meerssen, modern Belgium lands all became part of the western kingdom for a period, but in 880 in the Treaty of Ribemont, Lotharingia returned to the lasting control of the Holy Roman Emperor. The lordships and bishoprics along the "March" (frontier) between the two great kingdoms maintained important connections between each other. The county of Flanders expanded over the Scheldt into the empire, and during several periods was ruled by the same lords as the county of Hainaut. In the 13th and 14th centuries, the cloth industry and commerce boomed especially in the County of Flanders and it became one of the richest areas in Europe. This prosperity played a role in conflicts between Flanders and the king of France. Famously, Flemish militias scored a surprise victory at the Battle of the Golden Spurs against a strong force of mounted knights in 1302, but France soon regained control of the rebellious province.In the 15th century, the Duke of Burgundy in France took control of Flanders, and from there they proceeded to unite much of what is now the Benelux, the so-called Burgundian Netherlands. "Belgium" and "Flanders" were the first two common names used for the Burgundian Netherlands which was the predecessor of the Austrian Netherlands, the predecessor of modern Belgium. The union, technically stretching between two kingdoms, gave the area economic and political stability which led to an even greater prosperity and artistic creation.Born in Belgium, the Habsburg Emperor Charles V was heir of the Burgundians, but also of the royal families of Austria, Castile and Aragon. With the Pragmatic Sanction of 1549 he gave the Seventeen Provinces more legitimacy as a stable entity, rather than just a temporary personal union. He also increased the influence of these Netherlands over the Prince-Bishopric of Liège, which continued to exist as a large semi-independent enclave.The Eighty Years' War (1568–1648), was triggered by the Spanish government's policy towards protestantism, which was becoming popular in the Low Countries. The rebellious northern United Provinces ("Belgica Foederata" in Latin, the "Federated Netherlands") eventually separated from the Southern Netherlands ("Belgica Regia", the "Royal Netherlands"). The latter were ruled successively by the Spanish (Spanish Netherlands) and the Austrian Habsburgs (Austrian Netherlands) and comprised most of modern Belgium. This was the theatre of several more protracted conflicts during much of the 17th and 18th centuries involving France, including the Franco-Dutch War (1672–1678), the Nine Years' War (1688–1697), the War of the Spanish Succession (1701–1714), and part of the War of the Austrian Succession (1740–1748).Following the , the Low Countriesincluding territories that were never nominally under Habsburg rule, such as the Prince-Bishopric of Liègewere annexed by the French First Republic, ending Austrian rule in the region. A reunification of the Low Countries as the United Kingdom of the Netherlands occurred at the dissolution of the First French Empire in 1814, after the abdication of Napoleon.In 1830, the Belgian Revolution led to the separation of the Southern Provinces from the Netherlands and to the establishment of a Catholic and bourgeois, officially French-speaking and neutral, independent Belgium under a provisional government and a national congress. Since the installation of Leopold I as king on 1831, now celebrated as Belgium's National Day, Belgium has been a constitutional monarchy and parliamentary democracy, with a laicist constitution based on the Napoleonic code. Although the franchise was initially restricted, universal suffrage for men was introduced after the general strike of 1893 (with plural voting until 1919) and for women in 1949.The main political parties of the 19th century were the Catholic Party and the Liberal Party, with the Belgian Labour Party emerging towards the end of the 19th century. French was originally the single official language adopted by the nobility and the bourgeoisie. It progressively lost its overall importance as Dutch became recognized as well. This recognition became official in 1898, and in 1967, the parliament accepted a Dutch version of the Constitution.The Berlin Conference of 1885 ceded control of the Congo Free State to King Leopold II as his private possession. From around 1900 there was growing international concern for the extreme and savage treatment of the Congolese population under Leopold II, for whom the Congo was primarily a source of revenue from ivory and rubber production. Many Congolese were killed by Leopold's agents for failing to meet production quotas for ivory and rubber. In 1908, this outcry led the Belgian state to assume responsibility for the government of the colony, henceforth called the Belgian Congo. A Belgian commission in 1919 estimated that Congo's population was half what it was in 1879.Germany invaded Belgium in August 1914 as part of the Schlieffen Plan to attack France, and much of the Western Front fighting of World War I occurred in western parts of the country. The opening months of the war were known as the Rape of Belgium due to German excesses. Belgium assumed control of the German colonies of Ruanda-Urundi (modern-day Rwanda and Burundi) during the war, and in 1924 the League of Nations mandated them to Belgium. In the aftermath of the First World War, Belgium annexed the Prussian districts of Eupen and Malmedy in 1925, thereby causing the presence of a German-speaking minority.German forces again invaded the country in May 1940, and 40,690 Belgians, over half of them Jews, were killed during the subsequent occupation and The Holocaust. From September 1944 to February 1945 the Allies liberated Belgium. After World War II, a general strike forced King Leopold III to abdicate in 1951, since many Belgians felt he had collaborated with Germany during the war. The Belgian Congo gained independence in 1960 during the Congo Crisis; Ruanda-Urundi followed with its independence two years later. Belgium joined NATO as a founding member and formed the Benelux group of nations with the Netherlands and Luxembourg.Belgium became one of the six founding members of the European Coal and Steel Community in 1951 and of the European Atomic Energy Community and European Economic Community, established in 1957. The latter has now become the European Union, for which Belgium hosts major administrations and institutions, including the European Commission, the Council of the European Union and the extraordinary and committee sessions of the European Parliament.In the early 1990s, Belgium saw several large corruption scandals notably surrounding Marc Dutroux, Andre Cools, the Dioxin Affair, Agusta Scandal and Murder of Karel Van Noppen.Belgium shares borders with France (), Germany (), Luxembourg () and the Netherlands (). Its total surface, including water area, is . Before 2018, its total area was believed to be . However, when the country's statistics were measured in 2018, a new calculation method was used. Unlike previous calculations, this one included the area from the coast to the low-water line, revealing the country to be larger in surface area than previously thought. Its land area alone is 30,278 km. It lies between latitudes 49°30' and 51°30' N, and longitudes 2°33' and 6°24' E.Belgium has three main geographical regions; the coastal plain in the northwest and the central plateau both belong to the Anglo-Belgian Basin, and the Ardennes uplands in the southeast to the Hercynian orogenic belt. The Paris Basin reaches a small fourth area at Belgium's southernmost tip, Belgian Lorraine.The coastal plain consists mainly of sand dunes and polders. Further inland lies a smooth, slowly rising landscape irrigated by numerous waterways, with fertile valleys and the northeastern sandy plain of the Campine ("Kempen"). The thickly forested hills and plateaus of the Ardennes are more rugged and rocky with caves and small gorges. Extending westward into France, this area is eastwardly connected to the Eifel in Germany by the High Fens plateau, on which the Signal de Botrange forms the country's highest point at .The climate is maritime temperate with significant precipitation in all seasons (Köppen climate classification: "Cfb"), like most of northwest Europe. The average temperature is lowest in January at and highest in July at . The average precipitation per month varies between for February and April, to for July. Averages for the years 2000 to 2006 show daily temperature minimums of and maximums of and monthly rainfall of ; these are about 1 °C and nearly 10 millimetres above last century's normal values, respectively.Phytogeographically, Belgium is shared between the Atlantic European and Central European provinces of the Circumboreal Region within the Boreal Kingdom. According to the World Wide Fund for Nature, the territory of Belgium belongs to the terrestrial ecoregions of Atlantic mixed forests and Western European broadleaf forests. Belgium had a 2018 Forest Landscape Integrity Index mean score of 1.36/10, ranking it 163rd globally out of 172 countries.The territory of Belgium is divided into three Regions, two of which, the Flemish Region and Walloon Region, are in turn subdivided into provinces; the third Region, the Brussels Capital Region, is neither a province nor a part of a province.Belgium is a constitutional, popular monarchy and a federal parliamentary democracy. The bicameral federal parliament is composed of a Senate and a Chamber of Representatives. The former is made up of 50 senators appointed by the parliaments of the communities and regions and 10 co-opted senators. Prior to 2014, most of the Senate's members were directly elected. The Chamber's 150 representatives are elected under a proportional voting system from 11 electoral districts. Belgium has compulsory voting and thus maintains one of the highest rates of voter turnout in the world.The King (currently Philippe) is the head of state, though with limited prerogatives. He appoints ministers, including a Prime Minister, that have the confidence of the Chamber of Representatives to form the federal government. The Council of Ministers is composed of no more than fifteen members. With the possible exception of the Prime Minister, the Council of Ministers is composed of an equal number of Dutch-speaking members and French-speaking members.The judicial system is based on civil law and originates from the Napoleonic code. The Court of Cassation is the court of last resort, with the courts of appeal one level below.Belgium's political institutions are complex; most political power is organized around the need to represent the main cultural communities.Since about 1970, the significant national Belgian political parties have split into distinct components that mainly represent the political and linguistic interests of these communities.The major parties in each community, though close to the political center, belong to three main groups: Christian Democrats, Liberals, and Social Democrats.Further notable parties came into being well after the middle of last century, mainly around linguistic, nationalist, or environmental themes and recently smaller ones of some specific liberal nature.A string of Christian Democrat coalition governments from 1958 was broken in 1999 after the first dioxin crisis, a major food contamination scandal. A "rainbow coalition" emerged from six parties: the Flemish and the French-speaking Liberals, Social Democrats and Greens. Later, a "purple coalition" of Liberals and Social Democrats formed after the Greens lost most of their seats in the 2003 election.The government led by Prime Minister Guy Verhofstadt from 1999 to 2007 achieved a balanced budget, some tax reforms, a labor-market reform, scheduled nuclear phase-out and instigated legislation allowing more stringent war crime and more lenient soft drug usage prosecution. Restrictions on withholding euthanasia were reduced and same-sex marriage legalized. The government promoted active diplomacy in Africa and opposed the invasion of Iraq. It is the only country that does not have age restrictions on euthanasia.Verhofstadt's coalition fared badly in the June 2007 elections. For more than a year, the country experienced a political crisis. This crisis was such that many observers speculated on a possible partition of Belgium. From 2007 until 2008 the temporary Verhofstadt III Government was in office. This coalition of the Flemish and Francophone Christian Democrats, the Flemish and Francophone Liberals together with the Francophone Social Democrats was an interim government until 2008.On that day a new government, led by Flemish Christian Democrat Yves Leterme, the actual winner of the federal elections of , was sworn in by the king. On 2008 Leterme announced the resignation of the cabinet to the king, as no progress in constitutional reforms had been made.In December 2008, he once more offered his resignation to the king after a crisis surrounding the sale of Fortis to BNP Paribas. At this juncture, his resignation was accepted and Christian Democratic and Flemish Herman Van Rompuy was sworn in as Prime Minister on 2008.After Herman Van Rompuy was designated the first permanent President of the European Council on 2009, he offered the resignation of his government to King Albert II on 2009. A few hours later, the new government under Prime Minister Yves Leterme was sworn in. On 2010, Leterme again offered the resignation of his cabinet to the king after one of the coalition partners, the OpenVLD, withdrew from the government, and on 2010 King Albert officially accepted the resignation.The Parliamentary elections in Belgium on 2010 saw the Flemish nationalist N-VA become the largest party in Flanders, and the Socialist Party PS the largest party in Wallonia. Until December 2011, Belgium was governed by Leterme's caretaker government awaiting the end of the deadlocked negotiations for formation of a new government. By 30 March 2011, this set a new world record for the elapsed time without an official government, previously held by war-torn Iraq. Finally, in December 2011 the Di Rupo Government led by Walloon socialist Prime Minister Elio Di Rupo was sworn in.The 2014 federal election (coinciding with the regional elections) resulted in a further electoral gain for the Flemish nationalist N-VA, although the incumbent coalition (composed of Flemish and French-speaking Social Democrats, Liberals, and Christian Democrats) maintains a solid majority in Parliament and in all electoral constituencies. On 22 July 2014, King Philippe nominated Charles Michel (MR) and Kris Peeters (CD&V) to lead the formation of a new federal cabinet composed of the Flemish parties N-VA, CD&V, Open Vld and the French-speaking MR, which resulted in the Michel Government. It was the first time N-VA was part of the federal cabinet, while the French-speaking side was represented only by the MR, which achieved a minority of the public votes in Wallonia.In May 2019 federal elections in the Flemish-speaking northern region of Flanders far-right Vlaams Belang party made major gains. In the French-speaking southern area of Wallonia the Socialists were strong. The moderate Flemish nationalist party the N-VA remained the largest party in parliament.In July 2019 prime minister Charles Michel was selected to hold the post of President of the European Council. His successor Sophie Wilmès was Belgium's first female prime minister. She led the caretaker government since October 2019. The Flemish Liberal party politician Alexander De Croo became new prime minister in October 2020. The parties had agreed on federal government 16 months after the elections.Following a usage which can be traced back to the Burgundian and Habsburg courts, in the 19th century it was necessary to speak French to belong to the governing upper class, and those who could only speak Dutch were effectively second-class citizens. Late that century, and continuing into the 20th century, Flemish movements evolved to counter this situation.While the people in Southern Belgium spoke French or dialects of French, and most Brusselers adopted French as their first language, the Flemings refused to do so and succeeded progressively in making Dutch an equal language in the education system. Following World War II, Belgian politics became increasingly dominated by the autonomy of its two main linguistic communities. Intercommunal tensions rose and the constitution was amended to minimize the potential for conflict.Based on the four language areas defined in 1962–63 (the Dutch, bilingual, French and German language areas), consecutive revisions of the country's constitution in 1970, 1980, 1988 and 1993 established a unique form of a federal state with segregated political power into three levels:The constitutional language areas determine the official languages in their municipalities, as well as the geographical limits of the empowered institutions for specific matters. Although this would allow for seven parliaments and governments when the Communities and Regions were created in 1980, Flemish politicians decided to merge both. Thus the Flemings just have one single institutional body of parliament and government is empowered for all except federal and specific municipal matters.The overlapping boundaries of the Regions and Communities have created two notable peculiarities: the territory of the Brussels-Capital Region (which came into existence nearly a decade after the other regions) is included in both the Flemish and French Communities, and the territory of the German-speaking Community lies wholly within the Walloon Region. Conflicts about jurisdiction between the bodies are resolved by the Constitutional Court of Belgium. The structure is intended as a compromise to allow different cultures to live together peacefully.The Federal State's authority includes justice, defense, federal police, social security, nuclear energy, monetary policy and public debt, and other aspects of public finances. State-owned companies include the Belgian Post Group and Belgian Railways. The Federal Government is responsible for the obligations of Belgium and its federalized institutions towards the European Union and NATO. It controls substantial parts of public health, home affairs and foreign affairs. The budget—without the debt—controlled by the federal government amounts to about 50% of the national fiscal income. The federal government employs around 12% of the civil servants.Communities exercise their authority only within linguistically determined geographical boundaries, originally oriented towards the individuals of a Community's language: culture (including audiovisual media), education and the use of the relevant language. Extensions to personal matters less directly connected with language comprise health policy (curative and preventive medicine) and assistance to individuals (protection of youth, social welfare, aid to families, immigrant assistance services, and so on.).Regions have authority in fields that can be broadly associated with their territory. These include economy, employment, agriculture, water policy, housing, public works, energy, transport, the environment, town and country planning, nature conservation, credit and foreign trade. They supervise the provinces, municipalities and intercommunal utility companies.In several fields, the different levels each have their own say on specifics. With education, for instance, the autonomy of the Communities neither includes decisions about the compulsory aspect nor allows for setting minimum requirements for awarding qualifications, which remain federal matters. Each level of government can be involved in scientific research and international relations associated with its powers. The treaty-making power of the Regions' and Communities' Governments is the broadest of all the Federating units of all the Federations all over the world.Because of its location at the crossroads of Western Europe, Belgium has historically been the route of invading armies from its larger neighbors. With virtually defenseless borders, Belgium has traditionally sought to avoid domination by the more powerful nations which surround it through a policy of mediation. The Belgians have been strong advocates of European integration. Both the European Union and NATO are headquartered in Belgium.The Belgian Armed Forces have about 47,000 active troops. In 2019, Belgium's defense budget totaled €4.303 billion ($4.921 billion) representing .93% of its GDP. They are organized into one unified structure which consists of four main components: Land Component, or the Army; Air Component, or the Air Force; Marine Component, or the Navy; Medical Component. The operational commands of the four components are subordinate to the Staff Department for Operations and Training of the Ministry of Defense, which is headed by the Assistant Chief of Staff Operations and Training, and to the Chief of Defense.The effects of the Second World War made collective security a priority for Belgian foreign policy. In March 1948 Belgium signed the Treaty of Brussels and then joined NATO in 1948. However, the integration of the armed forces into NATO did not begin until after the Korean War. The Belgians, along with the Luxembourg government, sent a detachment of battalion strength to fight in Korea known as the Belgian United Nations Command. This mission was the first in a long line of UN missions which the Belgians supported. Currently, the Belgian Marine Component is working closely together with the Dutch Navy under the command of the Admiral Benelux.Belgium's strongly globalized economy and its transport infrastructure are integrated with the rest of Europe. Its location at the heart of a highly industrialized region helped make it the world's 15th largest trading nation in 2007. The economy is characterized by a highly productive work force, high GNP and high exports per capita. Belgium's main imports are raw materials, machinery and equipment, chemicals, raw diamonds, pharmaceuticals, foodstuffs, transportation equipment, and oil products. Its main exports are machinery and equipment, chemicals, finished diamonds, metals and metal products, and foodstuffs.The Belgian economy is heavily service-oriented and shows a dual nature: a dynamic Flemish economy and a Walloon economy that lags behind. One of the founding members of the European Union, Belgium strongly supports an open economy and the extension of the powers of EU institutions to integrate member economies. Since 1922, through the Belgium-Luxembourg Economic Union, Belgium and Luxembourg have been a single trade market with customs and currency union.Belgium was the first continental European country to undergo the Industrial Revolution, in the early 19th century. Areas in Liège Province and around Charleroi rapidly developed mining and steelmaking, which flourished until the mid-20th century in the Sambre and Meuse valley and made Belgium one of the three most industrialized nations in the world from 1830 to 1910. However, by the 1840s the textile industry of Flanders was in severe crisis, and the region experienced famine from 1846 to 1850.After World War II, Ghent and Antwerp experienced a rapid expansion of the chemical and petroleum industries. The 1973 and 1979 oil crises sent the economy into a recession; it was particularly prolonged in Wallonia, where the steel industry had become less competitive and experienced a serious decline. In the 1980s and 1990s, the economic center of the country continued to shift northwards and is now concentrated in the populous Flemish Diamond area.By the end of the 1980s, Belgian macroeconomic policies had resulted in a cumulative government debt of about 120% of GDP. , the budget was balanced and public debt was equal to 90.30% of GDP. In 2005 and 2006, real GDP growth rates of 1.5% and 3.0%, respectively, were slightly above the average for the Euro area. Unemployment rates of 8.4% in 2005 and 8.2% in 2006 were close to the area average. By , this had grown to 8.5% compared to an average rate of 9.6% for the European Union as a whole (EU 27). From 1832 until 2002, Belgium's currency was the Belgian franc. Belgium switched to the euro in 2002, with the first sets of euro coins being minted in 1999. The standard Belgian euro coins designated for circulation show the portrait of the monarch (first King Albert II, since 2013 King Philippe).Despite an 18% decrease observed from 1970 to 1999, Belgium still had in 1999 the highest rail network density within the European Union with 113.8 km/1 000 km. On the other hand, the same period, 1970–1999, has seen a huge growth (+56%) of the motorway network. In 1999, the density of km motorways per 1000 km and 1000 inhabitants amounted to 55.1 and 16.5 respectively and were significantly superior to the EU's means of 13.7 and 15.9.From a biological resource perspective, Belgium has a low endowment: Belgium's biocapacity adds up to only 0.8 global hectares in 2016, just about half of the 1.6 global hectares of biocapacity available per person worldwide. In contrast, in 2016, Belgians used on average 6.3 global hectares of biocapacity - their ecological footprint of consumption. This means they required about eight times as much biocapacity as Belgium contains. As a result, Belgium was running a biocapacity deficit of 5.5 global hectares per person in 2016.Belgium experiences some of the most congested traffic in Europe. In 2010, commuters to the cities of Brussels and Antwerp spent respectively 65 and 64 hours a year in traffic jams. Like in most small European countries, more than 80% of the airways traffic is handled by a single airport, the Brussels Airport. The ports of Antwerp and Zeebrugge (Bruges) share more than 80% of Belgian maritime traffic, Antwerp being the second European harbor with a gross weight of goods handled of 115 988 000 t in 2000 after a growth of 10.9% over the preceding five years. In 2016, the port of Antwerp handled 214 million tons after a year-on-year growth of 2.7%.There is a large economic gap between Flanders and Wallonia. Wallonia was historically wealthy compared to Flanders, mostly due to its heavy industries, but the decline of the steel industry post-World War II led to the region's rapid decline, whereas Flanders rose swiftly. Since then, Flanders has been prosperous, among the wealthiest regions in Europe, whereas Wallonia has been languishing. As of 2007, the unemployment rate of Wallonia is over double that of Flanders. The divide has played a key part in the tensions between the Flemish and Walloons in addition to the already-existing language divide. Pro-independence movements have gained high popularity in Flanders as a consequence. The separatist New Flemish Alliance (N-VA) party, for instance, is the largest party in Belgium.Contributions to the development of science and technology have appeared throughout the country's history. The 16th century Early Modern flourishing of Western Europe included cartographer Gerardus Mercator, anatomist Andreas Vesalius, herbalist Rembert Dodoens and mathematician Simon Stevin among the most influential scientists.Chemist Ernest Solvay and engineer Zenobe Gramme (École industrielle de Liège) gave their names to the Solvay process and the Gramme dynamo, respectively, in the 1860s. Bakelite was developed in 1907–1909 by Leo Baekeland. Ernest Solvay also acted as a major philanthropist and gave its name to the Solvay Institute of Sociology, the Solvay Brussels School of Economics and Management and the International Solvay Institutes for Physics and Chemistry which are now part of the Université libre de Bruxelles. In 1911, he started a series of conferences, the Solvay Conferences on Physics and Chemistry, which have had a deep impact on the evolution of quantum physics and chemistry. A major contribution to fundamental science was also due to a Belgian, Monsignor Georges Lemaître (Catholic University of Louvain), who is credited with proposing the Big Bang theory of the origin of the universe in 1927.Three Nobel Prizes in Physiology or Medicine were awarded to Belgians: Jules Bordet (Université libre de Bruxelles) in 1919, Corneille Heymans (University of Ghent) in 1938 and Albert Claude (Université libre de Bruxelles) together with Christian de Duve (Université catholique de Louvain) in 1974. François Englert (Université libre de Bruxelles) was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics in 2013. Ilya Prigogine (Université libre de Bruxelles) was awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1977. Two Belgian mathematicians have been awarded the Fields Medal: Pierre Deligne in 1978 and Jean Bourgain in 1994.As of 1 January 2020, the total population of Belgium according to its population register was 11,492,641. The population density of Belgium is as of January 2019, making it the 22nd most densely populated country in the world, and the 6th most densely populated country in Europe. The most densely populated province is Antwerp, the least densely populated province is Luxembourg. As of January 2019, the Flemish Region had a population of 6,589,069 (57.6% of Belgium), its most populous cities being Antwerp (523,248), Ghent (260,341) and Bruges (118,284). Wallonia had a population of 3,633,795 (31.8% of Belgium) with Charleroi (201,816), Liège (197,355) and Namur (110,939), its most populous cities. The Brussels-Capital Region has 1,208,542 inhabitants (10.6% of Belgium) in the 19 municipalities, three of which have over 100,000 residents.In 2017 the average total fertility rate (TFR) across Belgium was 1.64 children per woman, below the replacement rate of 2.1, it remains considerably below the high of 4.87 children born per woman in 1873. Belgium subsequently has one of the oldest populations in the world, with the average age of 41.6 years., nearly 92% of the population had Belgian citizenship, and other European Union member citizens account for around 6%. The prevalent foreign nationals were Italian (171,918), French (125,061), Dutch (116,970), Moroccan (80,579), Portuguese (43,509), Spanish (42,765), Turkish (39,419) and German (37,621). In 2007, there were 1.38 million foreign-born residents in Belgium, corresponding to 12.9% of the total population. Of these, 685,000 (6.4%) were born outside the EU and 695,000 (6.5%) were born in another EU Member State.At the beginning of 2012, people of foreign background and their descendants were estimated to have formed around 25% of the total population i.e. 2.8 million "new Belgians". Of these new Belgians, 1,200,000 are of European ancestry and 1,350,000 are from non-Western countries (most of them from Morocco, Turkey, and the DR Congo). Since the modification of the Belgian nationality law in 1984 more than 1.3 million migrants have acquired Belgian citizenship. The largest group of immigrants and their descendants in Belgium are Moroccans. 89.2% of inhabitants of Turkish origin have been naturalized, as have 88.4% of people of Moroccan background, 75.4% of Italians, 56.2% of the French and 47.8% of Dutch people.Belgium has three official languages: Dutch, French and German. A number of non-official minority languages are spoken as well.As no census exists, there are no official statistical data regarding the distribution or usage of Belgium's three official languages or their dialects. However, various criteria, including the language(s) of parents, of education, or the second-language status of foreign born, may provide suggested figures. An estimated 60% of the Belgian population are native speakers of Dutch (often referred to as Flemish), and 40% of the population speaks French natively. French-speaking Belgians are often referred to as Walloons, although the French speakers in Brussels are not Walloons.The total number of native Dutch speakers is estimated to be about 6.23 million, concentrated in the northern Flanders region, while native French speakers number 3.32 million in Wallonia and an estimated 870,000 (or 85%) in the officially bilingual Brussels-Capital Region. The German-speaking Community is made up of 73,000 people in the east of the Walloon Region; around 10,000 German and 60,000 Belgian nationals are speakers of German. Roughly 23,000 more German speakers live in municipalities near the official Community.Both Belgian Dutch and Belgian French have minor differences in vocabulary and semantic nuances from the varieties spoken respectively in the Netherlands and France. Many Flemish people still speak dialects of Dutch in their local environment. Walloon, considered either as a dialect of French or a distinct Romance language, is now only understood and spoken occasionally, mostly by elderly people. Walloon is divided into four dialects, which along with those of Picard, are rarely used in public life and have largely been replaced by French.Since the country's independence, Roman Catholicism has had an important role in Belgium's politics. However Belgium is largely a secular country as the constitution provides for freedom of religion, and the government generally respects this right in practice. During the reigns of Albert I and Baudouin, the Belgian royal family had a reputation of deeply rooted Catholicism.Roman Catholicism has traditionally been Belgium's majority religion; being especially strong in Flanders. However, by 2009 Sunday church attendance was 5% for Belgium in total; 3% in Brussels, and 5.4% in Flanders. Church attendance in 2009 in Belgium was roughly half of the Sunday church attendance in 1998 (11% for the total of Belgium in 1998). Despite the drop in church attendance, Catholic identity nevertheless remains an important part of Belgium's culture.According to the Eurobarometer 2010, 37% of Belgian citizens responded that they believe there is a God. 31% answered that they believe there is some sort of spirit or life-force. 27% answered that they do not believe there is any sort of spirit, God, or life-force. 5% did not respond. According to the Eurobarometer 2015, 60.7% of the total population of Belgium adhered to Christianity, with Roman Catholicism being the largest denomination with 52.9%. Protestants comprised 2.1% and Orthodox Christians were the 1.6% of the total. Non-religious people comprised 32.0% of the population and were divided between atheists (14.9%) and agnostics (17.1%). A further 5.2% of the population was Muslim and 2.1% were believers in other religions. The same survey held in 2012 found that Christianity was the largest religion in Belgium, accounting for 65% of Belgians.Symbolically and materially, the Roman Catholic Church remains in a favorable position. Belgium officially recognizes three religions: Christianity (Catholic, Protestantism, Orthodox churches and Anglicanism), Islam and Judaism.In the early 2000s, there were approximately 42,000 Jews in Belgium. The Jewish Community of Antwerp (numbering some 18,000) is one of the largest in Europe, and one of the last places in the world where Yiddish is the primary language of a large Jewish community (mirroring certain Orthodox and Hasidic communities in New York, New Jersey, and Israel). In addition, most Jewish children in Antwerp receive a Jewish education. There are several Jewish newspapers and more than 45 active synagogues (30 of which are in Antwerp) in the country.A 2006 inquiry in Flanders, considered to be a more religious region than Wallonia, showed that 55% considered themselves religious and that 36% believed that God created the universe. On the other hand, Wallonia has become one of Europe's most secular/least religious regions. Most of the French-speaking region's population does not consider religion an important part of their lives, and as much as 45% of the population identifies as irreligious. This is particularly the case in eastern Wallonia and areas along the French border.A 2008 estimate found that approximately 6% of the Belgian population (628,751 people) is Muslim. Muslims constitute 23.6% of the population of Brussels, 4.9% of Wallonia and 5.1% of Flanders. The majority of Belgian Muslims live in the major cities, such as Antwerp, Brussels and Charleroi. The largest group of immigrants in Belgium are Moroccans, with 400,000 people. The Turks are the third largest group, and the second largest Muslim ethnic group, numbering 220,000.The Belgians enjoy good health. According to 2012 estimates, the average life expectancy is 79.65 years. Since 1960, life expectancy has, in line with the European average, grown by two months per year. Death in Belgium is mainly due to heart and vascular disorders, neoplasms, disorders of the respiratory system and unnatural causes of death (accidents, suicide). Non-natural causes of death and cancer are the most common causes of death for females up to age 24 and males up to age 44.Healthcare in Belgium is financed through both social security contributions and taxation. Health insurance is compulsory. Health care is delivered by a mixed public and private system of independent medical practitioners and public, university and semi-private hospitals. Health care service are payable by the patient and reimbursed later by health insurance institutions, but for ineligible categories (of patients and services) so-called 3rd party payment systems exist. The Belgian health care system is supervised and financed by the federal government, the Flemish and Walloon Regional governments; and the German Community also has (indirect) oversight and responsibilities.For the first time in Belgian history, the first child was euthanized following the 2-year mark of the removal of the euthanization age restrictions. The child had been euthanized due to an incurable disease that was inflicted upon the child. Although there may have been some support for the euthanization there is a possibility of controversy due to the issue revolving around the subject of assisted suicide. Excluding assisted suicide, Belgium has the highest suicide rate in Western Europe and one of the highest suicide rates in the developed world (exceeded only by Lithuania, South Korea, and Latvia).Education is compulsory from 6 to 18 years of age for Belgians. Among OECD countries in 2002, Belgium had the third highest proportion of 18- to 21-year-olds enrolled in postsecondary education, at 42%. Though an estimated 99% of the adult population is literate, concern is rising over functional illiteracy. The Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA), coordinated by the OECD, currently ranks Belgium's education as the 19th best in the world, being significantly higher than the OECD average. Education being organized separately by each, the Flemish Community scores noticeably above the French and German-speaking Communities.Mirroring the dual structure of the 19th-century Belgian political landscape, characterized by the Liberal and the Catholic parties, the educational system is segregated within a secular and a religious segment. The secular branch of schooling is controlled by the communities, the provinces, or the municipalities, while religious, mainly Catholic branch education, is organized by religious authorities, although subsidized and supervised by the communities.Despite its political and linguistic divisions, the region corresponding to today's Belgium has seen the flourishing of major artistic movements that have had tremendous influence on European art and culture. Nowadays, to a certain extent, cultural life is concentrated within each language Community, and a variety of barriers have made a shared cultural sphere less pronounced. Since the 1970s, there are no bilingual universities or colleges in the country except the Royal Military Academy and the Antwerp Maritime Academy.Contributions to painting and architecture have been especially rich. The Mosan art, the Early Netherlandish, the Flemish Renaissance and Baroque painting and major examples of Romanesque, Gothic, Renaissance and Baroque architecture are milestones in the history of art. While the 15th century's art in the Low Countries is dominated by the religious paintings of Jan van Eyck and Rogier van der Weyden, the 16th century is characterized by a broader panel of styles such as Peter Breughel's landscape paintings and Lambert Lombard's representation of the antique. Though the Baroque style of Peter Paul Rubens and Anthony van Dyck flourished in the early 17th century in the Southern Netherlands, it gradually declined thereafter.During the 19th and 20th centuries many original romantic, expressionist and surrealist Belgian painters emerged, including James Ensor and other artists belonging to the Les XX group, Constant Permeke, Paul Delvaux and René Magritte. The avant-garde CoBrA movement appeared in the 1950s, while the sculptor Panamarenko remains a remarkable figure in contemporary art. Multidisciplinary artists Jan Fabre, Wim Delvoye and the painter Luc Tuymans are other internationally renowned figures on the contemporary art scene.Belgian contributions to architecture also continued into the 19th and 20th centuries, including the work of Victor Horta and Henry van de Velde, who were major initiators of the Art Nouveau style.The vocal music of the Franco-Flemish School developed in the southern part of the Low Countries and was an important contribution to Renaissance culture. In the 19th and 20th centuries, there was an emergence of major violinists, such as Henri Vieuxtemps, Eugène Ysaÿe and Arthur Grumiaux, while Adolphe Sax invented the saxophone in 1846. The composer César Franck was born in Liège in 1822. Contemporary popular music in Belgium is also of repute. Jazz musician Toots Thielemans and singer Jacques Brel have achieved global fame. Nowadays, singer Stromae has been a musical revelation in Europe and beyond, having great success. In rock/pop music, Telex, Front 242, K's Choice, Hooverphonic, Zap Mama, Soulwax and dEUS are well known. In the heavy metal scene, bands like Machiavel, Channel Zero and Enthroned have a worldwide fan-base.Belgium has produced several well-known authors, including the poets Emile Verhaeren, Guido Gezelle, Robert Goffin and novelists Hendrik Conscience, Stijn Streuvels, Georges Simenon, Suzanne Lilar, Hugo Claus and Amélie Nothomb. The poet and playwright Maurice Maeterlinck won the Nobel Prize in literature in 1911. "The Adventures of Tintin" by Hergé is the best known of Franco-Belgian comics, but many other major authors, including Peyo ("The Smurfs"), André Franquin ("Gaston Lagaffe"), Dupa ("Cubitus"), Morris ("Lucky Luke"), Greg ("Achille Talon"), Lambil ("Les Tuniques Bleues"), Edgar P. Jacobs and Willy Vandersteen brought the Belgian cartoon strip industry a worldwide fame. Additionally, famous crime author Agatha Christie created the character Hercule Poirot, a Belgian detective, who has served as a protagonist in a number of her acclaimed mystery novels.Belgian cinema has brought a number of mainly Flemish novels to life on-screen. Other Belgian directors include André Delvaux, Stijn Coninx, Luc and Jean-Pierre Dardenne; well-known actors include Jean-Claude Van Damme, Jan Decleir and Marie Gillain; and successful films include "Bullhead, Man Bites Dog" and "The Alzheimer Affair".Belgium is also home to a number of successful fashion designers . For instance, in the 1980s, Antwerp's Royal Academy of Fine Arts produced important fashion trendsetters, known as the Antwerp Six.Folklore plays a major role in Belgium's cultural life: the country has a comparatively high number of processions, cavalcades, parades, " and 'ducasses', 'kermesse' and other local festivals, nearly always with an originally religious or mythological background. The Carnival of Binche with its famous Gilles and the 'Processional Giants and Dragons' of Ath, Brussels, Dendermonde, Mechelen and Mons are recognized by UNESCO as Masterpieces of the Oral and Intangible Heritage of Humanity.Other examples are the Carnival of Aalst; the still very religious processions of the Holy Blood in Bruges, Virga Jesse Basilica in Hasselt and Basilica of Our Lady of Hanswijk in Mechelen; festival in Liège; and the Walloon festival in Namur. Originated in 1832 and revived in the 1960s, the Gentse Feesten have become a modern tradition. A major non-official holiday is the Saint Nicholas Day, a festivity for children and, in Liège, for students.Many highly ranked Belgian restaurants can be found in the most influential restaurant guides, such as the Michelin Guide. Belgium is famous for beer, chocolate, waffles and french fries with mayonnaise. Contrary to their name, french fries are claimed to have originated in Belgium, although their exact place of origin is uncertain. The national dishes are "steak and fries with salad", and "mussels with fries".Brands of Belgian chocolate and pralines, like Côte d'Or, Neuhaus, Leonidas and Godiva are famous, as well as independent producers such as Burie and Del Rey in Antwerp and Mary's in Brussels. Belgium produces over 1100 varieties of beer. The Trappist beer of the Abbey of Westvleteren has repeatedly been rated the world's best beer.The biggest brewer in the world by volume is Anheuser-Busch InBev, based in Leuven.Since the 1970s, sports clubs and federations are organized separately within each language community. Association football is the most popular sport in both parts of Belgium; also very popular are cycling, tennis, swimming, judo and basketball.The Belgium national football team have been on the top spot of the FIFA World Rankings ever since September 2018 (first time reached this rank in November 2015). Since the 1990s, the team have been the world's number one for the most years in history, only behind the records of Brazil and Spain. The team's golden generations with the world class players in the squad, namely Eden Hazard, Kevin De Bruyne, Jean-Marie Pfaff, Jan Ceulemans achieved the bronze medals at World Cup 2018, and silver medals at Euro 1980. Belgium hosted the Euro 1972, and co-hosted the Euro 2000 with the Netherlands.Belgians hold the most Tour de France victories of any country except France. They have also the most victories on the UCI Road World Championships. Philippe Gilbert is the 2012 world champion. Another modern well-known Belgian cyclist is Tom Boonen. With five victories in the Tour de France and numerous other cycling records, Belgian cyclist Eddy Merckx is regarded as one of the greatest cyclists of all time.Kim Clijsters and Justine Henin both were Player of the Year in the Women's Tennis Association as they were ranked the number one female tennis player.The Spa-Francorchamps motor-racing circuit hosts the Formula One World Championship Belgian Grand Prix. The Belgian driver, Jacky Ickx, won eight Grands Prix and six 24 Hours of Le Mans and finished twice as runner-up in the Formula One World Championship. Belgium also has a strong reputation in, motocross with the riders Joël Robert, Roger De Coster, Georges Jobé, Eric Geboers and Stefan Everts among others. Sporting events annually held in Belgium include the Memorial Van Damme athletics competition, the Belgian Grand Prix Formula One, and a number of classic cycle races such as the Tour of Flanders and Liège–Bastogne–Liège. The 1920 Summer Olympics were held in Antwerp. The 1977 European Basketball Championship was held in Liège and Ostend.	[ "Charles Michel", "Alexander De Croo" ]
Who was the head of Belgium in 05/28/2020?	May 28, 2020	{ "text": [ "Sophie Wilmès" ] }	L2_Q31_P6_1	Charles Michel is the head of the government of Belgium from Oct, 2014 to Oct, 2019. Alexander De Croo is the head of the government of Belgium from Oct, 2020 to Dec, 2022. Sophie Wilmès is the head of the government of Belgium from Oct, 2019 to Oct, 2020.	BelgiumBelgium ( ; ; ), officially the Kingdom of Belgium, is a country in Western Europe. It is bordered by the Netherlands to the north, Germany to the east, Luxembourg to the southeast, France to the southwest, and the North Sea to the northwest. It covers an area of and has a population of more than 11.5 million, making it the 22nd most densely populated country in the world and the 6th most densely populated country in Europe, with a density of . The capital and largest city is Brussels; other major cities are Antwerp, Ghent, Charleroi, Liège, Bruges, Namur, and Leuven.Belgium is a sovereign state and a federal constitutional monarchy with a parliamentary system. Its institutional organization is complex and is structured on both regional and linguistic grounds. It is divided into three highly autonomous regions: the Flemish Region (Flanders) in the north, the Walloon Region (Wallonia) in the south, and the Brussels-Capital Region. Brussels is the smallest and most densely populated region, as well as the richest region in terms of GDP per capita.Belgium is home to two main linguistic communities: the Dutch-speaking Flemish Community, which constitutes about 60 percent of the population, and the French-speaking Community, which constitutes about 40 percent of the population. A small German-speaking Community, numbering around one percent, exists in the East Cantons. The Brussels-Capital Region is officially bilingual in French and Dutch, although French is the dominant language. Belgium's linguistic diversity and related political conflicts are reflected in its complex system of governance, made up of six different governments.The country as it exists today was established following the 1830 Belgian Revolution, when it seceded from the Netherlands, which had itself only existed since 1815. The name chosen for the new state is derived from the Latin word "Belgium", used in Julius Caesar's "Gallic Wars", to describe a nearby region in the period around 55 BCE. Belgium is part of an area known as the Low Countries, historically a somewhat larger region than the Benelux group of states, as it also included parts of northern France. Since the Middle Ages, its central location near several major rivers has meant that the area has been relatively prosperous, connected commercially and politically to its bigger neighbours. Belgium has unfortunately also been the battleground of European powers, earning the moniker the "Battlefield of Europe", a reputation strengthened in the 20th century by both world wars. Belgium participated in the Industrial Revolution and, during the course of the 20th century, possessed a number of colonies in Africa. Between 1888 and 1908, Leopold II, king of Belgium, perpetrated one of the largest massacres in human history in Congo Free State, which was his private estate, and not yet a colony of Belgium. Estimates of the death toll are disputed but millions of people, a significant part of the population, died for the sake of rubber and ivory exports.The second half of the 20th century was marked by rising tensions between the Dutch-speaking and the French-speaking citizens fuelled by differences in language and culture and the unequal economic development of Flanders and Wallonia. This continuing antagonism has led to several far-reaching reforms, resulting in a transition from a unitary to a federal arrangement during the period from 1970 to 1993. Despite the reforms, tensions between the groups have remained, if not increased; there is significant separatism particularly among the Flemish; controversial language laws exist such as the municipalities with language facilities; and the formation of a coalition government took 18 months following the June 2010 federal election, a world record. Unemployment in Wallonia is more than double that of Flanders, which boomed after the war.Belgium is one of the six founding countries of the European Union and its capital, Brussels, hosts the official seats of the European Commission, the Council of the European Union, and the European Council, as well as one of two seats of the European Parliament (the other being Strasbourg). Belgium is also a founding member of the Eurozone, NATO, OECD, and WTO, and a part of the trilateral Benelux Union and the Schengen Area. Brussels hosts the headquarters of many major international organizations such as NATO.Belgium is a developed country, with an advanced high-income economy. It has very high standards of living, quality of life, healthcare, education, and is categorized as "very high" in the Human Development Index. It also ranks as one of the safest or most peaceful countries in the world.The "Belgae" were the inhabitants of the northernmost part of Gaul, which was much bigger than modern Belgium. Caesar used the Latin word ""Belgium"", to refer to their country within northern Gaul, which was a region now in northern France. Modern Belgium corresponds to the lands of the Morini, Menapii, Nervii, Germani Cisrhenani, Aduatuci, and, around Arlon, a part of the country of the Treveri. All of these except the Treveri formed a less Celtic-influenced "transition zone", north of the area Caesar treated as "Belgium".After Caesar's conquests, "Gallia Belgica" came to be the Latin name of a large Roman province covering most of Northern Gaul, including the Treveri. Areas closer to the lower Rhine frontier, including the eastern part of modern Belgium, eventually became part of the frontier province of "Germania Inferior", which interacted with Germanic tribes outside the empire. At the time when central government collapsed in the Western Roman Empire, the Roman provinces of Belgica and Germania were inhabited by a mix of a Romanized population and Germanic-speaking Franks who came to dominate the military and political class.During the 5th century, the area came under the rule of the Frankish Merovingian kings, who were probably first established in what is northern France. During the 8th century, the kingdom of the Franks came to be ruled by the Carolingian Dynasty, whose centre of power was around the area which is now eastern Belgium. The frankish kingdom had been divided up in many ways, but the Treaty of Verdun in 843 divided the Carolingian Empire into three kingdoms, whose borders had a lasting impact on medieval political boundaries. Most of modern Belgium was in the Middle Kingdom, later known as Lotharingia, but the coastal county of Flanders, west of the Scheldt, became part of West Francia, the predecessor of France. In 870 in the Treaty of Meerssen, modern Belgium lands all became part of the western kingdom for a period, but in 880 in the Treaty of Ribemont, Lotharingia returned to the lasting control of the Holy Roman Emperor. The lordships and bishoprics along the "March" (frontier) between the two great kingdoms maintained important connections between each other. The county of Flanders expanded over the Scheldt into the empire, and during several periods was ruled by the same lords as the county of Hainaut. In the 13th and 14th centuries, the cloth industry and commerce boomed especially in the County of Flanders and it became one of the richest areas in Europe. This prosperity played a role in conflicts between Flanders and the king of France. Famously, Flemish militias scored a surprise victory at the Battle of the Golden Spurs against a strong force of mounted knights in 1302, but France soon regained control of the rebellious province.In the 15th century, the Duke of Burgundy in France took control of Flanders, and from there they proceeded to unite much of what is now the Benelux, the so-called Burgundian Netherlands. "Belgium" and "Flanders" were the first two common names used for the Burgundian Netherlands which was the predecessor of the Austrian Netherlands, the predecessor of modern Belgium. The union, technically stretching between two kingdoms, gave the area economic and political stability which led to an even greater prosperity and artistic creation.Born in Belgium, the Habsburg Emperor Charles V was heir of the Burgundians, but also of the royal families of Austria, Castile and Aragon. With the Pragmatic Sanction of 1549 he gave the Seventeen Provinces more legitimacy as a stable entity, rather than just a temporary personal union. He also increased the influence of these Netherlands over the Prince-Bishopric of Liège, which continued to exist as a large semi-independent enclave.The Eighty Years' War (1568–1648), was triggered by the Spanish government's policy towards protestantism, which was becoming popular in the Low Countries. The rebellious northern United Provinces ("Belgica Foederata" in Latin, the "Federated Netherlands") eventually separated from the Southern Netherlands ("Belgica Regia", the "Royal Netherlands"). The latter were ruled successively by the Spanish (Spanish Netherlands) and the Austrian Habsburgs (Austrian Netherlands) and comprised most of modern Belgium. This was the theatre of several more protracted conflicts during much of the 17th and 18th centuries involving France, including the Franco-Dutch War (1672–1678), the Nine Years' War (1688–1697), the War of the Spanish Succession (1701–1714), and part of the War of the Austrian Succession (1740–1748).Following the , the Low Countriesincluding territories that were never nominally under Habsburg rule, such as the Prince-Bishopric of Liègewere annexed by the French First Republic, ending Austrian rule in the region. A reunification of the Low Countries as the United Kingdom of the Netherlands occurred at the dissolution of the First French Empire in 1814, after the abdication of Napoleon.In 1830, the Belgian Revolution led to the separation of the Southern Provinces from the Netherlands and to the establishment of a Catholic and bourgeois, officially French-speaking and neutral, independent Belgium under a provisional government and a national congress. Since the installation of Leopold I as king on 1831, now celebrated as Belgium's National Day, Belgium has been a constitutional monarchy and parliamentary democracy, with a laicist constitution based on the Napoleonic code. Although the franchise was initially restricted, universal suffrage for men was introduced after the general strike of 1893 (with plural voting until 1919) and for women in 1949.The main political parties of the 19th century were the Catholic Party and the Liberal Party, with the Belgian Labour Party emerging towards the end of the 19th century. French was originally the single official language adopted by the nobility and the bourgeoisie. It progressively lost its overall importance as Dutch became recognized as well. This recognition became official in 1898, and in 1967, the parliament accepted a Dutch version of the Constitution.The Berlin Conference of 1885 ceded control of the Congo Free State to King Leopold II as his private possession. From around 1900 there was growing international concern for the extreme and savage treatment of the Congolese population under Leopold II, for whom the Congo was primarily a source of revenue from ivory and rubber production. Many Congolese were killed by Leopold's agents for failing to meet production quotas for ivory and rubber. In 1908, this outcry led the Belgian state to assume responsibility for the government of the colony, henceforth called the Belgian Congo. A Belgian commission in 1919 estimated that Congo's population was half what it was in 1879.Germany invaded Belgium in August 1914 as part of the Schlieffen Plan to attack France, and much of the Western Front fighting of World War I occurred in western parts of the country. The opening months of the war were known as the Rape of Belgium due to German excesses. Belgium assumed control of the German colonies of Ruanda-Urundi (modern-day Rwanda and Burundi) during the war, and in 1924 the League of Nations mandated them to Belgium. In the aftermath of the First World War, Belgium annexed the Prussian districts of Eupen and Malmedy in 1925, thereby causing the presence of a German-speaking minority.German forces again invaded the country in May 1940, and 40,690 Belgians, over half of them Jews, were killed during the subsequent occupation and The Holocaust. From September 1944 to February 1945 the Allies liberated Belgium. After World War II, a general strike forced King Leopold III to abdicate in 1951, since many Belgians felt he had collaborated with Germany during the war. The Belgian Congo gained independence in 1960 during the Congo Crisis; Ruanda-Urundi followed with its independence two years later. Belgium joined NATO as a founding member and formed the Benelux group of nations with the Netherlands and Luxembourg.Belgium became one of the six founding members of the European Coal and Steel Community in 1951 and of the European Atomic Energy Community and European Economic Community, established in 1957. The latter has now become the European Union, for which Belgium hosts major administrations and institutions, including the European Commission, the Council of the European Union and the extraordinary and committee sessions of the European Parliament.In the early 1990s, Belgium saw several large corruption scandals notably surrounding Marc Dutroux, Andre Cools, the Dioxin Affair, Agusta Scandal and Murder of Karel Van Noppen.Belgium shares borders with France (), Germany (), Luxembourg () and the Netherlands (). Its total surface, including water area, is . Before 2018, its total area was believed to be . However, when the country's statistics were measured in 2018, a new calculation method was used. Unlike previous calculations, this one included the area from the coast to the low-water line, revealing the country to be larger in surface area than previously thought. Its land area alone is 30,278 km. It lies between latitudes 49°30' and 51°30' N, and longitudes 2°33' and 6°24' E.Belgium has three main geographical regions; the coastal plain in the northwest and the central plateau both belong to the Anglo-Belgian Basin, and the Ardennes uplands in the southeast to the Hercynian orogenic belt. The Paris Basin reaches a small fourth area at Belgium's southernmost tip, Belgian Lorraine.The coastal plain consists mainly of sand dunes and polders. Further inland lies a smooth, slowly rising landscape irrigated by numerous waterways, with fertile valleys and the northeastern sandy plain of the Campine ("Kempen"). The thickly forested hills and plateaus of the Ardennes are more rugged and rocky with caves and small gorges. Extending westward into France, this area is eastwardly connected to the Eifel in Germany by the High Fens plateau, on which the Signal de Botrange forms the country's highest point at .The climate is maritime temperate with significant precipitation in all seasons (Köppen climate classification: "Cfb"), like most of northwest Europe. The average temperature is lowest in January at and highest in July at . The average precipitation per month varies between for February and April, to for July. Averages for the years 2000 to 2006 show daily temperature minimums of and maximums of and monthly rainfall of ; these are about 1 °C and nearly 10 millimetres above last century's normal values, respectively.Phytogeographically, Belgium is shared between the Atlantic European and Central European provinces of the Circumboreal Region within the Boreal Kingdom. According to the World Wide Fund for Nature, the territory of Belgium belongs to the terrestrial ecoregions of Atlantic mixed forests and Western European broadleaf forests. Belgium had a 2018 Forest Landscape Integrity Index mean score of 1.36/10, ranking it 163rd globally out of 172 countries.The territory of Belgium is divided into three Regions, two of which, the Flemish Region and Walloon Region, are in turn subdivided into provinces; the third Region, the Brussels Capital Region, is neither a province nor a part of a province.Belgium is a constitutional, popular monarchy and a federal parliamentary democracy. The bicameral federal parliament is composed of a Senate and a Chamber of Representatives. The former is made up of 50 senators appointed by the parliaments of the communities and regions and 10 co-opted senators. Prior to 2014, most of the Senate's members were directly elected. The Chamber's 150 representatives are elected under a proportional voting system from 11 electoral districts. Belgium has compulsory voting and thus maintains one of the highest rates of voter turnout in the world.The King (currently Philippe) is the head of state, though with limited prerogatives. He appoints ministers, including a Prime Minister, that have the confidence of the Chamber of Representatives to form the federal government. The Council of Ministers is composed of no more than fifteen members. With the possible exception of the Prime Minister, the Council of Ministers is composed of an equal number of Dutch-speaking members and French-speaking members.The judicial system is based on civil law and originates from the Napoleonic code. The Court of Cassation is the court of last resort, with the courts of appeal one level below.Belgium's political institutions are complex; most political power is organized around the need to represent the main cultural communities.Since about 1970, the significant national Belgian political parties have split into distinct components that mainly represent the political and linguistic interests of these communities.The major parties in each community, though close to the political center, belong to three main groups: Christian Democrats, Liberals, and Social Democrats.Further notable parties came into being well after the middle of last century, mainly around linguistic, nationalist, or environmental themes and recently smaller ones of some specific liberal nature.A string of Christian Democrat coalition governments from 1958 was broken in 1999 after the first dioxin crisis, a major food contamination scandal. A "rainbow coalition" emerged from six parties: the Flemish and the French-speaking Liberals, Social Democrats and Greens. Later, a "purple coalition" of Liberals and Social Democrats formed after the Greens lost most of their seats in the 2003 election.The government led by Prime Minister Guy Verhofstadt from 1999 to 2007 achieved a balanced budget, some tax reforms, a labor-market reform, scheduled nuclear phase-out and instigated legislation allowing more stringent war crime and more lenient soft drug usage prosecution. Restrictions on withholding euthanasia were reduced and same-sex marriage legalized. The government promoted active diplomacy in Africa and opposed the invasion of Iraq. It is the only country that does not have age restrictions on euthanasia.Verhofstadt's coalition fared badly in the June 2007 elections. For more than a year, the country experienced a political crisis. This crisis was such that many observers speculated on a possible partition of Belgium. From 2007 until 2008 the temporary Verhofstadt III Government was in office. This coalition of the Flemish and Francophone Christian Democrats, the Flemish and Francophone Liberals together with the Francophone Social Democrats was an interim government until 2008.On that day a new government, led by Flemish Christian Democrat Yves Leterme, the actual winner of the federal elections of , was sworn in by the king. On 2008 Leterme announced the resignation of the cabinet to the king, as no progress in constitutional reforms had been made.In December 2008, he once more offered his resignation to the king after a crisis surrounding the sale of Fortis to BNP Paribas. At this juncture, his resignation was accepted and Christian Democratic and Flemish Herman Van Rompuy was sworn in as Prime Minister on 2008.After Herman Van Rompuy was designated the first permanent President of the European Council on 2009, he offered the resignation of his government to King Albert II on 2009. A few hours later, the new government under Prime Minister Yves Leterme was sworn in. On 2010, Leterme again offered the resignation of his cabinet to the king after one of the coalition partners, the OpenVLD, withdrew from the government, and on 2010 King Albert officially accepted the resignation.The Parliamentary elections in Belgium on 2010 saw the Flemish nationalist N-VA become the largest party in Flanders, and the Socialist Party PS the largest party in Wallonia. Until December 2011, Belgium was governed by Leterme's caretaker government awaiting the end of the deadlocked negotiations for formation of a new government. By 30 March 2011, this set a new world record for the elapsed time without an official government, previously held by war-torn Iraq. Finally, in December 2011 the Di Rupo Government led by Walloon socialist Prime Minister Elio Di Rupo was sworn in.The 2014 federal election (coinciding with the regional elections) resulted in a further electoral gain for the Flemish nationalist N-VA, although the incumbent coalition (composed of Flemish and French-speaking Social Democrats, Liberals, and Christian Democrats) maintains a solid majority in Parliament and in all electoral constituencies. On 22 July 2014, King Philippe nominated Charles Michel (MR) and Kris Peeters (CD&V) to lead the formation of a new federal cabinet composed of the Flemish parties N-VA, CD&V, Open Vld and the French-speaking MR, which resulted in the Michel Government. It was the first time N-VA was part of the federal cabinet, while the French-speaking side was represented only by the MR, which achieved a minority of the public votes in Wallonia.In May 2019 federal elections in the Flemish-speaking northern region of Flanders far-right Vlaams Belang party made major gains. In the French-speaking southern area of Wallonia the Socialists were strong. The moderate Flemish nationalist party the N-VA remained the largest party in parliament.In July 2019 prime minister Charles Michel was selected to hold the post of President of the European Council. His successor Sophie Wilmès was Belgium's first female prime minister. She led the caretaker government since October 2019. The Flemish Liberal party politician Alexander De Croo became new prime minister in October 2020. The parties had agreed on federal government 16 months after the elections.Following a usage which can be traced back to the Burgundian and Habsburg courts, in the 19th century it was necessary to speak French to belong to the governing upper class, and those who could only speak Dutch were effectively second-class citizens. Late that century, and continuing into the 20th century, Flemish movements evolved to counter this situation.While the people in Southern Belgium spoke French or dialects of French, and most Brusselers adopted French as their first language, the Flemings refused to do so and succeeded progressively in making Dutch an equal language in the education system. Following World War II, Belgian politics became increasingly dominated by the autonomy of its two main linguistic communities. Intercommunal tensions rose and the constitution was amended to minimize the potential for conflict.Based on the four language areas defined in 1962–63 (the Dutch, bilingual, French and German language areas), consecutive revisions of the country's constitution in 1970, 1980, 1988 and 1993 established a unique form of a federal state with segregated political power into three levels:The constitutional language areas determine the official languages in their municipalities, as well as the geographical limits of the empowered institutions for specific matters. Although this would allow for seven parliaments and governments when the Communities and Regions were created in 1980, Flemish politicians decided to merge both. Thus the Flemings just have one single institutional body of parliament and government is empowered for all except federal and specific municipal matters.The overlapping boundaries of the Regions and Communities have created two notable peculiarities: the territory of the Brussels-Capital Region (which came into existence nearly a decade after the other regions) is included in both the Flemish and French Communities, and the territory of the German-speaking Community lies wholly within the Walloon Region. Conflicts about jurisdiction between the bodies are resolved by the Constitutional Court of Belgium. The structure is intended as a compromise to allow different cultures to live together peacefully.The Federal State's authority includes justice, defense, federal police, social security, nuclear energy, monetary policy and public debt, and other aspects of public finances. State-owned companies include the Belgian Post Group and Belgian Railways. The Federal Government is responsible for the obligations of Belgium and its federalized institutions towards the European Union and NATO. It controls substantial parts of public health, home affairs and foreign affairs. The budget—without the debt—controlled by the federal government amounts to about 50% of the national fiscal income. The federal government employs around 12% of the civil servants.Communities exercise their authority only within linguistically determined geographical boundaries, originally oriented towards the individuals of a Community's language: culture (including audiovisual media), education and the use of the relevant language. Extensions to personal matters less directly connected with language comprise health policy (curative and preventive medicine) and assistance to individuals (protection of youth, social welfare, aid to families, immigrant assistance services, and so on.).Regions have authority in fields that can be broadly associated with their territory. These include economy, employment, agriculture, water policy, housing, public works, energy, transport, the environment, town and country planning, nature conservation, credit and foreign trade. They supervise the provinces, municipalities and intercommunal utility companies.In several fields, the different levels each have their own say on specifics. With education, for instance, the autonomy of the Communities neither includes decisions about the compulsory aspect nor allows for setting minimum requirements for awarding qualifications, which remain federal matters. Each level of government can be involved in scientific research and international relations associated with its powers. The treaty-making power of the Regions' and Communities' Governments is the broadest of all the Federating units of all the Federations all over the world.Because of its location at the crossroads of Western Europe, Belgium has historically been the route of invading armies from its larger neighbors. With virtually defenseless borders, Belgium has traditionally sought to avoid domination by the more powerful nations which surround it through a policy of mediation. The Belgians have been strong advocates of European integration. Both the European Union and NATO are headquartered in Belgium.The Belgian Armed Forces have about 47,000 active troops. In 2019, Belgium's defense budget totaled €4.303 billion ($4.921 billion) representing .93% of its GDP. They are organized into one unified structure which consists of four main components: Land Component, or the Army; Air Component, or the Air Force; Marine Component, or the Navy; Medical Component. The operational commands of the four components are subordinate to the Staff Department for Operations and Training of the Ministry of Defense, which is headed by the Assistant Chief of Staff Operations and Training, and to the Chief of Defense.The effects of the Second World War made collective security a priority for Belgian foreign policy. In March 1948 Belgium signed the Treaty of Brussels and then joined NATO in 1948. However, the integration of the armed forces into NATO did not begin until after the Korean War. The Belgians, along with the Luxembourg government, sent a detachment of battalion strength to fight in Korea known as the Belgian United Nations Command. This mission was the first in a long line of UN missions which the Belgians supported. Currently, the Belgian Marine Component is working closely together with the Dutch Navy under the command of the Admiral Benelux.Belgium's strongly globalized economy and its transport infrastructure are integrated with the rest of Europe. Its location at the heart of a highly industrialized region helped make it the world's 15th largest trading nation in 2007. The economy is characterized by a highly productive work force, high GNP and high exports per capita. Belgium's main imports are raw materials, machinery and equipment, chemicals, raw diamonds, pharmaceuticals, foodstuffs, transportation equipment, and oil products. Its main exports are machinery and equipment, chemicals, finished diamonds, metals and metal products, and foodstuffs.The Belgian economy is heavily service-oriented and shows a dual nature: a dynamic Flemish economy and a Walloon economy that lags behind. One of the founding members of the European Union, Belgium strongly supports an open economy and the extension of the powers of EU institutions to integrate member economies. Since 1922, through the Belgium-Luxembourg Economic Union, Belgium and Luxembourg have been a single trade market with customs and currency union.Belgium was the first continental European country to undergo the Industrial Revolution, in the early 19th century. Areas in Liège Province and around Charleroi rapidly developed mining and steelmaking, which flourished until the mid-20th century in the Sambre and Meuse valley and made Belgium one of the three most industrialized nations in the world from 1830 to 1910. However, by the 1840s the textile industry of Flanders was in severe crisis, and the region experienced famine from 1846 to 1850.After World War II, Ghent and Antwerp experienced a rapid expansion of the chemical and petroleum industries. The 1973 and 1979 oil crises sent the economy into a recession; it was particularly prolonged in Wallonia, where the steel industry had become less competitive and experienced a serious decline. In the 1980s and 1990s, the economic center of the country continued to shift northwards and is now concentrated in the populous Flemish Diamond area.By the end of the 1980s, Belgian macroeconomic policies had resulted in a cumulative government debt of about 120% of GDP. , the budget was balanced and public debt was equal to 90.30% of GDP. In 2005 and 2006, real GDP growth rates of 1.5% and 3.0%, respectively, were slightly above the average for the Euro area. Unemployment rates of 8.4% in 2005 and 8.2% in 2006 were close to the area average. By , this had grown to 8.5% compared to an average rate of 9.6% for the European Union as a whole (EU 27). From 1832 until 2002, Belgium's currency was the Belgian franc. Belgium switched to the euro in 2002, with the first sets of euro coins being minted in 1999. The standard Belgian euro coins designated for circulation show the portrait of the monarch (first King Albert II, since 2013 King Philippe).Despite an 18% decrease observed from 1970 to 1999, Belgium still had in 1999 the highest rail network density within the European Union with 113.8 km/1 000 km. On the other hand, the same period, 1970–1999, has seen a huge growth (+56%) of the motorway network. In 1999, the density of km motorways per 1000 km and 1000 inhabitants amounted to 55.1 and 16.5 respectively and were significantly superior to the EU's means of 13.7 and 15.9.From a biological resource perspective, Belgium has a low endowment: Belgium's biocapacity adds up to only 0.8 global hectares in 2016, just about half of the 1.6 global hectares of biocapacity available per person worldwide. In contrast, in 2016, Belgians used on average 6.3 global hectares of biocapacity - their ecological footprint of consumption. This means they required about eight times as much biocapacity as Belgium contains. As a result, Belgium was running a biocapacity deficit of 5.5 global hectares per person in 2016.Belgium experiences some of the most congested traffic in Europe. In 2010, commuters to the cities of Brussels and Antwerp spent respectively 65 and 64 hours a year in traffic jams. Like in most small European countries, more than 80% of the airways traffic is handled by a single airport, the Brussels Airport. The ports of Antwerp and Zeebrugge (Bruges) share more than 80% of Belgian maritime traffic, Antwerp being the second European harbor with a gross weight of goods handled of 115 988 000 t in 2000 after a growth of 10.9% over the preceding five years. In 2016, the port of Antwerp handled 214 million tons after a year-on-year growth of 2.7%.There is a large economic gap between Flanders and Wallonia. Wallonia was historically wealthy compared to Flanders, mostly due to its heavy industries, but the decline of the steel industry post-World War II led to the region's rapid decline, whereas Flanders rose swiftly. Since then, Flanders has been prosperous, among the wealthiest regions in Europe, whereas Wallonia has been languishing. As of 2007, the unemployment rate of Wallonia is over double that of Flanders. The divide has played a key part in the tensions between the Flemish and Walloons in addition to the already-existing language divide. Pro-independence movements have gained high popularity in Flanders as a consequence. The separatist New Flemish Alliance (N-VA) party, for instance, is the largest party in Belgium.Contributions to the development of science and technology have appeared throughout the country's history. The 16th century Early Modern flourishing of Western Europe included cartographer Gerardus Mercator, anatomist Andreas Vesalius, herbalist Rembert Dodoens and mathematician Simon Stevin among the most influential scientists.Chemist Ernest Solvay and engineer Zenobe Gramme (École industrielle de Liège) gave their names to the Solvay process and the Gramme dynamo, respectively, in the 1860s. Bakelite was developed in 1907–1909 by Leo Baekeland. Ernest Solvay also acted as a major philanthropist and gave its name to the Solvay Institute of Sociology, the Solvay Brussels School of Economics and Management and the International Solvay Institutes for Physics and Chemistry which are now part of the Université libre de Bruxelles. In 1911, he started a series of conferences, the Solvay Conferences on Physics and Chemistry, which have had a deep impact on the evolution of quantum physics and chemistry. A major contribution to fundamental science was also due to a Belgian, Monsignor Georges Lemaître (Catholic University of Louvain), who is credited with proposing the Big Bang theory of the origin of the universe in 1927.Three Nobel Prizes in Physiology or Medicine were awarded to Belgians: Jules Bordet (Université libre de Bruxelles) in 1919, Corneille Heymans (University of Ghent) in 1938 and Albert Claude (Université libre de Bruxelles) together with Christian de Duve (Université catholique de Louvain) in 1974. François Englert (Université libre de Bruxelles) was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics in 2013. Ilya Prigogine (Université libre de Bruxelles) was awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1977. Two Belgian mathematicians have been awarded the Fields Medal: Pierre Deligne in 1978 and Jean Bourgain in 1994.As of 1 January 2020, the total population of Belgium according to its population register was 11,492,641. The population density of Belgium is as of January 2019, making it the 22nd most densely populated country in the world, and the 6th most densely populated country in Europe. The most densely populated province is Antwerp, the least densely populated province is Luxembourg. As of January 2019, the Flemish Region had a population of 6,589,069 (57.6% of Belgium), its most populous cities being Antwerp (523,248), Ghent (260,341) and Bruges (118,284). Wallonia had a population of 3,633,795 (31.8% of Belgium) with Charleroi (201,816), Liège (197,355) and Namur (110,939), its most populous cities. The Brussels-Capital Region has 1,208,542 inhabitants (10.6% of Belgium) in the 19 municipalities, three of which have over 100,000 residents.In 2017 the average total fertility rate (TFR) across Belgium was 1.64 children per woman, below the replacement rate of 2.1, it remains considerably below the high of 4.87 children born per woman in 1873. Belgium subsequently has one of the oldest populations in the world, with the average age of 41.6 years., nearly 92% of the population had Belgian citizenship, and other European Union member citizens account for around 6%. The prevalent foreign nationals were Italian (171,918), French (125,061), Dutch (116,970), Moroccan (80,579), Portuguese (43,509), Spanish (42,765), Turkish (39,419) and German (37,621). In 2007, there were 1.38 million foreign-born residents in Belgium, corresponding to 12.9% of the total population. Of these, 685,000 (6.4%) were born outside the EU and 695,000 (6.5%) were born in another EU Member State.At the beginning of 2012, people of foreign background and their descendants were estimated to have formed around 25% of the total population i.e. 2.8 million "new Belgians". Of these new Belgians, 1,200,000 are of European ancestry and 1,350,000 are from non-Western countries (most of them from Morocco, Turkey, and the DR Congo). Since the modification of the Belgian nationality law in 1984 more than 1.3 million migrants have acquired Belgian citizenship. The largest group of immigrants and their descendants in Belgium are Moroccans. 89.2% of inhabitants of Turkish origin have been naturalized, as have 88.4% of people of Moroccan background, 75.4% of Italians, 56.2% of the French and 47.8% of Dutch people.Belgium has three official languages: Dutch, French and German. A number of non-official minority languages are spoken as well.As no census exists, there are no official statistical data regarding the distribution or usage of Belgium's three official languages or their dialects. However, various criteria, including the language(s) of parents, of education, or the second-language status of foreign born, may provide suggested figures. An estimated 60% of the Belgian population are native speakers of Dutch (often referred to as Flemish), and 40% of the population speaks French natively. French-speaking Belgians are often referred to as Walloons, although the French speakers in Brussels are not Walloons.The total number of native Dutch speakers is estimated to be about 6.23 million, concentrated in the northern Flanders region, while native French speakers number 3.32 million in Wallonia and an estimated 870,000 (or 85%) in the officially bilingual Brussels-Capital Region. The German-speaking Community is made up of 73,000 people in the east of the Walloon Region; around 10,000 German and 60,000 Belgian nationals are speakers of German. Roughly 23,000 more German speakers live in municipalities near the official Community.Both Belgian Dutch and Belgian French have minor differences in vocabulary and semantic nuances from the varieties spoken respectively in the Netherlands and France. Many Flemish people still speak dialects of Dutch in their local environment. Walloon, considered either as a dialect of French or a distinct Romance language, is now only understood and spoken occasionally, mostly by elderly people. Walloon is divided into four dialects, which along with those of Picard, are rarely used in public life and have largely been replaced by French.Since the country's independence, Roman Catholicism has had an important role in Belgium's politics. However Belgium is largely a secular country as the constitution provides for freedom of religion, and the government generally respects this right in practice. During the reigns of Albert I and Baudouin, the Belgian royal family had a reputation of deeply rooted Catholicism.Roman Catholicism has traditionally been Belgium's majority religion; being especially strong in Flanders. However, by 2009 Sunday church attendance was 5% for Belgium in total; 3% in Brussels, and 5.4% in Flanders. Church attendance in 2009 in Belgium was roughly half of the Sunday church attendance in 1998 (11% for the total of Belgium in 1998). Despite the drop in church attendance, Catholic identity nevertheless remains an important part of Belgium's culture.According to the Eurobarometer 2010, 37% of Belgian citizens responded that they believe there is a God. 31% answered that they believe there is some sort of spirit or life-force. 27% answered that they do not believe there is any sort of spirit, God, or life-force. 5% did not respond. According to the Eurobarometer 2015, 60.7% of the total population of Belgium adhered to Christianity, with Roman Catholicism being the largest denomination with 52.9%. Protestants comprised 2.1% and Orthodox Christians were the 1.6% of the total. Non-religious people comprised 32.0% of the population and were divided between atheists (14.9%) and agnostics (17.1%). A further 5.2% of the population was Muslim and 2.1% were believers in other religions. The same survey held in 2012 found that Christianity was the largest religion in Belgium, accounting for 65% of Belgians.Symbolically and materially, the Roman Catholic Church remains in a favorable position. Belgium officially recognizes three religions: Christianity (Catholic, Protestantism, Orthodox churches and Anglicanism), Islam and Judaism.In the early 2000s, there were approximately 42,000 Jews in Belgium. The Jewish Community of Antwerp (numbering some 18,000) is one of the largest in Europe, and one of the last places in the world where Yiddish is the primary language of a large Jewish community (mirroring certain Orthodox and Hasidic communities in New York, New Jersey, and Israel). In addition, most Jewish children in Antwerp receive a Jewish education. There are several Jewish newspapers and more than 45 active synagogues (30 of which are in Antwerp) in the country.A 2006 inquiry in Flanders, considered to be a more religious region than Wallonia, showed that 55% considered themselves religious and that 36% believed that God created the universe. On the other hand, Wallonia has become one of Europe's most secular/least religious regions. Most of the French-speaking region's population does not consider religion an important part of their lives, and as much as 45% of the population identifies as irreligious. This is particularly the case in eastern Wallonia and areas along the French border.A 2008 estimate found that approximately 6% of the Belgian population (628,751 people) is Muslim. Muslims constitute 23.6% of the population of Brussels, 4.9% of Wallonia and 5.1% of Flanders. The majority of Belgian Muslims live in the major cities, such as Antwerp, Brussels and Charleroi. The largest group of immigrants in Belgium are Moroccans, with 400,000 people. The Turks are the third largest group, and the second largest Muslim ethnic group, numbering 220,000.The Belgians enjoy good health. According to 2012 estimates, the average life expectancy is 79.65 years. Since 1960, life expectancy has, in line with the European average, grown by two months per year. Death in Belgium is mainly due to heart and vascular disorders, neoplasms, disorders of the respiratory system and unnatural causes of death (accidents, suicide). Non-natural causes of death and cancer are the most common causes of death for females up to age 24 and males up to age 44.Healthcare in Belgium is financed through both social security contributions and taxation. Health insurance is compulsory. Health care is delivered by a mixed public and private system of independent medical practitioners and public, university and semi-private hospitals. Health care service are payable by the patient and reimbursed later by health insurance institutions, but for ineligible categories (of patients and services) so-called 3rd party payment systems exist. The Belgian health care system is supervised and financed by the federal government, the Flemish and Walloon Regional governments; and the German Community also has (indirect) oversight and responsibilities.For the first time in Belgian history, the first child was euthanized following the 2-year mark of the removal of the euthanization age restrictions. The child had been euthanized due to an incurable disease that was inflicted upon the child. Although there may have been some support for the euthanization there is a possibility of controversy due to the issue revolving around the subject of assisted suicide. Excluding assisted suicide, Belgium has the highest suicide rate in Western Europe and one of the highest suicide rates in the developed world (exceeded only by Lithuania, South Korea, and Latvia).Education is compulsory from 6 to 18 years of age for Belgians. Among OECD countries in 2002, Belgium had the third highest proportion of 18- to 21-year-olds enrolled in postsecondary education, at 42%. Though an estimated 99% of the adult population is literate, concern is rising over functional illiteracy. The Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA), coordinated by the OECD, currently ranks Belgium's education as the 19th best in the world, being significantly higher than the OECD average. Education being organized separately by each, the Flemish Community scores noticeably above the French and German-speaking Communities.Mirroring the dual structure of the 19th-century Belgian political landscape, characterized by the Liberal and the Catholic parties, the educational system is segregated within a secular and a religious segment. The secular branch of schooling is controlled by the communities, the provinces, or the municipalities, while religious, mainly Catholic branch education, is organized by religious authorities, although subsidized and supervised by the communities.Despite its political and linguistic divisions, the region corresponding to today's Belgium has seen the flourishing of major artistic movements that have had tremendous influence on European art and culture. Nowadays, to a certain extent, cultural life is concentrated within each language Community, and a variety of barriers have made a shared cultural sphere less pronounced. Since the 1970s, there are no bilingual universities or colleges in the country except the Royal Military Academy and the Antwerp Maritime Academy.Contributions to painting and architecture have been especially rich. The Mosan art, the Early Netherlandish, the Flemish Renaissance and Baroque painting and major examples of Romanesque, Gothic, Renaissance and Baroque architecture are milestones in the history of art. While the 15th century's art in the Low Countries is dominated by the religious paintings of Jan van Eyck and Rogier van der Weyden, the 16th century is characterized by a broader panel of styles such as Peter Breughel's landscape paintings and Lambert Lombard's representation of the antique. Though the Baroque style of Peter Paul Rubens and Anthony van Dyck flourished in the early 17th century in the Southern Netherlands, it gradually declined thereafter.During the 19th and 20th centuries many original romantic, expressionist and surrealist Belgian painters emerged, including James Ensor and other artists belonging to the Les XX group, Constant Permeke, Paul Delvaux and René Magritte. The avant-garde CoBrA movement appeared in the 1950s, while the sculptor Panamarenko remains a remarkable figure in contemporary art. Multidisciplinary artists Jan Fabre, Wim Delvoye and the painter Luc Tuymans are other internationally renowned figures on the contemporary art scene.Belgian contributions to architecture also continued into the 19th and 20th centuries, including the work of Victor Horta and Henry van de Velde, who were major initiators of the Art Nouveau style.The vocal music of the Franco-Flemish School developed in the southern part of the Low Countries and was an important contribution to Renaissance culture. In the 19th and 20th centuries, there was an emergence of major violinists, such as Henri Vieuxtemps, Eugène Ysaÿe and Arthur Grumiaux, while Adolphe Sax invented the saxophone in 1846. The composer César Franck was born in Liège in 1822. Contemporary popular music in Belgium is also of repute. Jazz musician Toots Thielemans and singer Jacques Brel have achieved global fame. Nowadays, singer Stromae has been a musical revelation in Europe and beyond, having great success. In rock/pop music, Telex, Front 242, K's Choice, Hooverphonic, Zap Mama, Soulwax and dEUS are well known. In the heavy metal scene, bands like Machiavel, Channel Zero and Enthroned have a worldwide fan-base.Belgium has produced several well-known authors, including the poets Emile Verhaeren, Guido Gezelle, Robert Goffin and novelists Hendrik Conscience, Stijn Streuvels, Georges Simenon, Suzanne Lilar, Hugo Claus and Amélie Nothomb. The poet and playwright Maurice Maeterlinck won the Nobel Prize in literature in 1911. "The Adventures of Tintin" by Hergé is the best known of Franco-Belgian comics, but many other major authors, including Peyo ("The Smurfs"), André Franquin ("Gaston Lagaffe"), Dupa ("Cubitus"), Morris ("Lucky Luke"), Greg ("Achille Talon"), Lambil ("Les Tuniques Bleues"), Edgar P. Jacobs and Willy Vandersteen brought the Belgian cartoon strip industry a worldwide fame. Additionally, famous crime author Agatha Christie created the character Hercule Poirot, a Belgian detective, who has served as a protagonist in a number of her acclaimed mystery novels.Belgian cinema has brought a number of mainly Flemish novels to life on-screen. Other Belgian directors include André Delvaux, Stijn Coninx, Luc and Jean-Pierre Dardenne; well-known actors include Jean-Claude Van Damme, Jan Decleir and Marie Gillain; and successful films include "Bullhead, Man Bites Dog" and "The Alzheimer Affair".Belgium is also home to a number of successful fashion designers . For instance, in the 1980s, Antwerp's Royal Academy of Fine Arts produced important fashion trendsetters, known as the Antwerp Six.Folklore plays a major role in Belgium's cultural life: the country has a comparatively high number of processions, cavalcades, parades, " and 'ducasses', 'kermesse' and other local festivals, nearly always with an originally religious or mythological background. The Carnival of Binche with its famous Gilles and the 'Processional Giants and Dragons' of Ath, Brussels, Dendermonde, Mechelen and Mons are recognized by UNESCO as Masterpieces of the Oral and Intangible Heritage of Humanity.Other examples are the Carnival of Aalst; the still very religious processions of the Holy Blood in Bruges, Virga Jesse Basilica in Hasselt and Basilica of Our Lady of Hanswijk in Mechelen; festival in Liège; and the Walloon festival in Namur. Originated in 1832 and revived in the 1960s, the Gentse Feesten have become a modern tradition. A major non-official holiday is the Saint Nicholas Day, a festivity for children and, in Liège, for students.Many highly ranked Belgian restaurants can be found in the most influential restaurant guides, such as the Michelin Guide. Belgium is famous for beer, chocolate, waffles and french fries with mayonnaise. Contrary to their name, french fries are claimed to have originated in Belgium, although their exact place of origin is uncertain. The national dishes are "steak and fries with salad", and "mussels with fries".Brands of Belgian chocolate and pralines, like Côte d'Or, Neuhaus, Leonidas and Godiva are famous, as well as independent producers such as Burie and Del Rey in Antwerp and Mary's in Brussels. Belgium produces over 1100 varieties of beer. The Trappist beer of the Abbey of Westvleteren has repeatedly been rated the world's best beer.The biggest brewer in the world by volume is Anheuser-Busch InBev, based in Leuven.Since the 1970s, sports clubs and federations are organized separately within each language community. Association football is the most popular sport in both parts of Belgium; also very popular are cycling, tennis, swimming, judo and basketball.The Belgium national football team have been on the top spot of the FIFA World Rankings ever since September 2018 (first time reached this rank in November 2015). Since the 1990s, the team have been the world's number one for the most years in history, only behind the records of Brazil and Spain. The team's golden generations with the world class players in the squad, namely Eden Hazard, Kevin De Bruyne, Jean-Marie Pfaff, Jan Ceulemans achieved the bronze medals at World Cup 2018, and silver medals at Euro 1980. Belgium hosted the Euro 1972, and co-hosted the Euro 2000 with the Netherlands.Belgians hold the most Tour de France victories of any country except France. They have also the most victories on the UCI Road World Championships. Philippe Gilbert is the 2012 world champion. Another modern well-known Belgian cyclist is Tom Boonen. With five victories in the Tour de France and numerous other cycling records, Belgian cyclist Eddy Merckx is regarded as one of the greatest cyclists of all time.Kim Clijsters and Justine Henin both were Player of the Year in the Women's Tennis Association as they were ranked the number one female tennis player.The Spa-Francorchamps motor-racing circuit hosts the Formula One World Championship Belgian Grand Prix. The Belgian driver, Jacky Ickx, won eight Grands Prix and six 24 Hours of Le Mans and finished twice as runner-up in the Formula One World Championship. Belgium also has a strong reputation in, motocross with the riders Joël Robert, Roger De Coster, Georges Jobé, Eric Geboers and Stefan Everts among others. Sporting events annually held in Belgium include the Memorial Van Damme athletics competition, the Belgian Grand Prix Formula One, and a number of classic cycle races such as the Tour of Flanders and Liège–Bastogne–Liège. The 1920 Summer Olympics were held in Antwerp. The 1977 European Basketball Championship was held in Liège and Ostend.	[ "Charles Michel", "Alexander De Croo" ]
Who was the head of Belgium in 28-May-202028-May-2020?	May 28, 2020	{ "text": [ "Sophie Wilmès" ] }	L2_Q31_P6_1	Charles Michel is the head of the government of Belgium from Oct, 2014 to Oct, 2019. Alexander De Croo is the head of the government of Belgium from Oct, 2020 to Dec, 2022. Sophie Wilmès is the head of the government of Belgium from Oct, 2019 to Oct, 2020.	BelgiumBelgium ( ; ; ), officially the Kingdom of Belgium, is a country in Western Europe. It is bordered by the Netherlands to the north, Germany to the east, Luxembourg to the southeast, France to the southwest, and the North Sea to the northwest. It covers an area of and has a population of more than 11.5 million, making it the 22nd most densely populated country in the world and the 6th most densely populated country in Europe, with a density of . The capital and largest city is Brussels; other major cities are Antwerp, Ghent, Charleroi, Liège, Bruges, Namur, and Leuven.Belgium is a sovereign state and a federal constitutional monarchy with a parliamentary system. Its institutional organization is complex and is structured on both regional and linguistic grounds. It is divided into three highly autonomous regions: the Flemish Region (Flanders) in the north, the Walloon Region (Wallonia) in the south, and the Brussels-Capital Region. Brussels is the smallest and most densely populated region, as well as the richest region in terms of GDP per capita.Belgium is home to two main linguistic communities: the Dutch-speaking Flemish Community, which constitutes about 60 percent of the population, and the French-speaking Community, which constitutes about 40 percent of the population. A small German-speaking Community, numbering around one percent, exists in the East Cantons. The Brussels-Capital Region is officially bilingual in French and Dutch, although French is the dominant language. Belgium's linguistic diversity and related political conflicts are reflected in its complex system of governance, made up of six different governments.The country as it exists today was established following the 1830 Belgian Revolution, when it seceded from the Netherlands, which had itself only existed since 1815. The name chosen for the new state is derived from the Latin word "Belgium", used in Julius Caesar's "Gallic Wars", to describe a nearby region in the period around 55 BCE. Belgium is part of an area known as the Low Countries, historically a somewhat larger region than the Benelux group of states, as it also included parts of northern France. Since the Middle Ages, its central location near several major rivers has meant that the area has been relatively prosperous, connected commercially and politically to its bigger neighbours. Belgium has unfortunately also been the battleground of European powers, earning the moniker the "Battlefield of Europe", a reputation strengthened in the 20th century by both world wars. Belgium participated in the Industrial Revolution and, during the course of the 20th century, possessed a number of colonies in Africa. Between 1888 and 1908, Leopold II, king of Belgium, perpetrated one of the largest massacres in human history in Congo Free State, which was his private estate, and not yet a colony of Belgium. Estimates of the death toll are disputed but millions of people, a significant part of the population, died for the sake of rubber and ivory exports.The second half of the 20th century was marked by rising tensions between the Dutch-speaking and the French-speaking citizens fuelled by differences in language and culture and the unequal economic development of Flanders and Wallonia. This continuing antagonism has led to several far-reaching reforms, resulting in a transition from a unitary to a federal arrangement during the period from 1970 to 1993. Despite the reforms, tensions between the groups have remained, if not increased; there is significant separatism particularly among the Flemish; controversial language laws exist such as the municipalities with language facilities; and the formation of a coalition government took 18 months following the June 2010 federal election, a world record. Unemployment in Wallonia is more than double that of Flanders, which boomed after the war.Belgium is one of the six founding countries of the European Union and its capital, Brussels, hosts the official seats of the European Commission, the Council of the European Union, and the European Council, as well as one of two seats of the European Parliament (the other being Strasbourg). Belgium is also a founding member of the Eurozone, NATO, OECD, and WTO, and a part of the trilateral Benelux Union and the Schengen Area. Brussels hosts the headquarters of many major international organizations such as NATO.Belgium is a developed country, with an advanced high-income economy. It has very high standards of living, quality of life, healthcare, education, and is categorized as "very high" in the Human Development Index. It also ranks as one of the safest or most peaceful countries in the world.The "Belgae" were the inhabitants of the northernmost part of Gaul, which was much bigger than modern Belgium. Caesar used the Latin word ""Belgium"", to refer to their country within northern Gaul, which was a region now in northern France. Modern Belgium corresponds to the lands of the Morini, Menapii, Nervii, Germani Cisrhenani, Aduatuci, and, around Arlon, a part of the country of the Treveri. All of these except the Treveri formed a less Celtic-influenced "transition zone", north of the area Caesar treated as "Belgium".After Caesar's conquests, "Gallia Belgica" came to be the Latin name of a large Roman province covering most of Northern Gaul, including the Treveri. Areas closer to the lower Rhine frontier, including the eastern part of modern Belgium, eventually became part of the frontier province of "Germania Inferior", which interacted with Germanic tribes outside the empire. At the time when central government collapsed in the Western Roman Empire, the Roman provinces of Belgica and Germania were inhabited by a mix of a Romanized population and Germanic-speaking Franks who came to dominate the military and political class.During the 5th century, the area came under the rule of the Frankish Merovingian kings, who were probably first established in what is northern France. During the 8th century, the kingdom of the Franks came to be ruled by the Carolingian Dynasty, whose centre of power was around the area which is now eastern Belgium. The frankish kingdom had been divided up in many ways, but the Treaty of Verdun in 843 divided the Carolingian Empire into three kingdoms, whose borders had a lasting impact on medieval political boundaries. Most of modern Belgium was in the Middle Kingdom, later known as Lotharingia, but the coastal county of Flanders, west of the Scheldt, became part of West Francia, the predecessor of France. In 870 in the Treaty of Meerssen, modern Belgium lands all became part of the western kingdom for a period, but in 880 in the Treaty of Ribemont, Lotharingia returned to the lasting control of the Holy Roman Emperor. The lordships and bishoprics along the "March" (frontier) between the two great kingdoms maintained important connections between each other. The county of Flanders expanded over the Scheldt into the empire, and during several periods was ruled by the same lords as the county of Hainaut. In the 13th and 14th centuries, the cloth industry and commerce boomed especially in the County of Flanders and it became one of the richest areas in Europe. This prosperity played a role in conflicts between Flanders and the king of France. Famously, Flemish militias scored a surprise victory at the Battle of the Golden Spurs against a strong force of mounted knights in 1302, but France soon regained control of the rebellious province.In the 15th century, the Duke of Burgundy in France took control of Flanders, and from there they proceeded to unite much of what is now the Benelux, the so-called Burgundian Netherlands. "Belgium" and "Flanders" were the first two common names used for the Burgundian Netherlands which was the predecessor of the Austrian Netherlands, the predecessor of modern Belgium. The union, technically stretching between two kingdoms, gave the area economic and political stability which led to an even greater prosperity and artistic creation.Born in Belgium, the Habsburg Emperor Charles V was heir of the Burgundians, but also of the royal families of Austria, Castile and Aragon. With the Pragmatic Sanction of 1549 he gave the Seventeen Provinces more legitimacy as a stable entity, rather than just a temporary personal union. He also increased the influence of these Netherlands over the Prince-Bishopric of Liège, which continued to exist as a large semi-independent enclave.The Eighty Years' War (1568–1648), was triggered by the Spanish government's policy towards protestantism, which was becoming popular in the Low Countries. The rebellious northern United Provinces ("Belgica Foederata" in Latin, the "Federated Netherlands") eventually separated from the Southern Netherlands ("Belgica Regia", the "Royal Netherlands"). The latter were ruled successively by the Spanish (Spanish Netherlands) and the Austrian Habsburgs (Austrian Netherlands) and comprised most of modern Belgium. This was the theatre of several more protracted conflicts during much of the 17th and 18th centuries involving France, including the Franco-Dutch War (1672–1678), the Nine Years' War (1688–1697), the War of the Spanish Succession (1701–1714), and part of the War of the Austrian Succession (1740–1748).Following the , the Low Countriesincluding territories that were never nominally under Habsburg rule, such as the Prince-Bishopric of Liègewere annexed by the French First Republic, ending Austrian rule in the region. A reunification of the Low Countries as the United Kingdom of the Netherlands occurred at the dissolution of the First French Empire in 1814, after the abdication of Napoleon.In 1830, the Belgian Revolution led to the separation of the Southern Provinces from the Netherlands and to the establishment of a Catholic and bourgeois, officially French-speaking and neutral, independent Belgium under a provisional government and a national congress. Since the installation of Leopold I as king on 1831, now celebrated as Belgium's National Day, Belgium has been a constitutional monarchy and parliamentary democracy, with a laicist constitution based on the Napoleonic code. Although the franchise was initially restricted, universal suffrage for men was introduced after the general strike of 1893 (with plural voting until 1919) and for women in 1949.The main political parties of the 19th century were the Catholic Party and the Liberal Party, with the Belgian Labour Party emerging towards the end of the 19th century. French was originally the single official language adopted by the nobility and the bourgeoisie. It progressively lost its overall importance as Dutch became recognized as well. This recognition became official in 1898, and in 1967, the parliament accepted a Dutch version of the Constitution.The Berlin Conference of 1885 ceded control of the Congo Free State to King Leopold II as his private possession. From around 1900 there was growing international concern for the extreme and savage treatment of the Congolese population under Leopold II, for whom the Congo was primarily a source of revenue from ivory and rubber production. Many Congolese were killed by Leopold's agents for failing to meet production quotas for ivory and rubber. In 1908, this outcry led the Belgian state to assume responsibility for the government of the colony, henceforth called the Belgian Congo. A Belgian commission in 1919 estimated that Congo's population was half what it was in 1879.Germany invaded Belgium in August 1914 as part of the Schlieffen Plan to attack France, and much of the Western Front fighting of World War I occurred in western parts of the country. The opening months of the war were known as the Rape of Belgium due to German excesses. Belgium assumed control of the German colonies of Ruanda-Urundi (modern-day Rwanda and Burundi) during the war, and in 1924 the League of Nations mandated them to Belgium. In the aftermath of the First World War, Belgium annexed the Prussian districts of Eupen and Malmedy in 1925, thereby causing the presence of a German-speaking minority.German forces again invaded the country in May 1940, and 40,690 Belgians, over half of them Jews, were killed during the subsequent occupation and The Holocaust. From September 1944 to February 1945 the Allies liberated Belgium. After World War II, a general strike forced King Leopold III to abdicate in 1951, since many Belgians felt he had collaborated with Germany during the war. The Belgian Congo gained independence in 1960 during the Congo Crisis; Ruanda-Urundi followed with its independence two years later. Belgium joined NATO as a founding member and formed the Benelux group of nations with the Netherlands and Luxembourg.Belgium became one of the six founding members of the European Coal and Steel Community in 1951 and of the European Atomic Energy Community and European Economic Community, established in 1957. The latter has now become the European Union, for which Belgium hosts major administrations and institutions, including the European Commission, the Council of the European Union and the extraordinary and committee sessions of the European Parliament.In the early 1990s, Belgium saw several large corruption scandals notably surrounding Marc Dutroux, Andre Cools, the Dioxin Affair, Agusta Scandal and Murder of Karel Van Noppen.Belgium shares borders with France (), Germany (), Luxembourg () and the Netherlands (). Its total surface, including water area, is . Before 2018, its total area was believed to be . However, when the country's statistics were measured in 2018, a new calculation method was used. Unlike previous calculations, this one included the area from the coast to the low-water line, revealing the country to be larger in surface area than previously thought. Its land area alone is 30,278 km. It lies between latitudes 49°30' and 51°30' N, and longitudes 2°33' and 6°24' E.Belgium has three main geographical regions; the coastal plain in the northwest and the central plateau both belong to the Anglo-Belgian Basin, and the Ardennes uplands in the southeast to the Hercynian orogenic belt. The Paris Basin reaches a small fourth area at Belgium's southernmost tip, Belgian Lorraine.The coastal plain consists mainly of sand dunes and polders. Further inland lies a smooth, slowly rising landscape irrigated by numerous waterways, with fertile valleys and the northeastern sandy plain of the Campine ("Kempen"). The thickly forested hills and plateaus of the Ardennes are more rugged and rocky with caves and small gorges. Extending westward into France, this area is eastwardly connected to the Eifel in Germany by the High Fens plateau, on which the Signal de Botrange forms the country's highest point at .The climate is maritime temperate with significant precipitation in all seasons (Köppen climate classification: "Cfb"), like most of northwest Europe. The average temperature is lowest in January at and highest in July at . The average precipitation per month varies between for February and April, to for July. Averages for the years 2000 to 2006 show daily temperature minimums of and maximums of and monthly rainfall of ; these are about 1 °C and nearly 10 millimetres above last century's normal values, respectively.Phytogeographically, Belgium is shared between the Atlantic European and Central European provinces of the Circumboreal Region within the Boreal Kingdom. According to the World Wide Fund for Nature, the territory of Belgium belongs to the terrestrial ecoregions of Atlantic mixed forests and Western European broadleaf forests. Belgium had a 2018 Forest Landscape Integrity Index mean score of 1.36/10, ranking it 163rd globally out of 172 countries.The territory of Belgium is divided into three Regions, two of which, the Flemish Region and Walloon Region, are in turn subdivided into provinces; the third Region, the Brussels Capital Region, is neither a province nor a part of a province.Belgium is a constitutional, popular monarchy and a federal parliamentary democracy. The bicameral federal parliament is composed of a Senate and a Chamber of Representatives. The former is made up of 50 senators appointed by the parliaments of the communities and regions and 10 co-opted senators. Prior to 2014, most of the Senate's members were directly elected. The Chamber's 150 representatives are elected under a proportional voting system from 11 electoral districts. Belgium has compulsory voting and thus maintains one of the highest rates of voter turnout in the world.The King (currently Philippe) is the head of state, though with limited prerogatives. He appoints ministers, including a Prime Minister, that have the confidence of the Chamber of Representatives to form the federal government. The Council of Ministers is composed of no more than fifteen members. With the possible exception of the Prime Minister, the Council of Ministers is composed of an equal number of Dutch-speaking members and French-speaking members.The judicial system is based on civil law and originates from the Napoleonic code. The Court of Cassation is the court of last resort, with the courts of appeal one level below.Belgium's political institutions are complex; most political power is organized around the need to represent the main cultural communities.Since about 1970, the significant national Belgian political parties have split into distinct components that mainly represent the political and linguistic interests of these communities.The major parties in each community, though close to the political center, belong to three main groups: Christian Democrats, Liberals, and Social Democrats.Further notable parties came into being well after the middle of last century, mainly around linguistic, nationalist, or environmental themes and recently smaller ones of some specific liberal nature.A string of Christian Democrat coalition governments from 1958 was broken in 1999 after the first dioxin crisis, a major food contamination scandal. A "rainbow coalition" emerged from six parties: the Flemish and the French-speaking Liberals, Social Democrats and Greens. Later, a "purple coalition" of Liberals and Social Democrats formed after the Greens lost most of their seats in the 2003 election.The government led by Prime Minister Guy Verhofstadt from 1999 to 2007 achieved a balanced budget, some tax reforms, a labor-market reform, scheduled nuclear phase-out and instigated legislation allowing more stringent war crime and more lenient soft drug usage prosecution. Restrictions on withholding euthanasia were reduced and same-sex marriage legalized. The government promoted active diplomacy in Africa and opposed the invasion of Iraq. It is the only country that does not have age restrictions on euthanasia.Verhofstadt's coalition fared badly in the June 2007 elections. For more than a year, the country experienced a political crisis. This crisis was such that many observers speculated on a possible partition of Belgium. From 2007 until 2008 the temporary Verhofstadt III Government was in office. This coalition of the Flemish and Francophone Christian Democrats, the Flemish and Francophone Liberals together with the Francophone Social Democrats was an interim government until 2008.On that day a new government, led by Flemish Christian Democrat Yves Leterme, the actual winner of the federal elections of , was sworn in by the king. On 2008 Leterme announced the resignation of the cabinet to the king, as no progress in constitutional reforms had been made.In December 2008, he once more offered his resignation to the king after a crisis surrounding the sale of Fortis to BNP Paribas. At this juncture, his resignation was accepted and Christian Democratic and Flemish Herman Van Rompuy was sworn in as Prime Minister on 2008.After Herman Van Rompuy was designated the first permanent President of the European Council on 2009, he offered the resignation of his government to King Albert II on 2009. A few hours later, the new government under Prime Minister Yves Leterme was sworn in. On 2010, Leterme again offered the resignation of his cabinet to the king after one of the coalition partners, the OpenVLD, withdrew from the government, and on 2010 King Albert officially accepted the resignation.The Parliamentary elections in Belgium on 2010 saw the Flemish nationalist N-VA become the largest party in Flanders, and the Socialist Party PS the largest party in Wallonia. Until December 2011, Belgium was governed by Leterme's caretaker government awaiting the end of the deadlocked negotiations for formation of a new government. By 30 March 2011, this set a new world record for the elapsed time without an official government, previously held by war-torn Iraq. Finally, in December 2011 the Di Rupo Government led by Walloon socialist Prime Minister Elio Di Rupo was sworn in.The 2014 federal election (coinciding with the regional elections) resulted in a further electoral gain for the Flemish nationalist N-VA, although the incumbent coalition (composed of Flemish and French-speaking Social Democrats, Liberals, and Christian Democrats) maintains a solid majority in Parliament and in all electoral constituencies. On 22 July 2014, King Philippe nominated Charles Michel (MR) and Kris Peeters (CD&V) to lead the formation of a new federal cabinet composed of the Flemish parties N-VA, CD&V, Open Vld and the French-speaking MR, which resulted in the Michel Government. It was the first time N-VA was part of the federal cabinet, while the French-speaking side was represented only by the MR, which achieved a minority of the public votes in Wallonia.In May 2019 federal elections in the Flemish-speaking northern region of Flanders far-right Vlaams Belang party made major gains. In the French-speaking southern area of Wallonia the Socialists were strong. The moderate Flemish nationalist party the N-VA remained the largest party in parliament.In July 2019 prime minister Charles Michel was selected to hold the post of President of the European Council. His successor Sophie Wilmès was Belgium's first female prime minister. She led the caretaker government since October 2019. The Flemish Liberal party politician Alexander De Croo became new prime minister in October 2020. The parties had agreed on federal government 16 months after the elections.Following a usage which can be traced back to the Burgundian and Habsburg courts, in the 19th century it was necessary to speak French to belong to the governing upper class, and those who could only speak Dutch were effectively second-class citizens. Late that century, and continuing into the 20th century, Flemish movements evolved to counter this situation.While the people in Southern Belgium spoke French or dialects of French, and most Brusselers adopted French as their first language, the Flemings refused to do so and succeeded progressively in making Dutch an equal language in the education system. Following World War II, Belgian politics became increasingly dominated by the autonomy of its two main linguistic communities. Intercommunal tensions rose and the constitution was amended to minimize the potential for conflict.Based on the four language areas defined in 1962–63 (the Dutch, bilingual, French and German language areas), consecutive revisions of the country's constitution in 1970, 1980, 1988 and 1993 established a unique form of a federal state with segregated political power into three levels:The constitutional language areas determine the official languages in their municipalities, as well as the geographical limits of the empowered institutions for specific matters. Although this would allow for seven parliaments and governments when the Communities and Regions were created in 1980, Flemish politicians decided to merge both. Thus the Flemings just have one single institutional body of parliament and government is empowered for all except federal and specific municipal matters.The overlapping boundaries of the Regions and Communities have created two notable peculiarities: the territory of the Brussels-Capital Region (which came into existence nearly a decade after the other regions) is included in both the Flemish and French Communities, and the territory of the German-speaking Community lies wholly within the Walloon Region. Conflicts about jurisdiction between the bodies are resolved by the Constitutional Court of Belgium. The structure is intended as a compromise to allow different cultures to live together peacefully.The Federal State's authority includes justice, defense, federal police, social security, nuclear energy, monetary policy and public debt, and other aspects of public finances. State-owned companies include the Belgian Post Group and Belgian Railways. The Federal Government is responsible for the obligations of Belgium and its federalized institutions towards the European Union and NATO. It controls substantial parts of public health, home affairs and foreign affairs. The budget—without the debt—controlled by the federal government amounts to about 50% of the national fiscal income. The federal government employs around 12% of the civil servants.Communities exercise their authority only within linguistically determined geographical boundaries, originally oriented towards the individuals of a Community's language: culture (including audiovisual media), education and the use of the relevant language. Extensions to personal matters less directly connected with language comprise health policy (curative and preventive medicine) and assistance to individuals (protection of youth, social welfare, aid to families, immigrant assistance services, and so on.).Regions have authority in fields that can be broadly associated with their territory. These include economy, employment, agriculture, water policy, housing, public works, energy, transport, the environment, town and country planning, nature conservation, credit and foreign trade. They supervise the provinces, municipalities and intercommunal utility companies.In several fields, the different levels each have their own say on specifics. With education, for instance, the autonomy of the Communities neither includes decisions about the compulsory aspect nor allows for setting minimum requirements for awarding qualifications, which remain federal matters. Each level of government can be involved in scientific research and international relations associated with its powers. The treaty-making power of the Regions' and Communities' Governments is the broadest of all the Federating units of all the Federations all over the world.Because of its location at the crossroads of Western Europe, Belgium has historically been the route of invading armies from its larger neighbors. With virtually defenseless borders, Belgium has traditionally sought to avoid domination by the more powerful nations which surround it through a policy of mediation. The Belgians have been strong advocates of European integration. Both the European Union and NATO are headquartered in Belgium.The Belgian Armed Forces have about 47,000 active troops. In 2019, Belgium's defense budget totaled €4.303 billion ($4.921 billion) representing .93% of its GDP. They are organized into one unified structure which consists of four main components: Land Component, or the Army; Air Component, or the Air Force; Marine Component, or the Navy; Medical Component. The operational commands of the four components are subordinate to the Staff Department for Operations and Training of the Ministry of Defense, which is headed by the Assistant Chief of Staff Operations and Training, and to the Chief of Defense.The effects of the Second World War made collective security a priority for Belgian foreign policy. In March 1948 Belgium signed the Treaty of Brussels and then joined NATO in 1948. However, the integration of the armed forces into NATO did not begin until after the Korean War. The Belgians, along with the Luxembourg government, sent a detachment of battalion strength to fight in Korea known as the Belgian United Nations Command. This mission was the first in a long line of UN missions which the Belgians supported. Currently, the Belgian Marine Component is working closely together with the Dutch Navy under the command of the Admiral Benelux.Belgium's strongly globalized economy and its transport infrastructure are integrated with the rest of Europe. Its location at the heart of a highly industrialized region helped make it the world's 15th largest trading nation in 2007. The economy is characterized by a highly productive work force, high GNP and high exports per capita. Belgium's main imports are raw materials, machinery and equipment, chemicals, raw diamonds, pharmaceuticals, foodstuffs, transportation equipment, and oil products. Its main exports are machinery and equipment, chemicals, finished diamonds, metals and metal products, and foodstuffs.The Belgian economy is heavily service-oriented and shows a dual nature: a dynamic Flemish economy and a Walloon economy that lags behind. One of the founding members of the European Union, Belgium strongly supports an open economy and the extension of the powers of EU institutions to integrate member economies. Since 1922, through the Belgium-Luxembourg Economic Union, Belgium and Luxembourg have been a single trade market with customs and currency union.Belgium was the first continental European country to undergo the Industrial Revolution, in the early 19th century. Areas in Liège Province and around Charleroi rapidly developed mining and steelmaking, which flourished until the mid-20th century in the Sambre and Meuse valley and made Belgium one of the three most industrialized nations in the world from 1830 to 1910. However, by the 1840s the textile industry of Flanders was in severe crisis, and the region experienced famine from 1846 to 1850.After World War II, Ghent and Antwerp experienced a rapid expansion of the chemical and petroleum industries. The 1973 and 1979 oil crises sent the economy into a recession; it was particularly prolonged in Wallonia, where the steel industry had become less competitive and experienced a serious decline. In the 1980s and 1990s, the economic center of the country continued to shift northwards and is now concentrated in the populous Flemish Diamond area.By the end of the 1980s, Belgian macroeconomic policies had resulted in a cumulative government debt of about 120% of GDP. , the budget was balanced and public debt was equal to 90.30% of GDP. In 2005 and 2006, real GDP growth rates of 1.5% and 3.0%, respectively, were slightly above the average for the Euro area. Unemployment rates of 8.4% in 2005 and 8.2% in 2006 were close to the area average. By , this had grown to 8.5% compared to an average rate of 9.6% for the European Union as a whole (EU 27). From 1832 until 2002, Belgium's currency was the Belgian franc. Belgium switched to the euro in 2002, with the first sets of euro coins being minted in 1999. The standard Belgian euro coins designated for circulation show the portrait of the monarch (first King Albert II, since 2013 King Philippe).Despite an 18% decrease observed from 1970 to 1999, Belgium still had in 1999 the highest rail network density within the European Union with 113.8 km/1 000 km. On the other hand, the same period, 1970–1999, has seen a huge growth (+56%) of the motorway network. In 1999, the density of km motorways per 1000 km and 1000 inhabitants amounted to 55.1 and 16.5 respectively and were significantly superior to the EU's means of 13.7 and 15.9.From a biological resource perspective, Belgium has a low endowment: Belgium's biocapacity adds up to only 0.8 global hectares in 2016, just about half of the 1.6 global hectares of biocapacity available per person worldwide. In contrast, in 2016, Belgians used on average 6.3 global hectares of biocapacity - their ecological footprint of consumption. This means they required about eight times as much biocapacity as Belgium contains. As a result, Belgium was running a biocapacity deficit of 5.5 global hectares per person in 2016.Belgium experiences some of the most congested traffic in Europe. In 2010, commuters to the cities of Brussels and Antwerp spent respectively 65 and 64 hours a year in traffic jams. Like in most small European countries, more than 80% of the airways traffic is handled by a single airport, the Brussels Airport. The ports of Antwerp and Zeebrugge (Bruges) share more than 80% of Belgian maritime traffic, Antwerp being the second European harbor with a gross weight of goods handled of 115 988 000 t in 2000 after a growth of 10.9% over the preceding five years. In 2016, the port of Antwerp handled 214 million tons after a year-on-year growth of 2.7%.There is a large economic gap between Flanders and Wallonia. Wallonia was historically wealthy compared to Flanders, mostly due to its heavy industries, but the decline of the steel industry post-World War II led to the region's rapid decline, whereas Flanders rose swiftly. Since then, Flanders has been prosperous, among the wealthiest regions in Europe, whereas Wallonia has been languishing. As of 2007, the unemployment rate of Wallonia is over double that of Flanders. The divide has played a key part in the tensions between the Flemish and Walloons in addition to the already-existing language divide. Pro-independence movements have gained high popularity in Flanders as a consequence. The separatist New Flemish Alliance (N-VA) party, for instance, is the largest party in Belgium.Contributions to the development of science and technology have appeared throughout the country's history. The 16th century Early Modern flourishing of Western Europe included cartographer Gerardus Mercator, anatomist Andreas Vesalius, herbalist Rembert Dodoens and mathematician Simon Stevin among the most influential scientists.Chemist Ernest Solvay and engineer Zenobe Gramme (École industrielle de Liège) gave their names to the Solvay process and the Gramme dynamo, respectively, in the 1860s. Bakelite was developed in 1907–1909 by Leo Baekeland. Ernest Solvay also acted as a major philanthropist and gave its name to the Solvay Institute of Sociology, the Solvay Brussels School of Economics and Management and the International Solvay Institutes for Physics and Chemistry which are now part of the Université libre de Bruxelles. In 1911, he started a series of conferences, the Solvay Conferences on Physics and Chemistry, which have had a deep impact on the evolution of quantum physics and chemistry. A major contribution to fundamental science was also due to a Belgian, Monsignor Georges Lemaître (Catholic University of Louvain), who is credited with proposing the Big Bang theory of the origin of the universe in 1927.Three Nobel Prizes in Physiology or Medicine were awarded to Belgians: Jules Bordet (Université libre de Bruxelles) in 1919, Corneille Heymans (University of Ghent) in 1938 and Albert Claude (Université libre de Bruxelles) together with Christian de Duve (Université catholique de Louvain) in 1974. François Englert (Université libre de Bruxelles) was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics in 2013. Ilya Prigogine (Université libre de Bruxelles) was awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1977. Two Belgian mathematicians have been awarded the Fields Medal: Pierre Deligne in 1978 and Jean Bourgain in 1994.As of 1 January 2020, the total population of Belgium according to its population register was 11,492,641. The population density of Belgium is as of January 2019, making it the 22nd most densely populated country in the world, and the 6th most densely populated country in Europe. The most densely populated province is Antwerp, the least densely populated province is Luxembourg. As of January 2019, the Flemish Region had a population of 6,589,069 (57.6% of Belgium), its most populous cities being Antwerp (523,248), Ghent (260,341) and Bruges (118,284). Wallonia had a population of 3,633,795 (31.8% of Belgium) with Charleroi (201,816), Liège (197,355) and Namur (110,939), its most populous cities. The Brussels-Capital Region has 1,208,542 inhabitants (10.6% of Belgium) in the 19 municipalities, three of which have over 100,000 residents.In 2017 the average total fertility rate (TFR) across Belgium was 1.64 children per woman, below the replacement rate of 2.1, it remains considerably below the high of 4.87 children born per woman in 1873. Belgium subsequently has one of the oldest populations in the world, with the average age of 41.6 years., nearly 92% of the population had Belgian citizenship, and other European Union member citizens account for around 6%. The prevalent foreign nationals were Italian (171,918), French (125,061), Dutch (116,970), Moroccan (80,579), Portuguese (43,509), Spanish (42,765), Turkish (39,419) and German (37,621). In 2007, there were 1.38 million foreign-born residents in Belgium, corresponding to 12.9% of the total population. Of these, 685,000 (6.4%) were born outside the EU and 695,000 (6.5%) were born in another EU Member State.At the beginning of 2012, people of foreign background and their descendants were estimated to have formed around 25% of the total population i.e. 2.8 million "new Belgians". Of these new Belgians, 1,200,000 are of European ancestry and 1,350,000 are from non-Western countries (most of them from Morocco, Turkey, and the DR Congo). Since the modification of the Belgian nationality law in 1984 more than 1.3 million migrants have acquired Belgian citizenship. The largest group of immigrants and their descendants in Belgium are Moroccans. 89.2% of inhabitants of Turkish origin have been naturalized, as have 88.4% of people of Moroccan background, 75.4% of Italians, 56.2% of the French and 47.8% of Dutch people.Belgium has three official languages: Dutch, French and German. A number of non-official minority languages are spoken as well.As no census exists, there are no official statistical data regarding the distribution or usage of Belgium's three official languages or their dialects. However, various criteria, including the language(s) of parents, of education, or the second-language status of foreign born, may provide suggested figures. An estimated 60% of the Belgian population are native speakers of Dutch (often referred to as Flemish), and 40% of the population speaks French natively. French-speaking Belgians are often referred to as Walloons, although the French speakers in Brussels are not Walloons.The total number of native Dutch speakers is estimated to be about 6.23 million, concentrated in the northern Flanders region, while native French speakers number 3.32 million in Wallonia and an estimated 870,000 (or 85%) in the officially bilingual Brussels-Capital Region. The German-speaking Community is made up of 73,000 people in the east of the Walloon Region; around 10,000 German and 60,000 Belgian nationals are speakers of German. Roughly 23,000 more German speakers live in municipalities near the official Community.Both Belgian Dutch and Belgian French have minor differences in vocabulary and semantic nuances from the varieties spoken respectively in the Netherlands and France. Many Flemish people still speak dialects of Dutch in their local environment. Walloon, considered either as a dialect of French or a distinct Romance language, is now only understood and spoken occasionally, mostly by elderly people. Walloon is divided into four dialects, which along with those of Picard, are rarely used in public life and have largely been replaced by French.Since the country's independence, Roman Catholicism has had an important role in Belgium's politics. However Belgium is largely a secular country as the constitution provides for freedom of religion, and the government generally respects this right in practice. During the reigns of Albert I and Baudouin, the Belgian royal family had a reputation of deeply rooted Catholicism.Roman Catholicism has traditionally been Belgium's majority religion; being especially strong in Flanders. However, by 2009 Sunday church attendance was 5% for Belgium in total; 3% in Brussels, and 5.4% in Flanders. Church attendance in 2009 in Belgium was roughly half of the Sunday church attendance in 1998 (11% for the total of Belgium in 1998). Despite the drop in church attendance, Catholic identity nevertheless remains an important part of Belgium's culture.According to the Eurobarometer 2010, 37% of Belgian citizens responded that they believe there is a God. 31% answered that they believe there is some sort of spirit or life-force. 27% answered that they do not believe there is any sort of spirit, God, or life-force. 5% did not respond. According to the Eurobarometer 2015, 60.7% of the total population of Belgium adhered to Christianity, with Roman Catholicism being the largest denomination with 52.9%. Protestants comprised 2.1% and Orthodox Christians were the 1.6% of the total. Non-religious people comprised 32.0% of the population and were divided between atheists (14.9%) and agnostics (17.1%). A further 5.2% of the population was Muslim and 2.1% were believers in other religions. The same survey held in 2012 found that Christianity was the largest religion in Belgium, accounting for 65% of Belgians.Symbolically and materially, the Roman Catholic Church remains in a favorable position. Belgium officially recognizes three religions: Christianity (Catholic, Protestantism, Orthodox churches and Anglicanism), Islam and Judaism.In the early 2000s, there were approximately 42,000 Jews in Belgium. The Jewish Community of Antwerp (numbering some 18,000) is one of the largest in Europe, and one of the last places in the world where Yiddish is the primary language of a large Jewish community (mirroring certain Orthodox and Hasidic communities in New York, New Jersey, and Israel). In addition, most Jewish children in Antwerp receive a Jewish education. There are several Jewish newspapers and more than 45 active synagogues (30 of which are in Antwerp) in the country.A 2006 inquiry in Flanders, considered to be a more religious region than Wallonia, showed that 55% considered themselves religious and that 36% believed that God created the universe. On the other hand, Wallonia has become one of Europe's most secular/least religious regions. Most of the French-speaking region's population does not consider religion an important part of their lives, and as much as 45% of the population identifies as irreligious. This is particularly the case in eastern Wallonia and areas along the French border.A 2008 estimate found that approximately 6% of the Belgian population (628,751 people) is Muslim. Muslims constitute 23.6% of the population of Brussels, 4.9% of Wallonia and 5.1% of Flanders. The majority of Belgian Muslims live in the major cities, such as Antwerp, Brussels and Charleroi. The largest group of immigrants in Belgium are Moroccans, with 400,000 people. The Turks are the third largest group, and the second largest Muslim ethnic group, numbering 220,000.The Belgians enjoy good health. According to 2012 estimates, the average life expectancy is 79.65 years. Since 1960, life expectancy has, in line with the European average, grown by two months per year. Death in Belgium is mainly due to heart and vascular disorders, neoplasms, disorders of the respiratory system and unnatural causes of death (accidents, suicide). Non-natural causes of death and cancer are the most common causes of death for females up to age 24 and males up to age 44.Healthcare in Belgium is financed through both social security contributions and taxation. Health insurance is compulsory. Health care is delivered by a mixed public and private system of independent medical practitioners and public, university and semi-private hospitals. Health care service are payable by the patient and reimbursed later by health insurance institutions, but for ineligible categories (of patients and services) so-called 3rd party payment systems exist. The Belgian health care system is supervised and financed by the federal government, the Flemish and Walloon Regional governments; and the German Community also has (indirect) oversight and responsibilities.For the first time in Belgian history, the first child was euthanized following the 2-year mark of the removal of the euthanization age restrictions. The child had been euthanized due to an incurable disease that was inflicted upon the child. Although there may have been some support for the euthanization there is a possibility of controversy due to the issue revolving around the subject of assisted suicide. Excluding assisted suicide, Belgium has the highest suicide rate in Western Europe and one of the highest suicide rates in the developed world (exceeded only by Lithuania, South Korea, and Latvia).Education is compulsory from 6 to 18 years of age for Belgians. Among OECD countries in 2002, Belgium had the third highest proportion of 18- to 21-year-olds enrolled in postsecondary education, at 42%. Though an estimated 99% of the adult population is literate, concern is rising over functional illiteracy. The Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA), coordinated by the OECD, currently ranks Belgium's education as the 19th best in the world, being significantly higher than the OECD average. Education being organized separately by each, the Flemish Community scores noticeably above the French and German-speaking Communities.Mirroring the dual structure of the 19th-century Belgian political landscape, characterized by the Liberal and the Catholic parties, the educational system is segregated within a secular and a religious segment. The secular branch of schooling is controlled by the communities, the provinces, or the municipalities, while religious, mainly Catholic branch education, is organized by religious authorities, although subsidized and supervised by the communities.Despite its political and linguistic divisions, the region corresponding to today's Belgium has seen the flourishing of major artistic movements that have had tremendous influence on European art and culture. Nowadays, to a certain extent, cultural life is concentrated within each language Community, and a variety of barriers have made a shared cultural sphere less pronounced. Since the 1970s, there are no bilingual universities or colleges in the country except the Royal Military Academy and the Antwerp Maritime Academy.Contributions to painting and architecture have been especially rich. The Mosan art, the Early Netherlandish, the Flemish Renaissance and Baroque painting and major examples of Romanesque, Gothic, Renaissance and Baroque architecture are milestones in the history of art. While the 15th century's art in the Low Countries is dominated by the religious paintings of Jan van Eyck and Rogier van der Weyden, the 16th century is characterized by a broader panel of styles such as Peter Breughel's landscape paintings and Lambert Lombard's representation of the antique. Though the Baroque style of Peter Paul Rubens and Anthony van Dyck flourished in the early 17th century in the Southern Netherlands, it gradually declined thereafter.During the 19th and 20th centuries many original romantic, expressionist and surrealist Belgian painters emerged, including James Ensor and other artists belonging to the Les XX group, Constant Permeke, Paul Delvaux and René Magritte. The avant-garde CoBrA movement appeared in the 1950s, while the sculptor Panamarenko remains a remarkable figure in contemporary art. Multidisciplinary artists Jan Fabre, Wim Delvoye and the painter Luc Tuymans are other internationally renowned figures on the contemporary art scene.Belgian contributions to architecture also continued into the 19th and 20th centuries, including the work of Victor Horta and Henry van de Velde, who were major initiators of the Art Nouveau style.The vocal music of the Franco-Flemish School developed in the southern part of the Low Countries and was an important contribution to Renaissance culture. In the 19th and 20th centuries, there was an emergence of major violinists, such as Henri Vieuxtemps, Eugène Ysaÿe and Arthur Grumiaux, while Adolphe Sax invented the saxophone in 1846. The composer César Franck was born in Liège in 1822. Contemporary popular music in Belgium is also of repute. Jazz musician Toots Thielemans and singer Jacques Brel have achieved global fame. Nowadays, singer Stromae has been a musical revelation in Europe and beyond, having great success. In rock/pop music, Telex, Front 242, K's Choice, Hooverphonic, Zap Mama, Soulwax and dEUS are well known. In the heavy metal scene, bands like Machiavel, Channel Zero and Enthroned have a worldwide fan-base.Belgium has produced several well-known authors, including the poets Emile Verhaeren, Guido Gezelle, Robert Goffin and novelists Hendrik Conscience, Stijn Streuvels, Georges Simenon, Suzanne Lilar, Hugo Claus and Amélie Nothomb. The poet and playwright Maurice Maeterlinck won the Nobel Prize in literature in 1911. "The Adventures of Tintin" by Hergé is the best known of Franco-Belgian comics, but many other major authors, including Peyo ("The Smurfs"), André Franquin ("Gaston Lagaffe"), Dupa ("Cubitus"), Morris ("Lucky Luke"), Greg ("Achille Talon"), Lambil ("Les Tuniques Bleues"), Edgar P. Jacobs and Willy Vandersteen brought the Belgian cartoon strip industry a worldwide fame. Additionally, famous crime author Agatha Christie created the character Hercule Poirot, a Belgian detective, who has served as a protagonist in a number of her acclaimed mystery novels.Belgian cinema has brought a number of mainly Flemish novels to life on-screen. Other Belgian directors include André Delvaux, Stijn Coninx, Luc and Jean-Pierre Dardenne; well-known actors include Jean-Claude Van Damme, Jan Decleir and Marie Gillain; and successful films include "Bullhead, Man Bites Dog" and "The Alzheimer Affair".Belgium is also home to a number of successful fashion designers . For instance, in the 1980s, Antwerp's Royal Academy of Fine Arts produced important fashion trendsetters, known as the Antwerp Six.Folklore plays a major role in Belgium's cultural life: the country has a comparatively high number of processions, cavalcades, parades, " and 'ducasses', 'kermesse' and other local festivals, nearly always with an originally religious or mythological background. The Carnival of Binche with its famous Gilles and the 'Processional Giants and Dragons' of Ath, Brussels, Dendermonde, Mechelen and Mons are recognized by UNESCO as Masterpieces of the Oral and Intangible Heritage of Humanity.Other examples are the Carnival of Aalst; the still very religious processions of the Holy Blood in Bruges, Virga Jesse Basilica in Hasselt and Basilica of Our Lady of Hanswijk in Mechelen; festival in Liège; and the Walloon festival in Namur. Originated in 1832 and revived in the 1960s, the Gentse Feesten have become a modern tradition. A major non-official holiday is the Saint Nicholas Day, a festivity for children and, in Liège, for students.Many highly ranked Belgian restaurants can be found in the most influential restaurant guides, such as the Michelin Guide. Belgium is famous for beer, chocolate, waffles and french fries with mayonnaise. Contrary to their name, french fries are claimed to have originated in Belgium, although their exact place of origin is uncertain. The national dishes are "steak and fries with salad", and "mussels with fries".Brands of Belgian chocolate and pralines, like Côte d'Or, Neuhaus, Leonidas and Godiva are famous, as well as independent producers such as Burie and Del Rey in Antwerp and Mary's in Brussels. Belgium produces over 1100 varieties of beer. The Trappist beer of the Abbey of Westvleteren has repeatedly been rated the world's best beer.The biggest brewer in the world by volume is Anheuser-Busch InBev, based in Leuven.Since the 1970s, sports clubs and federations are organized separately within each language community. Association football is the most popular sport in both parts of Belgium; also very popular are cycling, tennis, swimming, judo and basketball.The Belgium national football team have been on the top spot of the FIFA World Rankings ever since September 2018 (first time reached this rank in November 2015). Since the 1990s, the team have been the world's number one for the most years in history, only behind the records of Brazil and Spain. The team's golden generations with the world class players in the squad, namely Eden Hazard, Kevin De Bruyne, Jean-Marie Pfaff, Jan Ceulemans achieved the bronze medals at World Cup 2018, and silver medals at Euro 1980. Belgium hosted the Euro 1972, and co-hosted the Euro 2000 with the Netherlands.Belgians hold the most Tour de France victories of any country except France. They have also the most victories on the UCI Road World Championships. Philippe Gilbert is the 2012 world champion. Another modern well-known Belgian cyclist is Tom Boonen. With five victories in the Tour de France and numerous other cycling records, Belgian cyclist Eddy Merckx is regarded as one of the greatest cyclists of all time.Kim Clijsters and Justine Henin both were Player of the Year in the Women's Tennis Association as they were ranked the number one female tennis player.The Spa-Francorchamps motor-racing circuit hosts the Formula One World Championship Belgian Grand Prix. The Belgian driver, Jacky Ickx, won eight Grands Prix and six 24 Hours of Le Mans and finished twice as runner-up in the Formula One World Championship. Belgium also has a strong reputation in, motocross with the riders Joël Robert, Roger De Coster, Georges Jobé, Eric Geboers and Stefan Everts among others. Sporting events annually held in Belgium include the Memorial Van Damme athletics competition, the Belgian Grand Prix Formula One, and a number of classic cycle races such as the Tour of Flanders and Liège–Bastogne–Liège. The 1920 Summer Olympics were held in Antwerp. The 1977 European Basketball Championship was held in Liège and Ostend.	[ "Charles Michel", "Alexander De Croo" ]
Who was the chair of Confederation of German Trade Unions in Nov, 1973?	November 25, 1973	{ "text": [ "Heinz Oskar Vetter" ] }	L2_Q586581_P488_5	Heinz-Werner Meyer is the chair of Confederation of German Trade Unions from Jan, 1990 to Jan, 1994. Christian Fette is the chair of Confederation of German Trade Unions from Jan, 1951 to Jan, 1952. Walter Freitag is the chair of Confederation of German Trade Unions from Jan, 1952 to Jan, 1956. Reiner Hoffmann is the chair of Confederation of German Trade Unions from May, 2014 to May, 2022. Yasmin Fahimi is the chair of Confederation of German Trade Unions from Jan, 2022 to Dec, 2022. Hans Böckler is the chair of Confederation of German Trade Unions from Jan, 1949 to Jan, 1951. Ludwig Rosenberg is the chair of Confederation of German Trade Unions from Jan, 1962 to Jan, 1969. Heinz Oskar Vetter is the chair of Confederation of German Trade Unions from Jan, 1969 to Jan, 1982. Michael Sommer is the chair of Confederation of German Trade Unions from Jan, 2002 to Jan, 2014. Willi Richter is the chair of Confederation of German Trade Unions from Jan, 1956 to Jan, 1962.	German Trade Union ConfederationThe German Trade Union Confederation (; DGB) is an umbrella organisation (sometimes known as a national trade union center) for eight German trade unions, in total representing more than 6 million people (31 December 2011). It was founded in Munich, 12 October 1949.The DGB coordinates joint demands and activities within the German trade union movement. It represents the member unions in contact with the government authorities, the political parties and the employers' organisations. However, the umbrella organisation is not directly involved in collective bargaining and does not conclude collective labour agreements.Union delegates elect committees for 9 districts, 66 regions and the federal centre. The organisation holds a federal congress every four years. This assembly sets the framework for trade union policies and elects five Federal Executives. Together with the presidents of the member unions they constitute the DGB's executive committee. The members of the executive committee, together with the DGB regional presidents and 70 delegates from the unions, form a Federal Council which meets once a year to make decisions on national issues. The DGB also has a youth organisation, DGB-Jugend.The DGB has its headquarters in Berlin. It is a member of the European Trade Union Confederation (ETUC) and the International Trade Union Confederation (ITUC).As first German confederation of unions at 14 March 1892 the "Generalkommission der Gewerkschaften Deutschlands" was founded in Halberstadt. It represented 57 national and some local unions with approximate 300,000 people in total. After World War I unions had to reorganise. During a congress in Nuremberg from 30 June until 5 July 1919 the "Allgemeiner Deutscher Gewerkschaftsbund" (ADGB) was founded as an umbrella organisation of 52 unions with more than 3 million members. The ADGB may be seen as predecessor of today's DGB. Like today, there also existed a conservative counterpart of lesser importance.Curiously, this conservative organisation was named "Deutscher Gewerkschaftsbund, DGB". On 2 May 1933 all trade unions were dissolved by the Nazis.After World War II German unions had to reorganize once again.On 9–11 February 1946 the "Freier Deutscher Gewerkschaftsbund" ("FDGB") was founded in Berlin as a confederation of 15 unions in the Soviet occupation zone.On 23–25 April 1947 the "Deutscher Gewerkschaftsbund, DGB" was founded in Bielefeld as a confederation of 12 unions in the Allied-occupied Germany.Foundations in the American occupation zone:24/25 August 1946: Freier Gewerkschaftsbund Hessen30 August – 1 September 1946: Gewerkschaftsbund Württemberg-Baden27–29 March 1947: Bayerischer GewerkschaftsbundFoundations in the French occupation zone:15/16 February 1947: Gewerkschaftsbund Süd-Württemberg und Hohenzollern1/2 March 1947: Badischer Gewerkschaftsbund2 May 1947: Allgemeiner Gewerkschaftsbund Rheinland-PfalzOn 12–14 October, the 7 umbrella organisation in West Germany merged into the West German DGB as a confederation of 16 single trade unions.In 1990, the members of the FDGB of the German Democratic Republic joined the members of the DGB. In recent years, many member unions of the DGB have merged, so today the DGB has only 8 members. This was seen as a progress by many unionists who hoped for stronger representation, while others claim that strong member unions like ver.di with its two million members have considerably weakened the DGB as a roof organization.In general, the influence of German trade unions has declined since 1990 and had to accept shrinking real incomes and a reform of the welfare system in 2004 ("Hartz IV laws"), which put additional pressure on wages. For some years, the DGB and its member unions have been campaigning for a minimum wage to be introduced in Germany. Well into the 1990s, they had rejected this idea because they got better results from their strong position in the German system of collective bargaining.In 1978 the Gewerkschaft der Polizei (GdP, see above) joined the DGB as 17th union.The Deutsche Angestellten Gewerkschaft – DAG – was a large white collar trade union. Although the DAG in the British zone 1946 was a member of the DGB in the British zone, the West German DAG never joined the West German DGB as a single member union. In 2001 the DAG merged with four existing DGB unions to become the new DGB union Ver.di.The railway union Verkehrsgewerkschaft GDBA was a member of the other labour federation, the German Civil Service Federation. In 2010 the GDBA merged with existing DGB union TRANSNET to form the new DGB union EVG.	[ "Willi Richter", "Ludwig Rosenberg", "Yasmin Fahimi", "Christian Fette", "Heinz-Werner Meyer", "Hans Böckler", "Walter Freitag", "Michael Sommer", "Reiner Hoffmann" ]
Who was the chair of Confederation of German Trade Unions in 1973-11-25?	November 25, 1973	{ "text": [ "Heinz Oskar Vetter" ] }	L2_Q586581_P488_5	Heinz-Werner Meyer is the chair of Confederation of German Trade Unions from Jan, 1990 to Jan, 1994. Christian Fette is the chair of Confederation of German Trade Unions from Jan, 1951 to Jan, 1952. Walter Freitag is the chair of Confederation of German Trade Unions from Jan, 1952 to Jan, 1956. Reiner Hoffmann is the chair of Confederation of German Trade Unions from May, 2014 to May, 2022. Yasmin Fahimi is the chair of Confederation of German Trade Unions from Jan, 2022 to Dec, 2022. Hans Böckler is the chair of Confederation of German Trade Unions from Jan, 1949 to Jan, 1951. Ludwig Rosenberg is the chair of Confederation of German Trade Unions from Jan, 1962 to Jan, 1969. Heinz Oskar Vetter is the chair of Confederation of German Trade Unions from Jan, 1969 to Jan, 1982. Michael Sommer is the chair of Confederation of German Trade Unions from Jan, 2002 to Jan, 2014. Willi Richter is the chair of Confederation of German Trade Unions from Jan, 1956 to Jan, 1962.	German Trade Union ConfederationThe German Trade Union Confederation (; DGB) is an umbrella organisation (sometimes known as a national trade union center) for eight German trade unions, in total representing more than 6 million people (31 December 2011). It was founded in Munich, 12 October 1949.The DGB coordinates joint demands and activities within the German trade union movement. It represents the member unions in contact with the government authorities, the political parties and the employers' organisations. However, the umbrella organisation is not directly involved in collective bargaining and does not conclude collective labour agreements.Union delegates elect committees for 9 districts, 66 regions and the federal centre. The organisation holds a federal congress every four years. This assembly sets the framework for trade union policies and elects five Federal Executives. Together with the presidents of the member unions they constitute the DGB's executive committee. The members of the executive committee, together with the DGB regional presidents and 70 delegates from the unions, form a Federal Council which meets once a year to make decisions on national issues. The DGB also has a youth organisation, DGB-Jugend.The DGB has its headquarters in Berlin. It is a member of the European Trade Union Confederation (ETUC) and the International Trade Union Confederation (ITUC).As first German confederation of unions at 14 March 1892 the "Generalkommission der Gewerkschaften Deutschlands" was founded in Halberstadt. It represented 57 national and some local unions with approximate 300,000 people in total. After World War I unions had to reorganise. During a congress in Nuremberg from 30 June until 5 July 1919 the "Allgemeiner Deutscher Gewerkschaftsbund" (ADGB) was founded as an umbrella organisation of 52 unions with more than 3 million members. The ADGB may be seen as predecessor of today's DGB. Like today, there also existed a conservative counterpart of lesser importance.Curiously, this conservative organisation was named "Deutscher Gewerkschaftsbund, DGB". On 2 May 1933 all trade unions were dissolved by the Nazis.After World War II German unions had to reorganize once again.On 9–11 February 1946 the "Freier Deutscher Gewerkschaftsbund" ("FDGB") was founded in Berlin as a confederation of 15 unions in the Soviet occupation zone.On 23–25 April 1947 the "Deutscher Gewerkschaftsbund, DGB" was founded in Bielefeld as a confederation of 12 unions in the Allied-occupied Germany.Foundations in the American occupation zone:24/25 August 1946: Freier Gewerkschaftsbund Hessen30 August – 1 September 1946: Gewerkschaftsbund Württemberg-Baden27–29 March 1947: Bayerischer GewerkschaftsbundFoundations in the French occupation zone:15/16 February 1947: Gewerkschaftsbund Süd-Württemberg und Hohenzollern1/2 March 1947: Badischer Gewerkschaftsbund2 May 1947: Allgemeiner Gewerkschaftsbund Rheinland-PfalzOn 12–14 October, the 7 umbrella organisation in West Germany merged into the West German DGB as a confederation of 16 single trade unions.In 1990, the members of the FDGB of the German Democratic Republic joined the members of the DGB. In recent years, many member unions of the DGB have merged, so today the DGB has only 8 members. This was seen as a progress by many unionists who hoped for stronger representation, while others claim that strong member unions like ver.di with its two million members have considerably weakened the DGB as a roof organization.In general, the influence of German trade unions has declined since 1990 and had to accept shrinking real incomes and a reform of the welfare system in 2004 ("Hartz IV laws"), which put additional pressure on wages. For some years, the DGB and its member unions have been campaigning for a minimum wage to be introduced in Germany. Well into the 1990s, they had rejected this idea because they got better results from their strong position in the German system of collective bargaining.In 1978 the Gewerkschaft der Polizei (GdP, see above) joined the DGB as 17th union.The Deutsche Angestellten Gewerkschaft – DAG – was a large white collar trade union. Although the DAG in the British zone 1946 was a member of the DGB in the British zone, the West German DAG never joined the West German DGB as a single member union. In 2001 the DAG merged with four existing DGB unions to become the new DGB union Ver.di.The railway union Verkehrsgewerkschaft GDBA was a member of the other labour federation, the German Civil Service Federation. In 2010 the GDBA merged with existing DGB union TRANSNET to form the new DGB union EVG.	[ "Willi Richter", "Ludwig Rosenberg", "Yasmin Fahimi", "Christian Fette", "Heinz-Werner Meyer", "Hans Böckler", "Walter Freitag", "Michael Sommer", "Reiner Hoffmann" ]
Who was the chair of Confederation of German Trade Unions in 25/11/1973?	November 25, 1973	{ "text": [ "Heinz Oskar Vetter" ] }	L2_Q586581_P488_5	Heinz-Werner Meyer is the chair of Confederation of German Trade Unions from Jan, 1990 to Jan, 1994. Christian Fette is the chair of Confederation of German Trade Unions from Jan, 1951 to Jan, 1952. Walter Freitag is the chair of Confederation of German Trade Unions from Jan, 1952 to Jan, 1956. Reiner Hoffmann is the chair of Confederation of German Trade Unions from May, 2014 to May, 2022. Yasmin Fahimi is the chair of Confederation of German Trade Unions from Jan, 2022 to Dec, 2022. Hans Böckler is the chair of Confederation of German Trade Unions from Jan, 1949 to Jan, 1951. Ludwig Rosenberg is the chair of Confederation of German Trade Unions from Jan, 1962 to Jan, 1969. Heinz Oskar Vetter is the chair of Confederation of German Trade Unions from Jan, 1969 to Jan, 1982. Michael Sommer is the chair of Confederation of German Trade Unions from Jan, 2002 to Jan, 2014. Willi Richter is the chair of Confederation of German Trade Unions from Jan, 1956 to Jan, 1962.	German Trade Union ConfederationThe German Trade Union Confederation (; DGB) is an umbrella organisation (sometimes known as a national trade union center) for eight German trade unions, in total representing more than 6 million people (31 December 2011). It was founded in Munich, 12 October 1949.The DGB coordinates joint demands and activities within the German trade union movement. It represents the member unions in contact with the government authorities, the political parties and the employers' organisations. However, the umbrella organisation is not directly involved in collective bargaining and does not conclude collective labour agreements.Union delegates elect committees for 9 districts, 66 regions and the federal centre. The organisation holds a federal congress every four years. This assembly sets the framework for trade union policies and elects five Federal Executives. Together with the presidents of the member unions they constitute the DGB's executive committee. The members of the executive committee, together with the DGB regional presidents and 70 delegates from the unions, form a Federal Council which meets once a year to make decisions on national issues. The DGB also has a youth organisation, DGB-Jugend.The DGB has its headquarters in Berlin. It is a member of the European Trade Union Confederation (ETUC) and the International Trade Union Confederation (ITUC).As first German confederation of unions at 14 March 1892 the "Generalkommission der Gewerkschaften Deutschlands" was founded in Halberstadt. It represented 57 national and some local unions with approximate 300,000 people in total. After World War I unions had to reorganise. During a congress in Nuremberg from 30 June until 5 July 1919 the "Allgemeiner Deutscher Gewerkschaftsbund" (ADGB) was founded as an umbrella organisation of 52 unions with more than 3 million members. The ADGB may be seen as predecessor of today's DGB. Like today, there also existed a conservative counterpart of lesser importance.Curiously, this conservative organisation was named "Deutscher Gewerkschaftsbund, DGB". On 2 May 1933 all trade unions were dissolved by the Nazis.After World War II German unions had to reorganize once again.On 9–11 February 1946 the "Freier Deutscher Gewerkschaftsbund" ("FDGB") was founded in Berlin as a confederation of 15 unions in the Soviet occupation zone.On 23–25 April 1947 the "Deutscher Gewerkschaftsbund, DGB" was founded in Bielefeld as a confederation of 12 unions in the Allied-occupied Germany.Foundations in the American occupation zone:24/25 August 1946: Freier Gewerkschaftsbund Hessen30 August – 1 September 1946: Gewerkschaftsbund Württemberg-Baden27–29 March 1947: Bayerischer GewerkschaftsbundFoundations in the French occupation zone:15/16 February 1947: Gewerkschaftsbund Süd-Württemberg und Hohenzollern1/2 March 1947: Badischer Gewerkschaftsbund2 May 1947: Allgemeiner Gewerkschaftsbund Rheinland-PfalzOn 12–14 October, the 7 umbrella organisation in West Germany merged into the West German DGB as a confederation of 16 single trade unions.In 1990, the members of the FDGB of the German Democratic Republic joined the members of the DGB. In recent years, many member unions of the DGB have merged, so today the DGB has only 8 members. This was seen as a progress by many unionists who hoped for stronger representation, while others claim that strong member unions like ver.di with its two million members have considerably weakened the DGB as a roof organization.In general, the influence of German trade unions has declined since 1990 and had to accept shrinking real incomes and a reform of the welfare system in 2004 ("Hartz IV laws"), which put additional pressure on wages. For some years, the DGB and its member unions have been campaigning for a minimum wage to be introduced in Germany. Well into the 1990s, they had rejected this idea because they got better results from their strong position in the German system of collective bargaining.In 1978 the Gewerkschaft der Polizei (GdP, see above) joined the DGB as 17th union.The Deutsche Angestellten Gewerkschaft – DAG – was a large white collar trade union. Although the DAG in the British zone 1946 was a member of the DGB in the British zone, the West German DAG never joined the West German DGB as a single member union. In 2001 the DAG merged with four existing DGB unions to become the new DGB union Ver.di.The railway union Verkehrsgewerkschaft GDBA was a member of the other labour federation, the German Civil Service Federation. In 2010 the GDBA merged with existing DGB union TRANSNET to form the new DGB union EVG.	[ "Willi Richter", "Ludwig Rosenberg", "Yasmin Fahimi", "Christian Fette", "Heinz-Werner Meyer", "Hans Böckler", "Walter Freitag", "Michael Sommer", "Reiner Hoffmann" ]
Who was the chair of Confederation of German Trade Unions in Nov 25, 1973?	November 25, 1973	{ "text": [ "Heinz Oskar Vetter" ] }	L2_Q586581_P488_5	Heinz-Werner Meyer is the chair of Confederation of German Trade Unions from Jan, 1990 to Jan, 1994. Christian Fette is the chair of Confederation of German Trade Unions from Jan, 1951 to Jan, 1952. Walter Freitag is the chair of Confederation of German Trade Unions from Jan, 1952 to Jan, 1956. Reiner Hoffmann is the chair of Confederation of German Trade Unions from May, 2014 to May, 2022. Yasmin Fahimi is the chair of Confederation of German Trade Unions from Jan, 2022 to Dec, 2022. Hans Böckler is the chair of Confederation of German Trade Unions from Jan, 1949 to Jan, 1951. Ludwig Rosenberg is the chair of Confederation of German Trade Unions from Jan, 1962 to Jan, 1969. Heinz Oskar Vetter is the chair of Confederation of German Trade Unions from Jan, 1969 to Jan, 1982. Michael Sommer is the chair of Confederation of German Trade Unions from Jan, 2002 to Jan, 2014. Willi Richter is the chair of Confederation of German Trade Unions from Jan, 1956 to Jan, 1962.	German Trade Union ConfederationThe German Trade Union Confederation (; DGB) is an umbrella organisation (sometimes known as a national trade union center) for eight German trade unions, in total representing more than 6 million people (31 December 2011). It was founded in Munich, 12 October 1949.The DGB coordinates joint demands and activities within the German trade union movement. It represents the member unions in contact with the government authorities, the political parties and the employers' organisations. However, the umbrella organisation is not directly involved in collective bargaining and does not conclude collective labour agreements.Union delegates elect committees for 9 districts, 66 regions and the federal centre. The organisation holds a federal congress every four years. This assembly sets the framework for trade union policies and elects five Federal Executives. Together with the presidents of the member unions they constitute the DGB's executive committee. The members of the executive committee, together with the DGB regional presidents and 70 delegates from the unions, form a Federal Council which meets once a year to make decisions on national issues. The DGB also has a youth organisation, DGB-Jugend.The DGB has its headquarters in Berlin. It is a member of the European Trade Union Confederation (ETUC) and the International Trade Union Confederation (ITUC).As first German confederation of unions at 14 March 1892 the "Generalkommission der Gewerkschaften Deutschlands" was founded in Halberstadt. It represented 57 national and some local unions with approximate 300,000 people in total. After World War I unions had to reorganise. During a congress in Nuremberg from 30 June until 5 July 1919 the "Allgemeiner Deutscher Gewerkschaftsbund" (ADGB) was founded as an umbrella organisation of 52 unions with more than 3 million members. The ADGB may be seen as predecessor of today's DGB. Like today, there also existed a conservative counterpart of lesser importance.Curiously, this conservative organisation was named "Deutscher Gewerkschaftsbund, DGB". On 2 May 1933 all trade unions were dissolved by the Nazis.After World War II German unions had to reorganize once again.On 9–11 February 1946 the "Freier Deutscher Gewerkschaftsbund" ("FDGB") was founded in Berlin as a confederation of 15 unions in the Soviet occupation zone.On 23–25 April 1947 the "Deutscher Gewerkschaftsbund, DGB" was founded in Bielefeld as a confederation of 12 unions in the Allied-occupied Germany.Foundations in the American occupation zone:24/25 August 1946: Freier Gewerkschaftsbund Hessen30 August – 1 September 1946: Gewerkschaftsbund Württemberg-Baden27–29 March 1947: Bayerischer GewerkschaftsbundFoundations in the French occupation zone:15/16 February 1947: Gewerkschaftsbund Süd-Württemberg und Hohenzollern1/2 March 1947: Badischer Gewerkschaftsbund2 May 1947: Allgemeiner Gewerkschaftsbund Rheinland-PfalzOn 12–14 October, the 7 umbrella organisation in West Germany merged into the West German DGB as a confederation of 16 single trade unions.In 1990, the members of the FDGB of the German Democratic Republic joined the members of the DGB. In recent years, many member unions of the DGB have merged, so today the DGB has only 8 members. This was seen as a progress by many unionists who hoped for stronger representation, while others claim that strong member unions like ver.di with its two million members have considerably weakened the DGB as a roof organization.In general, the influence of German trade unions has declined since 1990 and had to accept shrinking real incomes and a reform of the welfare system in 2004 ("Hartz IV laws"), which put additional pressure on wages. For some years, the DGB and its member unions have been campaigning for a minimum wage to be introduced in Germany. Well into the 1990s, they had rejected this idea because they got better results from their strong position in the German system of collective bargaining.In 1978 the Gewerkschaft der Polizei (GdP, see above) joined the DGB as 17th union.The Deutsche Angestellten Gewerkschaft – DAG – was a large white collar trade union. Although the DAG in the British zone 1946 was a member of the DGB in the British zone, the West German DAG never joined the West German DGB as a single member union. In 2001 the DAG merged with four existing DGB unions to become the new DGB union Ver.di.The railway union Verkehrsgewerkschaft GDBA was a member of the other labour federation, the German Civil Service Federation. In 2010 the GDBA merged with existing DGB union TRANSNET to form the new DGB union EVG.	[ "Willi Richter", "Ludwig Rosenberg", "Yasmin Fahimi", "Christian Fette", "Heinz-Werner Meyer", "Hans Böckler", "Walter Freitag", "Michael Sommer", "Reiner Hoffmann" ]
Who was the chair of Confederation of German Trade Unions in 11/25/1973?	November 25, 1973	{ "text": [ "Heinz Oskar Vetter" ] }	L2_Q586581_P488_5	Heinz-Werner Meyer is the chair of Confederation of German Trade Unions from Jan, 1990 to Jan, 1994. Christian Fette is the chair of Confederation of German Trade Unions from Jan, 1951 to Jan, 1952. Walter Freitag is the chair of Confederation of German Trade Unions from Jan, 1952 to Jan, 1956. Reiner Hoffmann is the chair of Confederation of German Trade Unions from May, 2014 to May, 2022. Yasmin Fahimi is the chair of Confederation of German Trade Unions from Jan, 2022 to Dec, 2022. Hans Böckler is the chair of Confederation of German Trade Unions from Jan, 1949 to Jan, 1951. Ludwig Rosenberg is the chair of Confederation of German Trade Unions from Jan, 1962 to Jan, 1969. Heinz Oskar Vetter is the chair of Confederation of German Trade Unions from Jan, 1969 to Jan, 1982. Michael Sommer is the chair of Confederation of German Trade Unions from Jan, 2002 to Jan, 2014. Willi Richter is the chair of Confederation of German Trade Unions from Jan, 1956 to Jan, 1962.	German Trade Union ConfederationThe German Trade Union Confederation (; DGB) is an umbrella organisation (sometimes known as a national trade union center) for eight German trade unions, in total representing more than 6 million people (31 December 2011). It was founded in Munich, 12 October 1949.The DGB coordinates joint demands and activities within the German trade union movement. It represents the member unions in contact with the government authorities, the political parties and the employers' organisations. However, the umbrella organisation is not directly involved in collective bargaining and does not conclude collective labour agreements.Union delegates elect committees for 9 districts, 66 regions and the federal centre. The organisation holds a federal congress every four years. This assembly sets the framework for trade union policies and elects five Federal Executives. Together with the presidents of the member unions they constitute the DGB's executive committee. The members of the executive committee, together with the DGB regional presidents and 70 delegates from the unions, form a Federal Council which meets once a year to make decisions on national issues. The DGB also has a youth organisation, DGB-Jugend.The DGB has its headquarters in Berlin. It is a member of the European Trade Union Confederation (ETUC) and the International Trade Union Confederation (ITUC).As first German confederation of unions at 14 March 1892 the "Generalkommission der Gewerkschaften Deutschlands" was founded in Halberstadt. It represented 57 national and some local unions with approximate 300,000 people in total. After World War I unions had to reorganise. During a congress in Nuremberg from 30 June until 5 July 1919 the "Allgemeiner Deutscher Gewerkschaftsbund" (ADGB) was founded as an umbrella organisation of 52 unions with more than 3 million members. The ADGB may be seen as predecessor of today's DGB. Like today, there also existed a conservative counterpart of lesser importance.Curiously, this conservative organisation was named "Deutscher Gewerkschaftsbund, DGB". On 2 May 1933 all trade unions were dissolved by the Nazis.After World War II German unions had to reorganize once again.On 9–11 February 1946 the "Freier Deutscher Gewerkschaftsbund" ("FDGB") was founded in Berlin as a confederation of 15 unions in the Soviet occupation zone.On 23–25 April 1947 the "Deutscher Gewerkschaftsbund, DGB" was founded in Bielefeld as a confederation of 12 unions in the Allied-occupied Germany.Foundations in the American occupation zone:24/25 August 1946: Freier Gewerkschaftsbund Hessen30 August – 1 September 1946: Gewerkschaftsbund Württemberg-Baden27–29 March 1947: Bayerischer GewerkschaftsbundFoundations in the French occupation zone:15/16 February 1947: Gewerkschaftsbund Süd-Württemberg und Hohenzollern1/2 March 1947: Badischer Gewerkschaftsbund2 May 1947: Allgemeiner Gewerkschaftsbund Rheinland-PfalzOn 12–14 October, the 7 umbrella organisation in West Germany merged into the West German DGB as a confederation of 16 single trade unions.In 1990, the members of the FDGB of the German Democratic Republic joined the members of the DGB. In recent years, many member unions of the DGB have merged, so today the DGB has only 8 members. This was seen as a progress by many unionists who hoped for stronger representation, while others claim that strong member unions like ver.di with its two million members have considerably weakened the DGB as a roof organization.In general, the influence of German trade unions has declined since 1990 and had to accept shrinking real incomes and a reform of the welfare system in 2004 ("Hartz IV laws"), which put additional pressure on wages. For some years, the DGB and its member unions have been campaigning for a minimum wage to be introduced in Germany. Well into the 1990s, they had rejected this idea because they got better results from their strong position in the German system of collective bargaining.In 1978 the Gewerkschaft der Polizei (GdP, see above) joined the DGB as 17th union.The Deutsche Angestellten Gewerkschaft – DAG – was a large white collar trade union. Although the DAG in the British zone 1946 was a member of the DGB in the British zone, the West German DAG never joined the West German DGB as a single member union. In 2001 the DAG merged with four existing DGB unions to become the new DGB union Ver.di.The railway union Verkehrsgewerkschaft GDBA was a member of the other labour federation, the German Civil Service Federation. In 2010 the GDBA merged with existing DGB union TRANSNET to form the new DGB union EVG.	[ "Willi Richter", "Ludwig Rosenberg", "Yasmin Fahimi", "Christian Fette", "Heinz-Werner Meyer", "Hans Böckler", "Walter Freitag", "Michael Sommer", "Reiner Hoffmann" ]
Who was the chair of Confederation of German Trade Unions in 25-Nov-197325-November-1973?	November 25, 1973	{ "text": [ "Heinz Oskar Vetter" ] }	L2_Q586581_P488_5	Heinz-Werner Meyer is the chair of Confederation of German Trade Unions from Jan, 1990 to Jan, 1994. Christian Fette is the chair of Confederation of German Trade Unions from Jan, 1951 to Jan, 1952. Walter Freitag is the chair of Confederation of German Trade Unions from Jan, 1952 to Jan, 1956. Reiner Hoffmann is the chair of Confederation of German Trade Unions from May, 2014 to May, 2022. Yasmin Fahimi is the chair of Confederation of German Trade Unions from Jan, 2022 to Dec, 2022. Hans Böckler is the chair of Confederation of German Trade Unions from Jan, 1949 to Jan, 1951. Ludwig Rosenberg is the chair of Confederation of German Trade Unions from Jan, 1962 to Jan, 1969. Heinz Oskar Vetter is the chair of Confederation of German Trade Unions from Jan, 1969 to Jan, 1982. Michael Sommer is the chair of Confederation of German Trade Unions from Jan, 2002 to Jan, 2014. Willi Richter is the chair of Confederation of German Trade Unions from Jan, 1956 to Jan, 1962.	German Trade Union ConfederationThe German Trade Union Confederation (; DGB) is an umbrella organisation (sometimes known as a national trade union center) for eight German trade unions, in total representing more than 6 million people (31 December 2011). It was founded in Munich, 12 October 1949.The DGB coordinates joint demands and activities within the German trade union movement. It represents the member unions in contact with the government authorities, the political parties and the employers' organisations. However, the umbrella organisation is not directly involved in collective bargaining and does not conclude collective labour agreements.Union delegates elect committees for 9 districts, 66 regions and the federal centre. The organisation holds a federal congress every four years. This assembly sets the framework for trade union policies and elects five Federal Executives. Together with the presidents of the member unions they constitute the DGB's executive committee. The members of the executive committee, together with the DGB regional presidents and 70 delegates from the unions, form a Federal Council which meets once a year to make decisions on national issues. The DGB also has a youth organisation, DGB-Jugend.The DGB has its headquarters in Berlin. It is a member of the European Trade Union Confederation (ETUC) and the International Trade Union Confederation (ITUC).As first German confederation of unions at 14 March 1892 the "Generalkommission der Gewerkschaften Deutschlands" was founded in Halberstadt. It represented 57 national and some local unions with approximate 300,000 people in total. After World War I unions had to reorganise. During a congress in Nuremberg from 30 June until 5 July 1919 the "Allgemeiner Deutscher Gewerkschaftsbund" (ADGB) was founded as an umbrella organisation of 52 unions with more than 3 million members. The ADGB may be seen as predecessor of today's DGB. Like today, there also existed a conservative counterpart of lesser importance.Curiously, this conservative organisation was named "Deutscher Gewerkschaftsbund, DGB". On 2 May 1933 all trade unions were dissolved by the Nazis.After World War II German unions had to reorganize once again.On 9–11 February 1946 the "Freier Deutscher Gewerkschaftsbund" ("FDGB") was founded in Berlin as a confederation of 15 unions in the Soviet occupation zone.On 23–25 April 1947 the "Deutscher Gewerkschaftsbund, DGB" was founded in Bielefeld as a confederation of 12 unions in the Allied-occupied Germany.Foundations in the American occupation zone:24/25 August 1946: Freier Gewerkschaftsbund Hessen30 August – 1 September 1946: Gewerkschaftsbund Württemberg-Baden27–29 March 1947: Bayerischer GewerkschaftsbundFoundations in the French occupation zone:15/16 February 1947: Gewerkschaftsbund Süd-Württemberg und Hohenzollern1/2 March 1947: Badischer Gewerkschaftsbund2 May 1947: Allgemeiner Gewerkschaftsbund Rheinland-PfalzOn 12–14 October, the 7 umbrella organisation in West Germany merged into the West German DGB as a confederation of 16 single trade unions.In 1990, the members of the FDGB of the German Democratic Republic joined the members of the DGB. In recent years, many member unions of the DGB have merged, so today the DGB has only 8 members. This was seen as a progress by many unionists who hoped for stronger representation, while others claim that strong member unions like ver.di with its two million members have considerably weakened the DGB as a roof organization.In general, the influence of German trade unions has declined since 1990 and had to accept shrinking real incomes and a reform of the welfare system in 2004 ("Hartz IV laws"), which put additional pressure on wages. For some years, the DGB and its member unions have been campaigning for a minimum wage to be introduced in Germany. Well into the 1990s, they had rejected this idea because they got better results from their strong position in the German system of collective bargaining.In 1978 the Gewerkschaft der Polizei (GdP, see above) joined the DGB as 17th union.The Deutsche Angestellten Gewerkschaft – DAG – was a large white collar trade union. Although the DAG in the British zone 1946 was a member of the DGB in the British zone, the West German DAG never joined the West German DGB as a single member union. In 2001 the DAG merged with four existing DGB unions to become the new DGB union Ver.di.The railway union Verkehrsgewerkschaft GDBA was a member of the other labour federation, the German Civil Service Federation. In 2010 the GDBA merged with existing DGB union TRANSNET to form the new DGB union EVG.	[ "Willi Richter", "Ludwig Rosenberg", "Yasmin Fahimi", "Christian Fette", "Heinz-Werner Meyer", "Hans Böckler", "Walter Freitag", "Michael Sommer", "Reiner Hoffmann" ]
Who was the owner of Primrose Hill Tunnel in Apr, 1965?	April 27, 1965	{ "text": [ "British Rail" ] }	L2_Q27082177_P127_3	Primrose Hill Tunnel is owned by Railtrack from Jan, 1994 to Jan, 2002. Primrose Hill Tunnel is owned by London, Midland and Scottish Railway from Jan, 1923 to Jan, 1948. Primrose Hill Tunnel is owned by British Rail from Jan, 1948 to Jan, 1994. Primrose Hill Tunnel is owned by London and North Western Railway from Jan, 1846 to Jan, 1923. Primrose Hill Tunnel is owned by London and Birmingham Railway from Jan, 1837 to Jan, 1846. Primrose Hill Tunnel is owned by Network Rail from Jan, 2002 to Dec, 2022.	Primrose Hill TunnelPrimrose Hill Tunnel is a railway tunnel on the West Coast Main Line, approximately from . It is located in South Hampstead in the London Borough of Camden, just north of Primrose Hill park and consists of two bores: the slow line to the northern side, driven through the London clay by the engineer Robert Stephenson for the London and Birmingham Railway in 1838, and the fast line to its south, added by the London and North Western Railway in 1879. The original tunnel's Italianate portals were designed by William H Budden and later replicated for the fast line. The western portals have been listed at Grade II and the eastern at Grade II* since 1974.As the first railway tunnel in London, Historic England considers it to be of special historic interest, as well as because "it was the first nationally to negotiate the issue of competing claims for the use of land in an urban context; and the first tunnel to treat one of its portals architecturally".Primrose Hill Tunnel's environmental context has transformed substantially, now obscured by fences, buildings and vegetation, yet the structures remain almost unchanged from when first built, aside from the duplication from single to twin portals. The eastern portals are grand and heavy, built of Portland stone and London stock brick. The arches of the tunnel mouths have concave surrounds of rusticated voussoirs, and are topped with a projecting cornice with carved lion masks. Surrounding the portals are large stone piers topped with bracketed hipped capitals, and curved flanking wing walls divided into brick-filled panels by stone pillars with semicircular pediments. The eastern portals evoke the style of Italianate villas, bringing, as owner Eton College hoped, a certain dramatic grace to Primrose Hill.The tunnel portals at the western end are humble in relation to the eastern ones. They are hard to see other than from the bridge carrying the Chiltern Main Line from , which was inserted across the LNWR line by the Great Central Railway in 1899, obscuring the western portals. Their arches are round with coved reveals of rusticated voussoirs and keystones crowned by a dentilled cornice, and large stone flanking piers on vermiculated stone pedestals.Two airshafts remain to ventilate the tunnels: one at the midpoint of the 1838 tunnel in the Marriott Hotel's car park, and a brick shaft for the 1879 tunnel in the back garden of 10 Wadham Gardens.Construction of the London and Birmingham Railway (L&BR) began in 1833, one of the first inter-city lines after the success of the Liverpool and Manchester Railway. Choosing a route to Birmingham Curzon Street out of was its chief engineer Robert Stephenson, who needed to pass through South Hampstead, a rural area which was starting to be developed concurrently with the railway's arrival. Though the topography of the land, known as the Chalcots Estate, did not strictly require a tunnel, it was constructed at the insistence of the landowner, Eton College. Negotiations began in 1831 between the L&BR and Eton, which firstly opposed the railway cutting, principally for the reason that it would reduce the value of land and leases on the route. Though the L&BR was able to persuade Eton that the railway would be quiet and carefully fenced, it agreed to place the line in a tunnel to prevent further obstruction.For the 1833 Act of Parliament which authorised the railway, Eton was able to require certain conditions regarding the tunnel's engineering and appearance, including that it must be strong enough to erect buildings on top of, and therefore be bored rather than use cut-and-cover (the fact that a tunnel would preserve valuable building land being its main advantage); the other main stipulation was that "the mouth of the tunnel at the eastern end shall be made good and finished with a substantial and ornamental facing of brickwork or masonry to the satisfaction of the Provost and College." This resulted in a grand eastern portal costing £7,000 (), sympathetic to the upmarket development planned for the Chalcots Estate, and is the reason for the less spectacular western portal.Both east and west portals were designed by William H Budden, an assistant engineer to Stephenson, who is unknown for any other works. The prestige of this commission for a non-established architect is unusual; the classical architect Philip Hardwick was the L&BR's company architect and designed the nearby terminus at Euston.The contract for the section of line including Primrose Hill was let on 21 April 1834 for £120,000 (). Excavation of Primrose Hill Tunnel began that year by the contractors Jackson and Sheddon, using four vertical shafts to access working faces, with the cut-and-cover method used for about at each end of the tunnel.The tunnelling was fraught with difficulties, arising from nature of the London clay through which it was being driven. Although bringing the advantage of being impermeable and keeping the work free from water, it is a tough material and was difficult to remove with the existing technology of spades, pickaxes and blasting, instead requiring crosscut saws and hatchets and increasing the expense, but the pressure of the clay also caused it to expand upon excavation and exposure to the atmosphere, necessitating additional unusual measures. Firstly, an extra-thick brick lining of was installed as the contractors went along, to hold back the pressure, and very strong timbering was needed to support the arches until a brickwork section was complete to prevent collapses. Also, excavation was not allowed to advance more than about beyond the completed lining.Another problem due to the expansivity of the moist clay was that it would force the mortar from between the joints of the brick lining, leading to shrinkage of the tunnel's dimension as the bricks came into contact and broke under the pressure. For a short period, Stephenson was apprehensive that stress could cause the brickwork to cave in altogether, as it made small fragments fly off the facing and coat his clothing while he inspected the work. The solution was found in using very hard paver bricks in place of hollow London stock brick, and in the substitution of lime mortar with Roman cement, which would harden before the pressure became great enough to force the bricks into contact.Jackson and Sheddon, the contractors, had become bankrupt in late 1834, leaving the railway company obliged to assume responsibility for the work. Robert Stephenson, as chief engineer, appointed John Birkinshaw, an assistant engineer, to take over supervision of the contractors' section, including the tunnel.In 1835, before it was completed, the tunnel received a special visit from a party of doctors for the L&BR to obtain their professional opinions on the "effect of such a tunnel on the health and feelings", due to the unease felt by prospective travellers in their ignorance regarding railway tunnels, of which Primrose Hill was the first in London. All four doctors, whom included William Lawrence, John Ayrton Paris and Thomas Watson, signed their names to confirm that even with a locomotive letting off steam, the tunnel remained unaffected, dry and at an agreeable temperature. They also traversed it in a carriage and found it no different to travelling in a coach down a narrow street at night and with no noise to prevent easy conversation. In fact, they were firm that the dangers of passing through well-constructed tunnels were no greater than those of travelling on an open railway, and the company used this to set the public's mind at rest.Completion of the tunnel was delayed by poor weather in addition to the engineering problems related to the London clay. By January 1837, Primrose Hill Tunnel was eventually completed, with the section of line that had originally been let at £120,000 costing more than double at £280,000 ().Being the first railway tunnel in London, Primrose Hill attracted crowds of people to watch its construction, and watch the trains operating through it once opened. Contemporary prints show the embankment by the eastern portal with crowds of sightseers. The sides of the cuttings at each end were open and unobscured, allowing views down to the portals. Development of houses on King Henry's Road soon hemmed it in and prevented this popular public attraction.By 1852 the London and North Western Railway, which had amalgamated from the L&BR, was experiencing rising pressure on this section of line and at Euston, and began to advocate for a second bore at Primrose Hill Tunnel to double the number of tracks. This work was ultimately carried out in 1879, with the main line becoming four-tracked between London and . The new bore, which features a sharp curve southwards and now forms the fast line for express services, was designed by the LNWR's chief engineer, William Baker, with portals which faithfully replicate the detailed decorative design of the originals, though taller due to a need to retain the rising land of Primrose Hill itself.A pair of new, separate tunnels to the north were built by the LNWR in 1912 for the Watford DC line, allowing capacity for electrified suburban commuter services. These are currently operated by London Overground and call at , just beyond the western portal.On 14 May 1974, Historic England (HE) awarded the portals at both ends the status of listed structures, in separate listings – the eastern portals at Grade II* (particularly important buildings of more than special interest), and the western portals are Grade II (special interest). HE noted that the comparison of east and west emphasises the exceptional circumstances at the eastern end of the tunnel where the Eton College Estate demanded a grand architectural set-piece. In its summary of importance, HE considers the eastern portal to be of more than special architectural interest for its proud, classical elevation which is indicative of the upmarket development the College hoped to undertake nearby; and that there are similarities in design with Brunel's portals to the Box Tunnel in the use of ashlar to imply strength, the classical features such as the treatment of the cornices and rusticated quoins, and the employment of quadrant arches to convey the sense of a grand entrance.	[ "Network Rail", "Railtrack", "London and Birmingham Railway", "London, Midland and Scottish Railway", "London and North Western Railway" ]
Who was the owner of Primrose Hill Tunnel in 1965-04-27?	April 27, 1965	{ "text": [ "British Rail" ] }	L2_Q27082177_P127_3	Primrose Hill Tunnel is owned by Railtrack from Jan, 1994 to Jan, 2002. Primrose Hill Tunnel is owned by London, Midland and Scottish Railway from Jan, 1923 to Jan, 1948. Primrose Hill Tunnel is owned by British Rail from Jan, 1948 to Jan, 1994. Primrose Hill Tunnel is owned by London and North Western Railway from Jan, 1846 to Jan, 1923. Primrose Hill Tunnel is owned by London and Birmingham Railway from Jan, 1837 to Jan, 1846. Primrose Hill Tunnel is owned by Network Rail from Jan, 2002 to Dec, 2022.	Primrose Hill TunnelPrimrose Hill Tunnel is a railway tunnel on the West Coast Main Line, approximately from . It is located in South Hampstead in the London Borough of Camden, just north of Primrose Hill park and consists of two bores: the slow line to the northern side, driven through the London clay by the engineer Robert Stephenson for the London and Birmingham Railway in 1838, and the fast line to its south, added by the London and North Western Railway in 1879. The original tunnel's Italianate portals were designed by William H Budden and later replicated for the fast line. The western portals have been listed at Grade II and the eastern at Grade II* since 1974.As the first railway tunnel in London, Historic England considers it to be of special historic interest, as well as because "it was the first nationally to negotiate the issue of competing claims for the use of land in an urban context; and the first tunnel to treat one of its portals architecturally".Primrose Hill Tunnel's environmental context has transformed substantially, now obscured by fences, buildings and vegetation, yet the structures remain almost unchanged from when first built, aside from the duplication from single to twin portals. The eastern portals are grand and heavy, built of Portland stone and London stock brick. The arches of the tunnel mouths have concave surrounds of rusticated voussoirs, and are topped with a projecting cornice with carved lion masks. Surrounding the portals are large stone piers topped with bracketed hipped capitals, and curved flanking wing walls divided into brick-filled panels by stone pillars with semicircular pediments. The eastern portals evoke the style of Italianate villas, bringing, as owner Eton College hoped, a certain dramatic grace to Primrose Hill.The tunnel portals at the western end are humble in relation to the eastern ones. They are hard to see other than from the bridge carrying the Chiltern Main Line from , which was inserted across the LNWR line by the Great Central Railway in 1899, obscuring the western portals. Their arches are round with coved reveals of rusticated voussoirs and keystones crowned by a dentilled cornice, and large stone flanking piers on vermiculated stone pedestals.Two airshafts remain to ventilate the tunnels: one at the midpoint of the 1838 tunnel in the Marriott Hotel's car park, and a brick shaft for the 1879 tunnel in the back garden of 10 Wadham Gardens.Construction of the London and Birmingham Railway (L&BR) began in 1833, one of the first inter-city lines after the success of the Liverpool and Manchester Railway. Choosing a route to Birmingham Curzon Street out of was its chief engineer Robert Stephenson, who needed to pass through South Hampstead, a rural area which was starting to be developed concurrently with the railway's arrival. Though the topography of the land, known as the Chalcots Estate, did not strictly require a tunnel, it was constructed at the insistence of the landowner, Eton College. Negotiations began in 1831 between the L&BR and Eton, which firstly opposed the railway cutting, principally for the reason that it would reduce the value of land and leases on the route. Though the L&BR was able to persuade Eton that the railway would be quiet and carefully fenced, it agreed to place the line in a tunnel to prevent further obstruction.For the 1833 Act of Parliament which authorised the railway, Eton was able to require certain conditions regarding the tunnel's engineering and appearance, including that it must be strong enough to erect buildings on top of, and therefore be bored rather than use cut-and-cover (the fact that a tunnel would preserve valuable building land being its main advantage); the other main stipulation was that "the mouth of the tunnel at the eastern end shall be made good and finished with a substantial and ornamental facing of brickwork or masonry to the satisfaction of the Provost and College." This resulted in a grand eastern portal costing £7,000 (), sympathetic to the upmarket development planned for the Chalcots Estate, and is the reason for the less spectacular western portal.Both east and west portals were designed by William H Budden, an assistant engineer to Stephenson, who is unknown for any other works. The prestige of this commission for a non-established architect is unusual; the classical architect Philip Hardwick was the L&BR's company architect and designed the nearby terminus at Euston.The contract for the section of line including Primrose Hill was let on 21 April 1834 for £120,000 (). Excavation of Primrose Hill Tunnel began that year by the contractors Jackson and Sheddon, using four vertical shafts to access working faces, with the cut-and-cover method used for about at each end of the tunnel.The tunnelling was fraught with difficulties, arising from nature of the London clay through which it was being driven. Although bringing the advantage of being impermeable and keeping the work free from water, it is a tough material and was difficult to remove with the existing technology of spades, pickaxes and blasting, instead requiring crosscut saws and hatchets and increasing the expense, but the pressure of the clay also caused it to expand upon excavation and exposure to the atmosphere, necessitating additional unusual measures. Firstly, an extra-thick brick lining of was installed as the contractors went along, to hold back the pressure, and very strong timbering was needed to support the arches until a brickwork section was complete to prevent collapses. Also, excavation was not allowed to advance more than about beyond the completed lining.Another problem due to the expansivity of the moist clay was that it would force the mortar from between the joints of the brick lining, leading to shrinkage of the tunnel's dimension as the bricks came into contact and broke under the pressure. For a short period, Stephenson was apprehensive that stress could cause the brickwork to cave in altogether, as it made small fragments fly off the facing and coat his clothing while he inspected the work. The solution was found in using very hard paver bricks in place of hollow London stock brick, and in the substitution of lime mortar with Roman cement, which would harden before the pressure became great enough to force the bricks into contact.Jackson and Sheddon, the contractors, had become bankrupt in late 1834, leaving the railway company obliged to assume responsibility for the work. Robert Stephenson, as chief engineer, appointed John Birkinshaw, an assistant engineer, to take over supervision of the contractors' section, including the tunnel.In 1835, before it was completed, the tunnel received a special visit from a party of doctors for the L&BR to obtain their professional opinions on the "effect of such a tunnel on the health and feelings", due to the unease felt by prospective travellers in their ignorance regarding railway tunnels, of which Primrose Hill was the first in London. All four doctors, whom included William Lawrence, John Ayrton Paris and Thomas Watson, signed their names to confirm that even with a locomotive letting off steam, the tunnel remained unaffected, dry and at an agreeable temperature. They also traversed it in a carriage and found it no different to travelling in a coach down a narrow street at night and with no noise to prevent easy conversation. In fact, they were firm that the dangers of passing through well-constructed tunnels were no greater than those of travelling on an open railway, and the company used this to set the public's mind at rest.Completion of the tunnel was delayed by poor weather in addition to the engineering problems related to the London clay. By January 1837, Primrose Hill Tunnel was eventually completed, with the section of line that had originally been let at £120,000 costing more than double at £280,000 ().Being the first railway tunnel in London, Primrose Hill attracted crowds of people to watch its construction, and watch the trains operating through it once opened. Contemporary prints show the embankment by the eastern portal with crowds of sightseers. The sides of the cuttings at each end were open and unobscured, allowing views down to the portals. Development of houses on King Henry's Road soon hemmed it in and prevented this popular public attraction.By 1852 the London and North Western Railway, which had amalgamated from the L&BR, was experiencing rising pressure on this section of line and at Euston, and began to advocate for a second bore at Primrose Hill Tunnel to double the number of tracks. This work was ultimately carried out in 1879, with the main line becoming four-tracked between London and . The new bore, which features a sharp curve southwards and now forms the fast line for express services, was designed by the LNWR's chief engineer, William Baker, with portals which faithfully replicate the detailed decorative design of the originals, though taller due to a need to retain the rising land of Primrose Hill itself.A pair of new, separate tunnels to the north were built by the LNWR in 1912 for the Watford DC line, allowing capacity for electrified suburban commuter services. These are currently operated by London Overground and call at , just beyond the western portal.On 14 May 1974, Historic England (HE) awarded the portals at both ends the status of listed structures, in separate listings – the eastern portals at Grade II* (particularly important buildings of more than special interest), and the western portals are Grade II (special interest). HE noted that the comparison of east and west emphasises the exceptional circumstances at the eastern end of the tunnel where the Eton College Estate demanded a grand architectural set-piece. In its summary of importance, HE considers the eastern portal to be of more than special architectural interest for its proud, classical elevation which is indicative of the upmarket development the College hoped to undertake nearby; and that there are similarities in design with Brunel's portals to the Box Tunnel in the use of ashlar to imply strength, the classical features such as the treatment of the cornices and rusticated quoins, and the employment of quadrant arches to convey the sense of a grand entrance.	[ "Network Rail", "Railtrack", "London and Birmingham Railway", "London, Midland and Scottish Railway", "London and North Western Railway" ]
Who was the owner of Primrose Hill Tunnel in 27/04/1965?	April 27, 1965	{ "text": [ "British Rail" ] }	L2_Q27082177_P127_3	Primrose Hill Tunnel is owned by Railtrack from Jan, 1994 to Jan, 2002. Primrose Hill Tunnel is owned by London, Midland and Scottish Railway from Jan, 1923 to Jan, 1948. Primrose Hill Tunnel is owned by British Rail from Jan, 1948 to Jan, 1994. Primrose Hill Tunnel is owned by London and North Western Railway from Jan, 1846 to Jan, 1923. Primrose Hill Tunnel is owned by London and Birmingham Railway from Jan, 1837 to Jan, 1846. Primrose Hill Tunnel is owned by Network Rail from Jan, 2002 to Dec, 2022.	Primrose Hill TunnelPrimrose Hill Tunnel is a railway tunnel on the West Coast Main Line, approximately from . It is located in South Hampstead in the London Borough of Camden, just north of Primrose Hill park and consists of two bores: the slow line to the northern side, driven through the London clay by the engineer Robert Stephenson for the London and Birmingham Railway in 1838, and the fast line to its south, added by the London and North Western Railway in 1879. The original tunnel's Italianate portals were designed by William H Budden and later replicated for the fast line. The western portals have been listed at Grade II and the eastern at Grade II* since 1974.As the first railway tunnel in London, Historic England considers it to be of special historic interest, as well as because "it was the first nationally to negotiate the issue of competing claims for the use of land in an urban context; and the first tunnel to treat one of its portals architecturally".Primrose Hill Tunnel's environmental context has transformed substantially, now obscured by fences, buildings and vegetation, yet the structures remain almost unchanged from when first built, aside from the duplication from single to twin portals. The eastern portals are grand and heavy, built of Portland stone and London stock brick. The arches of the tunnel mouths have concave surrounds of rusticated voussoirs, and are topped with a projecting cornice with carved lion masks. Surrounding the portals are large stone piers topped with bracketed hipped capitals, and curved flanking wing walls divided into brick-filled panels by stone pillars with semicircular pediments. The eastern portals evoke the style of Italianate villas, bringing, as owner Eton College hoped, a certain dramatic grace to Primrose Hill.The tunnel portals at the western end are humble in relation to the eastern ones. They are hard to see other than from the bridge carrying the Chiltern Main Line from , which was inserted across the LNWR line by the Great Central Railway in 1899, obscuring the western portals. Their arches are round with coved reveals of rusticated voussoirs and keystones crowned by a dentilled cornice, and large stone flanking piers on vermiculated stone pedestals.Two airshafts remain to ventilate the tunnels: one at the midpoint of the 1838 tunnel in the Marriott Hotel's car park, and a brick shaft for the 1879 tunnel in the back garden of 10 Wadham Gardens.Construction of the London and Birmingham Railway (L&BR) began in 1833, one of the first inter-city lines after the success of the Liverpool and Manchester Railway. Choosing a route to Birmingham Curzon Street out of was its chief engineer Robert Stephenson, who needed to pass through South Hampstead, a rural area which was starting to be developed concurrently with the railway's arrival. Though the topography of the land, known as the Chalcots Estate, did not strictly require a tunnel, it was constructed at the insistence of the landowner, Eton College. Negotiations began in 1831 between the L&BR and Eton, which firstly opposed the railway cutting, principally for the reason that it would reduce the value of land and leases on the route. Though the L&BR was able to persuade Eton that the railway would be quiet and carefully fenced, it agreed to place the line in a tunnel to prevent further obstruction.For the 1833 Act of Parliament which authorised the railway, Eton was able to require certain conditions regarding the tunnel's engineering and appearance, including that it must be strong enough to erect buildings on top of, and therefore be bored rather than use cut-and-cover (the fact that a tunnel would preserve valuable building land being its main advantage); the other main stipulation was that "the mouth of the tunnel at the eastern end shall be made good and finished with a substantial and ornamental facing of brickwork or masonry to the satisfaction of the Provost and College." This resulted in a grand eastern portal costing £7,000 (), sympathetic to the upmarket development planned for the Chalcots Estate, and is the reason for the less spectacular western portal.Both east and west portals were designed by William H Budden, an assistant engineer to Stephenson, who is unknown for any other works. The prestige of this commission for a non-established architect is unusual; the classical architect Philip Hardwick was the L&BR's company architect and designed the nearby terminus at Euston.The contract for the section of line including Primrose Hill was let on 21 April 1834 for £120,000 (). Excavation of Primrose Hill Tunnel began that year by the contractors Jackson and Sheddon, using four vertical shafts to access working faces, with the cut-and-cover method used for about at each end of the tunnel.The tunnelling was fraught with difficulties, arising from nature of the London clay through which it was being driven. Although bringing the advantage of being impermeable and keeping the work free from water, it is a tough material and was difficult to remove with the existing technology of spades, pickaxes and blasting, instead requiring crosscut saws and hatchets and increasing the expense, but the pressure of the clay also caused it to expand upon excavation and exposure to the atmosphere, necessitating additional unusual measures. Firstly, an extra-thick brick lining of was installed as the contractors went along, to hold back the pressure, and very strong timbering was needed to support the arches until a brickwork section was complete to prevent collapses. Also, excavation was not allowed to advance more than about beyond the completed lining.Another problem due to the expansivity of the moist clay was that it would force the mortar from between the joints of the brick lining, leading to shrinkage of the tunnel's dimension as the bricks came into contact and broke under the pressure. For a short period, Stephenson was apprehensive that stress could cause the brickwork to cave in altogether, as it made small fragments fly off the facing and coat his clothing while he inspected the work. The solution was found in using very hard paver bricks in place of hollow London stock brick, and in the substitution of lime mortar with Roman cement, which would harden before the pressure became great enough to force the bricks into contact.Jackson and Sheddon, the contractors, had become bankrupt in late 1834, leaving the railway company obliged to assume responsibility for the work. Robert Stephenson, as chief engineer, appointed John Birkinshaw, an assistant engineer, to take over supervision of the contractors' section, including the tunnel.In 1835, before it was completed, the tunnel received a special visit from a party of doctors for the L&BR to obtain their professional opinions on the "effect of such a tunnel on the health and feelings", due to the unease felt by prospective travellers in their ignorance regarding railway tunnels, of which Primrose Hill was the first in London. All four doctors, whom included William Lawrence, John Ayrton Paris and Thomas Watson, signed their names to confirm that even with a locomotive letting off steam, the tunnel remained unaffected, dry and at an agreeable temperature. They also traversed it in a carriage and found it no different to travelling in a coach down a narrow street at night and with no noise to prevent easy conversation. In fact, they were firm that the dangers of passing through well-constructed tunnels were no greater than those of travelling on an open railway, and the company used this to set the public's mind at rest.Completion of the tunnel was delayed by poor weather in addition to the engineering problems related to the London clay. By January 1837, Primrose Hill Tunnel was eventually completed, with the section of line that had originally been let at £120,000 costing more than double at £280,000 ().Being the first railway tunnel in London, Primrose Hill attracted crowds of people to watch its construction, and watch the trains operating through it once opened. Contemporary prints show the embankment by the eastern portal with crowds of sightseers. The sides of the cuttings at each end were open and unobscured, allowing views down to the portals. Development of houses on King Henry's Road soon hemmed it in and prevented this popular public attraction.By 1852 the London and North Western Railway, which had amalgamated from the L&BR, was experiencing rising pressure on this section of line and at Euston, and began to advocate for a second bore at Primrose Hill Tunnel to double the number of tracks. This work was ultimately carried out in 1879, with the main line becoming four-tracked between London and . The new bore, which features a sharp curve southwards and now forms the fast line for express services, was designed by the LNWR's chief engineer, William Baker, with portals which faithfully replicate the detailed decorative design of the originals, though taller due to a need to retain the rising land of Primrose Hill itself.A pair of new, separate tunnels to the north were built by the LNWR in 1912 for the Watford DC line, allowing capacity for electrified suburban commuter services. These are currently operated by London Overground and call at , just beyond the western portal.On 14 May 1974, Historic England (HE) awarded the portals at both ends the status of listed structures, in separate listings – the eastern portals at Grade II* (particularly important buildings of more than special interest), and the western portals are Grade II (special interest). HE noted that the comparison of east and west emphasises the exceptional circumstances at the eastern end of the tunnel where the Eton College Estate demanded a grand architectural set-piece. In its summary of importance, HE considers the eastern portal to be of more than special architectural interest for its proud, classical elevation which is indicative of the upmarket development the College hoped to undertake nearby; and that there are similarities in design with Brunel's portals to the Box Tunnel in the use of ashlar to imply strength, the classical features such as the treatment of the cornices and rusticated quoins, and the employment of quadrant arches to convey the sense of a grand entrance.	[ "Network Rail", "Railtrack", "London and Birmingham Railway", "London, Midland and Scottish Railway", "London and North Western Railway" ]
Who was the owner of Primrose Hill Tunnel in Apr 27, 1965?	April 27, 1965	{ "text": [ "British Rail" ] }	L2_Q27082177_P127_3	Primrose Hill Tunnel is owned by Railtrack from Jan, 1994 to Jan, 2002. Primrose Hill Tunnel is owned by London, Midland and Scottish Railway from Jan, 1923 to Jan, 1948. Primrose Hill Tunnel is owned by British Rail from Jan, 1948 to Jan, 1994. Primrose Hill Tunnel is owned by London and North Western Railway from Jan, 1846 to Jan, 1923. Primrose Hill Tunnel is owned by London and Birmingham Railway from Jan, 1837 to Jan, 1846. Primrose Hill Tunnel is owned by Network Rail from Jan, 2002 to Dec, 2022.	Primrose Hill TunnelPrimrose Hill Tunnel is a railway tunnel on the West Coast Main Line, approximately from . It is located in South Hampstead in the London Borough of Camden, just north of Primrose Hill park and consists of two bores: the slow line to the northern side, driven through the London clay by the engineer Robert Stephenson for the London and Birmingham Railway in 1838, and the fast line to its south, added by the London and North Western Railway in 1879. The original tunnel's Italianate portals were designed by William H Budden and later replicated for the fast line. The western portals have been listed at Grade II and the eastern at Grade II* since 1974.As the first railway tunnel in London, Historic England considers it to be of special historic interest, as well as because "it was the first nationally to negotiate the issue of competing claims for the use of land in an urban context; and the first tunnel to treat one of its portals architecturally".Primrose Hill Tunnel's environmental context has transformed substantially, now obscured by fences, buildings and vegetation, yet the structures remain almost unchanged from when first built, aside from the duplication from single to twin portals. The eastern portals are grand and heavy, built of Portland stone and London stock brick. The arches of the tunnel mouths have concave surrounds of rusticated voussoirs, and are topped with a projecting cornice with carved lion masks. Surrounding the portals are large stone piers topped with bracketed hipped capitals, and curved flanking wing walls divided into brick-filled panels by stone pillars with semicircular pediments. The eastern portals evoke the style of Italianate villas, bringing, as owner Eton College hoped, a certain dramatic grace to Primrose Hill.The tunnel portals at the western end are humble in relation to the eastern ones. They are hard to see other than from the bridge carrying the Chiltern Main Line from , which was inserted across the LNWR line by the Great Central Railway in 1899, obscuring the western portals. Their arches are round with coved reveals of rusticated voussoirs and keystones crowned by a dentilled cornice, and large stone flanking piers on vermiculated stone pedestals.Two airshafts remain to ventilate the tunnels: one at the midpoint of the 1838 tunnel in the Marriott Hotel's car park, and a brick shaft for the 1879 tunnel in the back garden of 10 Wadham Gardens.Construction of the London and Birmingham Railway (L&BR) began in 1833, one of the first inter-city lines after the success of the Liverpool and Manchester Railway. Choosing a route to Birmingham Curzon Street out of was its chief engineer Robert Stephenson, who needed to pass through South Hampstead, a rural area which was starting to be developed concurrently with the railway's arrival. Though the topography of the land, known as the Chalcots Estate, did not strictly require a tunnel, it was constructed at the insistence of the landowner, Eton College. Negotiations began in 1831 between the L&BR and Eton, which firstly opposed the railway cutting, principally for the reason that it would reduce the value of land and leases on the route. Though the L&BR was able to persuade Eton that the railway would be quiet and carefully fenced, it agreed to place the line in a tunnel to prevent further obstruction.For the 1833 Act of Parliament which authorised the railway, Eton was able to require certain conditions regarding the tunnel's engineering and appearance, including that it must be strong enough to erect buildings on top of, and therefore be bored rather than use cut-and-cover (the fact that a tunnel would preserve valuable building land being its main advantage); the other main stipulation was that "the mouth of the tunnel at the eastern end shall be made good and finished with a substantial and ornamental facing of brickwork or masonry to the satisfaction of the Provost and College." This resulted in a grand eastern portal costing £7,000 (), sympathetic to the upmarket development planned for the Chalcots Estate, and is the reason for the less spectacular western portal.Both east and west portals were designed by William H Budden, an assistant engineer to Stephenson, who is unknown for any other works. The prestige of this commission for a non-established architect is unusual; the classical architect Philip Hardwick was the L&BR's company architect and designed the nearby terminus at Euston.The contract for the section of line including Primrose Hill was let on 21 April 1834 for £120,000 (). Excavation of Primrose Hill Tunnel began that year by the contractors Jackson and Sheddon, using four vertical shafts to access working faces, with the cut-and-cover method used for about at each end of the tunnel.The tunnelling was fraught with difficulties, arising from nature of the London clay through which it was being driven. Although bringing the advantage of being impermeable and keeping the work free from water, it is a tough material and was difficult to remove with the existing technology of spades, pickaxes and blasting, instead requiring crosscut saws and hatchets and increasing the expense, but the pressure of the clay also caused it to expand upon excavation and exposure to the atmosphere, necessitating additional unusual measures. Firstly, an extra-thick brick lining of was installed as the contractors went along, to hold back the pressure, and very strong timbering was needed to support the arches until a brickwork section was complete to prevent collapses. Also, excavation was not allowed to advance more than about beyond the completed lining.Another problem due to the expansivity of the moist clay was that it would force the mortar from between the joints of the brick lining, leading to shrinkage of the tunnel's dimension as the bricks came into contact and broke under the pressure. For a short period, Stephenson was apprehensive that stress could cause the brickwork to cave in altogether, as it made small fragments fly off the facing and coat his clothing while he inspected the work. The solution was found in using very hard paver bricks in place of hollow London stock brick, and in the substitution of lime mortar with Roman cement, which would harden before the pressure became great enough to force the bricks into contact.Jackson and Sheddon, the contractors, had become bankrupt in late 1834, leaving the railway company obliged to assume responsibility for the work. Robert Stephenson, as chief engineer, appointed John Birkinshaw, an assistant engineer, to take over supervision of the contractors' section, including the tunnel.In 1835, before it was completed, the tunnel received a special visit from a party of doctors for the L&BR to obtain their professional opinions on the "effect of such a tunnel on the health and feelings", due to the unease felt by prospective travellers in their ignorance regarding railway tunnels, of which Primrose Hill was the first in London. All four doctors, whom included William Lawrence, John Ayrton Paris and Thomas Watson, signed their names to confirm that even with a locomotive letting off steam, the tunnel remained unaffected, dry and at an agreeable temperature. They also traversed it in a carriage and found it no different to travelling in a coach down a narrow street at night and with no noise to prevent easy conversation. In fact, they were firm that the dangers of passing through well-constructed tunnels were no greater than those of travelling on an open railway, and the company used this to set the public's mind at rest.Completion of the tunnel was delayed by poor weather in addition to the engineering problems related to the London clay. By January 1837, Primrose Hill Tunnel was eventually completed, with the section of line that had originally been let at £120,000 costing more than double at £280,000 ().Being the first railway tunnel in London, Primrose Hill attracted crowds of people to watch its construction, and watch the trains operating through it once opened. Contemporary prints show the embankment by the eastern portal with crowds of sightseers. The sides of the cuttings at each end were open and unobscured, allowing views down to the portals. Development of houses on King Henry's Road soon hemmed it in and prevented this popular public attraction.By 1852 the London and North Western Railway, which had amalgamated from the L&BR, was experiencing rising pressure on this section of line and at Euston, and began to advocate for a second bore at Primrose Hill Tunnel to double the number of tracks. This work was ultimately carried out in 1879, with the main line becoming four-tracked between London and . The new bore, which features a sharp curve southwards and now forms the fast line for express services, was designed by the LNWR's chief engineer, William Baker, with portals which faithfully replicate the detailed decorative design of the originals, though taller due to a need to retain the rising land of Primrose Hill itself.A pair of new, separate tunnels to the north were built by the LNWR in 1912 for the Watford DC line, allowing capacity for electrified suburban commuter services. These are currently operated by London Overground and call at , just beyond the western portal.On 14 May 1974, Historic England (HE) awarded the portals at both ends the status of listed structures, in separate listings – the eastern portals at Grade II* (particularly important buildings of more than special interest), and the western portals are Grade II (special interest). HE noted that the comparison of east and west emphasises the exceptional circumstances at the eastern end of the tunnel where the Eton College Estate demanded a grand architectural set-piece. In its summary of importance, HE considers the eastern portal to be of more than special architectural interest for its proud, classical elevation which is indicative of the upmarket development the College hoped to undertake nearby; and that there are similarities in design with Brunel's portals to the Box Tunnel in the use of ashlar to imply strength, the classical features such as the treatment of the cornices and rusticated quoins, and the employment of quadrant arches to convey the sense of a grand entrance.	[ "Network Rail", "Railtrack", "London and Birmingham Railway", "London, Midland and Scottish Railway", "London and North Western Railway" ]
Who was the owner of Primrose Hill Tunnel in 04/27/1965?	April 27, 1965	{ "text": [ "British Rail" ] }	L2_Q27082177_P127_3	Primrose Hill Tunnel is owned by Railtrack from Jan, 1994 to Jan, 2002. Primrose Hill Tunnel is owned by London, Midland and Scottish Railway from Jan, 1923 to Jan, 1948. Primrose Hill Tunnel is owned by British Rail from Jan, 1948 to Jan, 1994. Primrose Hill Tunnel is owned by London and North Western Railway from Jan, 1846 to Jan, 1923. Primrose Hill Tunnel is owned by London and Birmingham Railway from Jan, 1837 to Jan, 1846. Primrose Hill Tunnel is owned by Network Rail from Jan, 2002 to Dec, 2022.	Primrose Hill TunnelPrimrose Hill Tunnel is a railway tunnel on the West Coast Main Line, approximately from . It is located in South Hampstead in the London Borough of Camden, just north of Primrose Hill park and consists of two bores: the slow line to the northern side, driven through the London clay by the engineer Robert Stephenson for the London and Birmingham Railway in 1838, and the fast line to its south, added by the London and North Western Railway in 1879. The original tunnel's Italianate portals were designed by William H Budden and later replicated for the fast line. The western portals have been listed at Grade II and the eastern at Grade II* since 1974.As the first railway tunnel in London, Historic England considers it to be of special historic interest, as well as because "it was the first nationally to negotiate the issue of competing claims for the use of land in an urban context; and the first tunnel to treat one of its portals architecturally".Primrose Hill Tunnel's environmental context has transformed substantially, now obscured by fences, buildings and vegetation, yet the structures remain almost unchanged from when first built, aside from the duplication from single to twin portals. The eastern portals are grand and heavy, built of Portland stone and London stock brick. The arches of the tunnel mouths have concave surrounds of rusticated voussoirs, and are topped with a projecting cornice with carved lion masks. Surrounding the portals are large stone piers topped with bracketed hipped capitals, and curved flanking wing walls divided into brick-filled panels by stone pillars with semicircular pediments. The eastern portals evoke the style of Italianate villas, bringing, as owner Eton College hoped, a certain dramatic grace to Primrose Hill.The tunnel portals at the western end are humble in relation to the eastern ones. They are hard to see other than from the bridge carrying the Chiltern Main Line from , which was inserted across the LNWR line by the Great Central Railway in 1899, obscuring the western portals. Their arches are round with coved reveals of rusticated voussoirs and keystones crowned by a dentilled cornice, and large stone flanking piers on vermiculated stone pedestals.Two airshafts remain to ventilate the tunnels: one at the midpoint of the 1838 tunnel in the Marriott Hotel's car park, and a brick shaft for the 1879 tunnel in the back garden of 10 Wadham Gardens.Construction of the London and Birmingham Railway (L&BR) began in 1833, one of the first inter-city lines after the success of the Liverpool and Manchester Railway. Choosing a route to Birmingham Curzon Street out of was its chief engineer Robert Stephenson, who needed to pass through South Hampstead, a rural area which was starting to be developed concurrently with the railway's arrival. Though the topography of the land, known as the Chalcots Estate, did not strictly require a tunnel, it was constructed at the insistence of the landowner, Eton College. Negotiations began in 1831 between the L&BR and Eton, which firstly opposed the railway cutting, principally for the reason that it would reduce the value of land and leases on the route. Though the L&BR was able to persuade Eton that the railway would be quiet and carefully fenced, it agreed to place the line in a tunnel to prevent further obstruction.For the 1833 Act of Parliament which authorised the railway, Eton was able to require certain conditions regarding the tunnel's engineering and appearance, including that it must be strong enough to erect buildings on top of, and therefore be bored rather than use cut-and-cover (the fact that a tunnel would preserve valuable building land being its main advantage); the other main stipulation was that "the mouth of the tunnel at the eastern end shall be made good and finished with a substantial and ornamental facing of brickwork or masonry to the satisfaction of the Provost and College." This resulted in a grand eastern portal costing £7,000 (), sympathetic to the upmarket development planned for the Chalcots Estate, and is the reason for the less spectacular western portal.Both east and west portals were designed by William H Budden, an assistant engineer to Stephenson, who is unknown for any other works. The prestige of this commission for a non-established architect is unusual; the classical architect Philip Hardwick was the L&BR's company architect and designed the nearby terminus at Euston.The contract for the section of line including Primrose Hill was let on 21 April 1834 for £120,000 (). Excavation of Primrose Hill Tunnel began that year by the contractors Jackson and Sheddon, using four vertical shafts to access working faces, with the cut-and-cover method used for about at each end of the tunnel.The tunnelling was fraught with difficulties, arising from nature of the London clay through which it was being driven. Although bringing the advantage of being impermeable and keeping the work free from water, it is a tough material and was difficult to remove with the existing technology of spades, pickaxes and blasting, instead requiring crosscut saws and hatchets and increasing the expense, but the pressure of the clay also caused it to expand upon excavation and exposure to the atmosphere, necessitating additional unusual measures. Firstly, an extra-thick brick lining of was installed as the contractors went along, to hold back the pressure, and very strong timbering was needed to support the arches until a brickwork section was complete to prevent collapses. Also, excavation was not allowed to advance more than about beyond the completed lining.Another problem due to the expansivity of the moist clay was that it would force the mortar from between the joints of the brick lining, leading to shrinkage of the tunnel's dimension as the bricks came into contact and broke under the pressure. For a short period, Stephenson was apprehensive that stress could cause the brickwork to cave in altogether, as it made small fragments fly off the facing and coat his clothing while he inspected the work. The solution was found in using very hard paver bricks in place of hollow London stock brick, and in the substitution of lime mortar with Roman cement, which would harden before the pressure became great enough to force the bricks into contact.Jackson and Sheddon, the contractors, had become bankrupt in late 1834, leaving the railway company obliged to assume responsibility for the work. Robert Stephenson, as chief engineer, appointed John Birkinshaw, an assistant engineer, to take over supervision of the contractors' section, including the tunnel.In 1835, before it was completed, the tunnel received a special visit from a party of doctors for the L&BR to obtain their professional opinions on the "effect of such a tunnel on the health and feelings", due to the unease felt by prospective travellers in their ignorance regarding railway tunnels, of which Primrose Hill was the first in London. All four doctors, whom included William Lawrence, John Ayrton Paris and Thomas Watson, signed their names to confirm that even with a locomotive letting off steam, the tunnel remained unaffected, dry and at an agreeable temperature. They also traversed it in a carriage and found it no different to travelling in a coach down a narrow street at night and with no noise to prevent easy conversation. In fact, they were firm that the dangers of passing through well-constructed tunnels were no greater than those of travelling on an open railway, and the company used this to set the public's mind at rest.Completion of the tunnel was delayed by poor weather in addition to the engineering problems related to the London clay. By January 1837, Primrose Hill Tunnel was eventually completed, with the section of line that had originally been let at £120,000 costing more than double at £280,000 ().Being the first railway tunnel in London, Primrose Hill attracted crowds of people to watch its construction, and watch the trains operating through it once opened. Contemporary prints show the embankment by the eastern portal with crowds of sightseers. The sides of the cuttings at each end were open and unobscured, allowing views down to the portals. Development of houses on King Henry's Road soon hemmed it in and prevented this popular public attraction.By 1852 the London and North Western Railway, which had amalgamated from the L&BR, was experiencing rising pressure on this section of line and at Euston, and began to advocate for a second bore at Primrose Hill Tunnel to double the number of tracks. This work was ultimately carried out in 1879, with the main line becoming four-tracked between London and . The new bore, which features a sharp curve southwards and now forms the fast line for express services, was designed by the LNWR's chief engineer, William Baker, with portals which faithfully replicate the detailed decorative design of the originals, though taller due to a need to retain the rising land of Primrose Hill itself.A pair of new, separate tunnels to the north were built by the LNWR in 1912 for the Watford DC line, allowing capacity for electrified suburban commuter services. These are currently operated by London Overground and call at , just beyond the western portal.On 14 May 1974, Historic England (HE) awarded the portals at both ends the status of listed structures, in separate listings – the eastern portals at Grade II* (particularly important buildings of more than special interest), and the western portals are Grade II (special interest). HE noted that the comparison of east and west emphasises the exceptional circumstances at the eastern end of the tunnel where the Eton College Estate demanded a grand architectural set-piece. In its summary of importance, HE considers the eastern portal to be of more than special architectural interest for its proud, classical elevation which is indicative of the upmarket development the College hoped to undertake nearby; and that there are similarities in design with Brunel's portals to the Box Tunnel in the use of ashlar to imply strength, the classical features such as the treatment of the cornices and rusticated quoins, and the employment of quadrant arches to convey the sense of a grand entrance.	[ "Network Rail", "Railtrack", "London and Birmingham Railway", "London, Midland and Scottish Railway", "London and North Western Railway" ]
Who was the owner of Primrose Hill Tunnel in 27-Apr-196527-April-1965?	April 27, 1965	{ "text": [ "British Rail" ] }	L2_Q27082177_P127_3	Primrose Hill Tunnel is owned by Railtrack from Jan, 1994 to Jan, 2002. Primrose Hill Tunnel is owned by London, Midland and Scottish Railway from Jan, 1923 to Jan, 1948. Primrose Hill Tunnel is owned by British Rail from Jan, 1948 to Jan, 1994. Primrose Hill Tunnel is owned by London and North Western Railway from Jan, 1846 to Jan, 1923. Primrose Hill Tunnel is owned by London and Birmingham Railway from Jan, 1837 to Jan, 1846. Primrose Hill Tunnel is owned by Network Rail from Jan, 2002 to Dec, 2022.	Primrose Hill TunnelPrimrose Hill Tunnel is a railway tunnel on the West Coast Main Line, approximately from . It is located in South Hampstead in the London Borough of Camden, just north of Primrose Hill park and consists of two bores: the slow line to the northern side, driven through the London clay by the engineer Robert Stephenson for the London and Birmingham Railway in 1838, and the fast line to its south, added by the London and North Western Railway in 1879. The original tunnel's Italianate portals were designed by William H Budden and later replicated for the fast line. The western portals have been listed at Grade II and the eastern at Grade II* since 1974.As the first railway tunnel in London, Historic England considers it to be of special historic interest, as well as because "it was the first nationally to negotiate the issue of competing claims for the use of land in an urban context; and the first tunnel to treat one of its portals architecturally".Primrose Hill Tunnel's environmental context has transformed substantially, now obscured by fences, buildings and vegetation, yet the structures remain almost unchanged from when first built, aside from the duplication from single to twin portals. The eastern portals are grand and heavy, built of Portland stone and London stock brick. The arches of the tunnel mouths have concave surrounds of rusticated voussoirs, and are topped with a projecting cornice with carved lion masks. Surrounding the portals are large stone piers topped with bracketed hipped capitals, and curved flanking wing walls divided into brick-filled panels by stone pillars with semicircular pediments. The eastern portals evoke the style of Italianate villas, bringing, as owner Eton College hoped, a certain dramatic grace to Primrose Hill.The tunnel portals at the western end are humble in relation to the eastern ones. They are hard to see other than from the bridge carrying the Chiltern Main Line from , which was inserted across the LNWR line by the Great Central Railway in 1899, obscuring the western portals. Their arches are round with coved reveals of rusticated voussoirs and keystones crowned by a dentilled cornice, and large stone flanking piers on vermiculated stone pedestals.Two airshafts remain to ventilate the tunnels: one at the midpoint of the 1838 tunnel in the Marriott Hotel's car park, and a brick shaft for the 1879 tunnel in the back garden of 10 Wadham Gardens.Construction of the London and Birmingham Railway (L&BR) began in 1833, one of the first inter-city lines after the success of the Liverpool and Manchester Railway. Choosing a route to Birmingham Curzon Street out of was its chief engineer Robert Stephenson, who needed to pass through South Hampstead, a rural area which was starting to be developed concurrently with the railway's arrival. Though the topography of the land, known as the Chalcots Estate, did not strictly require a tunnel, it was constructed at the insistence of the landowner, Eton College. Negotiations began in 1831 between the L&BR and Eton, which firstly opposed the railway cutting, principally for the reason that it would reduce the value of land and leases on the route. Though the L&BR was able to persuade Eton that the railway would be quiet and carefully fenced, it agreed to place the line in a tunnel to prevent further obstruction.For the 1833 Act of Parliament which authorised the railway, Eton was able to require certain conditions regarding the tunnel's engineering and appearance, including that it must be strong enough to erect buildings on top of, and therefore be bored rather than use cut-and-cover (the fact that a tunnel would preserve valuable building land being its main advantage); the other main stipulation was that "the mouth of the tunnel at the eastern end shall be made good and finished with a substantial and ornamental facing of brickwork or masonry to the satisfaction of the Provost and College." This resulted in a grand eastern portal costing £7,000 (), sympathetic to the upmarket development planned for the Chalcots Estate, and is the reason for the less spectacular western portal.Both east and west portals were designed by William H Budden, an assistant engineer to Stephenson, who is unknown for any other works. The prestige of this commission for a non-established architect is unusual; the classical architect Philip Hardwick was the L&BR's company architect and designed the nearby terminus at Euston.The contract for the section of line including Primrose Hill was let on 21 April 1834 for £120,000 (). Excavation of Primrose Hill Tunnel began that year by the contractors Jackson and Sheddon, using four vertical shafts to access working faces, with the cut-and-cover method used for about at each end of the tunnel.The tunnelling was fraught with difficulties, arising from nature of the London clay through which it was being driven. Although bringing the advantage of being impermeable and keeping the work free from water, it is a tough material and was difficult to remove with the existing technology of spades, pickaxes and blasting, instead requiring crosscut saws and hatchets and increasing the expense, but the pressure of the clay also caused it to expand upon excavation and exposure to the atmosphere, necessitating additional unusual measures. Firstly, an extra-thick brick lining of was installed as the contractors went along, to hold back the pressure, and very strong timbering was needed to support the arches until a brickwork section was complete to prevent collapses. Also, excavation was not allowed to advance more than about beyond the completed lining.Another problem due to the expansivity of the moist clay was that it would force the mortar from between the joints of the brick lining, leading to shrinkage of the tunnel's dimension as the bricks came into contact and broke under the pressure. For a short period, Stephenson was apprehensive that stress could cause the brickwork to cave in altogether, as it made small fragments fly off the facing and coat his clothing while he inspected the work. The solution was found in using very hard paver bricks in place of hollow London stock brick, and in the substitution of lime mortar with Roman cement, which would harden before the pressure became great enough to force the bricks into contact.Jackson and Sheddon, the contractors, had become bankrupt in late 1834, leaving the railway company obliged to assume responsibility for the work. Robert Stephenson, as chief engineer, appointed John Birkinshaw, an assistant engineer, to take over supervision of the contractors' section, including the tunnel.In 1835, before it was completed, the tunnel received a special visit from a party of doctors for the L&BR to obtain their professional opinions on the "effect of such a tunnel on the health and feelings", due to the unease felt by prospective travellers in their ignorance regarding railway tunnels, of which Primrose Hill was the first in London. All four doctors, whom included William Lawrence, John Ayrton Paris and Thomas Watson, signed their names to confirm that even with a locomotive letting off steam, the tunnel remained unaffected, dry and at an agreeable temperature. They also traversed it in a carriage and found it no different to travelling in a coach down a narrow street at night and with no noise to prevent easy conversation. In fact, they were firm that the dangers of passing through well-constructed tunnels were no greater than those of travelling on an open railway, and the company used this to set the public's mind at rest.Completion of the tunnel was delayed by poor weather in addition to the engineering problems related to the London clay. By January 1837, Primrose Hill Tunnel was eventually completed, with the section of line that had originally been let at £120,000 costing more than double at £280,000 ().Being the first railway tunnel in London, Primrose Hill attracted crowds of people to watch its construction, and watch the trains operating through it once opened. Contemporary prints show the embankment by the eastern portal with crowds of sightseers. The sides of the cuttings at each end were open and unobscured, allowing views down to the portals. Development of houses on King Henry's Road soon hemmed it in and prevented this popular public attraction.By 1852 the London and North Western Railway, which had amalgamated from the L&BR, was experiencing rising pressure on this section of line and at Euston, and began to advocate for a second bore at Primrose Hill Tunnel to double the number of tracks. This work was ultimately carried out in 1879, with the main line becoming four-tracked between London and . The new bore, which features a sharp curve southwards and now forms the fast line for express services, was designed by the LNWR's chief engineer, William Baker, with portals which faithfully replicate the detailed decorative design of the originals, though taller due to a need to retain the rising land of Primrose Hill itself.A pair of new, separate tunnels to the north were built by the LNWR in 1912 for the Watford DC line, allowing capacity for electrified suburban commuter services. These are currently operated by London Overground and call at , just beyond the western portal.On 14 May 1974, Historic England (HE) awarded the portals at both ends the status of listed structures, in separate listings – the eastern portals at Grade II* (particularly important buildings of more than special interest), and the western portals are Grade II (special interest). HE noted that the comparison of east and west emphasises the exceptional circumstances at the eastern end of the tunnel where the Eton College Estate demanded a grand architectural set-piece. In its summary of importance, HE considers the eastern portal to be of more than special architectural interest for its proud, classical elevation which is indicative of the upmarket development the College hoped to undertake nearby; and that there are similarities in design with Brunel's portals to the Box Tunnel in the use of ashlar to imply strength, the classical features such as the treatment of the cornices and rusticated quoins, and the employment of quadrant arches to convey the sense of a grand entrance.	[ "Network Rail", "Railtrack", "London and Birmingham Railway", "London, Midland and Scottish Railway", "London and North Western Railway" ]
Which team did Abderrahim Achchakir play for in Jun, 2011?	June 22, 2011	{ "text": [ "Difaa El Jadida" ] }	L2_Q3661889_P54_1	Abderrahim Achchakir plays for Difaa El Jadida from Jan, 2010 to Jan, 2012. Abderrahim Achchakir plays for SCC Mohammédia from Jan, 2009 to Jan, 2010. Abderrahim Achchakir plays for FAR Rabat from Jan, 2012 to Dec, 2022. Abderrahim Achchakir plays for Morocco national football team from Jan, 2013 to Dec, 2022.	Abderrahim AchchakirAbderrahim Achchakir (born December 15, 1986) is a Moroccan footballer who plays for Raja Casablanca and the Morocco national team. He was a member of the Morocco national team at the 2013 Africa Cup of Nations in South Africa.	[ "Morocco national football team", "FAR Rabat", "SCC Mohammédia" ]
Which team did Abderrahim Achchakir play for in 2011-06-22?	June 22, 2011	{ "text": [ "Difaa El Jadida" ] }	L2_Q3661889_P54_1	Abderrahim Achchakir plays for Difaa El Jadida from Jan, 2010 to Jan, 2012. Abderrahim Achchakir plays for SCC Mohammédia from Jan, 2009 to Jan, 2010. Abderrahim Achchakir plays for FAR Rabat from Jan, 2012 to Dec, 2022. Abderrahim Achchakir plays for Morocco national football team from Jan, 2013 to Dec, 2022.	Abderrahim AchchakirAbderrahim Achchakir (born December 15, 1986) is a Moroccan footballer who plays for Raja Casablanca and the Morocco national team. He was a member of the Morocco national team at the 2013 Africa Cup of Nations in South Africa.	[ "Morocco national football team", "FAR Rabat", "SCC Mohammédia" ]
Which team did Abderrahim Achchakir play for in 22/06/2011?	June 22, 2011	{ "text": [ "Difaa El Jadida" ] }	L2_Q3661889_P54_1	Abderrahim Achchakir plays for Difaa El Jadida from Jan, 2010 to Jan, 2012. Abderrahim Achchakir plays for SCC Mohammédia from Jan, 2009 to Jan, 2010. Abderrahim Achchakir plays for FAR Rabat from Jan, 2012 to Dec, 2022. Abderrahim Achchakir plays for Morocco national football team from Jan, 2013 to Dec, 2022.	Abderrahim AchchakirAbderrahim Achchakir (born December 15, 1986) is a Moroccan footballer who plays for Raja Casablanca and the Morocco national team. He was a member of the Morocco national team at the 2013 Africa Cup of Nations in South Africa.	[ "Morocco national football team", "FAR Rabat", "SCC Mohammédia" ]
Which team did Abderrahim Achchakir play for in Jun 22, 2011?	June 22, 2011	{ "text": [ "Difaa El Jadida" ] }	L2_Q3661889_P54_1	Abderrahim Achchakir plays for Difaa El Jadida from Jan, 2010 to Jan, 2012. Abderrahim Achchakir plays for SCC Mohammédia from Jan, 2009 to Jan, 2010. Abderrahim Achchakir plays for FAR Rabat from Jan, 2012 to Dec, 2022. Abderrahim Achchakir plays for Morocco national football team from Jan, 2013 to Dec, 2022.	Abderrahim AchchakirAbderrahim Achchakir (born December 15, 1986) is a Moroccan footballer who plays for Raja Casablanca and the Morocco national team. He was a member of the Morocco national team at the 2013 Africa Cup of Nations in South Africa.	[ "Morocco national football team", "FAR Rabat", "SCC Mohammédia" ]
Which team did Abderrahim Achchakir play for in 06/22/2011?	June 22, 2011	{ "text": [ "Difaa El Jadida" ] }	L2_Q3661889_P54_1	Abderrahim Achchakir plays for Difaa El Jadida from Jan, 2010 to Jan, 2012. Abderrahim Achchakir plays for SCC Mohammédia from Jan, 2009 to Jan, 2010. Abderrahim Achchakir plays for FAR Rabat from Jan, 2012 to Dec, 2022. Abderrahim Achchakir plays for Morocco national football team from Jan, 2013 to Dec, 2022.	Abderrahim AchchakirAbderrahim Achchakir (born December 15, 1986) is a Moroccan footballer who plays for Raja Casablanca and the Morocco national team. He was a member of the Morocco national team at the 2013 Africa Cup of Nations in South Africa.	[ "Morocco national football team", "FAR Rabat", "SCC Mohammédia" ]
Which team did Abderrahim Achchakir play for in 22-Jun-201122-June-2011?	June 22, 2011	{ "text": [ "Difaa El Jadida" ] }	L2_Q3661889_P54_1	Abderrahim Achchakir plays for Difaa El Jadida from Jan, 2010 to Jan, 2012. Abderrahim Achchakir plays for SCC Mohammédia from Jan, 2009 to Jan, 2010. Abderrahim Achchakir plays for FAR Rabat from Jan, 2012 to Dec, 2022. Abderrahim Achchakir plays for Morocco national football team from Jan, 2013 to Dec, 2022.	Abderrahim AchchakirAbderrahim Achchakir (born December 15, 1986) is a Moroccan footballer who plays for Raja Casablanca and the Morocco national team. He was a member of the Morocco national team at the 2013 Africa Cup of Nations in South Africa.	[ "Morocco national football team", "FAR Rabat", "SCC Mohammédia" ]
Which employer did Richard Feynman work for in Nov, 1949?	November 09, 1949	{ "text": [ "Cornell University" ] }	L2_Q39246_P108_1	Richard Feynman works for Manhattan Project from Jan, 1941 to Jan, 1945. Richard Feynman works for Cornell University from Jan, 1945 to Jan, 1950. Richard Feynman works for California Institute of Technology from Jan, 1950 to Jan, 1988.	Richard FeynmanRichard Phillips Feynman (; May 11, 1918 – February 15, 1988) was an American theoretical physicist, known for his work in the path integral formulation of quantum mechanics, the theory of quantum electrodynamics, the physics of the superfluidity of supercooled liquid helium, as well as his work in particle physics for which he proposed the parton model. For contributions to the development of quantum electrodynamics, Feynman received the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1965 jointly with Julian Schwinger and Shin'ichirō Tomonaga.Feynman developed a widely used pictorial representation scheme for the mathematical expressions describing the behavior of subatomic particles, which later became known as Feynman diagrams. During his lifetime, Feynman became one of the best-known scientists in the world. In a 1999 poll of 130 leading physicists worldwide by the British journal "Physics World", he was ranked the seventh greatest physicist of all time.He assisted in the development of the atomic bomb during World War II and became known to a wide public in the 1980s as a member of the Rogers Commission, the panel that investigated the Space Shuttle "Challenger" disaster. Along with his work in theoretical physics, Feynman has been credited with pioneering the field of quantum computing and introducing the concept of nanotechnology. He held the Richard C. Tolman professorship in theoretical physics at the California Institute of Technology.Feynman was a keen popularizer of physics through both books and lectures, including a 1959 talk on top-down nanotechnology called "There's Plenty of Room at the Bottom" and the three-volume publication of his undergraduate lectures, "The Feynman Lectures on Physics". Feynman also became known through his semi-autobiographical books "Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman!" and "What Do You Care What Other People Think?", and books written about him such as "Tuva or Bust!" by Ralph Leighton and the biography "Genius: The Life and Science of Richard Feynman" by James Gleick.Feynman was born on May 11, 1918, in Queens, New York City, to Lucille , a homemaker, and Melville Arthur Feynman, a sales manager originally from Minsk in Belarus (then part of the Russian Empire).Feynman was a late talker, and did not speak until after his third birthday. As an adult he spoke with a New York accent strong enough to be perceived as an affectation or exaggeration—so much so that his friends Wolfgang Pauli and Hans Bethe once commented that Feynman spoke like a "bum".The young Feynman was heavily influenced by his father, who encouraged him to ask questions to challenge orthodox thinking, and who was always ready to teach Feynman something new. From his mother, he gained the sense of humor that he had throughout his life. As a child, he had a talent for engineering, maintained an experimental laboratory in his home, and delighted in repairing radios. This radio repairing was probably the first job Feynman had, and during this time he showed early signs of an aptitude for his later career in theoretical physics, when he would analyze the issues theoretically and arrive at the solutions. When he was in grade school, he created a home burglar alarm system while his parents were out for the day running errands.When Richard was five, his mother gave birth to a younger brother, Henry Phillips, who died at age four weeks. Four years later, Richard's sister Joan was born and the family moved to Far Rockaway, Queens. Though separated by nine years, Joan and Richard were close, and they both shared a curiosity about the world. Though their mother thought women lacked the capacity to understand such things, Richard encouraged Joan's interest in astronomy, and Joan eventually became an astrophysicist.Feynman's parents were both from Jewish families but not religious, and by his youth, Feynman described himself as an "avowed atheist". Many years later, in a letter to Tina Levitan, declining a request for information for her book on Jewish Nobel Prize winners, he stated, "To select, for approbation the peculiar elements that come from some supposedly Jewish heredity is to open the door to all kinds of nonsense on racial theory", adding, "at thirteen I was not only converted to other religious views, but I also stopped believing that the Jewish people are in any way 'the chosen people'". Later in his life, during a visit to the Jewish Theological Seminary, he encountered the Talmud for the first time. He saw that it contained the original text in a little square on the page, and surrounding it were commentaries written over time by different people. In this way the Talmud had evolved, and everything that was discussed was carefully recorded. Despite being impressed, Feynman was disappointed with the lack of interest for nature and the outside world expressed by the rabbis, who cared about only those questions which arise from the Talmud.Feynman attended Far Rockaway High School, which was also attended by fellow Nobel laureates Burton Richter and Baruch Samuel Blumberg. Upon starting high school, Feynman was quickly promoted to a higher math class. An IQ test administered in high school estimated his IQ at 125—high but "merely respectable", according to biographer James Gleick. His sister Joan did better, allowing her to claim that she was smarter. Years later he declined to join Mensa International, saying that his IQ was too low. Physicist Steve Hsu stated of the test: When Feynman was 15, he taught himself trigonometry, advanced algebra, infinite series, analytic geometry, and both differential and integral calculus. Before entering college, he was experimenting with and deriving mathematical topics such as the half-derivative using his own notation. He created special symbols for logarithm, sine, cosine and tangent functions so they did not look like three variables multiplied together, and for the derivative, to remove the temptation of canceling out the formula_1's in formula_2. A member of the Arista Honor Society, in his last year in high school he won the New York University Math Championship. His habit of direct characterization sometimes rattled more conventional thinkers; for example, one of his questions, when learning feline anatomy, was "Do you have a map of the cat?" (referring to an anatomical chart).Feynman applied to Columbia University but was not accepted because of their quota for the number of Jews admitted. Instead, he attended the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he joined the Pi Lambda Phi fraternity. Although he originally majored in mathematics, he later switched to electrical engineering, as he considered mathematics to be too abstract. Noticing that he "had gone too far", he then switched to physics, which he claimed was "somewhere in between". As an undergraduate, he published two papers in the "Physical Review". One of these, which was co-written with Manuel Vallarta, was entitled "The Scattering of Cosmic Rays by the Stars of a Galaxy". The other was his senior thesis, on "Forces in Molecules", based on an idea by John C. Slater, who was sufficiently impressed by the paper to have it published. Today, it is known as the Hellmann–Feynman theorem.In 1939, Feynman received a bachelor's degree and was named a Putnam Fellow. He attained a perfect score on the graduate school entrance exams to Princeton University in physics—an unprecedented feat—and an outstanding score in mathematics, but did poorly on the history and English portions. The head of the physics department there, Henry D. Smyth, had another concern, writing to Philip M. Morse to ask: "Is Feynman Jewish? We have no definite rule against Jews but have to keep their proportion in our department reasonably small because of the difficulty of placing them." Morse conceded that Feynman was indeed Jewish, but reassured Smyth that Feynman's "physiognomy and manner, however, show no trace of this characteristic".Attendees at Feynman's first seminar, which was on the classical version of the Wheeler–Feynman absorber theory, included Albert Einstein, Wolfgang Pauli, and John von Neumann. Pauli made the prescient comment that the theory would be extremely difficult to quantize, and Einstein said that one might try to apply this method to gravity in general relativity, which Sir Fred Hoyle and Jayant Narlikar did much later as the Hoyle–Narlikar theory of gravity. Feynman received a Ph.D. from Princeton in 1942; his thesis advisor was John Archibald Wheeler. In his doctoral thesis entitled "The Principle of Least Action in Quantum Mechanics", Feynman applied the principle of stationary action to problems of quantum mechanics, inspired by a desire to quantize the Wheeler–Feynman absorber theory of electrodynamics, and laid the groundwork for the path integral formulation and Feynman diagrams. A key insight was that positrons behaved like electrons moving backwards in time. James Gleick wrote:One of the conditions of Feynman's scholarship to Princeton was that he could not be married; nevertheless, he continued to see his high school sweetheart, Arline Greenbaum, and was determined to marry her once he had been awarded his Ph.D. despite the knowledge that she was seriously ill with tuberculosis. This was an incurable disease at the time, and she was not expected to live more than two years. On June 29, 1942, they took the ferry to Staten Island, where they were married in the city office. The ceremony was attended by neither family nor friends and was witnessed by a pair of strangers. Feynman could only kiss Arline on the cheek. After the ceremony he took her to Deborah Hospital, where he visited her on weekends.In 1941, with World War II raging in Europe but the United States not yet at war, Feynman spent the summer working on ballistics problems at the Frankford Arsenal in Pennsylvania. After the attack on Pearl Harbor brought the United States into the war, Feynman was recruited by Robert R. Wilson, who was working on means to produce enriched uranium for use in an atomic bomb, as part of what would become the Manhattan Project. At the time, Feynman had not earned a graduate degree. Wilson's team at Princeton was working on a device called an isotron, intended to electromagnetically separate uranium-235 from uranium-238. This was done in a quite different manner from that used by the calutron that was under development by a team under Wilson's former mentor, Ernest O. Lawrence, at the Radiation Laboratory of the University of California. On paper, the isotron was many times more efficient than the calutron, but Feynman and Paul Olum struggled to determine whether or not it was practical. Ultimately, on Lawrence's recommendation, the isotron project was abandoned.At this juncture, in early 1943, Robert Oppenheimer was establishing the Los Alamos Laboratory, a secret laboratory on a mesa in New Mexico where atomic bombs would be designed and built. An offer was made to the Princeton team to be redeployed there. "Like a bunch of professional soldiers," Wilson later recalled, "we signed up, en masse, to go to Los Alamos." Like many other young physicists, Feynman soon fell under the spell of the charismatic Oppenheimer, who telephoned Feynman long distance from Chicago to inform him that he had found a sanatorium in Albuquerque, New Mexico, for Arline. They were among the first to depart for New Mexico, leaving on a train on March 28, 1943. The railroad supplied Arline with a wheelchair, and Feynman paid extra for a private room for her.At Los Alamos, Feynman was assigned to Hans Bethe's Theoretical (T) Division, and impressed Bethe enough to be made a group leader. He and Bethe developed the Bethe–Feynman formula for calculating the yield of a fission bomb, which built upon previous work by Robert Serber. As a junior physicist, he was not central to the project. He administered the computation group of human computers in the theoretical division. With Stanley Frankel and Nicholas Metropolis, he assisted in establishing a system for using IBM punched cards for computation. He invented a new method of computing logarithms that he later used on the Connection Machine. Other work at Los Alamos included calculating neutron equations for the Los Alamos "Water Boiler", a small nuclear reactor, to measure how close an assembly of fissile material was to criticality.On completing this work, Feynman was sent to the Clinton Engineer Works in Oak Ridge, Tennessee, where the Manhattan Project had its uranium enrichment facilities. He aided the engineers there in devising safety procedures for material storage so that criticality accidents could be avoided, especially when enriched uranium came into contact with water, which acted as a neutron moderator. He insisted on giving the rank and file a lecture on nuclear physics so that they would realize the dangers. He explained that while any amount of unenriched uranium could be safely stored, the enriched uranium had to be carefully handled. He developed a series of safety recommendations for the various grades of enrichments. He was told that if the people at Oak Ridge gave him any difficulty with his proposals, he was to inform them that Los Alamos "could not be responsible for their safety otherwise".Returning to Los Alamos, Feynman was put in charge of the group responsible for the theoretical work and calculations on the proposed uranium hydride bomb, which ultimately proved to be infeasible. He was sought out by physicist Niels Bohr for one-on-one discussions. He later discovered the reason: most of the other physicists were too much in awe of Bohr to argue with him. Feynman had no such inhibitions, vigorously pointing out anything he considered to be flawed in Bohr's thinking. He said he felt as much respect for Bohr as anyone else, but once anyone got him talking about physics, he would become so focused he forgot about social niceties. Perhaps because of this, Bohr never warmed to Feynman.At Los Alamos, which was isolated for security, Feynman amused himself by investigating the combination locks on the cabinets and desks of physicists. He often found that they left the lock combinations on the factory settings, wrote the combinations down, or used easily guessable combinations like dates. He found one cabinet's combination by trying numbers he thought a physicist might use (it proved to be 27–18–28 after the base of natural logarithms, "e" = 2.71828 ...), and found that the three filing cabinets where a colleague kept research notes all had the same combination. He left notes in the cabinets as a prank, spooking his colleague, Frederic de Hoffmann, into thinking a spy had gained access to them.Feynman's $380 monthly salary was about half the amount needed for his modest living expenses and Arline's medical bills, and they were forced to dip into her $3,300 in savings. On weekends he drove to Albuquerque to see Arline in a car borrowed from his friend Klaus Fuchs. Asked who at Los Alamos was most likely to be a spy, Fuchs mentioned Feynman's safe cracking and frequent trips to Albuquerque; Fuchs himself later confessed to spying for the Soviet Union. The FBI would compile a bulky file on Feynman, particularly in view of Feynman's Q clearance.Informed that Arline was dying, Feynman drove to Albuquerque and sat with her for hours until she died on June 16, 1945. He then immersed himself in work on the project and was present at the Trinity nuclear test. Feynman claimed to be the only person to see the explosion without the very dark glasses or welder's lenses provided, reasoning that it was safe to look through a truck windshield, as it would screen out the harmful ultraviolet radiation. The immense brightness of the explosion made him duck to the truck's floor, where he saw a temporary "purple splotch" afterimage.Feynman nominally held an appointment at the University of Wisconsin–Madison as an assistant professor of physics, but was on unpaid leave during his involvement in the Manhattan Project. In 1945, he received a letter from Dean Mark Ingraham of the College of Letters and Science requesting his return to the university to teach in the coming academic year. His appointment was not extended when he did not commit to returning. In a talk given there several years later, Feynman quipped, "It's great to be back at the only university that ever had the good sense to fire me."As early as October 30, 1943, Bethe had written to the chairman of the physics department of his university, Cornell, to recommend that Feynman be hired. On February 28, 1944, this was endorsed by Robert Bacher, also from Cornell, and one of the most senior scientists at Los Alamos. This led to an offer being made in August 1944, which Feynman accepted. Oppenheimer had also hoped to recruit Feynman to the University of California, but the head of the physics department, Raymond T. Birge, was reluctant. He made Feynman an offer in May 1945, but Feynman turned it down. Cornell matched its salary offer of $3,900 per annum. Feynman became one of the first of the Los Alamos Laboratory's group leaders to depart, leaving for Ithaca, New York, in October 1945.Because Feynman was no longer working at the Los Alamos Laboratory, he was no longer exempt from the draft. At his induction, physical Army psychiatrists diagnosed Feynman as suffering from a mental illness and the Army gave him a 4-F exemption on mental grounds. His father died suddenly on October 8, 1946, and Feynman suffered from depression. On October 17, 1946, he wrote a letter to Arline, expressing his deep love and heartbreak. The letter was sealed and only opened after his death. "Please excuse my not mailing this," the letter concluded, "but I don't know your new address." Unable to focus on research problems, Feynman began tackling physics problems, not for utility, but for self-satisfaction. One of these involved analyzing the physics of a twirling, nutating disk as it is moving through the air, inspired by an incident in the cafeteria at Cornell when someone tossed a dinner plate in the air. He read the work of Sir William Rowan Hamilton on quaternions, and attempted unsuccessfully to use them to formulate a relativistic theory of electrons. His work during this period, which used equations of rotation to express various spinning speeds, ultimately proved important to his Nobel Prize–winning work, yet because he felt burned out and had turned his attention to less immediately practical problems, he was surprised by the offers of professorships from other renowned universities, including the Institute for Advanced Study, the University of California, Los Angeles, and the University of California, Berkeley.Feynman was not the only frustrated theoretical physicist in the early post-war years. Quantum electrodynamics suffered from infinite integrals in perturbation theory. These were clear mathematical flaws in the theory, which Feynman and Wheeler had unsuccessfully attempted to work around. "Theoreticians", noted Murray Gell-Mann, "were in disgrace." In June 1947, leading American physicists met at the Shelter Island Conference. For Feynman, it was his "first big conference with big men ... I had never gone to one like this one in peacetime." The problems plaguing quantum electrodynamics were discussed, but the theoreticians were completely overshadowed by the achievements of the experimentalists, who reported the discovery of the Lamb shift, the measurement of the magnetic moment of the electron, and Robert Marshak's two-meson hypothesis.Bethe took the lead from the work of Hans Kramers, and derived a renormalized non-relativistic quantum equation for the Lamb shift. The next step was to create a relativistic version. Feynman thought that he could do this, but when he went back to Bethe with his solution, it did not converge. Feynman carefully worked through the problem again, applying the path integral formulation that he had used in his thesis. Like Bethe, he made the integral finite by applying a cut-off term. The result corresponded to Bethe's version. Feynman presented his work to his peers at the Pocono Conference in 1948. It did not go well. Julian Schwinger gave a long presentation of his work in quantum electrodynamics, and Feynman then offered his version, entitled "Alternative Formulation of Quantum Electrodynamics". The unfamiliar Feynman diagrams, used for the first time, puzzled the audience. Feynman failed to get his point across, and Paul Dirac, Edward Teller and Niels Bohr all raised objections.To Freeman Dyson, one thing at least was clear: Shin'ichirō Tomonaga, Schwinger and Feynman understood what they were talking about even if no one else did, but had not published anything. He was convinced that Feynman's formulation was easier to understand, and ultimately managed to convince Oppenheimer that this was the case. Dyson published a paper in 1949, which added new rules to Feynman's that told how to implement renormalization. Feynman was prompted to publish his ideas in the "Physical Review" in a series of papers over three years. His 1948 papers on "A Relativistic Cut-Off for Classical Electrodynamics" attempted to explain what he had been unable to get across at Pocono. His 1949 paper on "The Theory of Positrons" addressed the Schrödinger equation and Dirac equation, and introduced what is now called the Feynman propagator. Finally, in papers on the "Mathematical Formulation of the Quantum Theory of Electromagnetic Interaction" in 1950 and "An Operator Calculus Having Applications in Quantum Electrodynamics" in 1951, he developed the mathematical basis of his ideas, derived familiar formulae and advanced new ones.While papers by others initially cited Schwinger, papers citing Feynman and employing Feynman diagrams appeared in 1950, and soon became prevalent. Students learned and used the powerful new tool that Feynman had created. Computer programs were later written to compute Feynman diagrams, providing a tool of unprecedented power. It is possible to write such programs because the Feynman diagrams constitute a formal language with a formal grammar. Marc Kac provided the formal proofs of the summation under history, showing that the parabolic partial differential equation can be re-expressed as a sum under different histories (that is, an expectation operator), what is now known as the Feynman–Kac formula, the use of which extends beyond physics to many applications of stochastic processes. To Schwinger, however, the Feynman diagram was "pedagogy, not physics".By 1949, Feynman was becoming restless at Cornell. He never settled into a particular house or apartment, living in guest houses or student residences, or with married friends "until these arrangements became sexually volatile". He liked to date undergraduates, hire prostitutes, and sleep with the wives of friends. He was not fond of Ithaca's cold winter weather, and pined for a warmer climate. Above all, at Cornell, he was always in the shadow of Hans Bethe. Despite all of this, Feynman looked back favorably on the Telluride House, where he resided for a large period of his Cornell career. In an interview, he described the House as "a group of boys that have been specially selected because of their scholarship, because of their cleverness or whatever it is, to be given free board and lodging and so on, because of their brains". He enjoyed the house's convenience and said that "it's there that I did the fundamental work" for which he won the Nobel Prize.Feynman spent several weeks in Rio de Janeiro in July 1949. That year, the Soviet Union detonated its first atomic bomb, generating concerns about espionage. Fuchs was arrested as a Soviet spy in 1950 and the FBI questioned Bethe about Feynman's loyalty. Physicist David Bohm was arrested on December 4, 1950 and emigrated to Brazil in October 1951. Because of the fears of a nuclear war, a girlfriend told Feynman that he should also consider moving to South America. He had a sabbatical coming for 1951–52, and elected to spend it in Brazil, where he gave courses at the Centro Brasileiro de Pesquisas Físicas. In Brazil, Feynman was impressed with "samba" music, and learned to play the "frigideira", a metal percussion instrument based on a frying pan (".") He was an enthusiastic amateur player of bongo and conga drums and often played them in the pit orchestra in musicals. He spent time in Rio with his friend Bohm but Bohm could not convince Feynman to investigate Bohm's ideas on physics.Feynman did not return to Cornell. Bacher, who had been instrumental in bringing Feynman to Cornell, had lured him to the California Institute of Technology (Caltech). Part of the deal was that he could spend his first year on sabbatical in Brazil. He had become smitten by Mary Louise Bell from Neodesha, Kansas. They had met in a cafeteria in Cornell, where she had studied the history of Mexican art and textiles. She later followed him to Caltech, where he gave a lecture. While he was in Brazil, she taught classes on the history of furniture and interiors at Michigan State University. He proposed to her by mail from Rio de Janeiro, and they married in Boise, Idaho, on June 28, 1952, shortly after he returned. They frequently quarreled and she was frightened by his violent temper. Their politics were different; although he registered and voted as a Republican, she was more conservative, and her opinion on the 1954 Oppenheimer security hearing ("Where there's smoke there's fire") offended him. They separated on May 20, 1956. An interlocutory decree of divorce was entered on June 19, 1956, on the grounds of "extreme cruelty". The divorce became final on May 5, 1958.In the wake of the 1957 Sputnik crisis, the U.S. government's interest in science rose for a time. Feynman was considered for a seat on the President's Science Advisory Committee, but was not appointed. At this time, the FBI interviewed a woman close to Feynman, possibly his ex-wife Bell, who sent a written statement to J. Edgar Hoover on August 8, 1958:The U.S. government nevertheless sent Feynman to Geneva for the September 1958 Atoms for Peace Conference. On the beach at Lake Geneva, he met Gweneth Howarth, who was from Ripponden, Yorkshire, and working in Switzerland as an "au pair". Feynman's love life had been turbulent since his divorce; his previous girlfriend had walked off with his Albert Einstein Award medal and, on the advice of an earlier girlfriend, had feigned pregnancy and extorted him into paying for an abortion, then used the money to buy furniture. When Feynman found that Howarth was being paid only $25 a month, he offered her $20 a week to be his live-in maid. Feynman knew that this sort of behavior was illegal under the Mann Act, so he had a friend, Matthew Sands, act as her sponsor. Howarth pointed out that she already had two boyfriends, but decided to take Feynman up on his offer, and arrived in Altadena, California, in June 1959. She made a point of dating other men, but Feynman proposed in early 1960. They were married on September 24, 1960, at the Huntington Hotel in Pasadena. They had a son, Carl, in 1962, and adopted a daughter, Michelle, in 1968. Besides their home in Altadena, they had a beach house in Baja California, purchased with the money from Feynman's Nobel Prize.Feynman tried marijuana and ketamine at John Lilly's sensory deprivation tanks, as a way of studying consciousness. He gave up alcohol when he began to show vague, early signs of alcoholism, as he did not want to do anything that could damage his brain. Despite his curiosity about hallucinations, he was reluctant to experiment with LSD.There had been protests over his alleged sexism in 1968, and again in 1972, but there is no evidence he discriminated against women. Feynman recalled protesters entering a hall and picketing a lecture he was about to make in San Francisco, calling him a "sexist pig". Seeing the protesters, as Feynman later recalled the incident, he addressed institutional sexism by saying that "women do indeed suffer prejudice and discrimination in physics".At Caltech, Feynman investigated the physics of the superfluidity of supercooled liquid helium, where helium seems to display a complete lack of viscosity when flowing. Feynman provided a quantum-mechanical explanation for the Soviet physicist Lev Landau's theory of superfluidity. Applying the Schrödinger equation to the question showed that the superfluid was displaying quantum mechanical behavior observable on a macroscopic scale. This helped with the problem of superconductivity, but the solution eluded Feynman. It was solved with the BCS theory of superconductivity, proposed by John Bardeen, Leon Neil Cooper, and John Robert Schrieffer in 1957.Feynman, inspired by a desire to quantize the Wheeler–Feynman absorber theory of electrodynamics, laid the groundwork for the path integral formulation and Feynman diagrams.With Murray Gell-Mann, Feynman developed a model of weak decay, which showed that the current coupling in the process is a combination of vector and axial currents (an example of weak decay is the decay of a neutron into an electron, a proton, and an antineutrino). Although E. C. George Sudarshan and Robert Marshak developed the theory nearly simultaneously, Feynman's collaboration with Murray Gell-Mann was seen as seminal because the weak interaction was neatly described by the vector and axial currents. It thus combined the 1933 beta decay theory of Enrico Fermi with an explanation of parity violation.Feynman attempted an explanation, called the parton model, of the strong interactions governing nucleon scattering. The parton model emerged as a complement to the quark model developed by Gell-Mann. The relationship between the two models was murky; Gell-Mann referred to Feynman's partons derisively as "put-ons". In the mid-1960s, physicists believed that quarks were just a bookkeeping device for symmetry numbers, not real particles; the statistics of the omega-minus particle, if it were interpreted as three identical strange quarks bound together, seemed impossible if quarks were real.The SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory deep inelastic scattering experiments of the late 1960s showed that nucleons (protons and neutrons) contained point-like particles that scattered electrons. It was natural to identify these with quarks, but Feynman's parton model attempted to interpret the experimental data in a way that did not introduce additional hypotheses. For example, the data showed that some 45% of the energy momentum was carried by electrically neutral particles in the nucleon. These electrically neutral particles are now seen to be the gluons that carry the forces between the quarks, and their three-valued color quantum number solves the omega-minus problem. Feynman did not dispute the quark model; for example, when the fifth quark was discovered in 1977, Feynman immediately pointed out to his students that the discovery implied the existence of a sixth quark, which was discovered in the decade after his death.After the success of quantum electrodynamics, Feynman turned to quantum gravity. By analogy with the photon, which has spin 1, he investigated the consequences of a free massless spin 2 field and derived the Einstein field equation of general relativity, but little more. The computational device that Feynman discovered then for gravity, "ghosts", which are "particles" in the interior of his diagrams that have the "wrong" connection between spin and statistics, have proved invaluable in explaining the quantum particle behavior of the Yang–Mills theories, for example, quantum chromodynamics and the electro-weak theory. He did work on all four of the forces of nature: electromagnetic, the weak force, the strong force and gravity. John and Mary Gribbin state in their book on Feynman that "Nobody else has made such influential contributions to the investigation of all four of the interactions".Partly as a way to bring publicity to progress in physics, Feynman offered $1,000 prizes for two of his challenges in nanotechnology; one was claimed by William McLellan and the other by Tom Newman.Feynman was also interested in the relationship between physics and computation. He was also one of the first scientists to conceive the possibility of quantum computers. In the 1980s he began to spend his summers working at Thinking Machines Corporation, helping to build some of the first parallel supercomputers and considering the construction of quantum computers.In 1984–1986, he developed a variational method for the approximate calculation of path integrals, which has led to a powerful method of converting divergent perturbation expansions into convergent strong-coupling expansions (variational perturbation theory) and, as a consequence, to the most accurate determination of critical exponents measured in satellite experiments. At Caltech, he once chalked "What I cannot create I do not understand" on his blackboard.In the early 1960s, Feynman acceded to a request to "spruce up" the teaching of undergraduates at Caltech. After three years devoted to the task, he produced a series of lectures that later became "The Feynman Lectures on Physics". He wanted a picture of a drumhead sprinkled with powder to show the modes of vibration at the beginning of the book. Concerned over the connections to drugs and rock and roll that could be made from the image, the publishers changed the cover to plain red, though they included a picture of him playing drums in the foreword. "The Feynman Lectures on Physics" occupied two physicists, Robert B. Leighton and Matthew Sands, as part-time co-authors for several years. Even though the books were not adopted by universities as textbooks, they continue to sell well because they provide a deep understanding of physics. Many of his lectures and miscellaneous talks were turned into other books, including "The Character of Physical Law", "", "Statistical Mechanics", "Lectures on Gravitation", and the "Feynman Lectures on Computation".Feynman wrote about his experiences teaching physics undergraduates in Brazil. The students' studying habits and the Portuguese language textbooks were so devoid of any context or applications for their information that, in Feynman's opinion, the students were not learning physics at all. At the end of the year, Feynman was invited to give a lecture on his teaching experiences, and he agreed to do so, provided he could speak frankly, which he did.Feynman opposed rote learning or unthinking memorization and other teaching methods that emphasized form over function. "Clear thinking" and "clear presentation" were fundamental prerequisites for his attention. It could be perilous even to approach him unprepared, and he did not forget fools and pretenders. In 1964, he served on the California State Curriculum Commission, which was responsible for approving textbooks to be used by schools in California. He was not impressed with what he found. Many of the mathematics texts covered subjects of use only to pure mathematicians as part of the "New Math". Elementary students were taught about sets, but:In April 1966, Feynman delivered an address to the National Science Teachers Association, in which he suggested how students could be made to think like scientists, be open-minded, curious, and especially, to doubt. In the course of the lecture, he gave a definition of science, which he said came about by several stages. The evolution of intelligent life on planet Earth—creatures such as cats that play and learn from experience. The evolution of humans, who came to use language to pass knowledge from one individual to the next, so that the knowledge was not lost when an individual died. Unfortunately, incorrect knowledge could be passed down as well as correct knowledge, so another step was needed. Galileo and others started doubting the truth of what was passed down and to investigate "ab initio", from experience, what the true situation was—this was science.In 1974, Feynman delivered the Caltech commencement address on the topic of "cargo cult science", which has the semblance of science, but is only pseudoscience due to a lack of "a kind of scientific integrity, a principle of scientific thought that corresponds to a kind of utter honesty" on the part of the scientist. He instructed the graduating class that "The first principle is that you must not fool yourself—and you are the easiest person to fool. So you have to be very careful about that. After you've not fooled yourself, it's easy not to fool other scientists. You just have to be honest in a conventional way after that."Feynman served as doctoral advisor to 31 students.In 1977, Feynman supported his colleague Jenijoy La Belle, who had been hired as Caltech's first female professor in 1969, and filed suit with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission after she was refused tenure in 1974. The EEOC ruled against Caltech in 1977, adding that La Belle had been paid less than male colleagues. La Belle finally received tenure in 1979. Many of Feynman's colleagues were surprised that he took her side, but he had gotten to know La Belle and liked and admired her.In the 1960s, Feynman began thinking of writing an autobiography, and he began granting interviews to historians. In the 1980s, working with Ralph Leighton (Robert Leighton's son), he recorded chapters on audio tape that Ralph transcribed. The book was published in 1985 as "Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman!" and became a best-seller.Gell-Mann was upset by Feynman's account in the book of the weak interaction work, and threatened to sue, resulting in a correction being inserted in later editions. This incident was just the latest provocation in decades of bad feeling between the two scientists. Gell-Mann often expressed frustration at the attention Feynman received; he remarked: "[Feynman] was a great scientist, but he spent a great deal of his effort generating anecdotes about himself."Feynman has been criticized for a chapter in the book entitled "You Just "Ask" Them", where he describes how he learned to seduce women at a bar he went to in the summer of 1946. A mentor taught him to ask a woman if she would sleep with him before buying her anything. He describes seeing women at the bar as "bitches" in his thoughts, and tells a story of how he told a woman named Ann that she was "worse than a whore" after Ann persuaded him to buy her sandwiches by telling him he could eat them at her place, but then, after he bought them, saying they actually couldn't eat together because another man was coming over. Later on that same evening, Ann returned to the bar to take Feynman to her place. Feynman states at the end of the chapter that this behaviour wasn't typical of him: "So it worked even with an ordinary girl! But no matter how effective the lesson was, I never really used it after that. I didn't enjoy doing it that way. But it was interesting to know that things worked much differently from how I was brought up."Feynman played an important role on the Presidential Rogers Commission, which investigated the "Challenger" disaster. He had been reluctant to participate, but was persuaded by advice from his wife. Feynman clashed several times with commission chairman William P. Rogers. During a break in one hearing, Rogers told commission member Neil Armstrong, "Feynman is becoming a pain in the ass."During a televised hearing, Feynman demonstrated that the material used in the shuttle's O-rings became less resilient in cold weather by compressing a sample of the material in a clamp and immersing it in ice-cold water. The commission ultimately determined that the disaster was caused by the primary O-ring not properly sealing in unusually cold weather at Cape Canaveral.Feynman devoted the latter half of his book "What Do You Care What Other People Think?" to his experience on the Rogers Commission, straying from his usual convention of brief, light-hearted anecdotes to deliver an extended and sober narrative. Feynman's account reveals a disconnect between NASA's engineers and executives that was far more striking than he expected. His interviews of NASA's high-ranking managers revealed startling misunderstandings of elementary concepts. For instance, NASA managers claimed that there was a 1 in 100,000 chance of a catastrophic failure aboard the Shuttle, but Feynman discovered that NASA's own engineers estimated the chance of a catastrophe at closer to 1 in 200. He concluded that NASA management's estimate of the reliability of the Space Shuttle was unrealistic, and he was particularly angered that NASA used it to recruit Christa McAuliffe into the Teacher-in-Space program. He warned in his appendix to the commission's report (which was included only after he threatened not to sign the report), "For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for nature cannot be fooled."The first public recognition of Feynman's work came in 1954, when Lewis Strauss, the chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission (AEC) notified him that he had won the Albert Einstein Award, which was worth $15,000 and came with a gold medal. Because of Strauss's actions in stripping Oppenheimer of his security clearance, Feynman was reluctant to accept the award, but Isidor Isaac Rabi cautioned him: "You should never turn a man's generosity as a sword against him. Any virtue that a man has, even if he has many vices, should not be used as a tool against him." It was followed by the AEC's Ernest Orlando Lawrence Award in 1962. Schwinger, Tomonaga and Feynman shared the 1965 Nobel Prize in Physics "for their fundamental work in quantum electrodynamics, with deep-ploughing consequences for the physics of elementary particles". He was elected a Foreign Member of the Royal Society in 1965, received the Oersted Medal in 1972, and the National Medal of Science in 1979. He was elected a Member of the National Academy of Sciences, but ultimately resigned and is no longer listed by them.In 1978, Feynman sought medical treatment for abdominal pains and was diagnosed with liposarcoma, a rare form of cancer. Surgeons removed a tumor the size of a football that had crushed one kidney and his spleen. Further operations were performed in October 1986 and October 1987. He was again hospitalized at the UCLA Medical Center on February 3, 1988. A ruptured duodenal ulcer caused kidney failure, and he declined to undergo the dialysis that might have prolonged his life for a few months. Watched over by his wife Gweneth, sister Joan, and cousin Frances Lewine, he died on February 15, 1988, at age 69.When Feynman was nearing death, he asked his friend and colleague Danny Hillis why Hillis appeared so sad. Hillis replied that he thought Feynman was going to die soon. Feynman said that this sometimes bothered him, too, adding, when you get to be as old as he was, and have told so many stories to so many people, even when he was dead he would not be completely gone.Near the end of his life, Feynman attempted to visit the Tuvan Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic (ASSR) in Russia, a dream thwarted by Cold War bureaucratic issues. The letter from the Soviet government authorizing the trip was not received until the day after he died. His daughter Michelle later made the journey.His burial was at Mountain View Cemetery and Mausoleum in Altadena, California. His last words were: "I'd hate to die twice. It's so boring."Aspects of Feynman's life have been portrayed in various media. Feynman was portrayed by Matthew Broderick in the 1996 biopic "Infinity". Actor Alan Alda commissioned playwright Peter Parnell to write a two-character play about a fictional day in the life of Feynman set two years before Feynman's death. The play, "QED", premiered at the Mark Taper Forum in Los Angeles in 2001 and was later presented at the Vivian Beaumont Theater on Broadway, with both presentations starring Alda as Richard Feynman. Real Time Opera premiered its opera "Feynman" at the Norfolk (CT) Chamber Music Festival in June 2005. In 2011, Feynman was the subject of a biographical graphic novel entitled simply "Feynman", written by Jim Ottaviani and illustrated by Leland Myrick. In 2013, Feynman's role on the Rogers Commission was dramatised by the BBC in "The Challenger" (US title: "The Challenger Disaster"), with William Hurt playing Feynman.Feynman is commemorated in various ways. On May 4, 2005, the United States Postal Service issued the "American Scientists" commemorative set of four 37-cent self-adhesive stamps in several configurations. The scientists depicted were Richard Feynman, John von Neumann, Barbara McClintock, and Josiah Willard Gibbs. Feynman's stamp, sepia-toned, features a photograph of a 30-something Feynman and eight small Feynman diagrams. The stamps were designed by Victor Stabin under the artistic direction of Carl T. Herrman. The main building for the Computing Division at Fermilab is named the "Feynman Computing Center" in his honor. A photograph of Richard Feynman giving a lecture was part of the 1997 poster series commissioned by Apple Inc. for their "Think Different" advertising campaign. Sheldon Cooper, a fictional theoretical physicist from the television series "The Big Bang Theory", is a Feynman fan who has emulated him on various occasions, once by playing the bongo drums. On January 27, 2016, Bill Gates wrote an article "The Best Teacher I Never Had" describing Feynman's talents as a teacher which inspired Gates to create Project Tuva to place the videos of Feynman's Messenger Lectures, "The Character of Physical Law", on a website for public viewing. In 2015 Gates made a video on why he thought Feynman was special. The video was made for the 50th anniversary of Feynman's 1965 Nobel Prize, in response to Caltech's request for thoughts on Feynman. At CERN, home of the Large Hadron Collider, a street on the Meyrin site is named "Route Feynman" after the physicist."The Feynman Lectures on Physics" is perhaps his most accessible work for anyone with an interest in physics, compiled from lectures to Caltech undergraduates in 1961–1964. As news of the lectures' lucidity grew, professional physicists and graduate students began to drop in to listen. Co-authors Robert B. Leighton and Matthew Sands, colleagues of Feynman, edited and illustrated them into book form. The work has endured and is useful to this day. They were edited and supplemented in 2005 with "Feynman's Tips on Physics: A Problem-Solving Supplement to the Feynman Lectures on Physics" by Michael Gottlieb and Ralph Leighton (Robert Leighton's son), with support from Kip Thorne and other physicists.	[ "Manhattan Project", "California Institute of Technology" ]
Which employer did Richard Feynman work for in 1949-11-09?	November 09, 1949	{ "text": [ "Cornell University" ] }	L2_Q39246_P108_1	Richard Feynman works for Manhattan Project from Jan, 1941 to Jan, 1945. Richard Feynman works for Cornell University from Jan, 1945 to Jan, 1950. Richard Feynman works for California Institute of Technology from Jan, 1950 to Jan, 1988.	Richard FeynmanRichard Phillips Feynman (; May 11, 1918 – February 15, 1988) was an American theoretical physicist, known for his work in the path integral formulation of quantum mechanics, the theory of quantum electrodynamics, the physics of the superfluidity of supercooled liquid helium, as well as his work in particle physics for which he proposed the parton model. For contributions to the development of quantum electrodynamics, Feynman received the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1965 jointly with Julian Schwinger and Shin'ichirō Tomonaga.Feynman developed a widely used pictorial representation scheme for the mathematical expressions describing the behavior of subatomic particles, which later became known as Feynman diagrams. During his lifetime, Feynman became one of the best-known scientists in the world. In a 1999 poll of 130 leading physicists worldwide by the British journal "Physics World", he was ranked the seventh greatest physicist of all time.He assisted in the development of the atomic bomb during World War II and became known to a wide public in the 1980s as a member of the Rogers Commission, the panel that investigated the Space Shuttle "Challenger" disaster. Along with his work in theoretical physics, Feynman has been credited with pioneering the field of quantum computing and introducing the concept of nanotechnology. He held the Richard C. Tolman professorship in theoretical physics at the California Institute of Technology.Feynman was a keen popularizer of physics through both books and lectures, including a 1959 talk on top-down nanotechnology called "There's Plenty of Room at the Bottom" and the three-volume publication of his undergraduate lectures, "The Feynman Lectures on Physics". Feynman also became known through his semi-autobiographical books "Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman!" and "What Do You Care What Other People Think?", and books written about him such as "Tuva or Bust!" by Ralph Leighton and the biography "Genius: The Life and Science of Richard Feynman" by James Gleick.Feynman was born on May 11, 1918, in Queens, New York City, to Lucille , a homemaker, and Melville Arthur Feynman, a sales manager originally from Minsk in Belarus (then part of the Russian Empire).Feynman was a late talker, and did not speak until after his third birthday. As an adult he spoke with a New York accent strong enough to be perceived as an affectation or exaggeration—so much so that his friends Wolfgang Pauli and Hans Bethe once commented that Feynman spoke like a "bum".The young Feynman was heavily influenced by his father, who encouraged him to ask questions to challenge orthodox thinking, and who was always ready to teach Feynman something new. From his mother, he gained the sense of humor that he had throughout his life. As a child, he had a talent for engineering, maintained an experimental laboratory in his home, and delighted in repairing radios. This radio repairing was probably the first job Feynman had, and during this time he showed early signs of an aptitude for his later career in theoretical physics, when he would analyze the issues theoretically and arrive at the solutions. When he was in grade school, he created a home burglar alarm system while his parents were out for the day running errands.When Richard was five, his mother gave birth to a younger brother, Henry Phillips, who died at age four weeks. Four years later, Richard's sister Joan was born and the family moved to Far Rockaway, Queens. Though separated by nine years, Joan and Richard were close, and they both shared a curiosity about the world. Though their mother thought women lacked the capacity to understand such things, Richard encouraged Joan's interest in astronomy, and Joan eventually became an astrophysicist.Feynman's parents were both from Jewish families but not religious, and by his youth, Feynman described himself as an "avowed atheist". Many years later, in a letter to Tina Levitan, declining a request for information for her book on Jewish Nobel Prize winners, he stated, "To select, for approbation the peculiar elements that come from some supposedly Jewish heredity is to open the door to all kinds of nonsense on racial theory", adding, "at thirteen I was not only converted to other religious views, but I also stopped believing that the Jewish people are in any way 'the chosen people'". Later in his life, during a visit to the Jewish Theological Seminary, he encountered the Talmud for the first time. He saw that it contained the original text in a little square on the page, and surrounding it were commentaries written over time by different people. In this way the Talmud had evolved, and everything that was discussed was carefully recorded. Despite being impressed, Feynman was disappointed with the lack of interest for nature and the outside world expressed by the rabbis, who cared about only those questions which arise from the Talmud.Feynman attended Far Rockaway High School, which was also attended by fellow Nobel laureates Burton Richter and Baruch Samuel Blumberg. Upon starting high school, Feynman was quickly promoted to a higher math class. An IQ test administered in high school estimated his IQ at 125—high but "merely respectable", according to biographer James Gleick. His sister Joan did better, allowing her to claim that she was smarter. Years later he declined to join Mensa International, saying that his IQ was too low. Physicist Steve Hsu stated of the test: When Feynman was 15, he taught himself trigonometry, advanced algebra, infinite series, analytic geometry, and both differential and integral calculus. Before entering college, he was experimenting with and deriving mathematical topics such as the half-derivative using his own notation. He created special symbols for logarithm, sine, cosine and tangent functions so they did not look like three variables multiplied together, and for the derivative, to remove the temptation of canceling out the formula_1's in formula_2. A member of the Arista Honor Society, in his last year in high school he won the New York University Math Championship. His habit of direct characterization sometimes rattled more conventional thinkers; for example, one of his questions, when learning feline anatomy, was "Do you have a map of the cat?" (referring to an anatomical chart).Feynman applied to Columbia University but was not accepted because of their quota for the number of Jews admitted. Instead, he attended the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he joined the Pi Lambda Phi fraternity. Although he originally majored in mathematics, he later switched to electrical engineering, as he considered mathematics to be too abstract. Noticing that he "had gone too far", he then switched to physics, which he claimed was "somewhere in between". As an undergraduate, he published two papers in the "Physical Review". One of these, which was co-written with Manuel Vallarta, was entitled "The Scattering of Cosmic Rays by the Stars of a Galaxy". The other was his senior thesis, on "Forces in Molecules", based on an idea by John C. Slater, who was sufficiently impressed by the paper to have it published. Today, it is known as the Hellmann–Feynman theorem.In 1939, Feynman received a bachelor's degree and was named a Putnam Fellow. He attained a perfect score on the graduate school entrance exams to Princeton University in physics—an unprecedented feat—and an outstanding score in mathematics, but did poorly on the history and English portions. The head of the physics department there, Henry D. Smyth, had another concern, writing to Philip M. Morse to ask: "Is Feynman Jewish? We have no definite rule against Jews but have to keep their proportion in our department reasonably small because of the difficulty of placing them." Morse conceded that Feynman was indeed Jewish, but reassured Smyth that Feynman's "physiognomy and manner, however, show no trace of this characteristic".Attendees at Feynman's first seminar, which was on the classical version of the Wheeler–Feynman absorber theory, included Albert Einstein, Wolfgang Pauli, and John von Neumann. Pauli made the prescient comment that the theory would be extremely difficult to quantize, and Einstein said that one might try to apply this method to gravity in general relativity, which Sir Fred Hoyle and Jayant Narlikar did much later as the Hoyle–Narlikar theory of gravity. Feynman received a Ph.D. from Princeton in 1942; his thesis advisor was John Archibald Wheeler. In his doctoral thesis entitled "The Principle of Least Action in Quantum Mechanics", Feynman applied the principle of stationary action to problems of quantum mechanics, inspired by a desire to quantize the Wheeler–Feynman absorber theory of electrodynamics, and laid the groundwork for the path integral formulation and Feynman diagrams. A key insight was that positrons behaved like electrons moving backwards in time. James Gleick wrote:One of the conditions of Feynman's scholarship to Princeton was that he could not be married; nevertheless, he continued to see his high school sweetheart, Arline Greenbaum, and was determined to marry her once he had been awarded his Ph.D. despite the knowledge that she was seriously ill with tuberculosis. This was an incurable disease at the time, and she was not expected to live more than two years. On June 29, 1942, they took the ferry to Staten Island, where they were married in the city office. The ceremony was attended by neither family nor friends and was witnessed by a pair of strangers. Feynman could only kiss Arline on the cheek. After the ceremony he took her to Deborah Hospital, where he visited her on weekends.In 1941, with World War II raging in Europe but the United States not yet at war, Feynman spent the summer working on ballistics problems at the Frankford Arsenal in Pennsylvania. After the attack on Pearl Harbor brought the United States into the war, Feynman was recruited by Robert R. Wilson, who was working on means to produce enriched uranium for use in an atomic bomb, as part of what would become the Manhattan Project. At the time, Feynman had not earned a graduate degree. Wilson's team at Princeton was working on a device called an isotron, intended to electromagnetically separate uranium-235 from uranium-238. This was done in a quite different manner from that used by the calutron that was under development by a team under Wilson's former mentor, Ernest O. Lawrence, at the Radiation Laboratory of the University of California. On paper, the isotron was many times more efficient than the calutron, but Feynman and Paul Olum struggled to determine whether or not it was practical. Ultimately, on Lawrence's recommendation, the isotron project was abandoned.At this juncture, in early 1943, Robert Oppenheimer was establishing the Los Alamos Laboratory, a secret laboratory on a mesa in New Mexico where atomic bombs would be designed and built. An offer was made to the Princeton team to be redeployed there. "Like a bunch of professional soldiers," Wilson later recalled, "we signed up, en masse, to go to Los Alamos." Like many other young physicists, Feynman soon fell under the spell of the charismatic Oppenheimer, who telephoned Feynman long distance from Chicago to inform him that he had found a sanatorium in Albuquerque, New Mexico, for Arline. They were among the first to depart for New Mexico, leaving on a train on March 28, 1943. The railroad supplied Arline with a wheelchair, and Feynman paid extra for a private room for her.At Los Alamos, Feynman was assigned to Hans Bethe's Theoretical (T) Division, and impressed Bethe enough to be made a group leader. He and Bethe developed the Bethe–Feynman formula for calculating the yield of a fission bomb, which built upon previous work by Robert Serber. As a junior physicist, he was not central to the project. He administered the computation group of human computers in the theoretical division. With Stanley Frankel and Nicholas Metropolis, he assisted in establishing a system for using IBM punched cards for computation. He invented a new method of computing logarithms that he later used on the Connection Machine. Other work at Los Alamos included calculating neutron equations for the Los Alamos "Water Boiler", a small nuclear reactor, to measure how close an assembly of fissile material was to criticality.On completing this work, Feynman was sent to the Clinton Engineer Works in Oak Ridge, Tennessee, where the Manhattan Project had its uranium enrichment facilities. He aided the engineers there in devising safety procedures for material storage so that criticality accidents could be avoided, especially when enriched uranium came into contact with water, which acted as a neutron moderator. He insisted on giving the rank and file a lecture on nuclear physics so that they would realize the dangers. He explained that while any amount of unenriched uranium could be safely stored, the enriched uranium had to be carefully handled. He developed a series of safety recommendations for the various grades of enrichments. He was told that if the people at Oak Ridge gave him any difficulty with his proposals, he was to inform them that Los Alamos "could not be responsible for their safety otherwise".Returning to Los Alamos, Feynman was put in charge of the group responsible for the theoretical work and calculations on the proposed uranium hydride bomb, which ultimately proved to be infeasible. He was sought out by physicist Niels Bohr for one-on-one discussions. He later discovered the reason: most of the other physicists were too much in awe of Bohr to argue with him. Feynman had no such inhibitions, vigorously pointing out anything he considered to be flawed in Bohr's thinking. He said he felt as much respect for Bohr as anyone else, but once anyone got him talking about physics, he would become so focused he forgot about social niceties. Perhaps because of this, Bohr never warmed to Feynman.At Los Alamos, which was isolated for security, Feynman amused himself by investigating the combination locks on the cabinets and desks of physicists. He often found that they left the lock combinations on the factory settings, wrote the combinations down, or used easily guessable combinations like dates. He found one cabinet's combination by trying numbers he thought a physicist might use (it proved to be 27–18–28 after the base of natural logarithms, "e" = 2.71828 ...), and found that the three filing cabinets where a colleague kept research notes all had the same combination. He left notes in the cabinets as a prank, spooking his colleague, Frederic de Hoffmann, into thinking a spy had gained access to them.Feynman's $380 monthly salary was about half the amount needed for his modest living expenses and Arline's medical bills, and they were forced to dip into her $3,300 in savings. On weekends he drove to Albuquerque to see Arline in a car borrowed from his friend Klaus Fuchs. Asked who at Los Alamos was most likely to be a spy, Fuchs mentioned Feynman's safe cracking and frequent trips to Albuquerque; Fuchs himself later confessed to spying for the Soviet Union. The FBI would compile a bulky file on Feynman, particularly in view of Feynman's Q clearance.Informed that Arline was dying, Feynman drove to Albuquerque and sat with her for hours until she died on June 16, 1945. He then immersed himself in work on the project and was present at the Trinity nuclear test. Feynman claimed to be the only person to see the explosion without the very dark glasses or welder's lenses provided, reasoning that it was safe to look through a truck windshield, as it would screen out the harmful ultraviolet radiation. The immense brightness of the explosion made him duck to the truck's floor, where he saw a temporary "purple splotch" afterimage.Feynman nominally held an appointment at the University of Wisconsin–Madison as an assistant professor of physics, but was on unpaid leave during his involvement in the Manhattan Project. In 1945, he received a letter from Dean Mark Ingraham of the College of Letters and Science requesting his return to the university to teach in the coming academic year. His appointment was not extended when he did not commit to returning. In a talk given there several years later, Feynman quipped, "It's great to be back at the only university that ever had the good sense to fire me."As early as October 30, 1943, Bethe had written to the chairman of the physics department of his university, Cornell, to recommend that Feynman be hired. On February 28, 1944, this was endorsed by Robert Bacher, also from Cornell, and one of the most senior scientists at Los Alamos. This led to an offer being made in August 1944, which Feynman accepted. Oppenheimer had also hoped to recruit Feynman to the University of California, but the head of the physics department, Raymond T. Birge, was reluctant. He made Feynman an offer in May 1945, but Feynman turned it down. Cornell matched its salary offer of $3,900 per annum. Feynman became one of the first of the Los Alamos Laboratory's group leaders to depart, leaving for Ithaca, New York, in October 1945.Because Feynman was no longer working at the Los Alamos Laboratory, he was no longer exempt from the draft. At his induction, physical Army psychiatrists diagnosed Feynman as suffering from a mental illness and the Army gave him a 4-F exemption on mental grounds. His father died suddenly on October 8, 1946, and Feynman suffered from depression. On October 17, 1946, he wrote a letter to Arline, expressing his deep love and heartbreak. The letter was sealed and only opened after his death. "Please excuse my not mailing this," the letter concluded, "but I don't know your new address." Unable to focus on research problems, Feynman began tackling physics problems, not for utility, but for self-satisfaction. One of these involved analyzing the physics of a twirling, nutating disk as it is moving through the air, inspired by an incident in the cafeteria at Cornell when someone tossed a dinner plate in the air. He read the work of Sir William Rowan Hamilton on quaternions, and attempted unsuccessfully to use them to formulate a relativistic theory of electrons. His work during this period, which used equations of rotation to express various spinning speeds, ultimately proved important to his Nobel Prize–winning work, yet because he felt burned out and had turned his attention to less immediately practical problems, he was surprised by the offers of professorships from other renowned universities, including the Institute for Advanced Study, the University of California, Los Angeles, and the University of California, Berkeley.Feynman was not the only frustrated theoretical physicist in the early post-war years. Quantum electrodynamics suffered from infinite integrals in perturbation theory. These were clear mathematical flaws in the theory, which Feynman and Wheeler had unsuccessfully attempted to work around. "Theoreticians", noted Murray Gell-Mann, "were in disgrace." In June 1947, leading American physicists met at the Shelter Island Conference. For Feynman, it was his "first big conference with big men ... I had never gone to one like this one in peacetime." The problems plaguing quantum electrodynamics were discussed, but the theoreticians were completely overshadowed by the achievements of the experimentalists, who reported the discovery of the Lamb shift, the measurement of the magnetic moment of the electron, and Robert Marshak's two-meson hypothesis.Bethe took the lead from the work of Hans Kramers, and derived a renormalized non-relativistic quantum equation for the Lamb shift. The next step was to create a relativistic version. Feynman thought that he could do this, but when he went back to Bethe with his solution, it did not converge. Feynman carefully worked through the problem again, applying the path integral formulation that he had used in his thesis. Like Bethe, he made the integral finite by applying a cut-off term. The result corresponded to Bethe's version. Feynman presented his work to his peers at the Pocono Conference in 1948. It did not go well. Julian Schwinger gave a long presentation of his work in quantum electrodynamics, and Feynman then offered his version, entitled "Alternative Formulation of Quantum Electrodynamics". The unfamiliar Feynman diagrams, used for the first time, puzzled the audience. Feynman failed to get his point across, and Paul Dirac, Edward Teller and Niels Bohr all raised objections.To Freeman Dyson, one thing at least was clear: Shin'ichirō Tomonaga, Schwinger and Feynman understood what they were talking about even if no one else did, but had not published anything. He was convinced that Feynman's formulation was easier to understand, and ultimately managed to convince Oppenheimer that this was the case. Dyson published a paper in 1949, which added new rules to Feynman's that told how to implement renormalization. Feynman was prompted to publish his ideas in the "Physical Review" in a series of papers over three years. His 1948 papers on "A Relativistic Cut-Off for Classical Electrodynamics" attempted to explain what he had been unable to get across at Pocono. His 1949 paper on "The Theory of Positrons" addressed the Schrödinger equation and Dirac equation, and introduced what is now called the Feynman propagator. Finally, in papers on the "Mathematical Formulation of the Quantum Theory of Electromagnetic Interaction" in 1950 and "An Operator Calculus Having Applications in Quantum Electrodynamics" in 1951, he developed the mathematical basis of his ideas, derived familiar formulae and advanced new ones.While papers by others initially cited Schwinger, papers citing Feynman and employing Feynman diagrams appeared in 1950, and soon became prevalent. Students learned and used the powerful new tool that Feynman had created. Computer programs were later written to compute Feynman diagrams, providing a tool of unprecedented power. It is possible to write such programs because the Feynman diagrams constitute a formal language with a formal grammar. Marc Kac provided the formal proofs of the summation under history, showing that the parabolic partial differential equation can be re-expressed as a sum under different histories (that is, an expectation operator), what is now known as the Feynman–Kac formula, the use of which extends beyond physics to many applications of stochastic processes. To Schwinger, however, the Feynman diagram was "pedagogy, not physics".By 1949, Feynman was becoming restless at Cornell. He never settled into a particular house or apartment, living in guest houses or student residences, or with married friends "until these arrangements became sexually volatile". He liked to date undergraduates, hire prostitutes, and sleep with the wives of friends. He was not fond of Ithaca's cold winter weather, and pined for a warmer climate. Above all, at Cornell, he was always in the shadow of Hans Bethe. Despite all of this, Feynman looked back favorably on the Telluride House, where he resided for a large period of his Cornell career. In an interview, he described the House as "a group of boys that have been specially selected because of their scholarship, because of their cleverness or whatever it is, to be given free board and lodging and so on, because of their brains". He enjoyed the house's convenience and said that "it's there that I did the fundamental work" for which he won the Nobel Prize.Feynman spent several weeks in Rio de Janeiro in July 1949. That year, the Soviet Union detonated its first atomic bomb, generating concerns about espionage. Fuchs was arrested as a Soviet spy in 1950 and the FBI questioned Bethe about Feynman's loyalty. Physicist David Bohm was arrested on December 4, 1950 and emigrated to Brazil in October 1951. Because of the fears of a nuclear war, a girlfriend told Feynman that he should also consider moving to South America. He had a sabbatical coming for 1951–52, and elected to spend it in Brazil, where he gave courses at the Centro Brasileiro de Pesquisas Físicas. In Brazil, Feynman was impressed with "samba" music, and learned to play the "frigideira", a metal percussion instrument based on a frying pan (".") He was an enthusiastic amateur player of bongo and conga drums and often played them in the pit orchestra in musicals. He spent time in Rio with his friend Bohm but Bohm could not convince Feynman to investigate Bohm's ideas on physics.Feynman did not return to Cornell. Bacher, who had been instrumental in bringing Feynman to Cornell, had lured him to the California Institute of Technology (Caltech). Part of the deal was that he could spend his first year on sabbatical in Brazil. He had become smitten by Mary Louise Bell from Neodesha, Kansas. They had met in a cafeteria in Cornell, where she had studied the history of Mexican art and textiles. She later followed him to Caltech, where he gave a lecture. While he was in Brazil, she taught classes on the history of furniture and interiors at Michigan State University. He proposed to her by mail from Rio de Janeiro, and they married in Boise, Idaho, on June 28, 1952, shortly after he returned. They frequently quarreled and she was frightened by his violent temper. Their politics were different; although he registered and voted as a Republican, she was more conservative, and her opinion on the 1954 Oppenheimer security hearing ("Where there's smoke there's fire") offended him. They separated on May 20, 1956. An interlocutory decree of divorce was entered on June 19, 1956, on the grounds of "extreme cruelty". The divorce became final on May 5, 1958.In the wake of the 1957 Sputnik crisis, the U.S. government's interest in science rose for a time. Feynman was considered for a seat on the President's Science Advisory Committee, but was not appointed. At this time, the FBI interviewed a woman close to Feynman, possibly his ex-wife Bell, who sent a written statement to J. Edgar Hoover on August 8, 1958:The U.S. government nevertheless sent Feynman to Geneva for the September 1958 Atoms for Peace Conference. On the beach at Lake Geneva, he met Gweneth Howarth, who was from Ripponden, Yorkshire, and working in Switzerland as an "au pair". Feynman's love life had been turbulent since his divorce; his previous girlfriend had walked off with his Albert Einstein Award medal and, on the advice of an earlier girlfriend, had feigned pregnancy and extorted him into paying for an abortion, then used the money to buy furniture. When Feynman found that Howarth was being paid only $25 a month, he offered her $20 a week to be his live-in maid. Feynman knew that this sort of behavior was illegal under the Mann Act, so he had a friend, Matthew Sands, act as her sponsor. Howarth pointed out that she already had two boyfriends, but decided to take Feynman up on his offer, and arrived in Altadena, California, in June 1959. She made a point of dating other men, but Feynman proposed in early 1960. They were married on September 24, 1960, at the Huntington Hotel in Pasadena. They had a son, Carl, in 1962, and adopted a daughter, Michelle, in 1968. Besides their home in Altadena, they had a beach house in Baja California, purchased with the money from Feynman's Nobel Prize.Feynman tried marijuana and ketamine at John Lilly's sensory deprivation tanks, as a way of studying consciousness. He gave up alcohol when he began to show vague, early signs of alcoholism, as he did not want to do anything that could damage his brain. Despite his curiosity about hallucinations, he was reluctant to experiment with LSD.There had been protests over his alleged sexism in 1968, and again in 1972, but there is no evidence he discriminated against women. Feynman recalled protesters entering a hall and picketing a lecture he was about to make in San Francisco, calling him a "sexist pig". Seeing the protesters, as Feynman later recalled the incident, he addressed institutional sexism by saying that "women do indeed suffer prejudice and discrimination in physics".At Caltech, Feynman investigated the physics of the superfluidity of supercooled liquid helium, where helium seems to display a complete lack of viscosity when flowing. Feynman provided a quantum-mechanical explanation for the Soviet physicist Lev Landau's theory of superfluidity. Applying the Schrödinger equation to the question showed that the superfluid was displaying quantum mechanical behavior observable on a macroscopic scale. This helped with the problem of superconductivity, but the solution eluded Feynman. It was solved with the BCS theory of superconductivity, proposed by John Bardeen, Leon Neil Cooper, and John Robert Schrieffer in 1957.Feynman, inspired by a desire to quantize the Wheeler–Feynman absorber theory of electrodynamics, laid the groundwork for the path integral formulation and Feynman diagrams.With Murray Gell-Mann, Feynman developed a model of weak decay, which showed that the current coupling in the process is a combination of vector and axial currents (an example of weak decay is the decay of a neutron into an electron, a proton, and an antineutrino). Although E. C. George Sudarshan and Robert Marshak developed the theory nearly simultaneously, Feynman's collaboration with Murray Gell-Mann was seen as seminal because the weak interaction was neatly described by the vector and axial currents. It thus combined the 1933 beta decay theory of Enrico Fermi with an explanation of parity violation.Feynman attempted an explanation, called the parton model, of the strong interactions governing nucleon scattering. The parton model emerged as a complement to the quark model developed by Gell-Mann. The relationship between the two models was murky; Gell-Mann referred to Feynman's partons derisively as "put-ons". In the mid-1960s, physicists believed that quarks were just a bookkeeping device for symmetry numbers, not real particles; the statistics of the omega-minus particle, if it were interpreted as three identical strange quarks bound together, seemed impossible if quarks were real.The SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory deep inelastic scattering experiments of the late 1960s showed that nucleons (protons and neutrons) contained point-like particles that scattered electrons. It was natural to identify these with quarks, but Feynman's parton model attempted to interpret the experimental data in a way that did not introduce additional hypotheses. For example, the data showed that some 45% of the energy momentum was carried by electrically neutral particles in the nucleon. These electrically neutral particles are now seen to be the gluons that carry the forces between the quarks, and their three-valued color quantum number solves the omega-minus problem. Feynman did not dispute the quark model; for example, when the fifth quark was discovered in 1977, Feynman immediately pointed out to his students that the discovery implied the existence of a sixth quark, which was discovered in the decade after his death.After the success of quantum electrodynamics, Feynman turned to quantum gravity. By analogy with the photon, which has spin 1, he investigated the consequences of a free massless spin 2 field and derived the Einstein field equation of general relativity, but little more. The computational device that Feynman discovered then for gravity, "ghosts", which are "particles" in the interior of his diagrams that have the "wrong" connection between spin and statistics, have proved invaluable in explaining the quantum particle behavior of the Yang–Mills theories, for example, quantum chromodynamics and the electro-weak theory. He did work on all four of the forces of nature: electromagnetic, the weak force, the strong force and gravity. John and Mary Gribbin state in their book on Feynman that "Nobody else has made such influential contributions to the investigation of all four of the interactions".Partly as a way to bring publicity to progress in physics, Feynman offered $1,000 prizes for two of his challenges in nanotechnology; one was claimed by William McLellan and the other by Tom Newman.Feynman was also interested in the relationship between physics and computation. He was also one of the first scientists to conceive the possibility of quantum computers. In the 1980s he began to spend his summers working at Thinking Machines Corporation, helping to build some of the first parallel supercomputers and considering the construction of quantum computers.In 1984–1986, he developed a variational method for the approximate calculation of path integrals, which has led to a powerful method of converting divergent perturbation expansions into convergent strong-coupling expansions (variational perturbation theory) and, as a consequence, to the most accurate determination of critical exponents measured in satellite experiments. At Caltech, he once chalked "What I cannot create I do not understand" on his blackboard.In the early 1960s, Feynman acceded to a request to "spruce up" the teaching of undergraduates at Caltech. After three years devoted to the task, he produced a series of lectures that later became "The Feynman Lectures on Physics". He wanted a picture of a drumhead sprinkled with powder to show the modes of vibration at the beginning of the book. Concerned over the connections to drugs and rock and roll that could be made from the image, the publishers changed the cover to plain red, though they included a picture of him playing drums in the foreword. "The Feynman Lectures on Physics" occupied two physicists, Robert B. Leighton and Matthew Sands, as part-time co-authors for several years. Even though the books were not adopted by universities as textbooks, they continue to sell well because they provide a deep understanding of physics. Many of his lectures and miscellaneous talks were turned into other books, including "The Character of Physical Law", "", "Statistical Mechanics", "Lectures on Gravitation", and the "Feynman Lectures on Computation".Feynman wrote about his experiences teaching physics undergraduates in Brazil. The students' studying habits and the Portuguese language textbooks were so devoid of any context or applications for their information that, in Feynman's opinion, the students were not learning physics at all. At the end of the year, Feynman was invited to give a lecture on his teaching experiences, and he agreed to do so, provided he could speak frankly, which he did.Feynman opposed rote learning or unthinking memorization and other teaching methods that emphasized form over function. "Clear thinking" and "clear presentation" were fundamental prerequisites for his attention. It could be perilous even to approach him unprepared, and he did not forget fools and pretenders. In 1964, he served on the California State Curriculum Commission, which was responsible for approving textbooks to be used by schools in California. He was not impressed with what he found. Many of the mathematics texts covered subjects of use only to pure mathematicians as part of the "New Math". Elementary students were taught about sets, but:In April 1966, Feynman delivered an address to the National Science Teachers Association, in which he suggested how students could be made to think like scientists, be open-minded, curious, and especially, to doubt. In the course of the lecture, he gave a definition of science, which he said came about by several stages. The evolution of intelligent life on planet Earth—creatures such as cats that play and learn from experience. The evolution of humans, who came to use language to pass knowledge from one individual to the next, so that the knowledge was not lost when an individual died. Unfortunately, incorrect knowledge could be passed down as well as correct knowledge, so another step was needed. Galileo and others started doubting the truth of what was passed down and to investigate "ab initio", from experience, what the true situation was—this was science.In 1974, Feynman delivered the Caltech commencement address on the topic of "cargo cult science", which has the semblance of science, but is only pseudoscience due to a lack of "a kind of scientific integrity, a principle of scientific thought that corresponds to a kind of utter honesty" on the part of the scientist. He instructed the graduating class that "The first principle is that you must not fool yourself—and you are the easiest person to fool. So you have to be very careful about that. After you've not fooled yourself, it's easy not to fool other scientists. You just have to be honest in a conventional way after that."Feynman served as doctoral advisor to 31 students.In 1977, Feynman supported his colleague Jenijoy La Belle, who had been hired as Caltech's first female professor in 1969, and filed suit with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission after she was refused tenure in 1974. The EEOC ruled against Caltech in 1977, adding that La Belle had been paid less than male colleagues. La Belle finally received tenure in 1979. Many of Feynman's colleagues were surprised that he took her side, but he had gotten to know La Belle and liked and admired her.In the 1960s, Feynman began thinking of writing an autobiography, and he began granting interviews to historians. In the 1980s, working with Ralph Leighton (Robert Leighton's son), he recorded chapters on audio tape that Ralph transcribed. The book was published in 1985 as "Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman!" and became a best-seller.Gell-Mann was upset by Feynman's account in the book of the weak interaction work, and threatened to sue, resulting in a correction being inserted in later editions. This incident was just the latest provocation in decades of bad feeling between the two scientists. Gell-Mann often expressed frustration at the attention Feynman received; he remarked: "[Feynman] was a great scientist, but he spent a great deal of his effort generating anecdotes about himself."Feynman has been criticized for a chapter in the book entitled "You Just "Ask" Them", where he describes how he learned to seduce women at a bar he went to in the summer of 1946. A mentor taught him to ask a woman if she would sleep with him before buying her anything. He describes seeing women at the bar as "bitches" in his thoughts, and tells a story of how he told a woman named Ann that she was "worse than a whore" after Ann persuaded him to buy her sandwiches by telling him he could eat them at her place, but then, after he bought them, saying they actually couldn't eat together because another man was coming over. Later on that same evening, Ann returned to the bar to take Feynman to her place. Feynman states at the end of the chapter that this behaviour wasn't typical of him: "So it worked even with an ordinary girl! But no matter how effective the lesson was, I never really used it after that. I didn't enjoy doing it that way. But it was interesting to know that things worked much differently from how I was brought up."Feynman played an important role on the Presidential Rogers Commission, which investigated the "Challenger" disaster. He had been reluctant to participate, but was persuaded by advice from his wife. Feynman clashed several times with commission chairman William P. Rogers. During a break in one hearing, Rogers told commission member Neil Armstrong, "Feynman is becoming a pain in the ass."During a televised hearing, Feynman demonstrated that the material used in the shuttle's O-rings became less resilient in cold weather by compressing a sample of the material in a clamp and immersing it in ice-cold water. The commission ultimately determined that the disaster was caused by the primary O-ring not properly sealing in unusually cold weather at Cape Canaveral.Feynman devoted the latter half of his book "What Do You Care What Other People Think?" to his experience on the Rogers Commission, straying from his usual convention of brief, light-hearted anecdotes to deliver an extended and sober narrative. Feynman's account reveals a disconnect between NASA's engineers and executives that was far more striking than he expected. His interviews of NASA's high-ranking managers revealed startling misunderstandings of elementary concepts. For instance, NASA managers claimed that there was a 1 in 100,000 chance of a catastrophic failure aboard the Shuttle, but Feynman discovered that NASA's own engineers estimated the chance of a catastrophe at closer to 1 in 200. He concluded that NASA management's estimate of the reliability of the Space Shuttle was unrealistic, and he was particularly angered that NASA used it to recruit Christa McAuliffe into the Teacher-in-Space program. He warned in his appendix to the commission's report (which was included only after he threatened not to sign the report), "For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for nature cannot be fooled."The first public recognition of Feynman's work came in 1954, when Lewis Strauss, the chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission (AEC) notified him that he had won the Albert Einstein Award, which was worth $15,000 and came with a gold medal. Because of Strauss's actions in stripping Oppenheimer of his security clearance, Feynman was reluctant to accept the award, but Isidor Isaac Rabi cautioned him: "You should never turn a man's generosity as a sword against him. Any virtue that a man has, even if he has many vices, should not be used as a tool against him." It was followed by the AEC's Ernest Orlando Lawrence Award in 1962. Schwinger, Tomonaga and Feynman shared the 1965 Nobel Prize in Physics "for their fundamental work in quantum electrodynamics, with deep-ploughing consequences for the physics of elementary particles". He was elected a Foreign Member of the Royal Society in 1965, received the Oersted Medal in 1972, and the National Medal of Science in 1979. He was elected a Member of the National Academy of Sciences, but ultimately resigned and is no longer listed by them.In 1978, Feynman sought medical treatment for abdominal pains and was diagnosed with liposarcoma, a rare form of cancer. Surgeons removed a tumor the size of a football that had crushed one kidney and his spleen. Further operations were performed in October 1986 and October 1987. He was again hospitalized at the UCLA Medical Center on February 3, 1988. A ruptured duodenal ulcer caused kidney failure, and he declined to undergo the dialysis that might have prolonged his life for a few months. Watched over by his wife Gweneth, sister Joan, and cousin Frances Lewine, he died on February 15, 1988, at age 69.When Feynman was nearing death, he asked his friend and colleague Danny Hillis why Hillis appeared so sad. Hillis replied that he thought Feynman was going to die soon. Feynman said that this sometimes bothered him, too, adding, when you get to be as old as he was, and have told so many stories to so many people, even when he was dead he would not be completely gone.Near the end of his life, Feynman attempted to visit the Tuvan Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic (ASSR) in Russia, a dream thwarted by Cold War bureaucratic issues. The letter from the Soviet government authorizing the trip was not received until the day after he died. His daughter Michelle later made the journey.His burial was at Mountain View Cemetery and Mausoleum in Altadena, California. His last words were: "I'd hate to die twice. It's so boring."Aspects of Feynman's life have been portrayed in various media. Feynman was portrayed by Matthew Broderick in the 1996 biopic "Infinity". Actor Alan Alda commissioned playwright Peter Parnell to write a two-character play about a fictional day in the life of Feynman set two years before Feynman's death. The play, "QED", premiered at the Mark Taper Forum in Los Angeles in 2001 and was later presented at the Vivian Beaumont Theater on Broadway, with both presentations starring Alda as Richard Feynman. Real Time Opera premiered its opera "Feynman" at the Norfolk (CT) Chamber Music Festival in June 2005. In 2011, Feynman was the subject of a biographical graphic novel entitled simply "Feynman", written by Jim Ottaviani and illustrated by Leland Myrick. In 2013, Feynman's role on the Rogers Commission was dramatised by the BBC in "The Challenger" (US title: "The Challenger Disaster"), with William Hurt playing Feynman.Feynman is commemorated in various ways. On May 4, 2005, the United States Postal Service issued the "American Scientists" commemorative set of four 37-cent self-adhesive stamps in several configurations. The scientists depicted were Richard Feynman, John von Neumann, Barbara McClintock, and Josiah Willard Gibbs. Feynman's stamp, sepia-toned, features a photograph of a 30-something Feynman and eight small Feynman diagrams. The stamps were designed by Victor Stabin under the artistic direction of Carl T. Herrman. The main building for the Computing Division at Fermilab is named the "Feynman Computing Center" in his honor. A photograph of Richard Feynman giving a lecture was part of the 1997 poster series commissioned by Apple Inc. for their "Think Different" advertising campaign. Sheldon Cooper, a fictional theoretical physicist from the television series "The Big Bang Theory", is a Feynman fan who has emulated him on various occasions, once by playing the bongo drums. On January 27, 2016, Bill Gates wrote an article "The Best Teacher I Never Had" describing Feynman's talents as a teacher which inspired Gates to create Project Tuva to place the videos of Feynman's Messenger Lectures, "The Character of Physical Law", on a website for public viewing. In 2015 Gates made a video on why he thought Feynman was special. The video was made for the 50th anniversary of Feynman's 1965 Nobel Prize, in response to Caltech's request for thoughts on Feynman. At CERN, home of the Large Hadron Collider, a street on the Meyrin site is named "Route Feynman" after the physicist."The Feynman Lectures on Physics" is perhaps his most accessible work for anyone with an interest in physics, compiled from lectures to Caltech undergraduates in 1961–1964. As news of the lectures' lucidity grew, professional physicists and graduate students began to drop in to listen. Co-authors Robert B. Leighton and Matthew Sands, colleagues of Feynman, edited and illustrated them into book form. The work has endured and is useful to this day. They were edited and supplemented in 2005 with "Feynman's Tips on Physics: A Problem-Solving Supplement to the Feynman Lectures on Physics" by Michael Gottlieb and Ralph Leighton (Robert Leighton's son), with support from Kip Thorne and other physicists.	[ "Manhattan Project", "California Institute of Technology" ]
Which employer did Richard Feynman work for in 09/11/1949?	November 09, 1949	{ "text": [ "Cornell University" ] }	L2_Q39246_P108_1	Richard Feynman works for Manhattan Project from Jan, 1941 to Jan, 1945. Richard Feynman works for Cornell University from Jan, 1945 to Jan, 1950. Richard Feynman works for California Institute of Technology from Jan, 1950 to Jan, 1988.	Richard FeynmanRichard Phillips Feynman (; May 11, 1918 – February 15, 1988) was an American theoretical physicist, known for his work in the path integral formulation of quantum mechanics, the theory of quantum electrodynamics, the physics of the superfluidity of supercooled liquid helium, as well as his work in particle physics for which he proposed the parton model. For contributions to the development of quantum electrodynamics, Feynman received the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1965 jointly with Julian Schwinger and Shin'ichirō Tomonaga.Feynman developed a widely used pictorial representation scheme for the mathematical expressions describing the behavior of subatomic particles, which later became known as Feynman diagrams. During his lifetime, Feynman became one of the best-known scientists in the world. In a 1999 poll of 130 leading physicists worldwide by the British journal "Physics World", he was ranked the seventh greatest physicist of all time.He assisted in the development of the atomic bomb during World War II and became known to a wide public in the 1980s as a member of the Rogers Commission, the panel that investigated the Space Shuttle "Challenger" disaster. Along with his work in theoretical physics, Feynman has been credited with pioneering the field of quantum computing and introducing the concept of nanotechnology. He held the Richard C. Tolman professorship in theoretical physics at the California Institute of Technology.Feynman was a keen popularizer of physics through both books and lectures, including a 1959 talk on top-down nanotechnology called "There's Plenty of Room at the Bottom" and the three-volume publication of his undergraduate lectures, "The Feynman Lectures on Physics". Feynman also became known through his semi-autobiographical books "Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman!" and "What Do You Care What Other People Think?", and books written about him such as "Tuva or Bust!" by Ralph Leighton and the biography "Genius: The Life and Science of Richard Feynman" by James Gleick.Feynman was born on May 11, 1918, in Queens, New York City, to Lucille , a homemaker, and Melville Arthur Feynman, a sales manager originally from Minsk in Belarus (then part of the Russian Empire).Feynman was a late talker, and did not speak until after his third birthday. As an adult he spoke with a New York accent strong enough to be perceived as an affectation or exaggeration—so much so that his friends Wolfgang Pauli and Hans Bethe once commented that Feynman spoke like a "bum".The young Feynman was heavily influenced by his father, who encouraged him to ask questions to challenge orthodox thinking, and who was always ready to teach Feynman something new. From his mother, he gained the sense of humor that he had throughout his life. As a child, he had a talent for engineering, maintained an experimental laboratory in his home, and delighted in repairing radios. This radio repairing was probably the first job Feynman had, and during this time he showed early signs of an aptitude for his later career in theoretical physics, when he would analyze the issues theoretically and arrive at the solutions. When he was in grade school, he created a home burglar alarm system while his parents were out for the day running errands.When Richard was five, his mother gave birth to a younger brother, Henry Phillips, who died at age four weeks. Four years later, Richard's sister Joan was born and the family moved to Far Rockaway, Queens. Though separated by nine years, Joan and Richard were close, and they both shared a curiosity about the world. Though their mother thought women lacked the capacity to understand such things, Richard encouraged Joan's interest in astronomy, and Joan eventually became an astrophysicist.Feynman's parents were both from Jewish families but not religious, and by his youth, Feynman described himself as an "avowed atheist". Many years later, in a letter to Tina Levitan, declining a request for information for her book on Jewish Nobel Prize winners, he stated, "To select, for approbation the peculiar elements that come from some supposedly Jewish heredity is to open the door to all kinds of nonsense on racial theory", adding, "at thirteen I was not only converted to other religious views, but I also stopped believing that the Jewish people are in any way 'the chosen people'". Later in his life, during a visit to the Jewish Theological Seminary, he encountered the Talmud for the first time. He saw that it contained the original text in a little square on the page, and surrounding it were commentaries written over time by different people. In this way the Talmud had evolved, and everything that was discussed was carefully recorded. Despite being impressed, Feynman was disappointed with the lack of interest for nature and the outside world expressed by the rabbis, who cared about only those questions which arise from the Talmud.Feynman attended Far Rockaway High School, which was also attended by fellow Nobel laureates Burton Richter and Baruch Samuel Blumberg. Upon starting high school, Feynman was quickly promoted to a higher math class. An IQ test administered in high school estimated his IQ at 125—high but "merely respectable", according to biographer James Gleick. His sister Joan did better, allowing her to claim that she was smarter. Years later he declined to join Mensa International, saying that his IQ was too low. Physicist Steve Hsu stated of the test: When Feynman was 15, he taught himself trigonometry, advanced algebra, infinite series, analytic geometry, and both differential and integral calculus. Before entering college, he was experimenting with and deriving mathematical topics such as the half-derivative using his own notation. He created special symbols for logarithm, sine, cosine and tangent functions so they did not look like three variables multiplied together, and for the derivative, to remove the temptation of canceling out the formula_1's in formula_2. A member of the Arista Honor Society, in his last year in high school he won the New York University Math Championship. His habit of direct characterization sometimes rattled more conventional thinkers; for example, one of his questions, when learning feline anatomy, was "Do you have a map of the cat?" (referring to an anatomical chart).Feynman applied to Columbia University but was not accepted because of their quota for the number of Jews admitted. Instead, he attended the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he joined the Pi Lambda Phi fraternity. Although he originally majored in mathematics, he later switched to electrical engineering, as he considered mathematics to be too abstract. Noticing that he "had gone too far", he then switched to physics, which he claimed was "somewhere in between". As an undergraduate, he published two papers in the "Physical Review". One of these, which was co-written with Manuel Vallarta, was entitled "The Scattering of Cosmic Rays by the Stars of a Galaxy". The other was his senior thesis, on "Forces in Molecules", based on an idea by John C. Slater, who was sufficiently impressed by the paper to have it published. Today, it is known as the Hellmann–Feynman theorem.In 1939, Feynman received a bachelor's degree and was named a Putnam Fellow. He attained a perfect score on the graduate school entrance exams to Princeton University in physics—an unprecedented feat—and an outstanding score in mathematics, but did poorly on the history and English portions. The head of the physics department there, Henry D. Smyth, had another concern, writing to Philip M. Morse to ask: "Is Feynman Jewish? We have no definite rule against Jews but have to keep their proportion in our department reasonably small because of the difficulty of placing them." Morse conceded that Feynman was indeed Jewish, but reassured Smyth that Feynman's "physiognomy and manner, however, show no trace of this characteristic".Attendees at Feynman's first seminar, which was on the classical version of the Wheeler–Feynman absorber theory, included Albert Einstein, Wolfgang Pauli, and John von Neumann. Pauli made the prescient comment that the theory would be extremely difficult to quantize, and Einstein said that one might try to apply this method to gravity in general relativity, which Sir Fred Hoyle and Jayant Narlikar did much later as the Hoyle–Narlikar theory of gravity. Feynman received a Ph.D. from Princeton in 1942; his thesis advisor was John Archibald Wheeler. In his doctoral thesis entitled "The Principle of Least Action in Quantum Mechanics", Feynman applied the principle of stationary action to problems of quantum mechanics, inspired by a desire to quantize the Wheeler–Feynman absorber theory of electrodynamics, and laid the groundwork for the path integral formulation and Feynman diagrams. A key insight was that positrons behaved like electrons moving backwards in time. James Gleick wrote:One of the conditions of Feynman's scholarship to Princeton was that he could not be married; nevertheless, he continued to see his high school sweetheart, Arline Greenbaum, and was determined to marry her once he had been awarded his Ph.D. despite the knowledge that she was seriously ill with tuberculosis. This was an incurable disease at the time, and she was not expected to live more than two years. On June 29, 1942, they took the ferry to Staten Island, where they were married in the city office. The ceremony was attended by neither family nor friends and was witnessed by a pair of strangers. Feynman could only kiss Arline on the cheek. After the ceremony he took her to Deborah Hospital, where he visited her on weekends.In 1941, with World War II raging in Europe but the United States not yet at war, Feynman spent the summer working on ballistics problems at the Frankford Arsenal in Pennsylvania. After the attack on Pearl Harbor brought the United States into the war, Feynman was recruited by Robert R. Wilson, who was working on means to produce enriched uranium for use in an atomic bomb, as part of what would become the Manhattan Project. At the time, Feynman had not earned a graduate degree. Wilson's team at Princeton was working on a device called an isotron, intended to electromagnetically separate uranium-235 from uranium-238. This was done in a quite different manner from that used by the calutron that was under development by a team under Wilson's former mentor, Ernest O. Lawrence, at the Radiation Laboratory of the University of California. On paper, the isotron was many times more efficient than the calutron, but Feynman and Paul Olum struggled to determine whether or not it was practical. Ultimately, on Lawrence's recommendation, the isotron project was abandoned.At this juncture, in early 1943, Robert Oppenheimer was establishing the Los Alamos Laboratory, a secret laboratory on a mesa in New Mexico where atomic bombs would be designed and built. An offer was made to the Princeton team to be redeployed there. "Like a bunch of professional soldiers," Wilson later recalled, "we signed up, en masse, to go to Los Alamos." Like many other young physicists, Feynman soon fell under the spell of the charismatic Oppenheimer, who telephoned Feynman long distance from Chicago to inform him that he had found a sanatorium in Albuquerque, New Mexico, for Arline. They were among the first to depart for New Mexico, leaving on a train on March 28, 1943. The railroad supplied Arline with a wheelchair, and Feynman paid extra for a private room for her.At Los Alamos, Feynman was assigned to Hans Bethe's Theoretical (T) Division, and impressed Bethe enough to be made a group leader. He and Bethe developed the Bethe–Feynman formula for calculating the yield of a fission bomb, which built upon previous work by Robert Serber. As a junior physicist, he was not central to the project. He administered the computation group of human computers in the theoretical division. With Stanley Frankel and Nicholas Metropolis, he assisted in establishing a system for using IBM punched cards for computation. He invented a new method of computing logarithms that he later used on the Connection Machine. Other work at Los Alamos included calculating neutron equations for the Los Alamos "Water Boiler", a small nuclear reactor, to measure how close an assembly of fissile material was to criticality.On completing this work, Feynman was sent to the Clinton Engineer Works in Oak Ridge, Tennessee, where the Manhattan Project had its uranium enrichment facilities. He aided the engineers there in devising safety procedures for material storage so that criticality accidents could be avoided, especially when enriched uranium came into contact with water, which acted as a neutron moderator. He insisted on giving the rank and file a lecture on nuclear physics so that they would realize the dangers. He explained that while any amount of unenriched uranium could be safely stored, the enriched uranium had to be carefully handled. He developed a series of safety recommendations for the various grades of enrichments. He was told that if the people at Oak Ridge gave him any difficulty with his proposals, he was to inform them that Los Alamos "could not be responsible for their safety otherwise".Returning to Los Alamos, Feynman was put in charge of the group responsible for the theoretical work and calculations on the proposed uranium hydride bomb, which ultimately proved to be infeasible. He was sought out by physicist Niels Bohr for one-on-one discussions. He later discovered the reason: most of the other physicists were too much in awe of Bohr to argue with him. Feynman had no such inhibitions, vigorously pointing out anything he considered to be flawed in Bohr's thinking. He said he felt as much respect for Bohr as anyone else, but once anyone got him talking about physics, he would become so focused he forgot about social niceties. Perhaps because of this, Bohr never warmed to Feynman.At Los Alamos, which was isolated for security, Feynman amused himself by investigating the combination locks on the cabinets and desks of physicists. He often found that they left the lock combinations on the factory settings, wrote the combinations down, or used easily guessable combinations like dates. He found one cabinet's combination by trying numbers he thought a physicist might use (it proved to be 27–18–28 after the base of natural logarithms, "e" = 2.71828 ...), and found that the three filing cabinets where a colleague kept research notes all had the same combination. He left notes in the cabinets as a prank, spooking his colleague, Frederic de Hoffmann, into thinking a spy had gained access to them.Feynman's $380 monthly salary was about half the amount needed for his modest living expenses and Arline's medical bills, and they were forced to dip into her $3,300 in savings. On weekends he drove to Albuquerque to see Arline in a car borrowed from his friend Klaus Fuchs. Asked who at Los Alamos was most likely to be a spy, Fuchs mentioned Feynman's safe cracking and frequent trips to Albuquerque; Fuchs himself later confessed to spying for the Soviet Union. The FBI would compile a bulky file on Feynman, particularly in view of Feynman's Q clearance.Informed that Arline was dying, Feynman drove to Albuquerque and sat with her for hours until she died on June 16, 1945. He then immersed himself in work on the project and was present at the Trinity nuclear test. Feynman claimed to be the only person to see the explosion without the very dark glasses or welder's lenses provided, reasoning that it was safe to look through a truck windshield, as it would screen out the harmful ultraviolet radiation. The immense brightness of the explosion made him duck to the truck's floor, where he saw a temporary "purple splotch" afterimage.Feynman nominally held an appointment at the University of Wisconsin–Madison as an assistant professor of physics, but was on unpaid leave during his involvement in the Manhattan Project. In 1945, he received a letter from Dean Mark Ingraham of the College of Letters and Science requesting his return to the university to teach in the coming academic year. His appointment was not extended when he did not commit to returning. In a talk given there several years later, Feynman quipped, "It's great to be back at the only university that ever had the good sense to fire me."As early as October 30, 1943, Bethe had written to the chairman of the physics department of his university, Cornell, to recommend that Feynman be hired. On February 28, 1944, this was endorsed by Robert Bacher, also from Cornell, and one of the most senior scientists at Los Alamos. This led to an offer being made in August 1944, which Feynman accepted. Oppenheimer had also hoped to recruit Feynman to the University of California, but the head of the physics department, Raymond T. Birge, was reluctant. He made Feynman an offer in May 1945, but Feynman turned it down. Cornell matched its salary offer of $3,900 per annum. Feynman became one of the first of the Los Alamos Laboratory's group leaders to depart, leaving for Ithaca, New York, in October 1945.Because Feynman was no longer working at the Los Alamos Laboratory, he was no longer exempt from the draft. At his induction, physical Army psychiatrists diagnosed Feynman as suffering from a mental illness and the Army gave him a 4-F exemption on mental grounds. His father died suddenly on October 8, 1946, and Feynman suffered from depression. On October 17, 1946, he wrote a letter to Arline, expressing his deep love and heartbreak. The letter was sealed and only opened after his death. "Please excuse my not mailing this," the letter concluded, "but I don't know your new address." Unable to focus on research problems, Feynman began tackling physics problems, not for utility, but for self-satisfaction. One of these involved analyzing the physics of a twirling, nutating disk as it is moving through the air, inspired by an incident in the cafeteria at Cornell when someone tossed a dinner plate in the air. He read the work of Sir William Rowan Hamilton on quaternions, and attempted unsuccessfully to use them to formulate a relativistic theory of electrons. His work during this period, which used equations of rotation to express various spinning speeds, ultimately proved important to his Nobel Prize–winning work, yet because he felt burned out and had turned his attention to less immediately practical problems, he was surprised by the offers of professorships from other renowned universities, including the Institute for Advanced Study, the University of California, Los Angeles, and the University of California, Berkeley.Feynman was not the only frustrated theoretical physicist in the early post-war years. Quantum electrodynamics suffered from infinite integrals in perturbation theory. These were clear mathematical flaws in the theory, which Feynman and Wheeler had unsuccessfully attempted to work around. "Theoreticians", noted Murray Gell-Mann, "were in disgrace." In June 1947, leading American physicists met at the Shelter Island Conference. For Feynman, it was his "first big conference with big men ... I had never gone to one like this one in peacetime." The problems plaguing quantum electrodynamics were discussed, but the theoreticians were completely overshadowed by the achievements of the experimentalists, who reported the discovery of the Lamb shift, the measurement of the magnetic moment of the electron, and Robert Marshak's two-meson hypothesis.Bethe took the lead from the work of Hans Kramers, and derived a renormalized non-relativistic quantum equation for the Lamb shift. The next step was to create a relativistic version. Feynman thought that he could do this, but when he went back to Bethe with his solution, it did not converge. Feynman carefully worked through the problem again, applying the path integral formulation that he had used in his thesis. Like Bethe, he made the integral finite by applying a cut-off term. The result corresponded to Bethe's version. Feynman presented his work to his peers at the Pocono Conference in 1948. It did not go well. Julian Schwinger gave a long presentation of his work in quantum electrodynamics, and Feynman then offered his version, entitled "Alternative Formulation of Quantum Electrodynamics". The unfamiliar Feynman diagrams, used for the first time, puzzled the audience. Feynman failed to get his point across, and Paul Dirac, Edward Teller and Niels Bohr all raised objections.To Freeman Dyson, one thing at least was clear: Shin'ichirō Tomonaga, Schwinger and Feynman understood what they were talking about even if no one else did, but had not published anything. He was convinced that Feynman's formulation was easier to understand, and ultimately managed to convince Oppenheimer that this was the case. Dyson published a paper in 1949, which added new rules to Feynman's that told how to implement renormalization. Feynman was prompted to publish his ideas in the "Physical Review" in a series of papers over three years. His 1948 papers on "A Relativistic Cut-Off for Classical Electrodynamics" attempted to explain what he had been unable to get across at Pocono. His 1949 paper on "The Theory of Positrons" addressed the Schrödinger equation and Dirac equation, and introduced what is now called the Feynman propagator. Finally, in papers on the "Mathematical Formulation of the Quantum Theory of Electromagnetic Interaction" in 1950 and "An Operator Calculus Having Applications in Quantum Electrodynamics" in 1951, he developed the mathematical basis of his ideas, derived familiar formulae and advanced new ones.While papers by others initially cited Schwinger, papers citing Feynman and employing Feynman diagrams appeared in 1950, and soon became prevalent. Students learned and used the powerful new tool that Feynman had created. Computer programs were later written to compute Feynman diagrams, providing a tool of unprecedented power. It is possible to write such programs because the Feynman diagrams constitute a formal language with a formal grammar. Marc Kac provided the formal proofs of the summation under history, showing that the parabolic partial differential equation can be re-expressed as a sum under different histories (that is, an expectation operator), what is now known as the Feynman–Kac formula, the use of which extends beyond physics to many applications of stochastic processes. To Schwinger, however, the Feynman diagram was "pedagogy, not physics".By 1949, Feynman was becoming restless at Cornell. He never settled into a particular house or apartment, living in guest houses or student residences, or with married friends "until these arrangements became sexually volatile". He liked to date undergraduates, hire prostitutes, and sleep with the wives of friends. He was not fond of Ithaca's cold winter weather, and pined for a warmer climate. Above all, at Cornell, he was always in the shadow of Hans Bethe. Despite all of this, Feynman looked back favorably on the Telluride House, where he resided for a large period of his Cornell career. In an interview, he described the House as "a group of boys that have been specially selected because of their scholarship, because of their cleverness or whatever it is, to be given free board and lodging and so on, because of their brains". He enjoyed the house's convenience and said that "it's there that I did the fundamental work" for which he won the Nobel Prize.Feynman spent several weeks in Rio de Janeiro in July 1949. That year, the Soviet Union detonated its first atomic bomb, generating concerns about espionage. Fuchs was arrested as a Soviet spy in 1950 and the FBI questioned Bethe about Feynman's loyalty. Physicist David Bohm was arrested on December 4, 1950 and emigrated to Brazil in October 1951. Because of the fears of a nuclear war, a girlfriend told Feynman that he should also consider moving to South America. He had a sabbatical coming for 1951–52, and elected to spend it in Brazil, where he gave courses at the Centro Brasileiro de Pesquisas Físicas. In Brazil, Feynman was impressed with "samba" music, and learned to play the "frigideira", a metal percussion instrument based on a frying pan (".") He was an enthusiastic amateur player of bongo and conga drums and often played them in the pit orchestra in musicals. He spent time in Rio with his friend Bohm but Bohm could not convince Feynman to investigate Bohm's ideas on physics.Feynman did not return to Cornell. Bacher, who had been instrumental in bringing Feynman to Cornell, had lured him to the California Institute of Technology (Caltech). Part of the deal was that he could spend his first year on sabbatical in Brazil. He had become smitten by Mary Louise Bell from Neodesha, Kansas. They had met in a cafeteria in Cornell, where she had studied the history of Mexican art and textiles. She later followed him to Caltech, where he gave a lecture. While he was in Brazil, she taught classes on the history of furniture and interiors at Michigan State University. He proposed to her by mail from Rio de Janeiro, and they married in Boise, Idaho, on June 28, 1952, shortly after he returned. They frequently quarreled and she was frightened by his violent temper. Their politics were different; although he registered and voted as a Republican, she was more conservative, and her opinion on the 1954 Oppenheimer security hearing ("Where there's smoke there's fire") offended him. They separated on May 20, 1956. An interlocutory decree of divorce was entered on June 19, 1956, on the grounds of "extreme cruelty". The divorce became final on May 5, 1958.In the wake of the 1957 Sputnik crisis, the U.S. government's interest in science rose for a time. Feynman was considered for a seat on the President's Science Advisory Committee, but was not appointed. At this time, the FBI interviewed a woman close to Feynman, possibly his ex-wife Bell, who sent a written statement to J. Edgar Hoover on August 8, 1958:The U.S. government nevertheless sent Feynman to Geneva for the September 1958 Atoms for Peace Conference. On the beach at Lake Geneva, he met Gweneth Howarth, who was from Ripponden, Yorkshire, and working in Switzerland as an "au pair". Feynman's love life had been turbulent since his divorce; his previous girlfriend had walked off with his Albert Einstein Award medal and, on the advice of an earlier girlfriend, had feigned pregnancy and extorted him into paying for an abortion, then used the money to buy furniture. When Feynman found that Howarth was being paid only $25 a month, he offered her $20 a week to be his live-in maid. Feynman knew that this sort of behavior was illegal under the Mann Act, so he had a friend, Matthew Sands, act as her sponsor. Howarth pointed out that she already had two boyfriends, but decided to take Feynman up on his offer, and arrived in Altadena, California, in June 1959. She made a point of dating other men, but Feynman proposed in early 1960. They were married on September 24, 1960, at the Huntington Hotel in Pasadena. They had a son, Carl, in 1962, and adopted a daughter, Michelle, in 1968. Besides their home in Altadena, they had a beach house in Baja California, purchased with the money from Feynman's Nobel Prize.Feynman tried marijuana and ketamine at John Lilly's sensory deprivation tanks, as a way of studying consciousness. He gave up alcohol when he began to show vague, early signs of alcoholism, as he did not want to do anything that could damage his brain. Despite his curiosity about hallucinations, he was reluctant to experiment with LSD.There had been protests over his alleged sexism in 1968, and again in 1972, but there is no evidence he discriminated against women. Feynman recalled protesters entering a hall and picketing a lecture he was about to make in San Francisco, calling him a "sexist pig". Seeing the protesters, as Feynman later recalled the incident, he addressed institutional sexism by saying that "women do indeed suffer prejudice and discrimination in physics".At Caltech, Feynman investigated the physics of the superfluidity of supercooled liquid helium, where helium seems to display a complete lack of viscosity when flowing. Feynman provided a quantum-mechanical explanation for the Soviet physicist Lev Landau's theory of superfluidity. Applying the Schrödinger equation to the question showed that the superfluid was displaying quantum mechanical behavior observable on a macroscopic scale. This helped with the problem of superconductivity, but the solution eluded Feynman. It was solved with the BCS theory of superconductivity, proposed by John Bardeen, Leon Neil Cooper, and John Robert Schrieffer in 1957.Feynman, inspired by a desire to quantize the Wheeler–Feynman absorber theory of electrodynamics, laid the groundwork for the path integral formulation and Feynman diagrams.With Murray Gell-Mann, Feynman developed a model of weak decay, which showed that the current coupling in the process is a combination of vector and axial currents (an example of weak decay is the decay of a neutron into an electron, a proton, and an antineutrino). Although E. C. George Sudarshan and Robert Marshak developed the theory nearly simultaneously, Feynman's collaboration with Murray Gell-Mann was seen as seminal because the weak interaction was neatly described by the vector and axial currents. It thus combined the 1933 beta decay theory of Enrico Fermi with an explanation of parity violation.Feynman attempted an explanation, called the parton model, of the strong interactions governing nucleon scattering. The parton model emerged as a complement to the quark model developed by Gell-Mann. The relationship between the two models was murky; Gell-Mann referred to Feynman's partons derisively as "put-ons". In the mid-1960s, physicists believed that quarks were just a bookkeeping device for symmetry numbers, not real particles; the statistics of the omega-minus particle, if it were interpreted as three identical strange quarks bound together, seemed impossible if quarks were real.The SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory deep inelastic scattering experiments of the late 1960s showed that nucleons (protons and neutrons) contained point-like particles that scattered electrons. It was natural to identify these with quarks, but Feynman's parton model attempted to interpret the experimental data in a way that did not introduce additional hypotheses. For example, the data showed that some 45% of the energy momentum was carried by electrically neutral particles in the nucleon. These electrically neutral particles are now seen to be the gluons that carry the forces between the quarks, and their three-valued color quantum number solves the omega-minus problem. Feynman did not dispute the quark model; for example, when the fifth quark was discovered in 1977, Feynman immediately pointed out to his students that the discovery implied the existence of a sixth quark, which was discovered in the decade after his death.After the success of quantum electrodynamics, Feynman turned to quantum gravity. By analogy with the photon, which has spin 1, he investigated the consequences of a free massless spin 2 field and derived the Einstein field equation of general relativity, but little more. The computational device that Feynman discovered then for gravity, "ghosts", which are "particles" in the interior of his diagrams that have the "wrong" connection between spin and statistics, have proved invaluable in explaining the quantum particle behavior of the Yang–Mills theories, for example, quantum chromodynamics and the electro-weak theory. He did work on all four of the forces of nature: electromagnetic, the weak force, the strong force and gravity. John and Mary Gribbin state in their book on Feynman that "Nobody else has made such influential contributions to the investigation of all four of the interactions".Partly as a way to bring publicity to progress in physics, Feynman offered $1,000 prizes for two of his challenges in nanotechnology; one was claimed by William McLellan and the other by Tom Newman.Feynman was also interested in the relationship between physics and computation. He was also one of the first scientists to conceive the possibility of quantum computers. In the 1980s he began to spend his summers working at Thinking Machines Corporation, helping to build some of the first parallel supercomputers and considering the construction of quantum computers.In 1984–1986, he developed a variational method for the approximate calculation of path integrals, which has led to a powerful method of converting divergent perturbation expansions into convergent strong-coupling expansions (variational perturbation theory) and, as a consequence, to the most accurate determination of critical exponents measured in satellite experiments. At Caltech, he once chalked "What I cannot create I do not understand" on his blackboard.In the early 1960s, Feynman acceded to a request to "spruce up" the teaching of undergraduates at Caltech. After three years devoted to the task, he produced a series of lectures that later became "The Feynman Lectures on Physics". He wanted a picture of a drumhead sprinkled with powder to show the modes of vibration at the beginning of the book. Concerned over the connections to drugs and rock and roll that could be made from the image, the publishers changed the cover to plain red, though they included a picture of him playing drums in the foreword. "The Feynman Lectures on Physics" occupied two physicists, Robert B. Leighton and Matthew Sands, as part-time co-authors for several years. Even though the books were not adopted by universities as textbooks, they continue to sell well because they provide a deep understanding of physics. Many of his lectures and miscellaneous talks were turned into other books, including "The Character of Physical Law", "", "Statistical Mechanics", "Lectures on Gravitation", and the "Feynman Lectures on Computation".Feynman wrote about his experiences teaching physics undergraduates in Brazil. The students' studying habits and the Portuguese language textbooks were so devoid of any context or applications for their information that, in Feynman's opinion, the students were not learning physics at all. At the end of the year, Feynman was invited to give a lecture on his teaching experiences, and he agreed to do so, provided he could speak frankly, which he did.Feynman opposed rote learning or unthinking memorization and other teaching methods that emphasized form over function. "Clear thinking" and "clear presentation" were fundamental prerequisites for his attention. It could be perilous even to approach him unprepared, and he did not forget fools and pretenders. In 1964, he served on the California State Curriculum Commission, which was responsible for approving textbooks to be used by schools in California. He was not impressed with what he found. Many of the mathematics texts covered subjects of use only to pure mathematicians as part of the "New Math". Elementary students were taught about sets, but:In April 1966, Feynman delivered an address to the National Science Teachers Association, in which he suggested how students could be made to think like scientists, be open-minded, curious, and especially, to doubt. In the course of the lecture, he gave a definition of science, which he said came about by several stages. The evolution of intelligent life on planet Earth—creatures such as cats that play and learn from experience. The evolution of humans, who came to use language to pass knowledge from one individual to the next, so that the knowledge was not lost when an individual died. Unfortunately, incorrect knowledge could be passed down as well as correct knowledge, so another step was needed. Galileo and others started doubting the truth of what was passed down and to investigate "ab initio", from experience, what the true situation was—this was science.In 1974, Feynman delivered the Caltech commencement address on the topic of "cargo cult science", which has the semblance of science, but is only pseudoscience due to a lack of "a kind of scientific integrity, a principle of scientific thought that corresponds to a kind of utter honesty" on the part of the scientist. He instructed the graduating class that "The first principle is that you must not fool yourself—and you are the easiest person to fool. So you have to be very careful about that. After you've not fooled yourself, it's easy not to fool other scientists. You just have to be honest in a conventional way after that."Feynman served as doctoral advisor to 31 students.In 1977, Feynman supported his colleague Jenijoy La Belle, who had been hired as Caltech's first female professor in 1969, and filed suit with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission after she was refused tenure in 1974. The EEOC ruled against Caltech in 1977, adding that La Belle had been paid less than male colleagues. La Belle finally received tenure in 1979. Many of Feynman's colleagues were surprised that he took her side, but he had gotten to know La Belle and liked and admired her.In the 1960s, Feynman began thinking of writing an autobiography, and he began granting interviews to historians. In the 1980s, working with Ralph Leighton (Robert Leighton's son), he recorded chapters on audio tape that Ralph transcribed. The book was published in 1985 as "Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman!" and became a best-seller.Gell-Mann was upset by Feynman's account in the book of the weak interaction work, and threatened to sue, resulting in a correction being inserted in later editions. This incident was just the latest provocation in decades of bad feeling between the two scientists. Gell-Mann often expressed frustration at the attention Feynman received; he remarked: "[Feynman] was a great scientist, but he spent a great deal of his effort generating anecdotes about himself."Feynman has been criticized for a chapter in the book entitled "You Just "Ask" Them", where he describes how he learned to seduce women at a bar he went to in the summer of 1946. A mentor taught him to ask a woman if she would sleep with him before buying her anything. He describes seeing women at the bar as "bitches" in his thoughts, and tells a story of how he told a woman named Ann that she was "worse than a whore" after Ann persuaded him to buy her sandwiches by telling him he could eat them at her place, but then, after he bought them, saying they actually couldn't eat together because another man was coming over. Later on that same evening, Ann returned to the bar to take Feynman to her place. Feynman states at the end of the chapter that this behaviour wasn't typical of him: "So it worked even with an ordinary girl! But no matter how effective the lesson was, I never really used it after that. I didn't enjoy doing it that way. But it was interesting to know that things worked much differently from how I was brought up."Feynman played an important role on the Presidential Rogers Commission, which investigated the "Challenger" disaster. He had been reluctant to participate, but was persuaded by advice from his wife. Feynman clashed several times with commission chairman William P. Rogers. During a break in one hearing, Rogers told commission member Neil Armstrong, "Feynman is becoming a pain in the ass."During a televised hearing, Feynman demonstrated that the material used in the shuttle's O-rings became less resilient in cold weather by compressing a sample of the material in a clamp and immersing it in ice-cold water. The commission ultimately determined that the disaster was caused by the primary O-ring not properly sealing in unusually cold weather at Cape Canaveral.Feynman devoted the latter half of his book "What Do You Care What Other People Think?" to his experience on the Rogers Commission, straying from his usual convention of brief, light-hearted anecdotes to deliver an extended and sober narrative. Feynman's account reveals a disconnect between NASA's engineers and executives that was far more striking than he expected. His interviews of NASA's high-ranking managers revealed startling misunderstandings of elementary concepts. For instance, NASA managers claimed that there was a 1 in 100,000 chance of a catastrophic failure aboard the Shuttle, but Feynman discovered that NASA's own engineers estimated the chance of a catastrophe at closer to 1 in 200. He concluded that NASA management's estimate of the reliability of the Space Shuttle was unrealistic, and he was particularly angered that NASA used it to recruit Christa McAuliffe into the Teacher-in-Space program. He warned in his appendix to the commission's report (which was included only after he threatened not to sign the report), "For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for nature cannot be fooled."The first public recognition of Feynman's work came in 1954, when Lewis Strauss, the chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission (AEC) notified him that he had won the Albert Einstein Award, which was worth $15,000 and came with a gold medal. Because of Strauss's actions in stripping Oppenheimer of his security clearance, Feynman was reluctant to accept the award, but Isidor Isaac Rabi cautioned him: "You should never turn a man's generosity as a sword against him. Any virtue that a man has, even if he has many vices, should not be used as a tool against him." It was followed by the AEC's Ernest Orlando Lawrence Award in 1962. Schwinger, Tomonaga and Feynman shared the 1965 Nobel Prize in Physics "for their fundamental work in quantum electrodynamics, with deep-ploughing consequences for the physics of elementary particles". He was elected a Foreign Member of the Royal Society in 1965, received the Oersted Medal in 1972, and the National Medal of Science in 1979. He was elected a Member of the National Academy of Sciences, but ultimately resigned and is no longer listed by them.In 1978, Feynman sought medical treatment for abdominal pains and was diagnosed with liposarcoma, a rare form of cancer. Surgeons removed a tumor the size of a football that had crushed one kidney and his spleen. Further operations were performed in October 1986 and October 1987. He was again hospitalized at the UCLA Medical Center on February 3, 1988. A ruptured duodenal ulcer caused kidney failure, and he declined to undergo the dialysis that might have prolonged his life for a few months. Watched over by his wife Gweneth, sister Joan, and cousin Frances Lewine, he died on February 15, 1988, at age 69.When Feynman was nearing death, he asked his friend and colleague Danny Hillis why Hillis appeared so sad. Hillis replied that he thought Feynman was going to die soon. Feynman said that this sometimes bothered him, too, adding, when you get to be as old as he was, and have told so many stories to so many people, even when he was dead he would not be completely gone.Near the end of his life, Feynman attempted to visit the Tuvan Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic (ASSR) in Russia, a dream thwarted by Cold War bureaucratic issues. The letter from the Soviet government authorizing the trip was not received until the day after he died. His daughter Michelle later made the journey.His burial was at Mountain View Cemetery and Mausoleum in Altadena, California. His last words were: "I'd hate to die twice. It's so boring."Aspects of Feynman's life have been portrayed in various media. Feynman was portrayed by Matthew Broderick in the 1996 biopic "Infinity". Actor Alan Alda commissioned playwright Peter Parnell to write a two-character play about a fictional day in the life of Feynman set two years before Feynman's death. The play, "QED", premiered at the Mark Taper Forum in Los Angeles in 2001 and was later presented at the Vivian Beaumont Theater on Broadway, with both presentations starring Alda as Richard Feynman. Real Time Opera premiered its opera "Feynman" at the Norfolk (CT) Chamber Music Festival in June 2005. In 2011, Feynman was the subject of a biographical graphic novel entitled simply "Feynman", written by Jim Ottaviani and illustrated by Leland Myrick. In 2013, Feynman's role on the Rogers Commission was dramatised by the BBC in "The Challenger" (US title: "The Challenger Disaster"), with William Hurt playing Feynman.Feynman is commemorated in various ways. On May 4, 2005, the United States Postal Service issued the "American Scientists" commemorative set of four 37-cent self-adhesive stamps in several configurations. The scientists depicted were Richard Feynman, John von Neumann, Barbara McClintock, and Josiah Willard Gibbs. Feynman's stamp, sepia-toned, features a photograph of a 30-something Feynman and eight small Feynman diagrams. The stamps were designed by Victor Stabin under the artistic direction of Carl T. Herrman. The main building for the Computing Division at Fermilab is named the "Feynman Computing Center" in his honor. A photograph of Richard Feynman giving a lecture was part of the 1997 poster series commissioned by Apple Inc. for their "Think Different" advertising campaign. Sheldon Cooper, a fictional theoretical physicist from the television series "The Big Bang Theory", is a Feynman fan who has emulated him on various occasions, once by playing the bongo drums. On January 27, 2016, Bill Gates wrote an article "The Best Teacher I Never Had" describing Feynman's talents as a teacher which inspired Gates to create Project Tuva to place the videos of Feynman's Messenger Lectures, "The Character of Physical Law", on a website for public viewing. In 2015 Gates made a video on why he thought Feynman was special. The video was made for the 50th anniversary of Feynman's 1965 Nobel Prize, in response to Caltech's request for thoughts on Feynman. At CERN, home of the Large Hadron Collider, a street on the Meyrin site is named "Route Feynman" after the physicist."The Feynman Lectures on Physics" is perhaps his most accessible work for anyone with an interest in physics, compiled from lectures to Caltech undergraduates in 1961–1964. As news of the lectures' lucidity grew, professional physicists and graduate students began to drop in to listen. Co-authors Robert B. Leighton and Matthew Sands, colleagues of Feynman, edited and illustrated them into book form. The work has endured and is useful to this day. They were edited and supplemented in 2005 with "Feynman's Tips on Physics: A Problem-Solving Supplement to the Feynman Lectures on Physics" by Michael Gottlieb and Ralph Leighton (Robert Leighton's son), with support from Kip Thorne and other physicists.	[ "Manhattan Project", "California Institute of Technology" ]
Which employer did Richard Feynman work for in Nov 09, 1949?	November 09, 1949	{ "text": [ "Cornell University" ] }	L2_Q39246_P108_1	Richard Feynman works for Manhattan Project from Jan, 1941 to Jan, 1945. Richard Feynman works for Cornell University from Jan, 1945 to Jan, 1950. Richard Feynman works for California Institute of Technology from Jan, 1950 to Jan, 1988.	Richard FeynmanRichard Phillips Feynman (; May 11, 1918 – February 15, 1988) was an American theoretical physicist, known for his work in the path integral formulation of quantum mechanics, the theory of quantum electrodynamics, the physics of the superfluidity of supercooled liquid helium, as well as his work in particle physics for which he proposed the parton model. For contributions to the development of quantum electrodynamics, Feynman received the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1965 jointly with Julian Schwinger and Shin'ichirō Tomonaga.Feynman developed a widely used pictorial representation scheme for the mathematical expressions describing the behavior of subatomic particles, which later became known as Feynman diagrams. During his lifetime, Feynman became one of the best-known scientists in the world. In a 1999 poll of 130 leading physicists worldwide by the British journal "Physics World", he was ranked the seventh greatest physicist of all time.He assisted in the development of the atomic bomb during World War II and became known to a wide public in the 1980s as a member of the Rogers Commission, the panel that investigated the Space Shuttle "Challenger" disaster. Along with his work in theoretical physics, Feynman has been credited with pioneering the field of quantum computing and introducing the concept of nanotechnology. He held the Richard C. Tolman professorship in theoretical physics at the California Institute of Technology.Feynman was a keen popularizer of physics through both books and lectures, including a 1959 talk on top-down nanotechnology called "There's Plenty of Room at the Bottom" and the three-volume publication of his undergraduate lectures, "The Feynman Lectures on Physics". Feynman also became known through his semi-autobiographical books "Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman!" and "What Do You Care What Other People Think?", and books written about him such as "Tuva or Bust!" by Ralph Leighton and the biography "Genius: The Life and Science of Richard Feynman" by James Gleick.Feynman was born on May 11, 1918, in Queens, New York City, to Lucille , a homemaker, and Melville Arthur Feynman, a sales manager originally from Minsk in Belarus (then part of the Russian Empire).Feynman was a late talker, and did not speak until after his third birthday. As an adult he spoke with a New York accent strong enough to be perceived as an affectation or exaggeration—so much so that his friends Wolfgang Pauli and Hans Bethe once commented that Feynman spoke like a "bum".The young Feynman was heavily influenced by his father, who encouraged him to ask questions to challenge orthodox thinking, and who was always ready to teach Feynman something new. From his mother, he gained the sense of humor that he had throughout his life. As a child, he had a talent for engineering, maintained an experimental laboratory in his home, and delighted in repairing radios. This radio repairing was probably the first job Feynman had, and during this time he showed early signs of an aptitude for his later career in theoretical physics, when he would analyze the issues theoretically and arrive at the solutions. When he was in grade school, he created a home burglar alarm system while his parents were out for the day running errands.When Richard was five, his mother gave birth to a younger brother, Henry Phillips, who died at age four weeks. Four years later, Richard's sister Joan was born and the family moved to Far Rockaway, Queens. Though separated by nine years, Joan and Richard were close, and they both shared a curiosity about the world. Though their mother thought women lacked the capacity to understand such things, Richard encouraged Joan's interest in astronomy, and Joan eventually became an astrophysicist.Feynman's parents were both from Jewish families but not religious, and by his youth, Feynman described himself as an "avowed atheist". Many years later, in a letter to Tina Levitan, declining a request for information for her book on Jewish Nobel Prize winners, he stated, "To select, for approbation the peculiar elements that come from some supposedly Jewish heredity is to open the door to all kinds of nonsense on racial theory", adding, "at thirteen I was not only converted to other religious views, but I also stopped believing that the Jewish people are in any way 'the chosen people'". Later in his life, during a visit to the Jewish Theological Seminary, he encountered the Talmud for the first time. He saw that it contained the original text in a little square on the page, and surrounding it were commentaries written over time by different people. In this way the Talmud had evolved, and everything that was discussed was carefully recorded. Despite being impressed, Feynman was disappointed with the lack of interest for nature and the outside world expressed by the rabbis, who cared about only those questions which arise from the Talmud.Feynman attended Far Rockaway High School, which was also attended by fellow Nobel laureates Burton Richter and Baruch Samuel Blumberg. Upon starting high school, Feynman was quickly promoted to a higher math class. An IQ test administered in high school estimated his IQ at 125—high but "merely respectable", according to biographer James Gleick. His sister Joan did better, allowing her to claim that she was smarter. Years later he declined to join Mensa International, saying that his IQ was too low. Physicist Steve Hsu stated of the test: When Feynman was 15, he taught himself trigonometry, advanced algebra, infinite series, analytic geometry, and both differential and integral calculus. Before entering college, he was experimenting with and deriving mathematical topics such as the half-derivative using his own notation. He created special symbols for logarithm, sine, cosine and tangent functions so they did not look like three variables multiplied together, and for the derivative, to remove the temptation of canceling out the formula_1's in formula_2. A member of the Arista Honor Society, in his last year in high school he won the New York University Math Championship. His habit of direct characterization sometimes rattled more conventional thinkers; for example, one of his questions, when learning feline anatomy, was "Do you have a map of the cat?" (referring to an anatomical chart).Feynman applied to Columbia University but was not accepted because of their quota for the number of Jews admitted. Instead, he attended the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he joined the Pi Lambda Phi fraternity. Although he originally majored in mathematics, he later switched to electrical engineering, as he considered mathematics to be too abstract. Noticing that he "had gone too far", he then switched to physics, which he claimed was "somewhere in between". As an undergraduate, he published two papers in the "Physical Review". One of these, which was co-written with Manuel Vallarta, was entitled "The Scattering of Cosmic Rays by the Stars of a Galaxy". The other was his senior thesis, on "Forces in Molecules", based on an idea by John C. Slater, who was sufficiently impressed by the paper to have it published. Today, it is known as the Hellmann–Feynman theorem.In 1939, Feynman received a bachelor's degree and was named a Putnam Fellow. He attained a perfect score on the graduate school entrance exams to Princeton University in physics—an unprecedented feat—and an outstanding score in mathematics, but did poorly on the history and English portions. The head of the physics department there, Henry D. Smyth, had another concern, writing to Philip M. Morse to ask: "Is Feynman Jewish? We have no definite rule against Jews but have to keep their proportion in our department reasonably small because of the difficulty of placing them." Morse conceded that Feynman was indeed Jewish, but reassured Smyth that Feynman's "physiognomy and manner, however, show no trace of this characteristic".Attendees at Feynman's first seminar, which was on the classical version of the Wheeler–Feynman absorber theory, included Albert Einstein, Wolfgang Pauli, and John von Neumann. Pauli made the prescient comment that the theory would be extremely difficult to quantize, and Einstein said that one might try to apply this method to gravity in general relativity, which Sir Fred Hoyle and Jayant Narlikar did much later as the Hoyle–Narlikar theory of gravity. Feynman received a Ph.D. from Princeton in 1942; his thesis advisor was John Archibald Wheeler. In his doctoral thesis entitled "The Principle of Least Action in Quantum Mechanics", Feynman applied the principle of stationary action to problems of quantum mechanics, inspired by a desire to quantize the Wheeler–Feynman absorber theory of electrodynamics, and laid the groundwork for the path integral formulation and Feynman diagrams. A key insight was that positrons behaved like electrons moving backwards in time. James Gleick wrote:One of the conditions of Feynman's scholarship to Princeton was that he could not be married; nevertheless, he continued to see his high school sweetheart, Arline Greenbaum, and was determined to marry her once he had been awarded his Ph.D. despite the knowledge that she was seriously ill with tuberculosis. This was an incurable disease at the time, and she was not expected to live more than two years. On June 29, 1942, they took the ferry to Staten Island, where they were married in the city office. The ceremony was attended by neither family nor friends and was witnessed by a pair of strangers. Feynman could only kiss Arline on the cheek. After the ceremony he took her to Deborah Hospital, where he visited her on weekends.In 1941, with World War II raging in Europe but the United States not yet at war, Feynman spent the summer working on ballistics problems at the Frankford Arsenal in Pennsylvania. After the attack on Pearl Harbor brought the United States into the war, Feynman was recruited by Robert R. Wilson, who was working on means to produce enriched uranium for use in an atomic bomb, as part of what would become the Manhattan Project. At the time, Feynman had not earned a graduate degree. Wilson's team at Princeton was working on a device called an isotron, intended to electromagnetically separate uranium-235 from uranium-238. This was done in a quite different manner from that used by the calutron that was under development by a team under Wilson's former mentor, Ernest O. Lawrence, at the Radiation Laboratory of the University of California. On paper, the isotron was many times more efficient than the calutron, but Feynman and Paul Olum struggled to determine whether or not it was practical. Ultimately, on Lawrence's recommendation, the isotron project was abandoned.At this juncture, in early 1943, Robert Oppenheimer was establishing the Los Alamos Laboratory, a secret laboratory on a mesa in New Mexico where atomic bombs would be designed and built. An offer was made to the Princeton team to be redeployed there. "Like a bunch of professional soldiers," Wilson later recalled, "we signed up, en masse, to go to Los Alamos." Like many other young physicists, Feynman soon fell under the spell of the charismatic Oppenheimer, who telephoned Feynman long distance from Chicago to inform him that he had found a sanatorium in Albuquerque, New Mexico, for Arline. They were among the first to depart for New Mexico, leaving on a train on March 28, 1943. The railroad supplied Arline with a wheelchair, and Feynman paid extra for a private room for her.At Los Alamos, Feynman was assigned to Hans Bethe's Theoretical (T) Division, and impressed Bethe enough to be made a group leader. He and Bethe developed the Bethe–Feynman formula for calculating the yield of a fission bomb, which built upon previous work by Robert Serber. As a junior physicist, he was not central to the project. He administered the computation group of human computers in the theoretical division. With Stanley Frankel and Nicholas Metropolis, he assisted in establishing a system for using IBM punched cards for computation. He invented a new method of computing logarithms that he later used on the Connection Machine. Other work at Los Alamos included calculating neutron equations for the Los Alamos "Water Boiler", a small nuclear reactor, to measure how close an assembly of fissile material was to criticality.On completing this work, Feynman was sent to the Clinton Engineer Works in Oak Ridge, Tennessee, where the Manhattan Project had its uranium enrichment facilities. He aided the engineers there in devising safety procedures for material storage so that criticality accidents could be avoided, especially when enriched uranium came into contact with water, which acted as a neutron moderator. He insisted on giving the rank and file a lecture on nuclear physics so that they would realize the dangers. He explained that while any amount of unenriched uranium could be safely stored, the enriched uranium had to be carefully handled. He developed a series of safety recommendations for the various grades of enrichments. He was told that if the people at Oak Ridge gave him any difficulty with his proposals, he was to inform them that Los Alamos "could not be responsible for their safety otherwise".Returning to Los Alamos, Feynman was put in charge of the group responsible for the theoretical work and calculations on the proposed uranium hydride bomb, which ultimately proved to be infeasible. He was sought out by physicist Niels Bohr for one-on-one discussions. He later discovered the reason: most of the other physicists were too much in awe of Bohr to argue with him. Feynman had no such inhibitions, vigorously pointing out anything he considered to be flawed in Bohr's thinking. He said he felt as much respect for Bohr as anyone else, but once anyone got him talking about physics, he would become so focused he forgot about social niceties. Perhaps because of this, Bohr never warmed to Feynman.At Los Alamos, which was isolated for security, Feynman amused himself by investigating the combination locks on the cabinets and desks of physicists. He often found that they left the lock combinations on the factory settings, wrote the combinations down, or used easily guessable combinations like dates. He found one cabinet's combination by trying numbers he thought a physicist might use (it proved to be 27–18–28 after the base of natural logarithms, "e" = 2.71828 ...), and found that the three filing cabinets where a colleague kept research notes all had the same combination. He left notes in the cabinets as a prank, spooking his colleague, Frederic de Hoffmann, into thinking a spy had gained access to them.Feynman's $380 monthly salary was about half the amount needed for his modest living expenses and Arline's medical bills, and they were forced to dip into her $3,300 in savings. On weekends he drove to Albuquerque to see Arline in a car borrowed from his friend Klaus Fuchs. Asked who at Los Alamos was most likely to be a spy, Fuchs mentioned Feynman's safe cracking and frequent trips to Albuquerque; Fuchs himself later confessed to spying for the Soviet Union. The FBI would compile a bulky file on Feynman, particularly in view of Feynman's Q clearance.Informed that Arline was dying, Feynman drove to Albuquerque and sat with her for hours until she died on June 16, 1945. He then immersed himself in work on the project and was present at the Trinity nuclear test. Feynman claimed to be the only person to see the explosion without the very dark glasses or welder's lenses provided, reasoning that it was safe to look through a truck windshield, as it would screen out the harmful ultraviolet radiation. The immense brightness of the explosion made him duck to the truck's floor, where he saw a temporary "purple splotch" afterimage.Feynman nominally held an appointment at the University of Wisconsin–Madison as an assistant professor of physics, but was on unpaid leave during his involvement in the Manhattan Project. In 1945, he received a letter from Dean Mark Ingraham of the College of Letters and Science requesting his return to the university to teach in the coming academic year. His appointment was not extended when he did not commit to returning. In a talk given there several years later, Feynman quipped, "It's great to be back at the only university that ever had the good sense to fire me."As early as October 30, 1943, Bethe had written to the chairman of the physics department of his university, Cornell, to recommend that Feynman be hired. On February 28, 1944, this was endorsed by Robert Bacher, also from Cornell, and one of the most senior scientists at Los Alamos. This led to an offer being made in August 1944, which Feynman accepted. Oppenheimer had also hoped to recruit Feynman to the University of California, but the head of the physics department, Raymond T. Birge, was reluctant. He made Feynman an offer in May 1945, but Feynman turned it down. Cornell matched its salary offer of $3,900 per annum. Feynman became one of the first of the Los Alamos Laboratory's group leaders to depart, leaving for Ithaca, New York, in October 1945.Because Feynman was no longer working at the Los Alamos Laboratory, he was no longer exempt from the draft. At his induction, physical Army psychiatrists diagnosed Feynman as suffering from a mental illness and the Army gave him a 4-F exemption on mental grounds. His father died suddenly on October 8, 1946, and Feynman suffered from depression. On October 17, 1946, he wrote a letter to Arline, expressing his deep love and heartbreak. The letter was sealed and only opened after his death. "Please excuse my not mailing this," the letter concluded, "but I don't know your new address." Unable to focus on research problems, Feynman began tackling physics problems, not for utility, but for self-satisfaction. One of these involved analyzing the physics of a twirling, nutating disk as it is moving through the air, inspired by an incident in the cafeteria at Cornell when someone tossed a dinner plate in the air. He read the work of Sir William Rowan Hamilton on quaternions, and attempted unsuccessfully to use them to formulate a relativistic theory of electrons. His work during this period, which used equations of rotation to express various spinning speeds, ultimately proved important to his Nobel Prize–winning work, yet because he felt burned out and had turned his attention to less immediately practical problems, he was surprised by the offers of professorships from other renowned universities, including the Institute for Advanced Study, the University of California, Los Angeles, and the University of California, Berkeley.Feynman was not the only frustrated theoretical physicist in the early post-war years. Quantum electrodynamics suffered from infinite integrals in perturbation theory. These were clear mathematical flaws in the theory, which Feynman and Wheeler had unsuccessfully attempted to work around. "Theoreticians", noted Murray Gell-Mann, "were in disgrace." In June 1947, leading American physicists met at the Shelter Island Conference. For Feynman, it was his "first big conference with big men ... I had never gone to one like this one in peacetime." The problems plaguing quantum electrodynamics were discussed, but the theoreticians were completely overshadowed by the achievements of the experimentalists, who reported the discovery of the Lamb shift, the measurement of the magnetic moment of the electron, and Robert Marshak's two-meson hypothesis.Bethe took the lead from the work of Hans Kramers, and derived a renormalized non-relativistic quantum equation for the Lamb shift. The next step was to create a relativistic version. Feynman thought that he could do this, but when he went back to Bethe with his solution, it did not converge. Feynman carefully worked through the problem again, applying the path integral formulation that he had used in his thesis. Like Bethe, he made the integral finite by applying a cut-off term. The result corresponded to Bethe's version. Feynman presented his work to his peers at the Pocono Conference in 1948. It did not go well. Julian Schwinger gave a long presentation of his work in quantum electrodynamics, and Feynman then offered his version, entitled "Alternative Formulation of Quantum Electrodynamics". The unfamiliar Feynman diagrams, used for the first time, puzzled the audience. Feynman failed to get his point across, and Paul Dirac, Edward Teller and Niels Bohr all raised objections.To Freeman Dyson, one thing at least was clear: Shin'ichirō Tomonaga, Schwinger and Feynman understood what they were talking about even if no one else did, but had not published anything. He was convinced that Feynman's formulation was easier to understand, and ultimately managed to convince Oppenheimer that this was the case. Dyson published a paper in 1949, which added new rules to Feynman's that told how to implement renormalization. Feynman was prompted to publish his ideas in the "Physical Review" in a series of papers over three years. His 1948 papers on "A Relativistic Cut-Off for Classical Electrodynamics" attempted to explain what he had been unable to get across at Pocono. His 1949 paper on "The Theory of Positrons" addressed the Schrödinger equation and Dirac equation, and introduced what is now called the Feynman propagator. Finally, in papers on the "Mathematical Formulation of the Quantum Theory of Electromagnetic Interaction" in 1950 and "An Operator Calculus Having Applications in Quantum Electrodynamics" in 1951, he developed the mathematical basis of his ideas, derived familiar formulae and advanced new ones.While papers by others initially cited Schwinger, papers citing Feynman and employing Feynman diagrams appeared in 1950, and soon became prevalent. Students learned and used the powerful new tool that Feynman had created. Computer programs were later written to compute Feynman diagrams, providing a tool of unprecedented power. It is possible to write such programs because the Feynman diagrams constitute a formal language with a formal grammar. Marc Kac provided the formal proofs of the summation under history, showing that the parabolic partial differential equation can be re-expressed as a sum under different histories (that is, an expectation operator), what is now known as the Feynman–Kac formula, the use of which extends beyond physics to many applications of stochastic processes. To Schwinger, however, the Feynman diagram was "pedagogy, not physics".By 1949, Feynman was becoming restless at Cornell. He never settled into a particular house or apartment, living in guest houses or student residences, or with married friends "until these arrangements became sexually volatile". He liked to date undergraduates, hire prostitutes, and sleep with the wives of friends. He was not fond of Ithaca's cold winter weather, and pined for a warmer climate. Above all, at Cornell, he was always in the shadow of Hans Bethe. Despite all of this, Feynman looked back favorably on the Telluride House, where he resided for a large period of his Cornell career. In an interview, he described the House as "a group of boys that have been specially selected because of their scholarship, because of their cleverness or whatever it is, to be given free board and lodging and so on, because of their brains". He enjoyed the house's convenience and said that "it's there that I did the fundamental work" for which he won the Nobel Prize.Feynman spent several weeks in Rio de Janeiro in July 1949. That year, the Soviet Union detonated its first atomic bomb, generating concerns about espionage. Fuchs was arrested as a Soviet spy in 1950 and the FBI questioned Bethe about Feynman's loyalty. Physicist David Bohm was arrested on December 4, 1950 and emigrated to Brazil in October 1951. Because of the fears of a nuclear war, a girlfriend told Feynman that he should also consider moving to South America. He had a sabbatical coming for 1951–52, and elected to spend it in Brazil, where he gave courses at the Centro Brasileiro de Pesquisas Físicas. In Brazil, Feynman was impressed with "samba" music, and learned to play the "frigideira", a metal percussion instrument based on a frying pan (".") He was an enthusiastic amateur player of bongo and conga drums and often played them in the pit orchestra in musicals. He spent time in Rio with his friend Bohm but Bohm could not convince Feynman to investigate Bohm's ideas on physics.Feynman did not return to Cornell. Bacher, who had been instrumental in bringing Feynman to Cornell, had lured him to the California Institute of Technology (Caltech). Part of the deal was that he could spend his first year on sabbatical in Brazil. He had become smitten by Mary Louise Bell from Neodesha, Kansas. They had met in a cafeteria in Cornell, where she had studied the history of Mexican art and textiles. She later followed him to Caltech, where he gave a lecture. While he was in Brazil, she taught classes on the history of furniture and interiors at Michigan State University. He proposed to her by mail from Rio de Janeiro, and they married in Boise, Idaho, on June 28, 1952, shortly after he returned. They frequently quarreled and she was frightened by his violent temper. Their politics were different; although he registered and voted as a Republican, she was more conservative, and her opinion on the 1954 Oppenheimer security hearing ("Where there's smoke there's fire") offended him. They separated on May 20, 1956. An interlocutory decree of divorce was entered on June 19, 1956, on the grounds of "extreme cruelty". The divorce became final on May 5, 1958.In the wake of the 1957 Sputnik crisis, the U.S. government's interest in science rose for a time. Feynman was considered for a seat on the President's Science Advisory Committee, but was not appointed. At this time, the FBI interviewed a woman close to Feynman, possibly his ex-wife Bell, who sent a written statement to J. Edgar Hoover on August 8, 1958:The U.S. government nevertheless sent Feynman to Geneva for the September 1958 Atoms for Peace Conference. On the beach at Lake Geneva, he met Gweneth Howarth, who was from Ripponden, Yorkshire, and working in Switzerland as an "au pair". Feynman's love life had been turbulent since his divorce; his previous girlfriend had walked off with his Albert Einstein Award medal and, on the advice of an earlier girlfriend, had feigned pregnancy and extorted him into paying for an abortion, then used the money to buy furniture. When Feynman found that Howarth was being paid only $25 a month, he offered her $20 a week to be his live-in maid. Feynman knew that this sort of behavior was illegal under the Mann Act, so he had a friend, Matthew Sands, act as her sponsor. Howarth pointed out that she already had two boyfriends, but decided to take Feynman up on his offer, and arrived in Altadena, California, in June 1959. She made a point of dating other men, but Feynman proposed in early 1960. They were married on September 24, 1960, at the Huntington Hotel in Pasadena. They had a son, Carl, in 1962, and adopted a daughter, Michelle, in 1968. Besides their home in Altadena, they had a beach house in Baja California, purchased with the money from Feynman's Nobel Prize.Feynman tried marijuana and ketamine at John Lilly's sensory deprivation tanks, as a way of studying consciousness. He gave up alcohol when he began to show vague, early signs of alcoholism, as he did not want to do anything that could damage his brain. Despite his curiosity about hallucinations, he was reluctant to experiment with LSD.There had been protests over his alleged sexism in 1968, and again in 1972, but there is no evidence he discriminated against women. Feynman recalled protesters entering a hall and picketing a lecture he was about to make in San Francisco, calling him a "sexist pig". Seeing the protesters, as Feynman later recalled the incident, he addressed institutional sexism by saying that "women do indeed suffer prejudice and discrimination in physics".At Caltech, Feynman investigated the physics of the superfluidity of supercooled liquid helium, where helium seems to display a complete lack of viscosity when flowing. Feynman provided a quantum-mechanical explanation for the Soviet physicist Lev Landau's theory of superfluidity. Applying the Schrödinger equation to the question showed that the superfluid was displaying quantum mechanical behavior observable on a macroscopic scale. This helped with the problem of superconductivity, but the solution eluded Feynman. It was solved with the BCS theory of superconductivity, proposed by John Bardeen, Leon Neil Cooper, and John Robert Schrieffer in 1957.Feynman, inspired by a desire to quantize the Wheeler–Feynman absorber theory of electrodynamics, laid the groundwork for the path integral formulation and Feynman diagrams.With Murray Gell-Mann, Feynman developed a model of weak decay, which showed that the current coupling in the process is a combination of vector and axial currents (an example of weak decay is the decay of a neutron into an electron, a proton, and an antineutrino). Although E. C. George Sudarshan and Robert Marshak developed the theory nearly simultaneously, Feynman's collaboration with Murray Gell-Mann was seen as seminal because the weak interaction was neatly described by the vector and axial currents. It thus combined the 1933 beta decay theory of Enrico Fermi with an explanation of parity violation.Feynman attempted an explanation, called the parton model, of the strong interactions governing nucleon scattering. The parton model emerged as a complement to the quark model developed by Gell-Mann. The relationship between the two models was murky; Gell-Mann referred to Feynman's partons derisively as "put-ons". In the mid-1960s, physicists believed that quarks were just a bookkeeping device for symmetry numbers, not real particles; the statistics of the omega-minus particle, if it were interpreted as three identical strange quarks bound together, seemed impossible if quarks were real.The SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory deep inelastic scattering experiments of the late 1960s showed that nucleons (protons and neutrons) contained point-like particles that scattered electrons. It was natural to identify these with quarks, but Feynman's parton model attempted to interpret the experimental data in a way that did not introduce additional hypotheses. For example, the data showed that some 45% of the energy momentum was carried by electrically neutral particles in the nucleon. These electrically neutral particles are now seen to be the gluons that carry the forces between the quarks, and their three-valued color quantum number solves the omega-minus problem. Feynman did not dispute the quark model; for example, when the fifth quark was discovered in 1977, Feynman immediately pointed out to his students that the discovery implied the existence of a sixth quark, which was discovered in the decade after his death.After the success of quantum electrodynamics, Feynman turned to quantum gravity. By analogy with the photon, which has spin 1, he investigated the consequences of a free massless spin 2 field and derived the Einstein field equation of general relativity, but little more. The computational device that Feynman discovered then for gravity, "ghosts", which are "particles" in the interior of his diagrams that have the "wrong" connection between spin and statistics, have proved invaluable in explaining the quantum particle behavior of the Yang–Mills theories, for example, quantum chromodynamics and the electro-weak theory. He did work on all four of the forces of nature: electromagnetic, the weak force, the strong force and gravity. John and Mary Gribbin state in their book on Feynman that "Nobody else has made such influential contributions to the investigation of all four of the interactions".Partly as a way to bring publicity to progress in physics, Feynman offered $1,000 prizes for two of his challenges in nanotechnology; one was claimed by William McLellan and the other by Tom Newman.Feynman was also interested in the relationship between physics and computation. He was also one of the first scientists to conceive the possibility of quantum computers. In the 1980s he began to spend his summers working at Thinking Machines Corporation, helping to build some of the first parallel supercomputers and considering the construction of quantum computers.In 1984–1986, he developed a variational method for the approximate calculation of path integrals, which has led to a powerful method of converting divergent perturbation expansions into convergent strong-coupling expansions (variational perturbation theory) and, as a consequence, to the most accurate determination of critical exponents measured in satellite experiments. At Caltech, he once chalked "What I cannot create I do not understand" on his blackboard.In the early 1960s, Feynman acceded to a request to "spruce up" the teaching of undergraduates at Caltech. After three years devoted to the task, he produced a series of lectures that later became "The Feynman Lectures on Physics". He wanted a picture of a drumhead sprinkled with powder to show the modes of vibration at the beginning of the book. Concerned over the connections to drugs and rock and roll that could be made from the image, the publishers changed the cover to plain red, though they included a picture of him playing drums in the foreword. "The Feynman Lectures on Physics" occupied two physicists, Robert B. Leighton and Matthew Sands, as part-time co-authors for several years. Even though the books were not adopted by universities as textbooks, they continue to sell well because they provide a deep understanding of physics. Many of his lectures and miscellaneous talks were turned into other books, including "The Character of Physical Law", "", "Statistical Mechanics", "Lectures on Gravitation", and the "Feynman Lectures on Computation".Feynman wrote about his experiences teaching physics undergraduates in Brazil. The students' studying habits and the Portuguese language textbooks were so devoid of any context or applications for their information that, in Feynman's opinion, the students were not learning physics at all. At the end of the year, Feynman was invited to give a lecture on his teaching experiences, and he agreed to do so, provided he could speak frankly, which he did.Feynman opposed rote learning or unthinking memorization and other teaching methods that emphasized form over function. "Clear thinking" and "clear presentation" were fundamental prerequisites for his attention. It could be perilous even to approach him unprepared, and he did not forget fools and pretenders. In 1964, he served on the California State Curriculum Commission, which was responsible for approving textbooks to be used by schools in California. He was not impressed with what he found. Many of the mathematics texts covered subjects of use only to pure mathematicians as part of the "New Math". Elementary students were taught about sets, but:In April 1966, Feynman delivered an address to the National Science Teachers Association, in which he suggested how students could be made to think like scientists, be open-minded, curious, and especially, to doubt. In the course of the lecture, he gave a definition of science, which he said came about by several stages. The evolution of intelligent life on planet Earth—creatures such as cats that play and learn from experience. The evolution of humans, who came to use language to pass knowledge from one individual to the next, so that the knowledge was not lost when an individual died. Unfortunately, incorrect knowledge could be passed down as well as correct knowledge, so another step was needed. Galileo and others started doubting the truth of what was passed down and to investigate "ab initio", from experience, what the true situation was—this was science.In 1974, Feynman delivered the Caltech commencement address on the topic of "cargo cult science", which has the semblance of science, but is only pseudoscience due to a lack of "a kind of scientific integrity, a principle of scientific thought that corresponds to a kind of utter honesty" on the part of the scientist. He instructed the graduating class that "The first principle is that you must not fool yourself—and you are the easiest person to fool. So you have to be very careful about that. After you've not fooled yourself, it's easy not to fool other scientists. You just have to be honest in a conventional way after that."Feynman served as doctoral advisor to 31 students.In 1977, Feynman supported his colleague Jenijoy La Belle, who had been hired as Caltech's first female professor in 1969, and filed suit with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission after she was refused tenure in 1974. The EEOC ruled against Caltech in 1977, adding that La Belle had been paid less than male colleagues. La Belle finally received tenure in 1979. Many of Feynman's colleagues were surprised that he took her side, but he had gotten to know La Belle and liked and admired her.In the 1960s, Feynman began thinking of writing an autobiography, and he began granting interviews to historians. In the 1980s, working with Ralph Leighton (Robert Leighton's son), he recorded chapters on audio tape that Ralph transcribed. The book was published in 1985 as "Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman!" and became a best-seller.Gell-Mann was upset by Feynman's account in the book of the weak interaction work, and threatened to sue, resulting in a correction being inserted in later editions. This incident was just the latest provocation in decades of bad feeling between the two scientists. Gell-Mann often expressed frustration at the attention Feynman received; he remarked: "[Feynman] was a great scientist, but he spent a great deal of his effort generating anecdotes about himself."Feynman has been criticized for a chapter in the book entitled "You Just "Ask" Them", where he describes how he learned to seduce women at a bar he went to in the summer of 1946. A mentor taught him to ask a woman if she would sleep with him before buying her anything. He describes seeing women at the bar as "bitches" in his thoughts, and tells a story of how he told a woman named Ann that she was "worse than a whore" after Ann persuaded him to buy her sandwiches by telling him he could eat them at her place, but then, after he bought them, saying they actually couldn't eat together because another man was coming over. Later on that same evening, Ann returned to the bar to take Feynman to her place. Feynman states at the end of the chapter that this behaviour wasn't typical of him: "So it worked even with an ordinary girl! But no matter how effective the lesson was, I never really used it after that. I didn't enjoy doing it that way. But it was interesting to know that things worked much differently from how I was brought up."Feynman played an important role on the Presidential Rogers Commission, which investigated the "Challenger" disaster. He had been reluctant to participate, but was persuaded by advice from his wife. Feynman clashed several times with commission chairman William P. Rogers. During a break in one hearing, Rogers told commission member Neil Armstrong, "Feynman is becoming a pain in the ass."During a televised hearing, Feynman demonstrated that the material used in the shuttle's O-rings became less resilient in cold weather by compressing a sample of the material in a clamp and immersing it in ice-cold water. The commission ultimately determined that the disaster was caused by the primary O-ring not properly sealing in unusually cold weather at Cape Canaveral.Feynman devoted the latter half of his book "What Do You Care What Other People Think?" to his experience on the Rogers Commission, straying from his usual convention of brief, light-hearted anecdotes to deliver an extended and sober narrative. Feynman's account reveals a disconnect between NASA's engineers and executives that was far more striking than he expected. His interviews of NASA's high-ranking managers revealed startling misunderstandings of elementary concepts. For instance, NASA managers claimed that there was a 1 in 100,000 chance of a catastrophic failure aboard the Shuttle, but Feynman discovered that NASA's own engineers estimated the chance of a catastrophe at closer to 1 in 200. He concluded that NASA management's estimate of the reliability of the Space Shuttle was unrealistic, and he was particularly angered that NASA used it to recruit Christa McAuliffe into the Teacher-in-Space program. He warned in his appendix to the commission's report (which was included only after he threatened not to sign the report), "For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for nature cannot be fooled."The first public recognition of Feynman's work came in 1954, when Lewis Strauss, the chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission (AEC) notified him that he had won the Albert Einstein Award, which was worth $15,000 and came with a gold medal. Because of Strauss's actions in stripping Oppenheimer of his security clearance, Feynman was reluctant to accept the award, but Isidor Isaac Rabi cautioned him: "You should never turn a man's generosity as a sword against him. Any virtue that a man has, even if he has many vices, should not be used as a tool against him." It was followed by the AEC's Ernest Orlando Lawrence Award in 1962. Schwinger, Tomonaga and Feynman shared the 1965 Nobel Prize in Physics "for their fundamental work in quantum electrodynamics, with deep-ploughing consequences for the physics of elementary particles". He was elected a Foreign Member of the Royal Society in 1965, received the Oersted Medal in 1972, and the National Medal of Science in 1979. He was elected a Member of the National Academy of Sciences, but ultimately resigned and is no longer listed by them.In 1978, Feynman sought medical treatment for abdominal pains and was diagnosed with liposarcoma, a rare form of cancer. Surgeons removed a tumor the size of a football that had crushed one kidney and his spleen. Further operations were performed in October 1986 and October 1987. He was again hospitalized at the UCLA Medical Center on February 3, 1988. A ruptured duodenal ulcer caused kidney failure, and he declined to undergo the dialysis that might have prolonged his life for a few months. Watched over by his wife Gweneth, sister Joan, and cousin Frances Lewine, he died on February 15, 1988, at age 69.When Feynman was nearing death, he asked his friend and colleague Danny Hillis why Hillis appeared so sad. Hillis replied that he thought Feynman was going to die soon. Feynman said that this sometimes bothered him, too, adding, when you get to be as old as he was, and have told so many stories to so many people, even when he was dead he would not be completely gone.Near the end of his life, Feynman attempted to visit the Tuvan Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic (ASSR) in Russia, a dream thwarted by Cold War bureaucratic issues. The letter from the Soviet government authorizing the trip was not received until the day after he died. His daughter Michelle later made the journey.His burial was at Mountain View Cemetery and Mausoleum in Altadena, California. His last words were: "I'd hate to die twice. It's so boring."Aspects of Feynman's life have been portrayed in various media. Feynman was portrayed by Matthew Broderick in the 1996 biopic "Infinity". Actor Alan Alda commissioned playwright Peter Parnell to write a two-character play about a fictional day in the life of Feynman set two years before Feynman's death. The play, "QED", premiered at the Mark Taper Forum in Los Angeles in 2001 and was later presented at the Vivian Beaumont Theater on Broadway, with both presentations starring Alda as Richard Feynman. Real Time Opera premiered its opera "Feynman" at the Norfolk (CT) Chamber Music Festival in June 2005. In 2011, Feynman was the subject of a biographical graphic novel entitled simply "Feynman", written by Jim Ottaviani and illustrated by Leland Myrick. In 2013, Feynman's role on the Rogers Commission was dramatised by the BBC in "The Challenger" (US title: "The Challenger Disaster"), with William Hurt playing Feynman.Feynman is commemorated in various ways. On May 4, 2005, the United States Postal Service issued the "American Scientists" commemorative set of four 37-cent self-adhesive stamps in several configurations. The scientists depicted were Richard Feynman, John von Neumann, Barbara McClintock, and Josiah Willard Gibbs. Feynman's stamp, sepia-toned, features a photograph of a 30-something Feynman and eight small Feynman diagrams. The stamps were designed by Victor Stabin under the artistic direction of Carl T. Herrman. The main building for the Computing Division at Fermilab is named the "Feynman Computing Center" in his honor. A photograph of Richard Feynman giving a lecture was part of the 1997 poster series commissioned by Apple Inc. for their "Think Different" advertising campaign. Sheldon Cooper, a fictional theoretical physicist from the television series "The Big Bang Theory", is a Feynman fan who has emulated him on various occasions, once by playing the bongo drums. On January 27, 2016, Bill Gates wrote an article "The Best Teacher I Never Had" describing Feynman's talents as a teacher which inspired Gates to create Project Tuva to place the videos of Feynman's Messenger Lectures, "The Character of Physical Law", on a website for public viewing. In 2015 Gates made a video on why he thought Feynman was special. The video was made for the 50th anniversary of Feynman's 1965 Nobel Prize, in response to Caltech's request for thoughts on Feynman. At CERN, home of the Large Hadron Collider, a street on the Meyrin site is named "Route Feynman" after the physicist."The Feynman Lectures on Physics" is perhaps his most accessible work for anyone with an interest in physics, compiled from lectures to Caltech undergraduates in 1961–1964. As news of the lectures' lucidity grew, professional physicists and graduate students began to drop in to listen. Co-authors Robert B. Leighton and Matthew Sands, colleagues of Feynman, edited and illustrated them into book form. The work has endured and is useful to this day. They were edited and supplemented in 2005 with "Feynman's Tips on Physics: A Problem-Solving Supplement to the Feynman Lectures on Physics" by Michael Gottlieb and Ralph Leighton (Robert Leighton's son), with support from Kip Thorne and other physicists.	[ "Manhattan Project", "California Institute of Technology" ]
Which employer did Richard Feynman work for in 11/09/1949?	November 09, 1949	{ "text": [ "Cornell University" ] }	L2_Q39246_P108_1	Richard Feynman works for Manhattan Project from Jan, 1941 to Jan, 1945. Richard Feynman works for Cornell University from Jan, 1945 to Jan, 1950. Richard Feynman works for California Institute of Technology from Jan, 1950 to Jan, 1988.	Richard FeynmanRichard Phillips Feynman (; May 11, 1918 – February 15, 1988) was an American theoretical physicist, known for his work in the path integral formulation of quantum mechanics, the theory of quantum electrodynamics, the physics of the superfluidity of supercooled liquid helium, as well as his work in particle physics for which he proposed the parton model. For contributions to the development of quantum electrodynamics, Feynman received the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1965 jointly with Julian Schwinger and Shin'ichirō Tomonaga.Feynman developed a widely used pictorial representation scheme for the mathematical expressions describing the behavior of subatomic particles, which later became known as Feynman diagrams. During his lifetime, Feynman became one of the best-known scientists in the world. In a 1999 poll of 130 leading physicists worldwide by the British journal "Physics World", he was ranked the seventh greatest physicist of all time.He assisted in the development of the atomic bomb during World War II and became known to a wide public in the 1980s as a member of the Rogers Commission, the panel that investigated the Space Shuttle "Challenger" disaster. Along with his work in theoretical physics, Feynman has been credited with pioneering the field of quantum computing and introducing the concept of nanotechnology. He held the Richard C. Tolman professorship in theoretical physics at the California Institute of Technology.Feynman was a keen popularizer of physics through both books and lectures, including a 1959 talk on top-down nanotechnology called "There's Plenty of Room at the Bottom" and the three-volume publication of his undergraduate lectures, "The Feynman Lectures on Physics". Feynman also became known through his semi-autobiographical books "Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman!" and "What Do You Care What Other People Think?", and books written about him such as "Tuva or Bust!" by Ralph Leighton and the biography "Genius: The Life and Science of Richard Feynman" by James Gleick.Feynman was born on May 11, 1918, in Queens, New York City, to Lucille , a homemaker, and Melville Arthur Feynman, a sales manager originally from Minsk in Belarus (then part of the Russian Empire).Feynman was a late talker, and did not speak until after his third birthday. As an adult he spoke with a New York accent strong enough to be perceived as an affectation or exaggeration—so much so that his friends Wolfgang Pauli and Hans Bethe once commented that Feynman spoke like a "bum".The young Feynman was heavily influenced by his father, who encouraged him to ask questions to challenge orthodox thinking, and who was always ready to teach Feynman something new. From his mother, he gained the sense of humor that he had throughout his life. As a child, he had a talent for engineering, maintained an experimental laboratory in his home, and delighted in repairing radios. This radio repairing was probably the first job Feynman had, and during this time he showed early signs of an aptitude for his later career in theoretical physics, when he would analyze the issues theoretically and arrive at the solutions. When he was in grade school, he created a home burglar alarm system while his parents were out for the day running errands.When Richard was five, his mother gave birth to a younger brother, Henry Phillips, who died at age four weeks. Four years later, Richard's sister Joan was born and the family moved to Far Rockaway, Queens. Though separated by nine years, Joan and Richard were close, and they both shared a curiosity about the world. Though their mother thought women lacked the capacity to understand such things, Richard encouraged Joan's interest in astronomy, and Joan eventually became an astrophysicist.Feynman's parents were both from Jewish families but not religious, and by his youth, Feynman described himself as an "avowed atheist". Many years later, in a letter to Tina Levitan, declining a request for information for her book on Jewish Nobel Prize winners, he stated, "To select, for approbation the peculiar elements that come from some supposedly Jewish heredity is to open the door to all kinds of nonsense on racial theory", adding, "at thirteen I was not only converted to other religious views, but I also stopped believing that the Jewish people are in any way 'the chosen people'". Later in his life, during a visit to the Jewish Theological Seminary, he encountered the Talmud for the first time. He saw that it contained the original text in a little square on the page, and surrounding it were commentaries written over time by different people. In this way the Talmud had evolved, and everything that was discussed was carefully recorded. Despite being impressed, Feynman was disappointed with the lack of interest for nature and the outside world expressed by the rabbis, who cared about only those questions which arise from the Talmud.Feynman attended Far Rockaway High School, which was also attended by fellow Nobel laureates Burton Richter and Baruch Samuel Blumberg. Upon starting high school, Feynman was quickly promoted to a higher math class. An IQ test administered in high school estimated his IQ at 125—high but "merely respectable", according to biographer James Gleick. His sister Joan did better, allowing her to claim that she was smarter. Years later he declined to join Mensa International, saying that his IQ was too low. Physicist Steve Hsu stated of the test: When Feynman was 15, he taught himself trigonometry, advanced algebra, infinite series, analytic geometry, and both differential and integral calculus. Before entering college, he was experimenting with and deriving mathematical topics such as the half-derivative using his own notation. He created special symbols for logarithm, sine, cosine and tangent functions so they did not look like three variables multiplied together, and for the derivative, to remove the temptation of canceling out the formula_1's in formula_2. A member of the Arista Honor Society, in his last year in high school he won the New York University Math Championship. His habit of direct characterization sometimes rattled more conventional thinkers; for example, one of his questions, when learning feline anatomy, was "Do you have a map of the cat?" (referring to an anatomical chart).Feynman applied to Columbia University but was not accepted because of their quota for the number of Jews admitted. Instead, he attended the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he joined the Pi Lambda Phi fraternity. Although he originally majored in mathematics, he later switched to electrical engineering, as he considered mathematics to be too abstract. Noticing that he "had gone too far", he then switched to physics, which he claimed was "somewhere in between". As an undergraduate, he published two papers in the "Physical Review". One of these, which was co-written with Manuel Vallarta, was entitled "The Scattering of Cosmic Rays by the Stars of a Galaxy". The other was his senior thesis, on "Forces in Molecules", based on an idea by John C. Slater, who was sufficiently impressed by the paper to have it published. Today, it is known as the Hellmann–Feynman theorem.In 1939, Feynman received a bachelor's degree and was named a Putnam Fellow. He attained a perfect score on the graduate school entrance exams to Princeton University in physics—an unprecedented feat—and an outstanding score in mathematics, but did poorly on the history and English portions. The head of the physics department there, Henry D. Smyth, had another concern, writing to Philip M. Morse to ask: "Is Feynman Jewish? We have no definite rule against Jews but have to keep their proportion in our department reasonably small because of the difficulty of placing them." Morse conceded that Feynman was indeed Jewish, but reassured Smyth that Feynman's "physiognomy and manner, however, show no trace of this characteristic".Attendees at Feynman's first seminar, which was on the classical version of the Wheeler–Feynman absorber theory, included Albert Einstein, Wolfgang Pauli, and John von Neumann. Pauli made the prescient comment that the theory would be extremely difficult to quantize, and Einstein said that one might try to apply this method to gravity in general relativity, which Sir Fred Hoyle and Jayant Narlikar did much later as the Hoyle–Narlikar theory of gravity. Feynman received a Ph.D. from Princeton in 1942; his thesis advisor was John Archibald Wheeler. In his doctoral thesis entitled "The Principle of Least Action in Quantum Mechanics", Feynman applied the principle of stationary action to problems of quantum mechanics, inspired by a desire to quantize the Wheeler–Feynman absorber theory of electrodynamics, and laid the groundwork for the path integral formulation and Feynman diagrams. A key insight was that positrons behaved like electrons moving backwards in time. James Gleick wrote:One of the conditions of Feynman's scholarship to Princeton was that he could not be married; nevertheless, he continued to see his high school sweetheart, Arline Greenbaum, and was determined to marry her once he had been awarded his Ph.D. despite the knowledge that she was seriously ill with tuberculosis. This was an incurable disease at the time, and she was not expected to live more than two years. On June 29, 1942, they took the ferry to Staten Island, where they were married in the city office. The ceremony was attended by neither family nor friends and was witnessed by a pair of strangers. Feynman could only kiss Arline on the cheek. After the ceremony he took her to Deborah Hospital, where he visited her on weekends.In 1941, with World War II raging in Europe but the United States not yet at war, Feynman spent the summer working on ballistics problems at the Frankford Arsenal in Pennsylvania. After the attack on Pearl Harbor brought the United States into the war, Feynman was recruited by Robert R. Wilson, who was working on means to produce enriched uranium for use in an atomic bomb, as part of what would become the Manhattan Project. At the time, Feynman had not earned a graduate degree. Wilson's team at Princeton was working on a device called an isotron, intended to electromagnetically separate uranium-235 from uranium-238. This was done in a quite different manner from that used by the calutron that was under development by a team under Wilson's former mentor, Ernest O. Lawrence, at the Radiation Laboratory of the University of California. On paper, the isotron was many times more efficient than the calutron, but Feynman and Paul Olum struggled to determine whether or not it was practical. Ultimately, on Lawrence's recommendation, the isotron project was abandoned.At this juncture, in early 1943, Robert Oppenheimer was establishing the Los Alamos Laboratory, a secret laboratory on a mesa in New Mexico where atomic bombs would be designed and built. An offer was made to the Princeton team to be redeployed there. "Like a bunch of professional soldiers," Wilson later recalled, "we signed up, en masse, to go to Los Alamos." Like many other young physicists, Feynman soon fell under the spell of the charismatic Oppenheimer, who telephoned Feynman long distance from Chicago to inform him that he had found a sanatorium in Albuquerque, New Mexico, for Arline. They were among the first to depart for New Mexico, leaving on a train on March 28, 1943. The railroad supplied Arline with a wheelchair, and Feynman paid extra for a private room for her.At Los Alamos, Feynman was assigned to Hans Bethe's Theoretical (T) Division, and impressed Bethe enough to be made a group leader. He and Bethe developed the Bethe–Feynman formula for calculating the yield of a fission bomb, which built upon previous work by Robert Serber. As a junior physicist, he was not central to the project. He administered the computation group of human computers in the theoretical division. With Stanley Frankel and Nicholas Metropolis, he assisted in establishing a system for using IBM punched cards for computation. He invented a new method of computing logarithms that he later used on the Connection Machine. Other work at Los Alamos included calculating neutron equations for the Los Alamos "Water Boiler", a small nuclear reactor, to measure how close an assembly of fissile material was to criticality.On completing this work, Feynman was sent to the Clinton Engineer Works in Oak Ridge, Tennessee, where the Manhattan Project had its uranium enrichment facilities. He aided the engineers there in devising safety procedures for material storage so that criticality accidents could be avoided, especially when enriched uranium came into contact with water, which acted as a neutron moderator. He insisted on giving the rank and file a lecture on nuclear physics so that they would realize the dangers. He explained that while any amount of unenriched uranium could be safely stored, the enriched uranium had to be carefully handled. He developed a series of safety recommendations for the various grades of enrichments. He was told that if the people at Oak Ridge gave him any difficulty with his proposals, he was to inform them that Los Alamos "could not be responsible for their safety otherwise".Returning to Los Alamos, Feynman was put in charge of the group responsible for the theoretical work and calculations on the proposed uranium hydride bomb, which ultimately proved to be infeasible. He was sought out by physicist Niels Bohr for one-on-one discussions. He later discovered the reason: most of the other physicists were too much in awe of Bohr to argue with him. Feynman had no such inhibitions, vigorously pointing out anything he considered to be flawed in Bohr's thinking. He said he felt as much respect for Bohr as anyone else, but once anyone got him talking about physics, he would become so focused he forgot about social niceties. Perhaps because of this, Bohr never warmed to Feynman.At Los Alamos, which was isolated for security, Feynman amused himself by investigating the combination locks on the cabinets and desks of physicists. He often found that they left the lock combinations on the factory settings, wrote the combinations down, or used easily guessable combinations like dates. He found one cabinet's combination by trying numbers he thought a physicist might use (it proved to be 27–18–28 after the base of natural logarithms, "e" = 2.71828 ...), and found that the three filing cabinets where a colleague kept research notes all had the same combination. He left notes in the cabinets as a prank, spooking his colleague, Frederic de Hoffmann, into thinking a spy had gained access to them.Feynman's $380 monthly salary was about half the amount needed for his modest living expenses and Arline's medical bills, and they were forced to dip into her $3,300 in savings. On weekends he drove to Albuquerque to see Arline in a car borrowed from his friend Klaus Fuchs. Asked who at Los Alamos was most likely to be a spy, Fuchs mentioned Feynman's safe cracking and frequent trips to Albuquerque; Fuchs himself later confessed to spying for the Soviet Union. The FBI would compile a bulky file on Feynman, particularly in view of Feynman's Q clearance.Informed that Arline was dying, Feynman drove to Albuquerque and sat with her for hours until she died on June 16, 1945. He then immersed himself in work on the project and was present at the Trinity nuclear test. Feynman claimed to be the only person to see the explosion without the very dark glasses or welder's lenses provided, reasoning that it was safe to look through a truck windshield, as it would screen out the harmful ultraviolet radiation. The immense brightness of the explosion made him duck to the truck's floor, where he saw a temporary "purple splotch" afterimage.Feynman nominally held an appointment at the University of Wisconsin–Madison as an assistant professor of physics, but was on unpaid leave during his involvement in the Manhattan Project. In 1945, he received a letter from Dean Mark Ingraham of the College of Letters and Science requesting his return to the university to teach in the coming academic year. His appointment was not extended when he did not commit to returning. In a talk given there several years later, Feynman quipped, "It's great to be back at the only university that ever had the good sense to fire me."As early as October 30, 1943, Bethe had written to the chairman of the physics department of his university, Cornell, to recommend that Feynman be hired. On February 28, 1944, this was endorsed by Robert Bacher, also from Cornell, and one of the most senior scientists at Los Alamos. This led to an offer being made in August 1944, which Feynman accepted. Oppenheimer had also hoped to recruit Feynman to the University of California, but the head of the physics department, Raymond T. Birge, was reluctant. He made Feynman an offer in May 1945, but Feynman turned it down. Cornell matched its salary offer of $3,900 per annum. Feynman became one of the first of the Los Alamos Laboratory's group leaders to depart, leaving for Ithaca, New York, in October 1945.Because Feynman was no longer working at the Los Alamos Laboratory, he was no longer exempt from the draft. At his induction, physical Army psychiatrists diagnosed Feynman as suffering from a mental illness and the Army gave him a 4-F exemption on mental grounds. His father died suddenly on October 8, 1946, and Feynman suffered from depression. On October 17, 1946, he wrote a letter to Arline, expressing his deep love and heartbreak. The letter was sealed and only opened after his death. "Please excuse my not mailing this," the letter concluded, "but I don't know your new address." Unable to focus on research problems, Feynman began tackling physics problems, not for utility, but for self-satisfaction. One of these involved analyzing the physics of a twirling, nutating disk as it is moving through the air, inspired by an incident in the cafeteria at Cornell when someone tossed a dinner plate in the air. He read the work of Sir William Rowan Hamilton on quaternions, and attempted unsuccessfully to use them to formulate a relativistic theory of electrons. His work during this period, which used equations of rotation to express various spinning speeds, ultimately proved important to his Nobel Prize–winning work, yet because he felt burned out and had turned his attention to less immediately practical problems, he was surprised by the offers of professorships from other renowned universities, including the Institute for Advanced Study, the University of California, Los Angeles, and the University of California, Berkeley.Feynman was not the only frustrated theoretical physicist in the early post-war years. Quantum electrodynamics suffered from infinite integrals in perturbation theory. These were clear mathematical flaws in the theory, which Feynman and Wheeler had unsuccessfully attempted to work around. "Theoreticians", noted Murray Gell-Mann, "were in disgrace." In June 1947, leading American physicists met at the Shelter Island Conference. For Feynman, it was his "first big conference with big men ... I had never gone to one like this one in peacetime." The problems plaguing quantum electrodynamics were discussed, but the theoreticians were completely overshadowed by the achievements of the experimentalists, who reported the discovery of the Lamb shift, the measurement of the magnetic moment of the electron, and Robert Marshak's two-meson hypothesis.Bethe took the lead from the work of Hans Kramers, and derived a renormalized non-relativistic quantum equation for the Lamb shift. The next step was to create a relativistic version. Feynman thought that he could do this, but when he went back to Bethe with his solution, it did not converge. Feynman carefully worked through the problem again, applying the path integral formulation that he had used in his thesis. Like Bethe, he made the integral finite by applying a cut-off term. The result corresponded to Bethe's version. Feynman presented his work to his peers at the Pocono Conference in 1948. It did not go well. Julian Schwinger gave a long presentation of his work in quantum electrodynamics, and Feynman then offered his version, entitled "Alternative Formulation of Quantum Electrodynamics". The unfamiliar Feynman diagrams, used for the first time, puzzled the audience. Feynman failed to get his point across, and Paul Dirac, Edward Teller and Niels Bohr all raised objections.To Freeman Dyson, one thing at least was clear: Shin'ichirō Tomonaga, Schwinger and Feynman understood what they were talking about even if no one else did, but had not published anything. He was convinced that Feynman's formulation was easier to understand, and ultimately managed to convince Oppenheimer that this was the case. Dyson published a paper in 1949, which added new rules to Feynman's that told how to implement renormalization. Feynman was prompted to publish his ideas in the "Physical Review" in a series of papers over three years. His 1948 papers on "A Relativistic Cut-Off for Classical Electrodynamics" attempted to explain what he had been unable to get across at Pocono. His 1949 paper on "The Theory of Positrons" addressed the Schrödinger equation and Dirac equation, and introduced what is now called the Feynman propagator. Finally, in papers on the "Mathematical Formulation of the Quantum Theory of Electromagnetic Interaction" in 1950 and "An Operator Calculus Having Applications in Quantum Electrodynamics" in 1951, he developed the mathematical basis of his ideas, derived familiar formulae and advanced new ones.While papers by others initially cited Schwinger, papers citing Feynman and employing Feynman diagrams appeared in 1950, and soon became prevalent. Students learned and used the powerful new tool that Feynman had created. Computer programs were later written to compute Feynman diagrams, providing a tool of unprecedented power. It is possible to write such programs because the Feynman diagrams constitute a formal language with a formal grammar. Marc Kac provided the formal proofs of the summation under history, showing that the parabolic partial differential equation can be re-expressed as a sum under different histories (that is, an expectation operator), what is now known as the Feynman–Kac formula, the use of which extends beyond physics to many applications of stochastic processes. To Schwinger, however, the Feynman diagram was "pedagogy, not physics".By 1949, Feynman was becoming restless at Cornell. He never settled into a particular house or apartment, living in guest houses or student residences, or with married friends "until these arrangements became sexually volatile". He liked to date undergraduates, hire prostitutes, and sleep with the wives of friends. He was not fond of Ithaca's cold winter weather, and pined for a warmer climate. Above all, at Cornell, he was always in the shadow of Hans Bethe. Despite all of this, Feynman looked back favorably on the Telluride House, where he resided for a large period of his Cornell career. In an interview, he described the House as "a group of boys that have been specially selected because of their scholarship, because of their cleverness or whatever it is, to be given free board and lodging and so on, because of their brains". He enjoyed the house's convenience and said that "it's there that I did the fundamental work" for which he won the Nobel Prize.Feynman spent several weeks in Rio de Janeiro in July 1949. That year, the Soviet Union detonated its first atomic bomb, generating concerns about espionage. Fuchs was arrested as a Soviet spy in 1950 and the FBI questioned Bethe about Feynman's loyalty. Physicist David Bohm was arrested on December 4, 1950 and emigrated to Brazil in October 1951. Because of the fears of a nuclear war, a girlfriend told Feynman that he should also consider moving to South America. He had a sabbatical coming for 1951–52, and elected to spend it in Brazil, where he gave courses at the Centro Brasileiro de Pesquisas Físicas. In Brazil, Feynman was impressed with "samba" music, and learned to play the "frigideira", a metal percussion instrument based on a frying pan (".") He was an enthusiastic amateur player of bongo and conga drums and often played them in the pit orchestra in musicals. He spent time in Rio with his friend Bohm but Bohm could not convince Feynman to investigate Bohm's ideas on physics.Feynman did not return to Cornell. Bacher, who had been instrumental in bringing Feynman to Cornell, had lured him to the California Institute of Technology (Caltech). Part of the deal was that he could spend his first year on sabbatical in Brazil. He had become smitten by Mary Louise Bell from Neodesha, Kansas. They had met in a cafeteria in Cornell, where she had studied the history of Mexican art and textiles. She later followed him to Caltech, where he gave a lecture. While he was in Brazil, she taught classes on the history of furniture and interiors at Michigan State University. He proposed to her by mail from Rio de Janeiro, and they married in Boise, Idaho, on June 28, 1952, shortly after he returned. They frequently quarreled and she was frightened by his violent temper. Their politics were different; although he registered and voted as a Republican, she was more conservative, and her opinion on the 1954 Oppenheimer security hearing ("Where there's smoke there's fire") offended him. They separated on May 20, 1956. An interlocutory decree of divorce was entered on June 19, 1956, on the grounds of "extreme cruelty". The divorce became final on May 5, 1958.In the wake of the 1957 Sputnik crisis, the U.S. government's interest in science rose for a time. Feynman was considered for a seat on the President's Science Advisory Committee, but was not appointed. At this time, the FBI interviewed a woman close to Feynman, possibly his ex-wife Bell, who sent a written statement to J. Edgar Hoover on August 8, 1958:The U.S. government nevertheless sent Feynman to Geneva for the September 1958 Atoms for Peace Conference. On the beach at Lake Geneva, he met Gweneth Howarth, who was from Ripponden, Yorkshire, and working in Switzerland as an "au pair". Feynman's love life had been turbulent since his divorce; his previous girlfriend had walked off with his Albert Einstein Award medal and, on the advice of an earlier girlfriend, had feigned pregnancy and extorted him into paying for an abortion, then used the money to buy furniture. When Feynman found that Howarth was being paid only $25 a month, he offered her $20 a week to be his live-in maid. Feynman knew that this sort of behavior was illegal under the Mann Act, so he had a friend, Matthew Sands, act as her sponsor. Howarth pointed out that she already had two boyfriends, but decided to take Feynman up on his offer, and arrived in Altadena, California, in June 1959. She made a point of dating other men, but Feynman proposed in early 1960. They were married on September 24, 1960, at the Huntington Hotel in Pasadena. They had a son, Carl, in 1962, and adopted a daughter, Michelle, in 1968. Besides their home in Altadena, they had a beach house in Baja California, purchased with the money from Feynman's Nobel Prize.Feynman tried marijuana and ketamine at John Lilly's sensory deprivation tanks, as a way of studying consciousness. He gave up alcohol when he began to show vague, early signs of alcoholism, as he did not want to do anything that could damage his brain. Despite his curiosity about hallucinations, he was reluctant to experiment with LSD.There had been protests over his alleged sexism in 1968, and again in 1972, but there is no evidence he discriminated against women. Feynman recalled protesters entering a hall and picketing a lecture he was about to make in San Francisco, calling him a "sexist pig". Seeing the protesters, as Feynman later recalled the incident, he addressed institutional sexism by saying that "women do indeed suffer prejudice and discrimination in physics".At Caltech, Feynman investigated the physics of the superfluidity of supercooled liquid helium, where helium seems to display a complete lack of viscosity when flowing. Feynman provided a quantum-mechanical explanation for the Soviet physicist Lev Landau's theory of superfluidity. Applying the Schrödinger equation to the question showed that the superfluid was displaying quantum mechanical behavior observable on a macroscopic scale. This helped with the problem of superconductivity, but the solution eluded Feynman. It was solved with the BCS theory of superconductivity, proposed by John Bardeen, Leon Neil Cooper, and John Robert Schrieffer in 1957.Feynman, inspired by a desire to quantize the Wheeler–Feynman absorber theory of electrodynamics, laid the groundwork for the path integral formulation and Feynman diagrams.With Murray Gell-Mann, Feynman developed a model of weak decay, which showed that the current coupling in the process is a combination of vector and axial currents (an example of weak decay is the decay of a neutron into an electron, a proton, and an antineutrino). Although E. C. George Sudarshan and Robert Marshak developed the theory nearly simultaneously, Feynman's collaboration with Murray Gell-Mann was seen as seminal because the weak interaction was neatly described by the vector and axial currents. It thus combined the 1933 beta decay theory of Enrico Fermi with an explanation of parity violation.Feynman attempted an explanation, called the parton model, of the strong interactions governing nucleon scattering. The parton model emerged as a complement to the quark model developed by Gell-Mann. The relationship between the two models was murky; Gell-Mann referred to Feynman's partons derisively as "put-ons". In the mid-1960s, physicists believed that quarks were just a bookkeeping device for symmetry numbers, not real particles; the statistics of the omega-minus particle, if it were interpreted as three identical strange quarks bound together, seemed impossible if quarks were real.The SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory deep inelastic scattering experiments of the late 1960s showed that nucleons (protons and neutrons) contained point-like particles that scattered electrons. It was natural to identify these with quarks, but Feynman's parton model attempted to interpret the experimental data in a way that did not introduce additional hypotheses. For example, the data showed that some 45% of the energy momentum was carried by electrically neutral particles in the nucleon. These electrically neutral particles are now seen to be the gluons that carry the forces between the quarks, and their three-valued color quantum number solves the omega-minus problem. Feynman did not dispute the quark model; for example, when the fifth quark was discovered in 1977, Feynman immediately pointed out to his students that the discovery implied the existence of a sixth quark, which was discovered in the decade after his death.After the success of quantum electrodynamics, Feynman turned to quantum gravity. By analogy with the photon, which has spin 1, he investigated the consequences of a free massless spin 2 field and derived the Einstein field equation of general relativity, but little more. The computational device that Feynman discovered then for gravity, "ghosts", which are "particles" in the interior of his diagrams that have the "wrong" connection between spin and statistics, have proved invaluable in explaining the quantum particle behavior of the Yang–Mills theories, for example, quantum chromodynamics and the electro-weak theory. He did work on all four of the forces of nature: electromagnetic, the weak force, the strong force and gravity. John and Mary Gribbin state in their book on Feynman that "Nobody else has made such influential contributions to the investigation of all four of the interactions".Partly as a way to bring publicity to progress in physics, Feynman offered $1,000 prizes for two of his challenges in nanotechnology; one was claimed by William McLellan and the other by Tom Newman.Feynman was also interested in the relationship between physics and computation. He was also one of the first scientists to conceive the possibility of quantum computers. In the 1980s he began to spend his summers working at Thinking Machines Corporation, helping to build some of the first parallel supercomputers and considering the construction of quantum computers.In 1984–1986, he developed a variational method for the approximate calculation of path integrals, which has led to a powerful method of converting divergent perturbation expansions into convergent strong-coupling expansions (variational perturbation theory) and, as a consequence, to the most accurate determination of critical exponents measured in satellite experiments. At Caltech, he once chalked "What I cannot create I do not understand" on his blackboard.In the early 1960s, Feynman acceded to a request to "spruce up" the teaching of undergraduates at Caltech. After three years devoted to the task, he produced a series of lectures that later became "The Feynman Lectures on Physics". He wanted a picture of a drumhead sprinkled with powder to show the modes of vibration at the beginning of the book. Concerned over the connections to drugs and rock and roll that could be made from the image, the publishers changed the cover to plain red, though they included a picture of him playing drums in the foreword. "The Feynman Lectures on Physics" occupied two physicists, Robert B. Leighton and Matthew Sands, as part-time co-authors for several years. Even though the books were not adopted by universities as textbooks, they continue to sell well because they provide a deep understanding of physics. Many of his lectures and miscellaneous talks were turned into other books, including "The Character of Physical Law", "", "Statistical Mechanics", "Lectures on Gravitation", and the "Feynman Lectures on Computation".Feynman wrote about his experiences teaching physics undergraduates in Brazil. The students' studying habits and the Portuguese language textbooks were so devoid of any context or applications for their information that, in Feynman's opinion, the students were not learning physics at all. At the end of the year, Feynman was invited to give a lecture on his teaching experiences, and he agreed to do so, provided he could speak frankly, which he did.Feynman opposed rote learning or unthinking memorization and other teaching methods that emphasized form over function. "Clear thinking" and "clear presentation" were fundamental prerequisites for his attention. It could be perilous even to approach him unprepared, and he did not forget fools and pretenders. In 1964, he served on the California State Curriculum Commission, which was responsible for approving textbooks to be used by schools in California. He was not impressed with what he found. Many of the mathematics texts covered subjects of use only to pure mathematicians as part of the "New Math". Elementary students were taught about sets, but:In April 1966, Feynman delivered an address to the National Science Teachers Association, in which he suggested how students could be made to think like scientists, be open-minded, curious, and especially, to doubt. In the course of the lecture, he gave a definition of science, which he said came about by several stages. The evolution of intelligent life on planet Earth—creatures such as cats that play and learn from experience. The evolution of humans, who came to use language to pass knowledge from one individual to the next, so that the knowledge was not lost when an individual died. Unfortunately, incorrect knowledge could be passed down as well as correct knowledge, so another step was needed. Galileo and others started doubting the truth of what was passed down and to investigate "ab initio", from experience, what the true situation was—this was science.In 1974, Feynman delivered the Caltech commencement address on the topic of "cargo cult science", which has the semblance of science, but is only pseudoscience due to a lack of "a kind of scientific integrity, a principle of scientific thought that corresponds to a kind of utter honesty" on the part of the scientist. He instructed the graduating class that "The first principle is that you must not fool yourself—and you are the easiest person to fool. So you have to be very careful about that. After you've not fooled yourself, it's easy not to fool other scientists. You just have to be honest in a conventional way after that."Feynman served as doctoral advisor to 31 students.In 1977, Feynman supported his colleague Jenijoy La Belle, who had been hired as Caltech's first female professor in 1969, and filed suit with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission after she was refused tenure in 1974. The EEOC ruled against Caltech in 1977, adding that La Belle had been paid less than male colleagues. La Belle finally received tenure in 1979. Many of Feynman's colleagues were surprised that he took her side, but he had gotten to know La Belle and liked and admired her.In the 1960s, Feynman began thinking of writing an autobiography, and he began granting interviews to historians. In the 1980s, working with Ralph Leighton (Robert Leighton's son), he recorded chapters on audio tape that Ralph transcribed. The book was published in 1985 as "Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman!" and became a best-seller.Gell-Mann was upset by Feynman's account in the book of the weak interaction work, and threatened to sue, resulting in a correction being inserted in later editions. This incident was just the latest provocation in decades of bad feeling between the two scientists. Gell-Mann often expressed frustration at the attention Feynman received; he remarked: "[Feynman] was a great scientist, but he spent a great deal of his effort generating anecdotes about himself."Feynman has been criticized for a chapter in the book entitled "You Just "Ask" Them", where he describes how he learned to seduce women at a bar he went to in the summer of 1946. A mentor taught him to ask a woman if she would sleep with him before buying her anything. He describes seeing women at the bar as "bitches" in his thoughts, and tells a story of how he told a woman named Ann that she was "worse than a whore" after Ann persuaded him to buy her sandwiches by telling him he could eat them at her place, but then, after he bought them, saying they actually couldn't eat together because another man was coming over. Later on that same evening, Ann returned to the bar to take Feynman to her place. Feynman states at the end of the chapter that this behaviour wasn't typical of him: "So it worked even with an ordinary girl! But no matter how effective the lesson was, I never really used it after that. I didn't enjoy doing it that way. But it was interesting to know that things worked much differently from how I was brought up."Feynman played an important role on the Presidential Rogers Commission, which investigated the "Challenger" disaster. He had been reluctant to participate, but was persuaded by advice from his wife. Feynman clashed several times with commission chairman William P. Rogers. During a break in one hearing, Rogers told commission member Neil Armstrong, "Feynman is becoming a pain in the ass."During a televised hearing, Feynman demonstrated that the material used in the shuttle's O-rings became less resilient in cold weather by compressing a sample of the material in a clamp and immersing it in ice-cold water. The commission ultimately determined that the disaster was caused by the primary O-ring not properly sealing in unusually cold weather at Cape Canaveral.Feynman devoted the latter half of his book "What Do You Care What Other People Think?" to his experience on the Rogers Commission, straying from his usual convention of brief, light-hearted anecdotes to deliver an extended and sober narrative. Feynman's account reveals a disconnect between NASA's engineers and executives that was far more striking than he expected. His interviews of NASA's high-ranking managers revealed startling misunderstandings of elementary concepts. For instance, NASA managers claimed that there was a 1 in 100,000 chance of a catastrophic failure aboard the Shuttle, but Feynman discovered that NASA's own engineers estimated the chance of a catastrophe at closer to 1 in 200. He concluded that NASA management's estimate of the reliability of the Space Shuttle was unrealistic, and he was particularly angered that NASA used it to recruit Christa McAuliffe into the Teacher-in-Space program. He warned in his appendix to the commission's report (which was included only after he threatened not to sign the report), "For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for nature cannot be fooled."The first public recognition of Feynman's work came in 1954, when Lewis Strauss, the chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission (AEC) notified him that he had won the Albert Einstein Award, which was worth $15,000 and came with a gold medal. Because of Strauss's actions in stripping Oppenheimer of his security clearance, Feynman was reluctant to accept the award, but Isidor Isaac Rabi cautioned him: "You should never turn a man's generosity as a sword against him. Any virtue that a man has, even if he has many vices, should not be used as a tool against him." It was followed by the AEC's Ernest Orlando Lawrence Award in 1962. Schwinger, Tomonaga and Feynman shared the 1965 Nobel Prize in Physics "for their fundamental work in quantum electrodynamics, with deep-ploughing consequences for the physics of elementary particles". He was elected a Foreign Member of the Royal Society in 1965, received the Oersted Medal in 1972, and the National Medal of Science in 1979. He was elected a Member of the National Academy of Sciences, but ultimately resigned and is no longer listed by them.In 1978, Feynman sought medical treatment for abdominal pains and was diagnosed with liposarcoma, a rare form of cancer. Surgeons removed a tumor the size of a football that had crushed one kidney and his spleen. Further operations were performed in October 1986 and October 1987. He was again hospitalized at the UCLA Medical Center on February 3, 1988. A ruptured duodenal ulcer caused kidney failure, and he declined to undergo the dialysis that might have prolonged his life for a few months. Watched over by his wife Gweneth, sister Joan, and cousin Frances Lewine, he died on February 15, 1988, at age 69.When Feynman was nearing death, he asked his friend and colleague Danny Hillis why Hillis appeared so sad. Hillis replied that he thought Feynman was going to die soon. Feynman said that this sometimes bothered him, too, adding, when you get to be as old as he was, and have told so many stories to so many people, even when he was dead he would not be completely gone.Near the end of his life, Feynman attempted to visit the Tuvan Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic (ASSR) in Russia, a dream thwarted by Cold War bureaucratic issues. The letter from the Soviet government authorizing the trip was not received until the day after he died. His daughter Michelle later made the journey.His burial was at Mountain View Cemetery and Mausoleum in Altadena, California. His last words were: "I'd hate to die twice. It's so boring."Aspects of Feynman's life have been portrayed in various media. Feynman was portrayed by Matthew Broderick in the 1996 biopic "Infinity". Actor Alan Alda commissioned playwright Peter Parnell to write a two-character play about a fictional day in the life of Feynman set two years before Feynman's death. The play, "QED", premiered at the Mark Taper Forum in Los Angeles in 2001 and was later presented at the Vivian Beaumont Theater on Broadway, with both presentations starring Alda as Richard Feynman. Real Time Opera premiered its opera "Feynman" at the Norfolk (CT) Chamber Music Festival in June 2005. In 2011, Feynman was the subject of a biographical graphic novel entitled simply "Feynman", written by Jim Ottaviani and illustrated by Leland Myrick. In 2013, Feynman's role on the Rogers Commission was dramatised by the BBC in "The Challenger" (US title: "The Challenger Disaster"), with William Hurt playing Feynman.Feynman is commemorated in various ways. On May 4, 2005, the United States Postal Service issued the "American Scientists" commemorative set of four 37-cent self-adhesive stamps in several configurations. The scientists depicted were Richard Feynman, John von Neumann, Barbara McClintock, and Josiah Willard Gibbs. Feynman's stamp, sepia-toned, features a photograph of a 30-something Feynman and eight small Feynman diagrams. The stamps were designed by Victor Stabin under the artistic direction of Carl T. Herrman. The main building for the Computing Division at Fermilab is named the "Feynman Computing Center" in his honor. A photograph of Richard Feynman giving a lecture was part of the 1997 poster series commissioned by Apple Inc. for their "Think Different" advertising campaign. Sheldon Cooper, a fictional theoretical physicist from the television series "The Big Bang Theory", is a Feynman fan who has emulated him on various occasions, once by playing the bongo drums. On January 27, 2016, Bill Gates wrote an article "The Best Teacher I Never Had" describing Feynman's talents as a teacher which inspired Gates to create Project Tuva to place the videos of Feynman's Messenger Lectures, "The Character of Physical Law", on a website for public viewing. In 2015 Gates made a video on why he thought Feynman was special. The video was made for the 50th anniversary of Feynman's 1965 Nobel Prize, in response to Caltech's request for thoughts on Feynman. At CERN, home of the Large Hadron Collider, a street on the Meyrin site is named "Route Feynman" after the physicist."The Feynman Lectures on Physics" is perhaps his most accessible work for anyone with an interest in physics, compiled from lectures to Caltech undergraduates in 1961–1964. As news of the lectures' lucidity grew, professional physicists and graduate students began to drop in to listen. Co-authors Robert B. Leighton and Matthew Sands, colleagues of Feynman, edited and illustrated them into book form. The work has endured and is useful to this day. They were edited and supplemented in 2005 with "Feynman's Tips on Physics: A Problem-Solving Supplement to the Feynman Lectures on Physics" by Michael Gottlieb and Ralph Leighton (Robert Leighton's son), with support from Kip Thorne and other physicists.	[ "Manhattan Project", "California Institute of Technology" ]
Which employer did Richard Feynman work for in 09-Nov-194909-November-1949?	November 09, 1949	{ "text": [ "Cornell University" ] }	L2_Q39246_P108_1	Richard Feynman works for Manhattan Project from Jan, 1941 to Jan, 1945. Richard Feynman works for Cornell University from Jan, 1945 to Jan, 1950. Richard Feynman works for California Institute of Technology from Jan, 1950 to Jan, 1988.	Richard FeynmanRichard Phillips Feynman (; May 11, 1918 – February 15, 1988) was an American theoretical physicist, known for his work in the path integral formulation of quantum mechanics, the theory of quantum electrodynamics, the physics of the superfluidity of supercooled liquid helium, as well as his work in particle physics for which he proposed the parton model. For contributions to the development of quantum electrodynamics, Feynman received the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1965 jointly with Julian Schwinger and Shin'ichirō Tomonaga.Feynman developed a widely used pictorial representation scheme for the mathematical expressions describing the behavior of subatomic particles, which later became known as Feynman diagrams. During his lifetime, Feynman became one of the best-known scientists in the world. In a 1999 poll of 130 leading physicists worldwide by the British journal "Physics World", he was ranked the seventh greatest physicist of all time.He assisted in the development of the atomic bomb during World War II and became known to a wide public in the 1980s as a member of the Rogers Commission, the panel that investigated the Space Shuttle "Challenger" disaster. Along with his work in theoretical physics, Feynman has been credited with pioneering the field of quantum computing and introducing the concept of nanotechnology. He held the Richard C. Tolman professorship in theoretical physics at the California Institute of Technology.Feynman was a keen popularizer of physics through both books and lectures, including a 1959 talk on top-down nanotechnology called "There's Plenty of Room at the Bottom" and the three-volume publication of his undergraduate lectures, "The Feynman Lectures on Physics". Feynman also became known through his semi-autobiographical books "Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman!" and "What Do You Care What Other People Think?", and books written about him such as "Tuva or Bust!" by Ralph Leighton and the biography "Genius: The Life and Science of Richard Feynman" by James Gleick.Feynman was born on May 11, 1918, in Queens, New York City, to Lucille , a homemaker, and Melville Arthur Feynman, a sales manager originally from Minsk in Belarus (then part of the Russian Empire).Feynman was a late talker, and did not speak until after his third birthday. As an adult he spoke with a New York accent strong enough to be perceived as an affectation or exaggeration—so much so that his friends Wolfgang Pauli and Hans Bethe once commented that Feynman spoke like a "bum".The young Feynman was heavily influenced by his father, who encouraged him to ask questions to challenge orthodox thinking, and who was always ready to teach Feynman something new. From his mother, he gained the sense of humor that he had throughout his life. As a child, he had a talent for engineering, maintained an experimental laboratory in his home, and delighted in repairing radios. This radio repairing was probably the first job Feynman had, and during this time he showed early signs of an aptitude for his later career in theoretical physics, when he would analyze the issues theoretically and arrive at the solutions. When he was in grade school, he created a home burglar alarm system while his parents were out for the day running errands.When Richard was five, his mother gave birth to a younger brother, Henry Phillips, who died at age four weeks. Four years later, Richard's sister Joan was born and the family moved to Far Rockaway, Queens. Though separated by nine years, Joan and Richard were close, and they both shared a curiosity about the world. Though their mother thought women lacked the capacity to understand such things, Richard encouraged Joan's interest in astronomy, and Joan eventually became an astrophysicist.Feynman's parents were both from Jewish families but not religious, and by his youth, Feynman described himself as an "avowed atheist". Many years later, in a letter to Tina Levitan, declining a request for information for her book on Jewish Nobel Prize winners, he stated, "To select, for approbation the peculiar elements that come from some supposedly Jewish heredity is to open the door to all kinds of nonsense on racial theory", adding, "at thirteen I was not only converted to other religious views, but I also stopped believing that the Jewish people are in any way 'the chosen people'". Later in his life, during a visit to the Jewish Theological Seminary, he encountered the Talmud for the first time. He saw that it contained the original text in a little square on the page, and surrounding it were commentaries written over time by different people. In this way the Talmud had evolved, and everything that was discussed was carefully recorded. Despite being impressed, Feynman was disappointed with the lack of interest for nature and the outside world expressed by the rabbis, who cared about only those questions which arise from the Talmud.Feynman attended Far Rockaway High School, which was also attended by fellow Nobel laureates Burton Richter and Baruch Samuel Blumberg. Upon starting high school, Feynman was quickly promoted to a higher math class. An IQ test administered in high school estimated his IQ at 125—high but "merely respectable", according to biographer James Gleick. His sister Joan did better, allowing her to claim that she was smarter. Years later he declined to join Mensa International, saying that his IQ was too low. Physicist Steve Hsu stated of the test: When Feynman was 15, he taught himself trigonometry, advanced algebra, infinite series, analytic geometry, and both differential and integral calculus. Before entering college, he was experimenting with and deriving mathematical topics such as the half-derivative using his own notation. He created special symbols for logarithm, sine, cosine and tangent functions so they did not look like three variables multiplied together, and for the derivative, to remove the temptation of canceling out the formula_1's in formula_2. A member of the Arista Honor Society, in his last year in high school he won the New York University Math Championship. His habit of direct characterization sometimes rattled more conventional thinkers; for example, one of his questions, when learning feline anatomy, was "Do you have a map of the cat?" (referring to an anatomical chart).Feynman applied to Columbia University but was not accepted because of their quota for the number of Jews admitted. Instead, he attended the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he joined the Pi Lambda Phi fraternity. Although he originally majored in mathematics, he later switched to electrical engineering, as he considered mathematics to be too abstract. Noticing that he "had gone too far", he then switched to physics, which he claimed was "somewhere in between". As an undergraduate, he published two papers in the "Physical Review". One of these, which was co-written with Manuel Vallarta, was entitled "The Scattering of Cosmic Rays by the Stars of a Galaxy". The other was his senior thesis, on "Forces in Molecules", based on an idea by John C. Slater, who was sufficiently impressed by the paper to have it published. Today, it is known as the Hellmann–Feynman theorem.In 1939, Feynman received a bachelor's degree and was named a Putnam Fellow. He attained a perfect score on the graduate school entrance exams to Princeton University in physics—an unprecedented feat—and an outstanding score in mathematics, but did poorly on the history and English portions. The head of the physics department there, Henry D. Smyth, had another concern, writing to Philip M. Morse to ask: "Is Feynman Jewish? We have no definite rule against Jews but have to keep their proportion in our department reasonably small because of the difficulty of placing them." Morse conceded that Feynman was indeed Jewish, but reassured Smyth that Feynman's "physiognomy and manner, however, show no trace of this characteristic".Attendees at Feynman's first seminar, which was on the classical version of the Wheeler–Feynman absorber theory, included Albert Einstein, Wolfgang Pauli, and John von Neumann. Pauli made the prescient comment that the theory would be extremely difficult to quantize, and Einstein said that one might try to apply this method to gravity in general relativity, which Sir Fred Hoyle and Jayant Narlikar did much later as the Hoyle–Narlikar theory of gravity. Feynman received a Ph.D. from Princeton in 1942; his thesis advisor was John Archibald Wheeler. In his doctoral thesis entitled "The Principle of Least Action in Quantum Mechanics", Feynman applied the principle of stationary action to problems of quantum mechanics, inspired by a desire to quantize the Wheeler–Feynman absorber theory of electrodynamics, and laid the groundwork for the path integral formulation and Feynman diagrams. A key insight was that positrons behaved like electrons moving backwards in time. James Gleick wrote:One of the conditions of Feynman's scholarship to Princeton was that he could not be married; nevertheless, he continued to see his high school sweetheart, Arline Greenbaum, and was determined to marry her once he had been awarded his Ph.D. despite the knowledge that she was seriously ill with tuberculosis. This was an incurable disease at the time, and she was not expected to live more than two years. On June 29, 1942, they took the ferry to Staten Island, where they were married in the city office. The ceremony was attended by neither family nor friends and was witnessed by a pair of strangers. Feynman could only kiss Arline on the cheek. After the ceremony he took her to Deborah Hospital, where he visited her on weekends.In 1941, with World War II raging in Europe but the United States not yet at war, Feynman spent the summer working on ballistics problems at the Frankford Arsenal in Pennsylvania. After the attack on Pearl Harbor brought the United States into the war, Feynman was recruited by Robert R. Wilson, who was working on means to produce enriched uranium for use in an atomic bomb, as part of what would become the Manhattan Project. At the time, Feynman had not earned a graduate degree. Wilson's team at Princeton was working on a device called an isotron, intended to electromagnetically separate uranium-235 from uranium-238. This was done in a quite different manner from that used by the calutron that was under development by a team under Wilson's former mentor, Ernest O. Lawrence, at the Radiation Laboratory of the University of California. On paper, the isotron was many times more efficient than the calutron, but Feynman and Paul Olum struggled to determine whether or not it was practical. Ultimately, on Lawrence's recommendation, the isotron project was abandoned.At this juncture, in early 1943, Robert Oppenheimer was establishing the Los Alamos Laboratory, a secret laboratory on a mesa in New Mexico where atomic bombs would be designed and built. An offer was made to the Princeton team to be redeployed there. "Like a bunch of professional soldiers," Wilson later recalled, "we signed up, en masse, to go to Los Alamos." Like many other young physicists, Feynman soon fell under the spell of the charismatic Oppenheimer, who telephoned Feynman long distance from Chicago to inform him that he had found a sanatorium in Albuquerque, New Mexico, for Arline. They were among the first to depart for New Mexico, leaving on a train on March 28, 1943. The railroad supplied Arline with a wheelchair, and Feynman paid extra for a private room for her.At Los Alamos, Feynman was assigned to Hans Bethe's Theoretical (T) Division, and impressed Bethe enough to be made a group leader. He and Bethe developed the Bethe–Feynman formula for calculating the yield of a fission bomb, which built upon previous work by Robert Serber. As a junior physicist, he was not central to the project. He administered the computation group of human computers in the theoretical division. With Stanley Frankel and Nicholas Metropolis, he assisted in establishing a system for using IBM punched cards for computation. He invented a new method of computing logarithms that he later used on the Connection Machine. Other work at Los Alamos included calculating neutron equations for the Los Alamos "Water Boiler", a small nuclear reactor, to measure how close an assembly of fissile material was to criticality.On completing this work, Feynman was sent to the Clinton Engineer Works in Oak Ridge, Tennessee, where the Manhattan Project had its uranium enrichment facilities. He aided the engineers there in devising safety procedures for material storage so that criticality accidents could be avoided, especially when enriched uranium came into contact with water, which acted as a neutron moderator. He insisted on giving the rank and file a lecture on nuclear physics so that they would realize the dangers. He explained that while any amount of unenriched uranium could be safely stored, the enriched uranium had to be carefully handled. He developed a series of safety recommendations for the various grades of enrichments. He was told that if the people at Oak Ridge gave him any difficulty with his proposals, he was to inform them that Los Alamos "could not be responsible for their safety otherwise".Returning to Los Alamos, Feynman was put in charge of the group responsible for the theoretical work and calculations on the proposed uranium hydride bomb, which ultimately proved to be infeasible. He was sought out by physicist Niels Bohr for one-on-one discussions. He later discovered the reason: most of the other physicists were too much in awe of Bohr to argue with him. Feynman had no such inhibitions, vigorously pointing out anything he considered to be flawed in Bohr's thinking. He said he felt as much respect for Bohr as anyone else, but once anyone got him talking about physics, he would become so focused he forgot about social niceties. Perhaps because of this, Bohr never warmed to Feynman.At Los Alamos, which was isolated for security, Feynman amused himself by investigating the combination locks on the cabinets and desks of physicists. He often found that they left the lock combinations on the factory settings, wrote the combinations down, or used easily guessable combinations like dates. He found one cabinet's combination by trying numbers he thought a physicist might use (it proved to be 27–18–28 after the base of natural logarithms, "e" = 2.71828 ...), and found that the three filing cabinets where a colleague kept research notes all had the same combination. He left notes in the cabinets as a prank, spooking his colleague, Frederic de Hoffmann, into thinking a spy had gained access to them.Feynman's $380 monthly salary was about half the amount needed for his modest living expenses and Arline's medical bills, and they were forced to dip into her $3,300 in savings. On weekends he drove to Albuquerque to see Arline in a car borrowed from his friend Klaus Fuchs. Asked who at Los Alamos was most likely to be a spy, Fuchs mentioned Feynman's safe cracking and frequent trips to Albuquerque; Fuchs himself later confessed to spying for the Soviet Union. The FBI would compile a bulky file on Feynman, particularly in view of Feynman's Q clearance.Informed that Arline was dying, Feynman drove to Albuquerque and sat with her for hours until she died on June 16, 1945. He then immersed himself in work on the project and was present at the Trinity nuclear test. Feynman claimed to be the only person to see the explosion without the very dark glasses or welder's lenses provided, reasoning that it was safe to look through a truck windshield, as it would screen out the harmful ultraviolet radiation. The immense brightness of the explosion made him duck to the truck's floor, where he saw a temporary "purple splotch" afterimage.Feynman nominally held an appointment at the University of Wisconsin–Madison as an assistant professor of physics, but was on unpaid leave during his involvement in the Manhattan Project. In 1945, he received a letter from Dean Mark Ingraham of the College of Letters and Science requesting his return to the university to teach in the coming academic year. His appointment was not extended when he did not commit to returning. In a talk given there several years later, Feynman quipped, "It's great to be back at the only university that ever had the good sense to fire me."As early as October 30, 1943, Bethe had written to the chairman of the physics department of his university, Cornell, to recommend that Feynman be hired. On February 28, 1944, this was endorsed by Robert Bacher, also from Cornell, and one of the most senior scientists at Los Alamos. This led to an offer being made in August 1944, which Feynman accepted. Oppenheimer had also hoped to recruit Feynman to the University of California, but the head of the physics department, Raymond T. Birge, was reluctant. He made Feynman an offer in May 1945, but Feynman turned it down. Cornell matched its salary offer of $3,900 per annum. Feynman became one of the first of the Los Alamos Laboratory's group leaders to depart, leaving for Ithaca, New York, in October 1945.Because Feynman was no longer working at the Los Alamos Laboratory, he was no longer exempt from the draft. At his induction, physical Army psychiatrists diagnosed Feynman as suffering from a mental illness and the Army gave him a 4-F exemption on mental grounds. His father died suddenly on October 8, 1946, and Feynman suffered from depression. On October 17, 1946, he wrote a letter to Arline, expressing his deep love and heartbreak. The letter was sealed and only opened after his death. "Please excuse my not mailing this," the letter concluded, "but I don't know your new address." Unable to focus on research problems, Feynman began tackling physics problems, not for utility, but for self-satisfaction. One of these involved analyzing the physics of a twirling, nutating disk as it is moving through the air, inspired by an incident in the cafeteria at Cornell when someone tossed a dinner plate in the air. He read the work of Sir William Rowan Hamilton on quaternions, and attempted unsuccessfully to use them to formulate a relativistic theory of electrons. His work during this period, which used equations of rotation to express various spinning speeds, ultimately proved important to his Nobel Prize–winning work, yet because he felt burned out and had turned his attention to less immediately practical problems, he was surprised by the offers of professorships from other renowned universities, including the Institute for Advanced Study, the University of California, Los Angeles, and the University of California, Berkeley.Feynman was not the only frustrated theoretical physicist in the early post-war years. Quantum electrodynamics suffered from infinite integrals in perturbation theory. These were clear mathematical flaws in the theory, which Feynman and Wheeler had unsuccessfully attempted to work around. "Theoreticians", noted Murray Gell-Mann, "were in disgrace." In June 1947, leading American physicists met at the Shelter Island Conference. For Feynman, it was his "first big conference with big men ... I had never gone to one like this one in peacetime." The problems plaguing quantum electrodynamics were discussed, but the theoreticians were completely overshadowed by the achievements of the experimentalists, who reported the discovery of the Lamb shift, the measurement of the magnetic moment of the electron, and Robert Marshak's two-meson hypothesis.Bethe took the lead from the work of Hans Kramers, and derived a renormalized non-relativistic quantum equation for the Lamb shift. The next step was to create a relativistic version. Feynman thought that he could do this, but when he went back to Bethe with his solution, it did not converge. Feynman carefully worked through the problem again, applying the path integral formulation that he had used in his thesis. Like Bethe, he made the integral finite by applying a cut-off term. The result corresponded to Bethe's version. Feynman presented his work to his peers at the Pocono Conference in 1948. It did not go well. Julian Schwinger gave a long presentation of his work in quantum electrodynamics, and Feynman then offered his version, entitled "Alternative Formulation of Quantum Electrodynamics". The unfamiliar Feynman diagrams, used for the first time, puzzled the audience. Feynman failed to get his point across, and Paul Dirac, Edward Teller and Niels Bohr all raised objections.To Freeman Dyson, one thing at least was clear: Shin'ichirō Tomonaga, Schwinger and Feynman understood what they were talking about even if no one else did, but had not published anything. He was convinced that Feynman's formulation was easier to understand, and ultimately managed to convince Oppenheimer that this was the case. Dyson published a paper in 1949, which added new rules to Feynman's that told how to implement renormalization. Feynman was prompted to publish his ideas in the "Physical Review" in a series of papers over three years. His 1948 papers on "A Relativistic Cut-Off for Classical Electrodynamics" attempted to explain what he had been unable to get across at Pocono. His 1949 paper on "The Theory of Positrons" addressed the Schrödinger equation and Dirac equation, and introduced what is now called the Feynman propagator. Finally, in papers on the "Mathematical Formulation of the Quantum Theory of Electromagnetic Interaction" in 1950 and "An Operator Calculus Having Applications in Quantum Electrodynamics" in 1951, he developed the mathematical basis of his ideas, derived familiar formulae and advanced new ones.While papers by others initially cited Schwinger, papers citing Feynman and employing Feynman diagrams appeared in 1950, and soon became prevalent. Students learned and used the powerful new tool that Feynman had created. Computer programs were later written to compute Feynman diagrams, providing a tool of unprecedented power. It is possible to write such programs because the Feynman diagrams constitute a formal language with a formal grammar. Marc Kac provided the formal proofs of the summation under history, showing that the parabolic partial differential equation can be re-expressed as a sum under different histories (that is, an expectation operator), what is now known as the Feynman–Kac formula, the use of which extends beyond physics to many applications of stochastic processes. To Schwinger, however, the Feynman diagram was "pedagogy, not physics".By 1949, Feynman was becoming restless at Cornell. He never settled into a particular house or apartment, living in guest houses or student residences, or with married friends "until these arrangements became sexually volatile". He liked to date undergraduates, hire prostitutes, and sleep with the wives of friends. He was not fond of Ithaca's cold winter weather, and pined for a warmer climate. Above all, at Cornell, he was always in the shadow of Hans Bethe. Despite all of this, Feynman looked back favorably on the Telluride House, where he resided for a large period of his Cornell career. In an interview, he described the House as "a group of boys that have been specially selected because of their scholarship, because of their cleverness or whatever it is, to be given free board and lodging and so on, because of their brains". He enjoyed the house's convenience and said that "it's there that I did the fundamental work" for which he won the Nobel Prize.Feynman spent several weeks in Rio de Janeiro in July 1949. That year, the Soviet Union detonated its first atomic bomb, generating concerns about espionage. Fuchs was arrested as a Soviet spy in 1950 and the FBI questioned Bethe about Feynman's loyalty. Physicist David Bohm was arrested on December 4, 1950 and emigrated to Brazil in October 1951. Because of the fears of a nuclear war, a girlfriend told Feynman that he should also consider moving to South America. He had a sabbatical coming for 1951–52, and elected to spend it in Brazil, where he gave courses at the Centro Brasileiro de Pesquisas Físicas. In Brazil, Feynman was impressed with "samba" music, and learned to play the "frigideira", a metal percussion instrument based on a frying pan (".") He was an enthusiastic amateur player of bongo and conga drums and often played them in the pit orchestra in musicals. He spent time in Rio with his friend Bohm but Bohm could not convince Feynman to investigate Bohm's ideas on physics.Feynman did not return to Cornell. Bacher, who had been instrumental in bringing Feynman to Cornell, had lured him to the California Institute of Technology (Caltech). Part of the deal was that he could spend his first year on sabbatical in Brazil. He had become smitten by Mary Louise Bell from Neodesha, Kansas. They had met in a cafeteria in Cornell, where she had studied the history of Mexican art and textiles. She later followed him to Caltech, where he gave a lecture. While he was in Brazil, she taught classes on the history of furniture and interiors at Michigan State University. He proposed to her by mail from Rio de Janeiro, and they married in Boise, Idaho, on June 28, 1952, shortly after he returned. They frequently quarreled and she was frightened by his violent temper. Their politics were different; although he registered and voted as a Republican, she was more conservative, and her opinion on the 1954 Oppenheimer security hearing ("Where there's smoke there's fire") offended him. They separated on May 20, 1956. An interlocutory decree of divorce was entered on June 19, 1956, on the grounds of "extreme cruelty". The divorce became final on May 5, 1958.In the wake of the 1957 Sputnik crisis, the U.S. government's interest in science rose for a time. Feynman was considered for a seat on the President's Science Advisory Committee, but was not appointed. At this time, the FBI interviewed a woman close to Feynman, possibly his ex-wife Bell, who sent a written statement to J. Edgar Hoover on August 8, 1958:The U.S. government nevertheless sent Feynman to Geneva for the September 1958 Atoms for Peace Conference. On the beach at Lake Geneva, he met Gweneth Howarth, who was from Ripponden, Yorkshire, and working in Switzerland as an "au pair". Feynman's love life had been turbulent since his divorce; his previous girlfriend had walked off with his Albert Einstein Award medal and, on the advice of an earlier girlfriend, had feigned pregnancy and extorted him into paying for an abortion, then used the money to buy furniture. When Feynman found that Howarth was being paid only $25 a month, he offered her $20 a week to be his live-in maid. Feynman knew that this sort of behavior was illegal under the Mann Act, so he had a friend, Matthew Sands, act as her sponsor. Howarth pointed out that she already had two boyfriends, but decided to take Feynman up on his offer, and arrived in Altadena, California, in June 1959. She made a point of dating other men, but Feynman proposed in early 1960. They were married on September 24, 1960, at the Huntington Hotel in Pasadena. They had a son, Carl, in 1962, and adopted a daughter, Michelle, in 1968. Besides their home in Altadena, they had a beach house in Baja California, purchased with the money from Feynman's Nobel Prize.Feynman tried marijuana and ketamine at John Lilly's sensory deprivation tanks, as a way of studying consciousness. He gave up alcohol when he began to show vague, early signs of alcoholism, as he did not want to do anything that could damage his brain. Despite his curiosity about hallucinations, he was reluctant to experiment with LSD.There had been protests over his alleged sexism in 1968, and again in 1972, but there is no evidence he discriminated against women. Feynman recalled protesters entering a hall and picketing a lecture he was about to make in San Francisco, calling him a "sexist pig". Seeing the protesters, as Feynman later recalled the incident, he addressed institutional sexism by saying that "women do indeed suffer prejudice and discrimination in physics".At Caltech, Feynman investigated the physics of the superfluidity of supercooled liquid helium, where helium seems to display a complete lack of viscosity when flowing. Feynman provided a quantum-mechanical explanation for the Soviet physicist Lev Landau's theory of superfluidity. Applying the Schrödinger equation to the question showed that the superfluid was displaying quantum mechanical behavior observable on a macroscopic scale. This helped with the problem of superconductivity, but the solution eluded Feynman. It was solved with the BCS theory of superconductivity, proposed by John Bardeen, Leon Neil Cooper, and John Robert Schrieffer in 1957.Feynman, inspired by a desire to quantize the Wheeler–Feynman absorber theory of electrodynamics, laid the groundwork for the path integral formulation and Feynman diagrams.With Murray Gell-Mann, Feynman developed a model of weak decay, which showed that the current coupling in the process is a combination of vector and axial currents (an example of weak decay is the decay of a neutron into an electron, a proton, and an antineutrino). Although E. C. George Sudarshan and Robert Marshak developed the theory nearly simultaneously, Feynman's collaboration with Murray Gell-Mann was seen as seminal because the weak interaction was neatly described by the vector and axial currents. It thus combined the 1933 beta decay theory of Enrico Fermi with an explanation of parity violation.Feynman attempted an explanation, called the parton model, of the strong interactions governing nucleon scattering. The parton model emerged as a complement to the quark model developed by Gell-Mann. The relationship between the two models was murky; Gell-Mann referred to Feynman's partons derisively as "put-ons". In the mid-1960s, physicists believed that quarks were just a bookkeeping device for symmetry numbers, not real particles; the statistics of the omega-minus particle, if it were interpreted as three identical strange quarks bound together, seemed impossible if quarks were real.The SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory deep inelastic scattering experiments of the late 1960s showed that nucleons (protons and neutrons) contained point-like particles that scattered electrons. It was natural to identify these with quarks, but Feynman's parton model attempted to interpret the experimental data in a way that did not introduce additional hypotheses. For example, the data showed that some 45% of the energy momentum was carried by electrically neutral particles in the nucleon. These electrically neutral particles are now seen to be the gluons that carry the forces between the quarks, and their three-valued color quantum number solves the omega-minus problem. Feynman did not dispute the quark model; for example, when the fifth quark was discovered in 1977, Feynman immediately pointed out to his students that the discovery implied the existence of a sixth quark, which was discovered in the decade after his death.After the success of quantum electrodynamics, Feynman turned to quantum gravity. By analogy with the photon, which has spin 1, he investigated the consequences of a free massless spin 2 field and derived the Einstein field equation of general relativity, but little more. The computational device that Feynman discovered then for gravity, "ghosts", which are "particles" in the interior of his diagrams that have the "wrong" connection between spin and statistics, have proved invaluable in explaining the quantum particle behavior of the Yang–Mills theories, for example, quantum chromodynamics and the electro-weak theory. He did work on all four of the forces of nature: electromagnetic, the weak force, the strong force and gravity. John and Mary Gribbin state in their book on Feynman that "Nobody else has made such influential contributions to the investigation of all four of the interactions".Partly as a way to bring publicity to progress in physics, Feynman offered $1,000 prizes for two of his challenges in nanotechnology; one was claimed by William McLellan and the other by Tom Newman.Feynman was also interested in the relationship between physics and computation. He was also one of the first scientists to conceive the possibility of quantum computers. In the 1980s he began to spend his summers working at Thinking Machines Corporation, helping to build some of the first parallel supercomputers and considering the construction of quantum computers.In 1984–1986, he developed a variational method for the approximate calculation of path integrals, which has led to a powerful method of converting divergent perturbation expansions into convergent strong-coupling expansions (variational perturbation theory) and, as a consequence, to the most accurate determination of critical exponents measured in satellite experiments. At Caltech, he once chalked "What I cannot create I do not understand" on his blackboard.In the early 1960s, Feynman acceded to a request to "spruce up" the teaching of undergraduates at Caltech. After three years devoted to the task, he produced a series of lectures that later became "The Feynman Lectures on Physics". He wanted a picture of a drumhead sprinkled with powder to show the modes of vibration at the beginning of the book. Concerned over the connections to drugs and rock and roll that could be made from the image, the publishers changed the cover to plain red, though they included a picture of him playing drums in the foreword. "The Feynman Lectures on Physics" occupied two physicists, Robert B. Leighton and Matthew Sands, as part-time co-authors for several years. Even though the books were not adopted by universities as textbooks, they continue to sell well because they provide a deep understanding of physics. Many of his lectures and miscellaneous talks were turned into other books, including "The Character of Physical Law", "", "Statistical Mechanics", "Lectures on Gravitation", and the "Feynman Lectures on Computation".Feynman wrote about his experiences teaching physics undergraduates in Brazil. The students' studying habits and the Portuguese language textbooks were so devoid of any context or applications for their information that, in Feynman's opinion, the students were not learning physics at all. At the end of the year, Feynman was invited to give a lecture on his teaching experiences, and he agreed to do so, provided he could speak frankly, which he did.Feynman opposed rote learning or unthinking memorization and other teaching methods that emphasized form over function. "Clear thinking" and "clear presentation" were fundamental prerequisites for his attention. It could be perilous even to approach him unprepared, and he did not forget fools and pretenders. In 1964, he served on the California State Curriculum Commission, which was responsible for approving textbooks to be used by schools in California. He was not impressed with what he found. Many of the mathematics texts covered subjects of use only to pure mathematicians as part of the "New Math". Elementary students were taught about sets, but:In April 1966, Feynman delivered an address to the National Science Teachers Association, in which he suggested how students could be made to think like scientists, be open-minded, curious, and especially, to doubt. In the course of the lecture, he gave a definition of science, which he said came about by several stages. The evolution of intelligent life on planet Earth—creatures such as cats that play and learn from experience. The evolution of humans, who came to use language to pass knowledge from one individual to the next, so that the knowledge was not lost when an individual died. Unfortunately, incorrect knowledge could be passed down as well as correct knowledge, so another step was needed. Galileo and others started doubting the truth of what was passed down and to investigate "ab initio", from experience, what the true situation was—this was science.In 1974, Feynman delivered the Caltech commencement address on the topic of "cargo cult science", which has the semblance of science, but is only pseudoscience due to a lack of "a kind of scientific integrity, a principle of scientific thought that corresponds to a kind of utter honesty" on the part of the scientist. He instructed the graduating class that "The first principle is that you must not fool yourself—and you are the easiest person to fool. So you have to be very careful about that. After you've not fooled yourself, it's easy not to fool other scientists. You just have to be honest in a conventional way after that."Feynman served as doctoral advisor to 31 students.In 1977, Feynman supported his colleague Jenijoy La Belle, who had been hired as Caltech's first female professor in 1969, and filed suit with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission after she was refused tenure in 1974. The EEOC ruled against Caltech in 1977, adding that La Belle had been paid less than male colleagues. La Belle finally received tenure in 1979. Many of Feynman's colleagues were surprised that he took her side, but he had gotten to know La Belle and liked and admired her.In the 1960s, Feynman began thinking of writing an autobiography, and he began granting interviews to historians. In the 1980s, working with Ralph Leighton (Robert Leighton's son), he recorded chapters on audio tape that Ralph transcribed. The book was published in 1985 as "Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman!" and became a best-seller.Gell-Mann was upset by Feynman's account in the book of the weak interaction work, and threatened to sue, resulting in a correction being inserted in later editions. This incident was just the latest provocation in decades of bad feeling between the two scientists. Gell-Mann often expressed frustration at the attention Feynman received; he remarked: "[Feynman] was a great scientist, but he spent a great deal of his effort generating anecdotes about himself."Feynman has been criticized for a chapter in the book entitled "You Just "Ask" Them", where he describes how he learned to seduce women at a bar he went to in the summer of 1946. A mentor taught him to ask a woman if she would sleep with him before buying her anything. He describes seeing women at the bar as "bitches" in his thoughts, and tells a story of how he told a woman named Ann that she was "worse than a whore" after Ann persuaded him to buy her sandwiches by telling him he could eat them at her place, but then, after he bought them, saying they actually couldn't eat together because another man was coming over. Later on that same evening, Ann returned to the bar to take Feynman to her place. Feynman states at the end of the chapter that this behaviour wasn't typical of him: "So it worked even with an ordinary girl! But no matter how effective the lesson was, I never really used it after that. I didn't enjoy doing it that way. But it was interesting to know that things worked much differently from how I was brought up."Feynman played an important role on the Presidential Rogers Commission, which investigated the "Challenger" disaster. He had been reluctant to participate, but was persuaded by advice from his wife. Feynman clashed several times with commission chairman William P. Rogers. During a break in one hearing, Rogers told commission member Neil Armstrong, "Feynman is becoming a pain in the ass."During a televised hearing, Feynman demonstrated that the material used in the shuttle's O-rings became less resilient in cold weather by compressing a sample of the material in a clamp and immersing it in ice-cold water. The commission ultimately determined that the disaster was caused by the primary O-ring not properly sealing in unusually cold weather at Cape Canaveral.Feynman devoted the latter half of his book "What Do You Care What Other People Think?" to his experience on the Rogers Commission, straying from his usual convention of brief, light-hearted anecdotes to deliver an extended and sober narrative. Feynman's account reveals a disconnect between NASA's engineers and executives that was far more striking than he expected. His interviews of NASA's high-ranking managers revealed startling misunderstandings of elementary concepts. For instance, NASA managers claimed that there was a 1 in 100,000 chance of a catastrophic failure aboard the Shuttle, but Feynman discovered that NASA's own engineers estimated the chance of a catastrophe at closer to 1 in 200. He concluded that NASA management's estimate of the reliability of the Space Shuttle was unrealistic, and he was particularly angered that NASA used it to recruit Christa McAuliffe into the Teacher-in-Space program. He warned in his appendix to the commission's report (which was included only after he threatened not to sign the report), "For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for nature cannot be fooled."The first public recognition of Feynman's work came in 1954, when Lewis Strauss, the chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission (AEC) notified him that he had won the Albert Einstein Award, which was worth $15,000 and came with a gold medal. Because of Strauss's actions in stripping Oppenheimer of his security clearance, Feynman was reluctant to accept the award, but Isidor Isaac Rabi cautioned him: "You should never turn a man's generosity as a sword against him. Any virtue that a man has, even if he has many vices, should not be used as a tool against him." It was followed by the AEC's Ernest Orlando Lawrence Award in 1962. Schwinger, Tomonaga and Feynman shared the 1965 Nobel Prize in Physics "for their fundamental work in quantum electrodynamics, with deep-ploughing consequences for the physics of elementary particles". He was elected a Foreign Member of the Royal Society in 1965, received the Oersted Medal in 1972, and the National Medal of Science in 1979. He was elected a Member of the National Academy of Sciences, but ultimately resigned and is no longer listed by them.In 1978, Feynman sought medical treatment for abdominal pains and was diagnosed with liposarcoma, a rare form of cancer. Surgeons removed a tumor the size of a football that had crushed one kidney and his spleen. Further operations were performed in October 1986 and October 1987. He was again hospitalized at the UCLA Medical Center on February 3, 1988. A ruptured duodenal ulcer caused kidney failure, and he declined to undergo the dialysis that might have prolonged his life for a few months. Watched over by his wife Gweneth, sister Joan, and cousin Frances Lewine, he died on February 15, 1988, at age 69.When Feynman was nearing death, he asked his friend and colleague Danny Hillis why Hillis appeared so sad. Hillis replied that he thought Feynman was going to die soon. Feynman said that this sometimes bothered him, too, adding, when you get to be as old as he was, and have told so many stories to so many people, even when he was dead he would not be completely gone.Near the end of his life, Feynman attempted to visit the Tuvan Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic (ASSR) in Russia, a dream thwarted by Cold War bureaucratic issues. The letter from the Soviet government authorizing the trip was not received until the day after he died. His daughter Michelle later made the journey.His burial was at Mountain View Cemetery and Mausoleum in Altadena, California. His last words were: "I'd hate to die twice. It's so boring."Aspects of Feynman's life have been portrayed in various media. Feynman was portrayed by Matthew Broderick in the 1996 biopic "Infinity". Actor Alan Alda commissioned playwright Peter Parnell to write a two-character play about a fictional day in the life of Feynman set two years before Feynman's death. The play, "QED", premiered at the Mark Taper Forum in Los Angeles in 2001 and was later presented at the Vivian Beaumont Theater on Broadway, with both presentations starring Alda as Richard Feynman. Real Time Opera premiered its opera "Feynman" at the Norfolk (CT) Chamber Music Festival in June 2005. In 2011, Feynman was the subject of a biographical graphic novel entitled simply "Feynman", written by Jim Ottaviani and illustrated by Leland Myrick. In 2013, Feynman's role on the Rogers Commission was dramatised by the BBC in "The Challenger" (US title: "The Challenger Disaster"), with William Hurt playing Feynman.Feynman is commemorated in various ways. On May 4, 2005, the United States Postal Service issued the "American Scientists" commemorative set of four 37-cent self-adhesive stamps in several configurations. The scientists depicted were Richard Feynman, John von Neumann, Barbara McClintock, and Josiah Willard Gibbs. Feynman's stamp, sepia-toned, features a photograph of a 30-something Feynman and eight small Feynman diagrams. The stamps were designed by Victor Stabin under the artistic direction of Carl T. Herrman. The main building for the Computing Division at Fermilab is named the "Feynman Computing Center" in his honor. A photograph of Richard Feynman giving a lecture was part of the 1997 poster series commissioned by Apple Inc. for their "Think Different" advertising campaign. Sheldon Cooper, a fictional theoretical physicist from the television series "The Big Bang Theory", is a Feynman fan who has emulated him on various occasions, once by playing the bongo drums. On January 27, 2016, Bill Gates wrote an article "The Best Teacher I Never Had" describing Feynman's talents as a teacher which inspired Gates to create Project Tuva to place the videos of Feynman's Messenger Lectures, "The Character of Physical Law", on a website for public viewing. In 2015 Gates made a video on why he thought Feynman was special. The video was made for the 50th anniversary of Feynman's 1965 Nobel Prize, in response to Caltech's request for thoughts on Feynman. At CERN, home of the Large Hadron Collider, a street on the Meyrin site is named "Route Feynman" after the physicist."The Feynman Lectures on Physics" is perhaps his most accessible work for anyone with an interest in physics, compiled from lectures to Caltech undergraduates in 1961–1964. As news of the lectures' lucidity grew, professional physicists and graduate students began to drop in to listen. Co-authors Robert B. Leighton and Matthew Sands, colleagues of Feynman, edited and illustrated them into book form. The work has endured and is useful to this day. They were edited and supplemented in 2005 with "Feynman's Tips on Physics: A Problem-Solving Supplement to the Feynman Lectures on Physics" by Michael Gottlieb and Ralph Leighton (Robert Leighton's son), with support from Kip Thorne and other physicists.	[ "Manhattan Project", "California Institute of Technology" ]
Which team did Adam Rooney play for in Jan, 2012?	January 12, 2012	{ "text": [ "Swindon Town F.C.", "Birmingham City F.C." ] }	L2_Q2737534_P54_7	Adam Rooney plays for Oldham Athletic A.F.C. from Jan, 2013 to Jan, 2014. Adam Rooney plays for Aberdeen F.C. from Jan, 2014 to Dec, 2022. Adam Rooney plays for Bury F.C. from Jan, 2008 to Jan, 2008. Adam Rooney plays for Stoke City F.C. from Jan, 2006 to Jan, 2008. Adam Rooney plays for Swindon Town F.C. from Jan, 2012 to Jan, 2013. Adam Rooney plays for Chesterfield F.C. from Jan, 2007 to Jan, 2008. Adam Rooney plays for Yeovil Town F.C. from Jan, 2007 to Jan, 2007. Adam Rooney plays for Birmingham City F.C. from Jan, 2011 to Jan, 2013. Adam Rooney plays for Republic of Ireland national under-21 football team from Jan, 2007 to Jan, 2010. Adam Rooney plays for Inverness Caledonian Thistle F.C. from Jan, 2008 to Jan, 2011.	Adam RooneyAdam Christopher David Rooney (born 21 April 1988) is an Irish professional footballer who plays as a striker for club Solihull Moors. He previously played for Stoke City, spent spells on loan at Yeovil Town, Chesterfield and Bury, was a regular first-team member for Inverness Caledonian Thistle, and played for Birmingham City and had a loan spell at Swindon Town. He played for Oldham Athletic and spent four-and-a-half seasons with Aberdeen before returning to England to sign for Salford City.Rooney signed for Stoke City in the summer of 2005, after spells with Home Farm, Cherry Orchard and Crumlin United. In his first season at Stoke, Rooney made his debut at academy and reserves levels, before making his first team debut as a second-half substitute against Tamworth in the FA Cup. Rooney scored his first goal for Stoke against Reading on 17 April 2006. In only his second full start for Stoke City, he scored a hat-trick against already relegated Brighton & Hove Albion in the final fixture of the 2005–06 season to become Stoke's youngest ever hat-trick scorer.On 16 March 2007, Rooney joined Yeovil Town on loan for a month. The loan was later extended until the end of the season. However, he returned to Stoke on 9 May 2007, after making one start and two substitute appearances for Yeovil.In August 2007, he joined League Two side Chesterfield on a four-month loan.Rooney travelled with Scottish Premier League club Inverness Caledonian Thistle's squad on their pre-season tour of Denmark and returned to train with the Highland side in August, before the club announced his signing on a three-year deal.Rooney scored his first goal for Inverness in a 2–1 defeat at home to St Mirren, which was the SPL's 6000th goal. In the 2009–10 season he was awarded the "Irn Bru Phenomenal" First Division Player of the Year award. He was top scorer in the First Division with 24 goals, 27 in all competitions, the last of which was scored against Dundee in the last fixture of the season. After the game the team were presented with the championship trophy.After his contract with Inverness expired at the end of the 2010–11 season, Rooney signed a two-year deal with Championship side Birmingham City. He scored what manager Chris Hughton described as "a typical poacher's goal" in a pre-season friendly against Cork City, and made his league debut for the club on the opening day of the new season, playing the whole of a 2–1 defeat at Derby County. His first competitive goal for the club came from the penalty spot to open the scoring away at Middlesbrough on 21 August; Middlesbrough came back to win 3–1. He also scored the following week against Watford. In the last game of the Europa League group stage, Rooney scored his first European goal as Birmingham beat NK Maribor 1–0, but a draw between the other two teams in the group meant Birmingham failed to progress to the last 32.On the last day of the August 2012 transfer window, Rooney joined League One club Swindon Town on loan for the season with a view to a permanent transfer. Swindon defender Paul Caddis moved in the other direction, also on loan for the season.Although a deal had been agreed for Rooney to join Swindon permanently at the end of the season, the club's new owners questioned the validity of the contract, and the player trained with League One club Oldham Athletic during 2013 pre-season while discussions continued to resolve the situation. On 1 August, he signed a two-year contract with Oldham, with an option of a further year. He scored his first goals for the club against Port Vale, scoring twice in a 3–1 win at Boundary Park.On 23 January 2014, Rooney signed a two-and-a-half-year contract with Scottish Premiership side Aberdeen. He scored on his debut two days later in a 2–2 draw with Motherwell at Fir Park, and scored his second in as many matches, as well as crossing for Jonny Hayes' opening goal, as Aberdeen beat St Johnstone 4–0 to progress to the 2014 Scottish League Cup Final. Rooney scored his fifth goal in six appearances on 25 February, to help his side end Celtic's 26-match unbeaten run in the Premiership season. On 8 March 2014, Rooney scored his sixth goal in eight appearances in a 1–0 Scottish Cup quarter-final win over Dumbarton.Rooney started for Aberdeen against his former club Inverness in the 2014 Scottish League Cup Final. A 0–0 scoreline after 90 minutes led to extra time and penalties, where Rooney scored the decisive penalty kick in a 4–2 victory to win the League Cup; it was Aberdeen's first piece of silverware for 19 years. Rooney was voted Scottish Professional Football Player of the Month for February 2014.Rooney started the 2014–2015 season strongly by scoring two goals in a 5–0 home victory against FK Daugava Riga in the first qualifying round of the Europa League. He continued his strong start with a first-half hat-trick in a 3–0 away win in the second leg. Rooney went on to give the Dons the lead in the second leg of the second qualifying round against FC Groningen, scoring a penalty as Aberdeen won 2–1, progressing to the third qualifying round to face Real Sociedad. This put his European goals total with Aberdeen to six in four games. Rooney scored his first league goal of the season in a 3–0 win against Ross County and continued his scoring exploits four days later with his second hat-trick for the Dons and tenth goal of the season in a 4–0 League Cup win against Livingston. Rooney then provided the only goal in a game against Hamilton Academical in the same competition to see the Dons through to the semi-finals. On 23 November, Rooney continued his good form and scored his 14th goal of the season by converting a penalty in a 1–0 victory away against Partick Thistle. On 22 December, Rooney signed a contract extension running until the summer of 2018. Rooney scored 28 goals in total for the season and finished the top scorer in the Scottish Premiership.On 5 August 2016, Rooney signed a four-year contract extension at Aberdeen. He scored his 100th Scottish League goal on 31 March 2017, in a 7–0 victory over Dundee. On 22 April 2017, in the semi-final of the Scottish Cup, Rooney opened the scoring after just 12 seconds as Aberdeen won 3–2 against Hibernian.Rooney signed a three-year contract with Salford City of the National League on 19 July 2018; the fee was undisclosed. The transfer led to Accrington Stanley owner Andy Holt accusing Salford of "buying" a place in the English Football League, with Rooney reportedly due to earn £4,000 per week at Salford. He made his debut in the opening match of the 2018–19 season on 4 August, playing the whole match as Salford drew 1–1 at home to Leyton Orient.Rooney joined National League club Solihull Moors on 13 March 2020 on a contract to run until the end of the 2021–22 season. The fee was undisclosed. Later that day, elite football in England was suspended because of the COVID-19 pandemic. The National League soon followed suit, and the season was declared complete, apart from the play-offs for which Solihull Moors had not qualified. Interviewed for "The Times" later in March, Rooney speculated that he might not make his debut for another six months. It was nearer seven: on 17 October, Rooney started Solihull Moors' match at home to Boreham Wood and, playing with ten men for most of the match after Darren Carter was sent off, he scored the only goal after 75 minutes.Rooney played for the Republic of Ireland under-18 team in the 2005 European Youth Olympic Festival in Lignano Sabbiadoro; he scored twice as Ireland beat Switzerland to win the bronze medal. On 14 May 2007, Rooney scored a hat-trick in the Ireland under-19s' 3–0 win over Bulgaria in the elite qualifying phase of the 2007 European Under-19 Championships.He was capped nine times for the under-21 team between 2007 and 2010.He was called up to the senior Republic of Ireland squad in August 2015 for the first time with manager Martin O'Neill including him in a 37-man preliminary squad to face Gibraltar and Georgia in Euro 2016 qualifiers.Rooney was born in Dublin. His older brother Mark was also a professional footballer.Inverness Caledonian ThistleAberdeenRepublic of Ireland U18	[ "Yeovil Town F.C.", "Aberdeen F.C.", "Chesterfield F.C.", "Bury F.C.", "Inverness Caledonian Thistle F.C.", "Oldham Athletic A.F.C.", "Republic of Ireland national under-21 football team", "Stoke City F.C." ]
Which team did Adam Rooney play for in 2012-01-12?	January 12, 2012	{ "text": [ "Swindon Town F.C.", "Birmingham City F.C." ] }	L2_Q2737534_P54_7	Adam Rooney plays for Oldham Athletic A.F.C. from Jan, 2013 to Jan, 2014. Adam Rooney plays for Aberdeen F.C. from Jan, 2014 to Dec, 2022. Adam Rooney plays for Bury F.C. from Jan, 2008 to Jan, 2008. Adam Rooney plays for Stoke City F.C. from Jan, 2006 to Jan, 2008. Adam Rooney plays for Swindon Town F.C. from Jan, 2012 to Jan, 2013. Adam Rooney plays for Chesterfield F.C. from Jan, 2007 to Jan, 2008. Adam Rooney plays for Yeovil Town F.C. from Jan, 2007 to Jan, 2007. Adam Rooney plays for Birmingham City F.C. from Jan, 2011 to Jan, 2013. Adam Rooney plays for Republic of Ireland national under-21 football team from Jan, 2007 to Jan, 2010. Adam Rooney plays for Inverness Caledonian Thistle F.C. from Jan, 2008 to Jan, 2011.	Adam RooneyAdam Christopher David Rooney (born 21 April 1988) is an Irish professional footballer who plays as a striker for club Solihull Moors. He previously played for Stoke City, spent spells on loan at Yeovil Town, Chesterfield and Bury, was a regular first-team member for Inverness Caledonian Thistle, and played for Birmingham City and had a loan spell at Swindon Town. He played for Oldham Athletic and spent four-and-a-half seasons with Aberdeen before returning to England to sign for Salford City.Rooney signed for Stoke City in the summer of 2005, after spells with Home Farm, Cherry Orchard and Crumlin United. In his first season at Stoke, Rooney made his debut at academy and reserves levels, before making his first team debut as a second-half substitute against Tamworth in the FA Cup. Rooney scored his first goal for Stoke against Reading on 17 April 2006. In only his second full start for Stoke City, he scored a hat-trick against already relegated Brighton & Hove Albion in the final fixture of the 2005–06 season to become Stoke's youngest ever hat-trick scorer.On 16 March 2007, Rooney joined Yeovil Town on loan for a month. The loan was later extended until the end of the season. However, he returned to Stoke on 9 May 2007, after making one start and two substitute appearances for Yeovil.In August 2007, he joined League Two side Chesterfield on a four-month loan.Rooney travelled with Scottish Premier League club Inverness Caledonian Thistle's squad on their pre-season tour of Denmark and returned to train with the Highland side in August, before the club announced his signing on a three-year deal.Rooney scored his first goal for Inverness in a 2–1 defeat at home to St Mirren, which was the SPL's 6000th goal. In the 2009–10 season he was awarded the "Irn Bru Phenomenal" First Division Player of the Year award. He was top scorer in the First Division with 24 goals, 27 in all competitions, the last of which was scored against Dundee in the last fixture of the season. After the game the team were presented with the championship trophy.After his contract with Inverness expired at the end of the 2010–11 season, Rooney signed a two-year deal with Championship side Birmingham City. He scored what manager Chris Hughton described as "a typical poacher's goal" in a pre-season friendly against Cork City, and made his league debut for the club on the opening day of the new season, playing the whole of a 2–1 defeat at Derby County. His first competitive goal for the club came from the penalty spot to open the scoring away at Middlesbrough on 21 August; Middlesbrough came back to win 3–1. He also scored the following week against Watford. In the last game of the Europa League group stage, Rooney scored his first European goal as Birmingham beat NK Maribor 1–0, but a draw between the other two teams in the group meant Birmingham failed to progress to the last 32.On the last day of the August 2012 transfer window, Rooney joined League One club Swindon Town on loan for the season with a view to a permanent transfer. Swindon defender Paul Caddis moved in the other direction, also on loan for the season.Although a deal had been agreed for Rooney to join Swindon permanently at the end of the season, the club's new owners questioned the validity of the contract, and the player trained with League One club Oldham Athletic during 2013 pre-season while discussions continued to resolve the situation. On 1 August, he signed a two-year contract with Oldham, with an option of a further year. He scored his first goals for the club against Port Vale, scoring twice in a 3–1 win at Boundary Park.On 23 January 2014, Rooney signed a two-and-a-half-year contract with Scottish Premiership side Aberdeen. He scored on his debut two days later in a 2–2 draw with Motherwell at Fir Park, and scored his second in as many matches, as well as crossing for Jonny Hayes' opening goal, as Aberdeen beat St Johnstone 4–0 to progress to the 2014 Scottish League Cup Final. Rooney scored his fifth goal in six appearances on 25 February, to help his side end Celtic's 26-match unbeaten run in the Premiership season. On 8 March 2014, Rooney scored his sixth goal in eight appearances in a 1–0 Scottish Cup quarter-final win over Dumbarton.Rooney started for Aberdeen against his former club Inverness in the 2014 Scottish League Cup Final. A 0–0 scoreline after 90 minutes led to extra time and penalties, where Rooney scored the decisive penalty kick in a 4–2 victory to win the League Cup; it was Aberdeen's first piece of silverware for 19 years. Rooney was voted Scottish Professional Football Player of the Month for February 2014.Rooney started the 2014–2015 season strongly by scoring two goals in a 5–0 home victory against FK Daugava Riga in the first qualifying round of the Europa League. He continued his strong start with a first-half hat-trick in a 3–0 away win in the second leg. Rooney went on to give the Dons the lead in the second leg of the second qualifying round against FC Groningen, scoring a penalty as Aberdeen won 2–1, progressing to the third qualifying round to face Real Sociedad. This put his European goals total with Aberdeen to six in four games. Rooney scored his first league goal of the season in a 3–0 win against Ross County and continued his scoring exploits four days later with his second hat-trick for the Dons and tenth goal of the season in a 4–0 League Cup win against Livingston. Rooney then provided the only goal in a game against Hamilton Academical in the same competition to see the Dons through to the semi-finals. On 23 November, Rooney continued his good form and scored his 14th goal of the season by converting a penalty in a 1–0 victory away against Partick Thistle. On 22 December, Rooney signed a contract extension running until the summer of 2018. Rooney scored 28 goals in total for the season and finished the top scorer in the Scottish Premiership.On 5 August 2016, Rooney signed a four-year contract extension at Aberdeen. He scored his 100th Scottish League goal on 31 March 2017, in a 7–0 victory over Dundee. On 22 April 2017, in the semi-final of the Scottish Cup, Rooney opened the scoring after just 12 seconds as Aberdeen won 3–2 against Hibernian.Rooney signed a three-year contract with Salford City of the National League on 19 July 2018; the fee was undisclosed. The transfer led to Accrington Stanley owner Andy Holt accusing Salford of "buying" a place in the English Football League, with Rooney reportedly due to earn £4,000 per week at Salford. He made his debut in the opening match of the 2018–19 season on 4 August, playing the whole match as Salford drew 1–1 at home to Leyton Orient.Rooney joined National League club Solihull Moors on 13 March 2020 on a contract to run until the end of the 2021–22 season. The fee was undisclosed. Later that day, elite football in England was suspended because of the COVID-19 pandemic. The National League soon followed suit, and the season was declared complete, apart from the play-offs for which Solihull Moors had not qualified. Interviewed for "The Times" later in March, Rooney speculated that he might not make his debut for another six months. It was nearer seven: on 17 October, Rooney started Solihull Moors' match at home to Boreham Wood and, playing with ten men for most of the match after Darren Carter was sent off, he scored the only goal after 75 minutes.Rooney played for the Republic of Ireland under-18 team in the 2005 European Youth Olympic Festival in Lignano Sabbiadoro; he scored twice as Ireland beat Switzerland to win the bronze medal. On 14 May 2007, Rooney scored a hat-trick in the Ireland under-19s' 3–0 win over Bulgaria in the elite qualifying phase of the 2007 European Under-19 Championships.He was capped nine times for the under-21 team between 2007 and 2010.He was called up to the senior Republic of Ireland squad in August 2015 for the first time with manager Martin O'Neill including him in a 37-man preliminary squad to face Gibraltar and Georgia in Euro 2016 qualifiers.Rooney was born in Dublin. His older brother Mark was also a professional footballer.Inverness Caledonian ThistleAberdeenRepublic of Ireland U18	[ "Yeovil Town F.C.", "Aberdeen F.C.", "Chesterfield F.C.", "Bury F.C.", "Inverness Caledonian Thistle F.C.", "Oldham Athletic A.F.C.", "Republic of Ireland national under-21 football team", "Stoke City F.C." ]
Which team did Adam Rooney play for in 12/01/2012?	January 12, 2012	{ "text": [ "Swindon Town F.C.", "Birmingham City F.C." ] }	L2_Q2737534_P54_7	Adam Rooney plays for Oldham Athletic A.F.C. from Jan, 2013 to Jan, 2014. Adam Rooney plays for Aberdeen F.C. from Jan, 2014 to Dec, 2022. Adam Rooney plays for Bury F.C. from Jan, 2008 to Jan, 2008. Adam Rooney plays for Stoke City F.C. from Jan, 2006 to Jan, 2008. Adam Rooney plays for Swindon Town F.C. from Jan, 2012 to Jan, 2013. Adam Rooney plays for Chesterfield F.C. from Jan, 2007 to Jan, 2008. Adam Rooney plays for Yeovil Town F.C. from Jan, 2007 to Jan, 2007. Adam Rooney plays for Birmingham City F.C. from Jan, 2011 to Jan, 2013. Adam Rooney plays for Republic of Ireland national under-21 football team from Jan, 2007 to Jan, 2010. Adam Rooney plays for Inverness Caledonian Thistle F.C. from Jan, 2008 to Jan, 2011.	Adam RooneyAdam Christopher David Rooney (born 21 April 1988) is an Irish professional footballer who plays as a striker for club Solihull Moors. He previously played for Stoke City, spent spells on loan at Yeovil Town, Chesterfield and Bury, was a regular first-team member for Inverness Caledonian Thistle, and played for Birmingham City and had a loan spell at Swindon Town. He played for Oldham Athletic and spent four-and-a-half seasons with Aberdeen before returning to England to sign for Salford City.Rooney signed for Stoke City in the summer of 2005, after spells with Home Farm, Cherry Orchard and Crumlin United. In his first season at Stoke, Rooney made his debut at academy and reserves levels, before making his first team debut as a second-half substitute against Tamworth in the FA Cup. Rooney scored his first goal for Stoke against Reading on 17 April 2006. In only his second full start for Stoke City, he scored a hat-trick against already relegated Brighton & Hove Albion in the final fixture of the 2005–06 season to become Stoke's youngest ever hat-trick scorer.On 16 March 2007, Rooney joined Yeovil Town on loan for a month. The loan was later extended until the end of the season. However, he returned to Stoke on 9 May 2007, after making one start and two substitute appearances for Yeovil.In August 2007, he joined League Two side Chesterfield on a four-month loan.Rooney travelled with Scottish Premier League club Inverness Caledonian Thistle's squad on their pre-season tour of Denmark and returned to train with the Highland side in August, before the club announced his signing on a three-year deal.Rooney scored his first goal for Inverness in a 2–1 defeat at home to St Mirren, which was the SPL's 6000th goal. In the 2009–10 season he was awarded the "Irn Bru Phenomenal" First Division Player of the Year award. He was top scorer in the First Division with 24 goals, 27 in all competitions, the last of which was scored against Dundee in the last fixture of the season. After the game the team were presented with the championship trophy.After his contract with Inverness expired at the end of the 2010–11 season, Rooney signed a two-year deal with Championship side Birmingham City. He scored what manager Chris Hughton described as "a typical poacher's goal" in a pre-season friendly against Cork City, and made his league debut for the club on the opening day of the new season, playing the whole of a 2–1 defeat at Derby County. His first competitive goal for the club came from the penalty spot to open the scoring away at Middlesbrough on 21 August; Middlesbrough came back to win 3–1. He also scored the following week against Watford. In the last game of the Europa League group stage, Rooney scored his first European goal as Birmingham beat NK Maribor 1–0, but a draw between the other two teams in the group meant Birmingham failed to progress to the last 32.On the last day of the August 2012 transfer window, Rooney joined League One club Swindon Town on loan for the season with a view to a permanent transfer. Swindon defender Paul Caddis moved in the other direction, also on loan for the season.Although a deal had been agreed for Rooney to join Swindon permanently at the end of the season, the club's new owners questioned the validity of the contract, and the player trained with League One club Oldham Athletic during 2013 pre-season while discussions continued to resolve the situation. On 1 August, he signed a two-year contract with Oldham, with an option of a further year. He scored his first goals for the club against Port Vale, scoring twice in a 3–1 win at Boundary Park.On 23 January 2014, Rooney signed a two-and-a-half-year contract with Scottish Premiership side Aberdeen. He scored on his debut two days later in a 2–2 draw with Motherwell at Fir Park, and scored his second in as many matches, as well as crossing for Jonny Hayes' opening goal, as Aberdeen beat St Johnstone 4–0 to progress to the 2014 Scottish League Cup Final. Rooney scored his fifth goal in six appearances on 25 February, to help his side end Celtic's 26-match unbeaten run in the Premiership season. On 8 March 2014, Rooney scored his sixth goal in eight appearances in a 1–0 Scottish Cup quarter-final win over Dumbarton.Rooney started for Aberdeen against his former club Inverness in the 2014 Scottish League Cup Final. A 0–0 scoreline after 90 minutes led to extra time and penalties, where Rooney scored the decisive penalty kick in a 4–2 victory to win the League Cup; it was Aberdeen's first piece of silverware for 19 years. Rooney was voted Scottish Professional Football Player of the Month for February 2014.Rooney started the 2014–2015 season strongly by scoring two goals in a 5–0 home victory against FK Daugava Riga in the first qualifying round of the Europa League. He continued his strong start with a first-half hat-trick in a 3–0 away win in the second leg. Rooney went on to give the Dons the lead in the second leg of the second qualifying round against FC Groningen, scoring a penalty as Aberdeen won 2–1, progressing to the third qualifying round to face Real Sociedad. This put his European goals total with Aberdeen to six in four games. Rooney scored his first league goal of the season in a 3–0 win against Ross County and continued his scoring exploits four days later with his second hat-trick for the Dons and tenth goal of the season in a 4–0 League Cup win against Livingston. Rooney then provided the only goal in a game against Hamilton Academical in the same competition to see the Dons through to the semi-finals. On 23 November, Rooney continued his good form and scored his 14th goal of the season by converting a penalty in a 1–0 victory away against Partick Thistle. On 22 December, Rooney signed a contract extension running until the summer of 2018. Rooney scored 28 goals in total for the season and finished the top scorer in the Scottish Premiership.On 5 August 2016, Rooney signed a four-year contract extension at Aberdeen. He scored his 100th Scottish League goal on 31 March 2017, in a 7–0 victory over Dundee. On 22 April 2017, in the semi-final of the Scottish Cup, Rooney opened the scoring after just 12 seconds as Aberdeen won 3–2 against Hibernian.Rooney signed a three-year contract with Salford City of the National League on 19 July 2018; the fee was undisclosed. The transfer led to Accrington Stanley owner Andy Holt accusing Salford of "buying" a place in the English Football League, with Rooney reportedly due to earn £4,000 per week at Salford. He made his debut in the opening match of the 2018–19 season on 4 August, playing the whole match as Salford drew 1–1 at home to Leyton Orient.Rooney joined National League club Solihull Moors on 13 March 2020 on a contract to run until the end of the 2021–22 season. The fee was undisclosed. Later that day, elite football in England was suspended because of the COVID-19 pandemic. The National League soon followed suit, and the season was declared complete, apart from the play-offs for which Solihull Moors had not qualified. Interviewed for "The Times" later in March, Rooney speculated that he might not make his debut for another six months. It was nearer seven: on 17 October, Rooney started Solihull Moors' match at home to Boreham Wood and, playing with ten men for most of the match after Darren Carter was sent off, he scored the only goal after 75 minutes.Rooney played for the Republic of Ireland under-18 team in the 2005 European Youth Olympic Festival in Lignano Sabbiadoro; he scored twice as Ireland beat Switzerland to win the bronze medal. On 14 May 2007, Rooney scored a hat-trick in the Ireland under-19s' 3–0 win over Bulgaria in the elite qualifying phase of the 2007 European Under-19 Championships.He was capped nine times for the under-21 team between 2007 and 2010.He was called up to the senior Republic of Ireland squad in August 2015 for the first time with manager Martin O'Neill including him in a 37-man preliminary squad to face Gibraltar and Georgia in Euro 2016 qualifiers.Rooney was born in Dublin. His older brother Mark was also a professional footballer.Inverness Caledonian ThistleAberdeenRepublic of Ireland U18	[ "Yeovil Town F.C.", "Aberdeen F.C.", "Chesterfield F.C.", "Bury F.C.", "Inverness Caledonian Thistle F.C.", "Oldham Athletic A.F.C.", "Republic of Ireland national under-21 football team", "Stoke City F.C." ]
Which team did Adam Rooney play for in Jan 12, 2012?	January 12, 2012	{ "text": [ "Swindon Town F.C.", "Birmingham City F.C." ] }	L2_Q2737534_P54_7	Adam Rooney plays for Oldham Athletic A.F.C. from Jan, 2013 to Jan, 2014. Adam Rooney plays for Aberdeen F.C. from Jan, 2014 to Dec, 2022. Adam Rooney plays for Bury F.C. from Jan, 2008 to Jan, 2008. Adam Rooney plays for Stoke City F.C. from Jan, 2006 to Jan, 2008. Adam Rooney plays for Swindon Town F.C. from Jan, 2012 to Jan, 2013. Adam Rooney plays for Chesterfield F.C. from Jan, 2007 to Jan, 2008. Adam Rooney plays for Yeovil Town F.C. from Jan, 2007 to Jan, 2007. Adam Rooney plays for Birmingham City F.C. from Jan, 2011 to Jan, 2013. Adam Rooney plays for Republic of Ireland national under-21 football team from Jan, 2007 to Jan, 2010. Adam Rooney plays for Inverness Caledonian Thistle F.C. from Jan, 2008 to Jan, 2011.	Adam RooneyAdam Christopher David Rooney (born 21 April 1988) is an Irish professional footballer who plays as a striker for club Solihull Moors. He previously played for Stoke City, spent spells on loan at Yeovil Town, Chesterfield and Bury, was a regular first-team member for Inverness Caledonian Thistle, and played for Birmingham City and had a loan spell at Swindon Town. He played for Oldham Athletic and spent four-and-a-half seasons with Aberdeen before returning to England to sign for Salford City.Rooney signed for Stoke City in the summer of 2005, after spells with Home Farm, Cherry Orchard and Crumlin United. In his first season at Stoke, Rooney made his debut at academy and reserves levels, before making his first team debut as a second-half substitute against Tamworth in the FA Cup. Rooney scored his first goal for Stoke against Reading on 17 April 2006. In only his second full start for Stoke City, he scored a hat-trick against already relegated Brighton & Hove Albion in the final fixture of the 2005–06 season to become Stoke's youngest ever hat-trick scorer.On 16 March 2007, Rooney joined Yeovil Town on loan for a month. The loan was later extended until the end of the season. However, he returned to Stoke on 9 May 2007, after making one start and two substitute appearances for Yeovil.In August 2007, he joined League Two side Chesterfield on a four-month loan.Rooney travelled with Scottish Premier League club Inverness Caledonian Thistle's squad on their pre-season tour of Denmark and returned to train with the Highland side in August, before the club announced his signing on a three-year deal.Rooney scored his first goal for Inverness in a 2–1 defeat at home to St Mirren, which was the SPL's 6000th goal. In the 2009–10 season he was awarded the "Irn Bru Phenomenal" First Division Player of the Year award. He was top scorer in the First Division with 24 goals, 27 in all competitions, the last of which was scored against Dundee in the last fixture of the season. After the game the team were presented with the championship trophy.After his contract with Inverness expired at the end of the 2010–11 season, Rooney signed a two-year deal with Championship side Birmingham City. He scored what manager Chris Hughton described as "a typical poacher's goal" in a pre-season friendly against Cork City, and made his league debut for the club on the opening day of the new season, playing the whole of a 2–1 defeat at Derby County. His first competitive goal for the club came from the penalty spot to open the scoring away at Middlesbrough on 21 August; Middlesbrough came back to win 3–1. He also scored the following week against Watford. In the last game of the Europa League group stage, Rooney scored his first European goal as Birmingham beat NK Maribor 1–0, but a draw between the other two teams in the group meant Birmingham failed to progress to the last 32.On the last day of the August 2012 transfer window, Rooney joined League One club Swindon Town on loan for the season with a view to a permanent transfer. Swindon defender Paul Caddis moved in the other direction, also on loan for the season.Although a deal had been agreed for Rooney to join Swindon permanently at the end of the season, the club's new owners questioned the validity of the contract, and the player trained with League One club Oldham Athletic during 2013 pre-season while discussions continued to resolve the situation. On 1 August, he signed a two-year contract with Oldham, with an option of a further year. He scored his first goals for the club against Port Vale, scoring twice in a 3–1 win at Boundary Park.On 23 January 2014, Rooney signed a two-and-a-half-year contract with Scottish Premiership side Aberdeen. He scored on his debut two days later in a 2–2 draw with Motherwell at Fir Park, and scored his second in as many matches, as well as crossing for Jonny Hayes' opening goal, as Aberdeen beat St Johnstone 4–0 to progress to the 2014 Scottish League Cup Final. Rooney scored his fifth goal in six appearances on 25 February, to help his side end Celtic's 26-match unbeaten run in the Premiership season. On 8 March 2014, Rooney scored his sixth goal in eight appearances in a 1–0 Scottish Cup quarter-final win over Dumbarton.Rooney started for Aberdeen against his former club Inverness in the 2014 Scottish League Cup Final. A 0–0 scoreline after 90 minutes led to extra time and penalties, where Rooney scored the decisive penalty kick in a 4–2 victory to win the League Cup; it was Aberdeen's first piece of silverware for 19 years. Rooney was voted Scottish Professional Football Player of the Month for February 2014.Rooney started the 2014–2015 season strongly by scoring two goals in a 5–0 home victory against FK Daugava Riga in the first qualifying round of the Europa League. He continued his strong start with a first-half hat-trick in a 3–0 away win in the second leg. Rooney went on to give the Dons the lead in the second leg of the second qualifying round against FC Groningen, scoring a penalty as Aberdeen won 2–1, progressing to the third qualifying round to face Real Sociedad. This put his European goals total with Aberdeen to six in four games. Rooney scored his first league goal of the season in a 3–0 win against Ross County and continued his scoring exploits four days later with his second hat-trick for the Dons and tenth goal of the season in a 4–0 League Cup win against Livingston. Rooney then provided the only goal in a game against Hamilton Academical in the same competition to see the Dons through to the semi-finals. On 23 November, Rooney continued his good form and scored his 14th goal of the season by converting a penalty in a 1–0 victory away against Partick Thistle. On 22 December, Rooney signed a contract extension running until the summer of 2018. Rooney scored 28 goals in total for the season and finished the top scorer in the Scottish Premiership.On 5 August 2016, Rooney signed a four-year contract extension at Aberdeen. He scored his 100th Scottish League goal on 31 March 2017, in a 7–0 victory over Dundee. On 22 April 2017, in the semi-final of the Scottish Cup, Rooney opened the scoring after just 12 seconds as Aberdeen won 3–2 against Hibernian.Rooney signed a three-year contract with Salford City of the National League on 19 July 2018; the fee was undisclosed. The transfer led to Accrington Stanley owner Andy Holt accusing Salford of "buying" a place in the English Football League, with Rooney reportedly due to earn £4,000 per week at Salford. He made his debut in the opening match of the 2018–19 season on 4 August, playing the whole match as Salford drew 1–1 at home to Leyton Orient.Rooney joined National League club Solihull Moors on 13 March 2020 on a contract to run until the end of the 2021–22 season. The fee was undisclosed. Later that day, elite football in England was suspended because of the COVID-19 pandemic. The National League soon followed suit, and the season was declared complete, apart from the play-offs for which Solihull Moors had not qualified. Interviewed for "The Times" later in March, Rooney speculated that he might not make his debut for another six months. It was nearer seven: on 17 October, Rooney started Solihull Moors' match at home to Boreham Wood and, playing with ten men for most of the match after Darren Carter was sent off, he scored the only goal after 75 minutes.Rooney played for the Republic of Ireland under-18 team in the 2005 European Youth Olympic Festival in Lignano Sabbiadoro; he scored twice as Ireland beat Switzerland to win the bronze medal. On 14 May 2007, Rooney scored a hat-trick in the Ireland under-19s' 3–0 win over Bulgaria in the elite qualifying phase of the 2007 European Under-19 Championships.He was capped nine times for the under-21 team between 2007 and 2010.He was called up to the senior Republic of Ireland squad in August 2015 for the first time with manager Martin O'Neill including him in a 37-man preliminary squad to face Gibraltar and Georgia in Euro 2016 qualifiers.Rooney was born in Dublin. His older brother Mark was also a professional footballer.Inverness Caledonian ThistleAberdeenRepublic of Ireland U18	[ "Yeovil Town F.C.", "Aberdeen F.C.", "Chesterfield F.C.", "Bury F.C.", "Inverness Caledonian Thistle F.C.", "Oldham Athletic A.F.C.", "Republic of Ireland national under-21 football team", "Stoke City F.C." ]
Which team did Adam Rooney play for in 01/12/2012?	January 12, 2012	{ "text": [ "Swindon Town F.C.", "Birmingham City F.C." ] }	L2_Q2737534_P54_7	Adam Rooney plays for Oldham Athletic A.F.C. from Jan, 2013 to Jan, 2014. Adam Rooney plays for Aberdeen F.C. from Jan, 2014 to Dec, 2022. Adam Rooney plays for Bury F.C. from Jan, 2008 to Jan, 2008. Adam Rooney plays for Stoke City F.C. from Jan, 2006 to Jan, 2008. Adam Rooney plays for Swindon Town F.C. from Jan, 2012 to Jan, 2013. Adam Rooney plays for Chesterfield F.C. from Jan, 2007 to Jan, 2008. Adam Rooney plays for Yeovil Town F.C. from Jan, 2007 to Jan, 2007. Adam Rooney plays for Birmingham City F.C. from Jan, 2011 to Jan, 2013. Adam Rooney plays for Republic of Ireland national under-21 football team from Jan, 2007 to Jan, 2010. Adam Rooney plays for Inverness Caledonian Thistle F.C. from Jan, 2008 to Jan, 2011.	Adam RooneyAdam Christopher David Rooney (born 21 April 1988) is an Irish professional footballer who plays as a striker for club Solihull Moors. He previously played for Stoke City, spent spells on loan at Yeovil Town, Chesterfield and Bury, was a regular first-team member for Inverness Caledonian Thistle, and played for Birmingham City and had a loan spell at Swindon Town. He played for Oldham Athletic and spent four-and-a-half seasons with Aberdeen before returning to England to sign for Salford City.Rooney signed for Stoke City in the summer of 2005, after spells with Home Farm, Cherry Orchard and Crumlin United. In his first season at Stoke, Rooney made his debut at academy and reserves levels, before making his first team debut as a second-half substitute against Tamworth in the FA Cup. Rooney scored his first goal for Stoke against Reading on 17 April 2006. In only his second full start for Stoke City, he scored a hat-trick against already relegated Brighton & Hove Albion in the final fixture of the 2005–06 season to become Stoke's youngest ever hat-trick scorer.On 16 March 2007, Rooney joined Yeovil Town on loan for a month. The loan was later extended until the end of the season. However, he returned to Stoke on 9 May 2007, after making one start and two substitute appearances for Yeovil.In August 2007, he joined League Two side Chesterfield on a four-month loan.Rooney travelled with Scottish Premier League club Inverness Caledonian Thistle's squad on their pre-season tour of Denmark and returned to train with the Highland side in August, before the club announced his signing on a three-year deal.Rooney scored his first goal for Inverness in a 2–1 defeat at home to St Mirren, which was the SPL's 6000th goal. In the 2009–10 season he was awarded the "Irn Bru Phenomenal" First Division Player of the Year award. He was top scorer in the First Division with 24 goals, 27 in all competitions, the last of which was scored against Dundee in the last fixture of the season. After the game the team were presented with the championship trophy.After his contract with Inverness expired at the end of the 2010–11 season, Rooney signed a two-year deal with Championship side Birmingham City. He scored what manager Chris Hughton described as "a typical poacher's goal" in a pre-season friendly against Cork City, and made his league debut for the club on the opening day of the new season, playing the whole of a 2–1 defeat at Derby County. His first competitive goal for the club came from the penalty spot to open the scoring away at Middlesbrough on 21 August; Middlesbrough came back to win 3–1. He also scored the following week against Watford. In the last game of the Europa League group stage, Rooney scored his first European goal as Birmingham beat NK Maribor 1–0, but a draw between the other two teams in the group meant Birmingham failed to progress to the last 32.On the last day of the August 2012 transfer window, Rooney joined League One club Swindon Town on loan for the season with a view to a permanent transfer. Swindon defender Paul Caddis moved in the other direction, also on loan for the season.Although a deal had been agreed for Rooney to join Swindon permanently at the end of the season, the club's new owners questioned the validity of the contract, and the player trained with League One club Oldham Athletic during 2013 pre-season while discussions continued to resolve the situation. On 1 August, he signed a two-year contract with Oldham, with an option of a further year. He scored his first goals for the club against Port Vale, scoring twice in a 3–1 win at Boundary Park.On 23 January 2014, Rooney signed a two-and-a-half-year contract with Scottish Premiership side Aberdeen. He scored on his debut two days later in a 2–2 draw with Motherwell at Fir Park, and scored his second in as many matches, as well as crossing for Jonny Hayes' opening goal, as Aberdeen beat St Johnstone 4–0 to progress to the 2014 Scottish League Cup Final. Rooney scored his fifth goal in six appearances on 25 February, to help his side end Celtic's 26-match unbeaten run in the Premiership season. On 8 March 2014, Rooney scored his sixth goal in eight appearances in a 1–0 Scottish Cup quarter-final win over Dumbarton.Rooney started for Aberdeen against his former club Inverness in the 2014 Scottish League Cup Final. A 0–0 scoreline after 90 minutes led to extra time and penalties, where Rooney scored the decisive penalty kick in a 4–2 victory to win the League Cup; it was Aberdeen's first piece of silverware for 19 years. Rooney was voted Scottish Professional Football Player of the Month for February 2014.Rooney started the 2014–2015 season strongly by scoring two goals in a 5–0 home victory against FK Daugava Riga in the first qualifying round of the Europa League. He continued his strong start with a first-half hat-trick in a 3–0 away win in the second leg. Rooney went on to give the Dons the lead in the second leg of the second qualifying round against FC Groningen, scoring a penalty as Aberdeen won 2–1, progressing to the third qualifying round to face Real Sociedad. This put his European goals total with Aberdeen to six in four games. Rooney scored his first league goal of the season in a 3–0 win against Ross County and continued his scoring exploits four days later with his second hat-trick for the Dons and tenth goal of the season in a 4–0 League Cup win against Livingston. Rooney then provided the only goal in a game against Hamilton Academical in the same competition to see the Dons through to the semi-finals. On 23 November, Rooney continued his good form and scored his 14th goal of the season by converting a penalty in a 1–0 victory away against Partick Thistle. On 22 December, Rooney signed a contract extension running until the summer of 2018. Rooney scored 28 goals in total for the season and finished the top scorer in the Scottish Premiership.On 5 August 2016, Rooney signed a four-year contract extension at Aberdeen. He scored his 100th Scottish League goal on 31 March 2017, in a 7–0 victory over Dundee. On 22 April 2017, in the semi-final of the Scottish Cup, Rooney opened the scoring after just 12 seconds as Aberdeen won 3–2 against Hibernian.Rooney signed a three-year contract with Salford City of the National League on 19 July 2018; the fee was undisclosed. The transfer led to Accrington Stanley owner Andy Holt accusing Salford of "buying" a place in the English Football League, with Rooney reportedly due to earn £4,000 per week at Salford. He made his debut in the opening match of the 2018–19 season on 4 August, playing the whole match as Salford drew 1–1 at home to Leyton Orient.Rooney joined National League club Solihull Moors on 13 March 2020 on a contract to run until the end of the 2021–22 season. The fee was undisclosed. Later that day, elite football in England was suspended because of the COVID-19 pandemic. The National League soon followed suit, and the season was declared complete, apart from the play-offs for which Solihull Moors had not qualified. Interviewed for "The Times" later in March, Rooney speculated that he might not make his debut for another six months. It was nearer seven: on 17 October, Rooney started Solihull Moors' match at home to Boreham Wood and, playing with ten men for most of the match after Darren Carter was sent off, he scored the only goal after 75 minutes.Rooney played for the Republic of Ireland under-18 team in the 2005 European Youth Olympic Festival in Lignano Sabbiadoro; he scored twice as Ireland beat Switzerland to win the bronze medal. On 14 May 2007, Rooney scored a hat-trick in the Ireland under-19s' 3–0 win over Bulgaria in the elite qualifying phase of the 2007 European Under-19 Championships.He was capped nine times for the under-21 team between 2007 and 2010.He was called up to the senior Republic of Ireland squad in August 2015 for the first time with manager Martin O'Neill including him in a 37-man preliminary squad to face Gibraltar and Georgia in Euro 2016 qualifiers.Rooney was born in Dublin. His older brother Mark was also a professional footballer.Inverness Caledonian ThistleAberdeenRepublic of Ireland U18	[ "Yeovil Town F.C.", "Aberdeen F.C.", "Chesterfield F.C.", "Bury F.C.", "Inverness Caledonian Thistle F.C.", "Oldham Athletic A.F.C.", "Republic of Ireland national under-21 football team", "Stoke City F.C." ]
Which team did Adam Rooney play for in 12-Jan-201212-January-2012?	January 12, 2012	{ "text": [ "Swindon Town F.C.", "Birmingham City F.C." ] }	L2_Q2737534_P54_7	Adam Rooney plays for Oldham Athletic A.F.C. from Jan, 2013 to Jan, 2014. Adam Rooney plays for Aberdeen F.C. from Jan, 2014 to Dec, 2022. Adam Rooney plays for Bury F.C. from Jan, 2008 to Jan, 2008. Adam Rooney plays for Stoke City F.C. from Jan, 2006 to Jan, 2008. Adam Rooney plays for Swindon Town F.C. from Jan, 2012 to Jan, 2013. Adam Rooney plays for Chesterfield F.C. from Jan, 2007 to Jan, 2008. Adam Rooney plays for Yeovil Town F.C. from Jan, 2007 to Jan, 2007. Adam Rooney plays for Birmingham City F.C. from Jan, 2011 to Jan, 2013. Adam Rooney plays for Republic of Ireland national under-21 football team from Jan, 2007 to Jan, 2010. Adam Rooney plays for Inverness Caledonian Thistle F.C. from Jan, 2008 to Jan, 2011.	Adam RooneyAdam Christopher David Rooney (born 21 April 1988) is an Irish professional footballer who plays as a striker for club Solihull Moors. He previously played for Stoke City, spent spells on loan at Yeovil Town, Chesterfield and Bury, was a regular first-team member for Inverness Caledonian Thistle, and played for Birmingham City and had a loan spell at Swindon Town. He played for Oldham Athletic and spent four-and-a-half seasons with Aberdeen before returning to England to sign for Salford City.Rooney signed for Stoke City in the summer of 2005, after spells with Home Farm, Cherry Orchard and Crumlin United. In his first season at Stoke, Rooney made his debut at academy and reserves levels, before making his first team debut as a second-half substitute against Tamworth in the FA Cup. Rooney scored his first goal for Stoke against Reading on 17 April 2006. In only his second full start for Stoke City, he scored a hat-trick against already relegated Brighton & Hove Albion in the final fixture of the 2005–06 season to become Stoke's youngest ever hat-trick scorer.On 16 March 2007, Rooney joined Yeovil Town on loan for a month. The loan was later extended until the end of the season. However, he returned to Stoke on 9 May 2007, after making one start and two substitute appearances for Yeovil.In August 2007, he joined League Two side Chesterfield on a four-month loan.Rooney travelled with Scottish Premier League club Inverness Caledonian Thistle's squad on their pre-season tour of Denmark and returned to train with the Highland side in August, before the club announced his signing on a three-year deal.Rooney scored his first goal for Inverness in a 2–1 defeat at home to St Mirren, which was the SPL's 6000th goal. In the 2009–10 season he was awarded the "Irn Bru Phenomenal" First Division Player of the Year award. He was top scorer in the First Division with 24 goals, 27 in all competitions, the last of which was scored against Dundee in the last fixture of the season. After the game the team were presented with the championship trophy.After his contract with Inverness expired at the end of the 2010–11 season, Rooney signed a two-year deal with Championship side Birmingham City. He scored what manager Chris Hughton described as "a typical poacher's goal" in a pre-season friendly against Cork City, and made his league debut for the club on the opening day of the new season, playing the whole of a 2–1 defeat at Derby County. His first competitive goal for the club came from the penalty spot to open the scoring away at Middlesbrough on 21 August; Middlesbrough came back to win 3–1. He also scored the following week against Watford. In the last game of the Europa League group stage, Rooney scored his first European goal as Birmingham beat NK Maribor 1–0, but a draw between the other two teams in the group meant Birmingham failed to progress to the last 32.On the last day of the August 2012 transfer window, Rooney joined League One club Swindon Town on loan for the season with a view to a permanent transfer. Swindon defender Paul Caddis moved in the other direction, also on loan for the season.Although a deal had been agreed for Rooney to join Swindon permanently at the end of the season, the club's new owners questioned the validity of the contract, and the player trained with League One club Oldham Athletic during 2013 pre-season while discussions continued to resolve the situation. On 1 August, he signed a two-year contract with Oldham, with an option of a further year. He scored his first goals for the club against Port Vale, scoring twice in a 3–1 win at Boundary Park.On 23 January 2014, Rooney signed a two-and-a-half-year contract with Scottish Premiership side Aberdeen. He scored on his debut two days later in a 2–2 draw with Motherwell at Fir Park, and scored his second in as many matches, as well as crossing for Jonny Hayes' opening goal, as Aberdeen beat St Johnstone 4–0 to progress to the 2014 Scottish League Cup Final. Rooney scored his fifth goal in six appearances on 25 February, to help his side end Celtic's 26-match unbeaten run in the Premiership season. On 8 March 2014, Rooney scored his sixth goal in eight appearances in a 1–0 Scottish Cup quarter-final win over Dumbarton.Rooney started for Aberdeen against his former club Inverness in the 2014 Scottish League Cup Final. A 0–0 scoreline after 90 minutes led to extra time and penalties, where Rooney scored the decisive penalty kick in a 4–2 victory to win the League Cup; it was Aberdeen's first piece of silverware for 19 years. Rooney was voted Scottish Professional Football Player of the Month for February 2014.Rooney started the 2014–2015 season strongly by scoring two goals in a 5–0 home victory against FK Daugava Riga in the first qualifying round of the Europa League. He continued his strong start with a first-half hat-trick in a 3–0 away win in the second leg. Rooney went on to give the Dons the lead in the second leg of the second qualifying round against FC Groningen, scoring a penalty as Aberdeen won 2–1, progressing to the third qualifying round to face Real Sociedad. This put his European goals total with Aberdeen to six in four games. Rooney scored his first league goal of the season in a 3–0 win against Ross County and continued his scoring exploits four days later with his second hat-trick for the Dons and tenth goal of the season in a 4–0 League Cup win against Livingston. Rooney then provided the only goal in a game against Hamilton Academical in the same competition to see the Dons through to the semi-finals. On 23 November, Rooney continued his good form and scored his 14th goal of the season by converting a penalty in a 1–0 victory away against Partick Thistle. On 22 December, Rooney signed a contract extension running until the summer of 2018. Rooney scored 28 goals in total for the season and finished the top scorer in the Scottish Premiership.On 5 August 2016, Rooney signed a four-year contract extension at Aberdeen. He scored his 100th Scottish League goal on 31 March 2017, in a 7–0 victory over Dundee. On 22 April 2017, in the semi-final of the Scottish Cup, Rooney opened the scoring after just 12 seconds as Aberdeen won 3–2 against Hibernian.Rooney signed a three-year contract with Salford City of the National League on 19 July 2018; the fee was undisclosed. The transfer led to Accrington Stanley owner Andy Holt accusing Salford of "buying" a place in the English Football League, with Rooney reportedly due to earn £4,000 per week at Salford. He made his debut in the opening match of the 2018–19 season on 4 August, playing the whole match as Salford drew 1–1 at home to Leyton Orient.Rooney joined National League club Solihull Moors on 13 March 2020 on a contract to run until the end of the 2021–22 season. The fee was undisclosed. Later that day, elite football in England was suspended because of the COVID-19 pandemic. The National League soon followed suit, and the season was declared complete, apart from the play-offs for which Solihull Moors had not qualified. Interviewed for "The Times" later in March, Rooney speculated that he might not make his debut for another six months. It was nearer seven: on 17 October, Rooney started Solihull Moors' match at home to Boreham Wood and, playing with ten men for most of the match after Darren Carter was sent off, he scored the only goal after 75 minutes.Rooney played for the Republic of Ireland under-18 team in the 2005 European Youth Olympic Festival in Lignano Sabbiadoro; he scored twice as Ireland beat Switzerland to win the bronze medal. On 14 May 2007, Rooney scored a hat-trick in the Ireland under-19s' 3–0 win over Bulgaria in the elite qualifying phase of the 2007 European Under-19 Championships.He was capped nine times for the under-21 team between 2007 and 2010.He was called up to the senior Republic of Ireland squad in August 2015 for the first time with manager Martin O'Neill including him in a 37-man preliminary squad to face Gibraltar and Georgia in Euro 2016 qualifiers.Rooney was born in Dublin. His older brother Mark was also a professional footballer.Inverness Caledonian ThistleAberdeenRepublic of Ireland U18	[ "Yeovil Town F.C.", "Aberdeen F.C.", "Chesterfield F.C.", "Bury F.C.", "Inverness Caledonian Thistle F.C.", "Oldham Athletic A.F.C.", "Republic of Ireland national under-21 football team", "Stoke City F.C." ]
Who was the chair of Union for a Popular Movement in Dec, 2014?	December 18, 2014	{ "text": [ "Nicolas Sarkozy" ] }	L2_Q173152_P488_2	Alain Juppé is the chair of Union for a Popular Movement from Nov, 2002 to Jul, 2004. Jean-François Copé is the chair of Union for a Popular Movement from Nov, 2012 to Jun, 2014. Nicolas Sarkozy is the chair of Union for a Popular Movement from Dec, 2014 to May, 2015.	Union for a Popular MovementThe Union for a Popular Movement ( ; UMP ) was a centre-right political party in France that was one of the two major contemporary political parties in France along with the centre-left Socialist Party (PS). The UMP was formed in 2002 as a merger of several centre-right parties under the leadership of President Jacques Chirac. In May 2015, the party was renamed and succeeded by The Republicans ("").Nicolas Sarkozy, then the president of the UMP, was elected President of France in the 2007 presidential election, but was defeated by PS candidate François Hollande in a run-off five years later. After the November 2012 party congress, the UMP experienced internal fractioning and was plagued by monetary scandals which forced its president, Jean-François Copé, to resign. After his re-election as UMP president in November 2014, Sarkozy put forward an amendment to change the name of the party into The Republicans, which was approved and came into effect on 30 May 2015.The UMP enjoyed an absolute majority in the National Assembly from 2002 to 2012 and was a member of the European People's Party (EPP), the Centrist Democrat International (CDI) and the International Democrat Union (IDU).Since the 1980s, the political groups of the parliamentary right have joined forces around the values of economic liberalism and the building of Europe. Their rivalries had contributed to their defeat in the 1981 and 1988 legislative elections.Before the 1993 legislative election, the Gaullist Rally for the Republic (RPR) and the centrist Union for French Democracy (UDF) formed an electoral alliance, the Union for France (UPF). However, in the 1995 presidential campaign they were both divided between followers of Jacques Chirac, who was eventually elected, and supporters of Prime Minister Edouard Balladur. After their defeat in the 1997 legislative election, the RPR and UDF created the Alliance for France in order to coordinate the actions of their parliamentary groups.Before the 2002 presidential campaign, the supporters of President Jacques Chirac, divided in three centre-right parliamentary parties, founded an association named Union on the Move ("Union en mouvement"). After Chirac's re-election, in order to contest the legislative election jointly, the Union for the Presidential Majority ("Union pour la majorité présidentielle") was created. It was renamed "Union for a Popular Movement" and as such established as a permanent organisation.The UMP was the merger of the Gaullist-conservative Rally for the Republic (RPR), the conservative-liberal party Liberal Democracy (DL), a sizeable portion of the Union for French Democracy (UDF), more precisely the UDF's Christian Democrats (such as Philippe Douste-Blazy and Jacques Barrot), the Radical Party and the centrist Popular Party for French Democracy (both associate parties of the UDF until 2002). In the UMP four major French political families were thus represented: Gaullism, republicanism (the kind of liberalism put forward by parties like the Democratic Republican Alliance or the PR, heir of DL), Christian democracy ("Popularism") and radicalism.Chirac's close ally Alain Juppé became the party's first president at the party's founding congress at the Bourget in November 2002. Juppé won 79.42% of the vote, defeating Nicolas Dupont-Aignan, the leader of the party's Eurosceptic Arise the Republic faction, and three other candidates. During the party's earlier years, it was marked by tensions and rivalries between Juppé and other "chiraquiens" and supporters of Nicolas Sarkozy, the then-Minister of the Interior.In the 2004 regional elections the UMP suffered a heavy blow, winning the presidencies of only 2 out of 22 regions in metropolitan France (Alsace and Corsica) and only half of the departments (the right had previously won numerous departmental presidencies) in the simultaneous 2004 cantonal elections. In the 2004 European Parliament election on 13 June 2004, the UMP also suffered another heavy blow, winning 16.6% of the vote, far behind the Socialist Party (PS), and only 16 seats.Juppé resigned the party's presidency on 15 July 2004 after being found guilty in a corruption scandal in January of the same year. Nicolas Sarkozy rapidly announced that he would take over the presidency of the UMP and resign his position as finance minister, ending months of speculation. On 28 November 2004, Sarkozy was elected to the party's presidency with 85.09% of the votes against 9.1% for Dupont-Aignan and 5.82% for Christine Boutin, the leader of the UMP's social conservatives. Having gained control of what had been Chirac's party, Sarkozy focused the party machinery and his energies on the 2007 presidential election.The failure of the referendum on the European Constitution on 25 May 2005 led to the fall of the government of Jean-Pierre Raffarin and to the formation of a new cabinet, presided by another UMP politician, Dominique de Villepin. However, during this time, the UMP under Sarkozy gained a record number of new members and rejuvenated itself in preparation of the 2007 election. On 14 January 2007, Sarkozy was nominated unopposed as the UMP's presidential candidate for the 2007 election.On the issues, the party under Sarkozy publicly disapproved of Turkey's proposed membership in the European Union, which Chirac had previously endorsed several times publicly, and generally took a more right-wing position.On 22 April 2007 Nicolas Sarkozy won the plurality of votes in the first round of the 2007 presidential election. On 6 May he faced the Socialist Party candidate Ségolène Royal in the second round and won, taking 53.06% of the vote. As a consequence, he resigned from the presidency of the UMP on 14 May 2007, two days before becoming President of the French Republic. François Fillon was appointed Prime Minister. On 17 June 2007, at a 2007 legislative election, the UMP gained a majority in the National Assembly with 313 out of 577 seats.Following Sarkozy's election to the presidency, interim leader Jean-Claude Gaudin prevented a leadership struggle between Patrick Devedjian and Jean-Pierre Raffarin by announcing that the UMP should have a collegial leadership while Sarkozy was President of the Republic. In July, the UMP's national council approved an amendment to the party's statute allowing for a collegial leadership around three vice-presidents (Jean-Pierre Raffarin, Jean-Claude Gaudin and Pierre Méhaignerie) and a secretary-general (Patrick Devedjian) and two associate secretary-generals.On 9 March 2008 municipal and cantonal elections, the party performed quite poorly, losing numerous cities, such as Toulouse and Strasbourg, as well as eight departmental presidencies to the left. Xavier Bertrand was selected as secretary-general of the party in late 2008 to replace Patrick Devedjian, who resigned to take up a cabinet position.In the 2009 European Parliament election on 7 June 2009, the UMP ran common lists with its junior allies including Jean-Louis Borloo's Radical Party, the New Centre and Modern Left. The UMP list won 27.9%, a remarkably good result for a governing party in off-year "mid-term" elections, and elected 29 MEPs, significantly improving on the UMP's poor result in the 2004 European election – also an off-year election. However, in the 2010 regional elections on 14 and 21 March 2010, the UMP obtained a very poor result with only 26%. While it lost Corsica, it retained Alsace but also defeated the left in "La Réunion" and French Guiana.In a cabinet reshuffle in November 2010, which disappointed centrists within and outside the UMP, François Fillon was confirmed Prime Minister and Alain Juppé re-joined the government. Among those who resigned from the cabinet were Bernard Kouchner, Hervé Morin and, above all, Jean-Louis Borloo. Xavier Bertrand, who re-joined the government, was replaced as general-secretary of the UMP by Jean-François Copé on 17 November 2010.The party suffered another major electoral defeat in the 2011 cantonal elections held on 20 and 27 March 2011, and in September, the centre-right lost control of the French Senate for the first time in the history of the Fifth Republic.In May 2011, during a party congress, the Radical Party, led by Borloo, decided to leave the UMP and launch The Alliance, a new centrist coalition.The party opted not to organise primaries ahead of the 2012 presidential election and endorsed Nicolas Sarkozy's bid for second term. Sarkozy lost reelection to the Socialist Party candidate François Hollande on 6 May 2012, winning 48.36% in the runoff. The party was defeated by the new President's left-wing majority in the subsequent legislative election.Prior to Sarkozy's defeat on 6 May, the UMP's secretary-general Jean-François Copé announced that he supported the creation of internal "movements" within the party and the organisation of primaries for the next presidential election.The UMP's political bureau announced the organisation of a party congress on 18 and 25 November 2012, leading prominent party leaders to organise factions and "movements" to influence the party's new direction.Ultimately, two candidates amassed the required endorsements to run for the party's presidency: former Prime Minister François Fillon and incumbent party secretary-general Jean-François Copé. Nathalie Kosciusko-Morizet, Bruno Le Maire, Xavier Bertrand, Henri Guaino, and Dominique Dord had also announced their candidacies but did not meet tough candidacy requirements.The campaign between Fillon and Copé lasted two months. Fillon had a strong lead in polls of UMP 'sympathizers' (as opposed to actual members, who would be the only eligible voters) and was backed by most UMP parliamentarians while Copé claimed he was the candidate of party activists rather than party 'barons'. However, Copé remained as secretary-general and retained control of the party machinery.While Fillon's campaign was regarded as more consensual, moderate and centre-right; Copé campaigned as the candidate of the "droite décomplexée" ('uninhibited right') and introduced issues such as anti-white racism. However, both candidates received support from moderate and conservative members of the party and their main differences were in rhetoric, style and temperament. Copé, again, appeared more militant and activist, saying that he would support and participate in street demonstrations while Fillon disagreed with his rival.Six 'motions' (declarations of principles) were submitted to party voters; under the new statutes, motions which won over 10% of the vote at the congress would be recognised as "movements" by the UMP leadership, granted financial autonomy and receive positions in the party structures.The vote on 18 November saw high turnout but was quickly marred by allegations of irregularities and potential fraud on both sides. Both candidates proclaimed victory within 20 minutes of each other on the night of the vote.24 hours later, the control commission in charge of the vote (COCOE) announced Copé's victory by only 98 votes. While Fillon initially conceded defeat, by 21 November his campaign claimed victory anew, with a 26-vote advantage over Copé. Fillon's campaign argued that the COCOE had failed to take into account votes cast in three overseas federations.Party elder Alain Juppé accepted to lead a mediation between both candidates on 23 November, but it failed within two days. Fillon's announced "precautionary seizure" of ballots cast "to protect them from tampering or alteration" and threatened to take the matter to court. On 26 November, the party appeals commission – led by a close supporter of Copé – decided in Copé's favour and rejected Fillon's arguments.On 27 November 72 "filloniste" parliamentarians in the National Assembly announced the creation of a new parliamentary group, the "Rassemblement-UMP", led by Fillon. Copé took up former President Nicolas Sarkozy's proposal of organising a referendum on a revote, but he saw the creation of the dissident "filloniste" group as a casus belli and took back his proposal. Luc Chatel, the new vice-president and a Copé supporter, later announced that he supported a new presidential vote and a modification of party statutes. The next day, Copé announced that he favoured organising a referendum the modification of party statutes and a reduction of his own term as president to two years (until November 2014); while Fillon welcomed the "consensus on the organisation of a new election" he rejected his rival's timeline and called for a new election before 2014. 'Unaligned' members of the UMP led by Bruno Le Maire and Nathalie Kosciusko-Morizet appealed for the organisation of a new election in the spring of 2013 and a reform of the party statutes.Both rivals reached an agreement at the end of December 2012, with Copé agreeing to the organisation of a new election and a modification of party statutes while Fillon agreed to dissolve his parliamentary group.The party's leadership was reorganized in January 2013 to accommodate Copé and Fillon's supporters: Laurent Wauquiez and Valérie Pécresse joined Luc Chatel and Michèle Tabarot as vice-president and secretary-general respectively. Christian Estrosi, Gérard Longuet, Henri de Raincourt (pro-Fillon), Jean-Claude Gaudin, Brice Hortefeux and Roger Karoutchi (pro-Copé) also became vice-presidents. Other positions in the party hierarchy were divided between supporters of both candidates. New leaders were also nominated in February 2013.Several spending scandals appeared in 2014. In early 2014, the Bygmalion scandal () pushed the party's leader Jean-François Copé to resign. In early July, Sarkozy got held in custody due to possible spying and active corruption of the judiciary system. On 8 July 2014, the UMP was discovered to have a hidden debt of €79.1 million for the year 2013. On 20 May 2021, the criminal trial began for Sarkozy and 13 other defendants who were said to have been involved in the Bygmalion scandal. The scandal allegations that Sarkozy diverting tens of millions of euros which was intended to be spent on the his failed 2012 re-election campaign and then hiring a PR firm to cover it up. The illicit campaign finance money which was not reported as being spent on Sarkozy's re-election campaign was instead used to overspend on lavish campaign rallies and events.After the election of Nicolas Sarkozy, the former President of France (2007–2012), as president of the Union for a Popular Movement (UMP) in November 2014, he put forward a request to the party's general committee to change its name to the Republicans as well as the statutes of the party. With the name already chosen Nathalie Kosciusko-Morizet, vice president of the UMP, presented Nicolas Sarkozy and the party's political bureau a project of new statutes. The proposed statutes provided for, among others, the election of the presidents of the departmental federations by direct suffrage, the end of the political currents and consulting members on election nominations.Critics of Sarkozy claimed it was illegal for him to name the party "Republicans" because every French person is a republican in that they support the values and ideals of the French Republic that emanated from the French Revolution, and as such the term is above party politics. The new name was adopted by the bureau on 5 May 2015 and approved by the party membership on 28 May by an online yes vote of 83.28% on a 45.74% participation after a court ruling in favor of Sarkozy. Similarly the new party statutes are adopted by 96.34% of voters and the composition of the new party's political bureau by 94.77%.The Republicans thus became the legal successor of the UMP as the leading centre-right party in France.The UMP was a centre-right party and was created to represent the various families of the French right, uniting the traditions of Gaullism, Christian democracy, conservatism and liberalism. As such, it officially adopted fairly vague policy statements which emphasize consensual common values.The UMP believed that each individual's destiny must be unencumbered and it rejects political systems which "stifle economic freedom". It said that work, merit, innovation and personal initiative must be encouraged to reduce unemployment and boost economic growth; but at the same time, it maintained that adherence to the rule of law and the authority of the state is necessary. In a Gaullist tradition, the UMP supported solidarity, with the state guaranteeing social protection of less fortunate individuals. But in a more liberal vein, the party always denounced "l'assistanat", a French term which can refer to "welfare handouts".The party took more nationalist positions at times, and often adopted tough stances against immigration and illegal immigration. It strongly supported the integration and assimilation of immigrants into French society and always denounced communitarianism as a danger to the French nation-state. However, the UMP traditionally was a strong proponent of European integration and the European Union, albeit sometimes with a hint of traditional Gaullist souverainism.Under Nicolas Sarkozy's leadership, the UMP adopted a liberal and security-oriented platform. His platform in the 2007 and 2012 presidential elections emphasized the ideas of personal responsibility and individual initiative. He developed the idea of "working more to earn more", promising that overtime hours would not be taxed and employers exonerated from non-wage labour costs. Under his presidency, the government's short-lived tax cap for high-income earners was denounced by the left but also several centrist and centre-right politicians within or outside the UMP.Having gained his popularity as a 'hardliner' Interior minister, Sarkozy's policies also carried a strong law-and-order and tough on crime orientation. He supported tougher sentences for criminals and repeat offenders. As candidate and President, he placed heavy emphasis on immigration and national identity, presenting immigration as a danger to French identity and as source of increased criminality. As President, he imposed stricter limits on family reunification, created a Ministry of Immigration, and National Identity for three years between 2007 and 2010, launched a controversial national dialogue on national identity and expelled thousands of Roma from illegal camps.Critics of the right-wing government denounced what they felt was a rapprochement with the controversial far-right National Front (FN). While several members of the UMP's right-wing have indicated that they would favour local alliances with the FN and prefer to vote for a FN candidate over a Socialist Party or left-wing candidate in runoff elections between the left and the FN; the party's official position continues to reject alliances with the FN at any level but also opposes so-called "republican fronts" with the left against the FN.The UMP's original statutes in 2002 allowed for the organisation of formal factions or movements within the party, to represent the various political families of which it was made up. However, fearing leadership rivalries and divisions, Juppé, Chirac and later Sarkozy 'postponed' the creation of such organised movements indefinitely. Nevertheless, prior to the organisations of formal "movements" in November 2012, there existed informal groupings of like-minded members, either through associations, political clubs, associated political parties or even informal factions.Jean-François Copé allowed for the organisation of formal movements within the party following the November 2012 congress. According to the party's statutes, motions backed by at least 10 parliamentarians from 10 departmental federations and which obtain at least 10% support from members at a congress are recognised as movements. They are granted financial autonomy by way of a fixed grant and additional funding in proportion to the votes they obtained; but the sum of funds transferred by the party to its movements can be no larger than 30% of the annual public subsidies the UMP receives from the state.Six motions representing various ideological tendencies within the party ran to be recognised as official movements following the November 2012 congress. Five of these motions met the conditions to be recognised as such, and their leaders have since integrated the UMP's leadership structure:The Hunting, Fishing, Nature, Tradition, the Christian Democratic Party, the Rally for France and The Progressives are associate parties of the UMP. By adhering to these parties, members also adhered to the UMP and could participate in the UMP's inner organisation. The Radical Party was associated with the UMP from 2002 through 2011.Overseas parties associated with the UMP included O Porinetia To Tatou Ai'a in French Polynesia and The Rally–UMP in New Caledonia.The aforementioned November 2012 congress saw the division of the party between the two candidates who sought the party's presidency, François Fillon and Jean-François Copé – the "fillonistes" and "copéistes".The UMP's electoral base reflects that of the old Rally for the Republic (RPR) and, in some cases, that of the Union for French Democracy (UDF). In the 2007 presidential election, Nicolas Sarkozy performed best in the east of France – particularly Alsace (36.2%); Provence-Alpes-Côte-d'Azur (37.0%) – the wealthy coastal department of the Alpes-Maritimes (43.6%) was his best department in France; Champagne-Ardenne (32.7%) and Rhône-Alpes (32.7%). These areas were among National Front candidate Jean-Marie Le Pen's best regions in 2002 and are conservative on issues such as immigration. Sarkozy received a lot of votes from voters who had supported the far-right in April 2002. For example, in the Alpes-Maritimes, Sarkozy performed 21.6% better than Chirac did in 2002 while Le Pen lost 12.6% in five years. Sarkozy also appealed more than average to blue-collar workers in regions such as northern Meurthe-et-Moselle and the Nord-Pas-de-Calais, although most of these regions, despite his gains, remain reliably left-wing. The party is also strong in every election in very wealthy suburban or coastal (and, in some cases, urban) areas such as Neuilly-sur-Seine (72.6% for Sarkozy in the first round), Saint-Tropez (54.79%), Cannes (48.19%) or Marcq-en-Barœul (47.35%). It is strong in most rural areas, like most conservative parties in the world, but this does not extend to the rural areas of the south of France, areas which are old strongholds of republican and secular ideals. However, in old "clerical" Catholic rural areas, such as parts of Lozère or Cantal, it is very strong, as was the UDF during its hey day.However, the UMP does poorly in one of the UDF's best regions, Brittany, where the decline of religious practice, a moderate electorate and urbanisation has hurt the UMP and also the UDF. Nicolas Sarkozy performed relatively poorly in departments with a large share of moderate Christian democratic (often centrist or centre-right) voters, such as Lozère where the Socialist candidate Ségolène Royal performed better (44.3%) than François Mitterrand had in his 1988 left-wing landslide (43.1%). While former President Jacques Chirac, the right's strongman in normally left-wing Corrèze had always done very well in Corrèze and the surrounding departments, Sarkozy did very poorly and actually lost the department in the 2007 runoff. However, in the 2009 European election, the UMP's results in those departments were superior to Sarkozy's first round result (nationally, they were 4% lower).	[ "Jean-François Copé", "Alain Juppé" ]
Who was the chair of Union for a Popular Movement in 2014-12-18?	December 18, 2014	{ "text": [ "Nicolas Sarkozy" ] }	L2_Q173152_P488_2	Alain Juppé is the chair of Union for a Popular Movement from Nov, 2002 to Jul, 2004. Jean-François Copé is the chair of Union for a Popular Movement from Nov, 2012 to Jun, 2014. Nicolas Sarkozy is the chair of Union for a Popular Movement from Dec, 2014 to May, 2015.	Union for a Popular MovementThe Union for a Popular Movement ( ; UMP ) was a centre-right political party in France that was one of the two major contemporary political parties in France along with the centre-left Socialist Party (PS). The UMP was formed in 2002 as a merger of several centre-right parties under the leadership of President Jacques Chirac. In May 2015, the party was renamed and succeeded by The Republicans ("").Nicolas Sarkozy, then the president of the UMP, was elected President of France in the 2007 presidential election, but was defeated by PS candidate François Hollande in a run-off five years later. After the November 2012 party congress, the UMP experienced internal fractioning and was plagued by monetary scandals which forced its president, Jean-François Copé, to resign. After his re-election as UMP president in November 2014, Sarkozy put forward an amendment to change the name of the party into The Republicans, which was approved and came into effect on 30 May 2015.The UMP enjoyed an absolute majority in the National Assembly from 2002 to 2012 and was a member of the European People's Party (EPP), the Centrist Democrat International (CDI) and the International Democrat Union (IDU).Since the 1980s, the political groups of the parliamentary right have joined forces around the values of economic liberalism and the building of Europe. Their rivalries had contributed to their defeat in the 1981 and 1988 legislative elections.Before the 1993 legislative election, the Gaullist Rally for the Republic (RPR) and the centrist Union for French Democracy (UDF) formed an electoral alliance, the Union for France (UPF). However, in the 1995 presidential campaign they were both divided between followers of Jacques Chirac, who was eventually elected, and supporters of Prime Minister Edouard Balladur. After their defeat in the 1997 legislative election, the RPR and UDF created the Alliance for France in order to coordinate the actions of their parliamentary groups.Before the 2002 presidential campaign, the supporters of President Jacques Chirac, divided in three centre-right parliamentary parties, founded an association named Union on the Move ("Union en mouvement"). After Chirac's re-election, in order to contest the legislative election jointly, the Union for the Presidential Majority ("Union pour la majorité présidentielle") was created. It was renamed "Union for a Popular Movement" and as such established as a permanent organisation.The UMP was the merger of the Gaullist-conservative Rally for the Republic (RPR), the conservative-liberal party Liberal Democracy (DL), a sizeable portion of the Union for French Democracy (UDF), more precisely the UDF's Christian Democrats (such as Philippe Douste-Blazy and Jacques Barrot), the Radical Party and the centrist Popular Party for French Democracy (both associate parties of the UDF until 2002). In the UMP four major French political families were thus represented: Gaullism, republicanism (the kind of liberalism put forward by parties like the Democratic Republican Alliance or the PR, heir of DL), Christian democracy ("Popularism") and radicalism.Chirac's close ally Alain Juppé became the party's first president at the party's founding congress at the Bourget in November 2002. Juppé won 79.42% of the vote, defeating Nicolas Dupont-Aignan, the leader of the party's Eurosceptic Arise the Republic faction, and three other candidates. During the party's earlier years, it was marked by tensions and rivalries between Juppé and other "chiraquiens" and supporters of Nicolas Sarkozy, the then-Minister of the Interior.In the 2004 regional elections the UMP suffered a heavy blow, winning the presidencies of only 2 out of 22 regions in metropolitan France (Alsace and Corsica) and only half of the departments (the right had previously won numerous departmental presidencies) in the simultaneous 2004 cantonal elections. In the 2004 European Parliament election on 13 June 2004, the UMP also suffered another heavy blow, winning 16.6% of the vote, far behind the Socialist Party (PS), and only 16 seats.Juppé resigned the party's presidency on 15 July 2004 after being found guilty in a corruption scandal in January of the same year. Nicolas Sarkozy rapidly announced that he would take over the presidency of the UMP and resign his position as finance minister, ending months of speculation. On 28 November 2004, Sarkozy was elected to the party's presidency with 85.09% of the votes against 9.1% for Dupont-Aignan and 5.82% for Christine Boutin, the leader of the UMP's social conservatives. Having gained control of what had been Chirac's party, Sarkozy focused the party machinery and his energies on the 2007 presidential election.The failure of the referendum on the European Constitution on 25 May 2005 led to the fall of the government of Jean-Pierre Raffarin and to the formation of a new cabinet, presided by another UMP politician, Dominique de Villepin. However, during this time, the UMP under Sarkozy gained a record number of new members and rejuvenated itself in preparation of the 2007 election. On 14 January 2007, Sarkozy was nominated unopposed as the UMP's presidential candidate for the 2007 election.On the issues, the party under Sarkozy publicly disapproved of Turkey's proposed membership in the European Union, which Chirac had previously endorsed several times publicly, and generally took a more right-wing position.On 22 April 2007 Nicolas Sarkozy won the plurality of votes in the first round of the 2007 presidential election. On 6 May he faced the Socialist Party candidate Ségolène Royal in the second round and won, taking 53.06% of the vote. As a consequence, he resigned from the presidency of the UMP on 14 May 2007, two days before becoming President of the French Republic. François Fillon was appointed Prime Minister. On 17 June 2007, at a 2007 legislative election, the UMP gained a majority in the National Assembly with 313 out of 577 seats.Following Sarkozy's election to the presidency, interim leader Jean-Claude Gaudin prevented a leadership struggle between Patrick Devedjian and Jean-Pierre Raffarin by announcing that the UMP should have a collegial leadership while Sarkozy was President of the Republic. In July, the UMP's national council approved an amendment to the party's statute allowing for a collegial leadership around three vice-presidents (Jean-Pierre Raffarin, Jean-Claude Gaudin and Pierre Méhaignerie) and a secretary-general (Patrick Devedjian) and two associate secretary-generals.On 9 March 2008 municipal and cantonal elections, the party performed quite poorly, losing numerous cities, such as Toulouse and Strasbourg, as well as eight departmental presidencies to the left. Xavier Bertrand was selected as secretary-general of the party in late 2008 to replace Patrick Devedjian, who resigned to take up a cabinet position.In the 2009 European Parliament election on 7 June 2009, the UMP ran common lists with its junior allies including Jean-Louis Borloo's Radical Party, the New Centre and Modern Left. The UMP list won 27.9%, a remarkably good result for a governing party in off-year "mid-term" elections, and elected 29 MEPs, significantly improving on the UMP's poor result in the 2004 European election – also an off-year election. However, in the 2010 regional elections on 14 and 21 March 2010, the UMP obtained a very poor result with only 26%. While it lost Corsica, it retained Alsace but also defeated the left in "La Réunion" and French Guiana.In a cabinet reshuffle in November 2010, which disappointed centrists within and outside the UMP, François Fillon was confirmed Prime Minister and Alain Juppé re-joined the government. Among those who resigned from the cabinet were Bernard Kouchner, Hervé Morin and, above all, Jean-Louis Borloo. Xavier Bertrand, who re-joined the government, was replaced as general-secretary of the UMP by Jean-François Copé on 17 November 2010.The party suffered another major electoral defeat in the 2011 cantonal elections held on 20 and 27 March 2011, and in September, the centre-right lost control of the French Senate for the first time in the history of the Fifth Republic.In May 2011, during a party congress, the Radical Party, led by Borloo, decided to leave the UMP and launch The Alliance, a new centrist coalition.The party opted not to organise primaries ahead of the 2012 presidential election and endorsed Nicolas Sarkozy's bid for second term. Sarkozy lost reelection to the Socialist Party candidate François Hollande on 6 May 2012, winning 48.36% in the runoff. The party was defeated by the new President's left-wing majority in the subsequent legislative election.Prior to Sarkozy's defeat on 6 May, the UMP's secretary-general Jean-François Copé announced that he supported the creation of internal "movements" within the party and the organisation of primaries for the next presidential election.The UMP's political bureau announced the organisation of a party congress on 18 and 25 November 2012, leading prominent party leaders to organise factions and "movements" to influence the party's new direction.Ultimately, two candidates amassed the required endorsements to run for the party's presidency: former Prime Minister François Fillon and incumbent party secretary-general Jean-François Copé. Nathalie Kosciusko-Morizet, Bruno Le Maire, Xavier Bertrand, Henri Guaino, and Dominique Dord had also announced their candidacies but did not meet tough candidacy requirements.The campaign between Fillon and Copé lasted two months. Fillon had a strong lead in polls of UMP 'sympathizers' (as opposed to actual members, who would be the only eligible voters) and was backed by most UMP parliamentarians while Copé claimed he was the candidate of party activists rather than party 'barons'. However, Copé remained as secretary-general and retained control of the party machinery.While Fillon's campaign was regarded as more consensual, moderate and centre-right; Copé campaigned as the candidate of the "droite décomplexée" ('uninhibited right') and introduced issues such as anti-white racism. However, both candidates received support from moderate and conservative members of the party and their main differences were in rhetoric, style and temperament. Copé, again, appeared more militant and activist, saying that he would support and participate in street demonstrations while Fillon disagreed with his rival.Six 'motions' (declarations of principles) were submitted to party voters; under the new statutes, motions which won over 10% of the vote at the congress would be recognised as "movements" by the UMP leadership, granted financial autonomy and receive positions in the party structures.The vote on 18 November saw high turnout but was quickly marred by allegations of irregularities and potential fraud on both sides. Both candidates proclaimed victory within 20 minutes of each other on the night of the vote.24 hours later, the control commission in charge of the vote (COCOE) announced Copé's victory by only 98 votes. While Fillon initially conceded defeat, by 21 November his campaign claimed victory anew, with a 26-vote advantage over Copé. Fillon's campaign argued that the COCOE had failed to take into account votes cast in three overseas federations.Party elder Alain Juppé accepted to lead a mediation between both candidates on 23 November, but it failed within two days. Fillon's announced "precautionary seizure" of ballots cast "to protect them from tampering or alteration" and threatened to take the matter to court. On 26 November, the party appeals commission – led by a close supporter of Copé – decided in Copé's favour and rejected Fillon's arguments.On 27 November 72 "filloniste" parliamentarians in the National Assembly announced the creation of a new parliamentary group, the "Rassemblement-UMP", led by Fillon. Copé took up former President Nicolas Sarkozy's proposal of organising a referendum on a revote, but he saw the creation of the dissident "filloniste" group as a casus belli and took back his proposal. Luc Chatel, the new vice-president and a Copé supporter, later announced that he supported a new presidential vote and a modification of party statutes. The next day, Copé announced that he favoured organising a referendum the modification of party statutes and a reduction of his own term as president to two years (until November 2014); while Fillon welcomed the "consensus on the organisation of a new election" he rejected his rival's timeline and called for a new election before 2014. 'Unaligned' members of the UMP led by Bruno Le Maire and Nathalie Kosciusko-Morizet appealed for the organisation of a new election in the spring of 2013 and a reform of the party statutes.Both rivals reached an agreement at the end of December 2012, with Copé agreeing to the organisation of a new election and a modification of party statutes while Fillon agreed to dissolve his parliamentary group.The party's leadership was reorganized in January 2013 to accommodate Copé and Fillon's supporters: Laurent Wauquiez and Valérie Pécresse joined Luc Chatel and Michèle Tabarot as vice-president and secretary-general respectively. Christian Estrosi, Gérard Longuet, Henri de Raincourt (pro-Fillon), Jean-Claude Gaudin, Brice Hortefeux and Roger Karoutchi (pro-Copé) also became vice-presidents. Other positions in the party hierarchy were divided between supporters of both candidates. New leaders were also nominated in February 2013.Several spending scandals appeared in 2014. In early 2014, the Bygmalion scandal () pushed the party's leader Jean-François Copé to resign. In early July, Sarkozy got held in custody due to possible spying and active corruption of the judiciary system. On 8 July 2014, the UMP was discovered to have a hidden debt of €79.1 million for the year 2013. On 20 May 2021, the criminal trial began for Sarkozy and 13 other defendants who were said to have been involved in the Bygmalion scandal. The scandal allegations that Sarkozy diverting tens of millions of euros which was intended to be spent on the his failed 2012 re-election campaign and then hiring a PR firm to cover it up. The illicit campaign finance money which was not reported as being spent on Sarkozy's re-election campaign was instead used to overspend on lavish campaign rallies and events.After the election of Nicolas Sarkozy, the former President of France (2007–2012), as president of the Union for a Popular Movement (UMP) in November 2014, he put forward a request to the party's general committee to change its name to the Republicans as well as the statutes of the party. With the name already chosen Nathalie Kosciusko-Morizet, vice president of the UMP, presented Nicolas Sarkozy and the party's political bureau a project of new statutes. The proposed statutes provided for, among others, the election of the presidents of the departmental federations by direct suffrage, the end of the political currents and consulting members on election nominations.Critics of Sarkozy claimed it was illegal for him to name the party "Republicans" because every French person is a republican in that they support the values and ideals of the French Republic that emanated from the French Revolution, and as such the term is above party politics. The new name was adopted by the bureau on 5 May 2015 and approved by the party membership on 28 May by an online yes vote of 83.28% on a 45.74% participation after a court ruling in favor of Sarkozy. Similarly the new party statutes are adopted by 96.34% of voters and the composition of the new party's political bureau by 94.77%.The Republicans thus became the legal successor of the UMP as the leading centre-right party in France.The UMP was a centre-right party and was created to represent the various families of the French right, uniting the traditions of Gaullism, Christian democracy, conservatism and liberalism. As such, it officially adopted fairly vague policy statements which emphasize consensual common values.The UMP believed that each individual's destiny must be unencumbered and it rejects political systems which "stifle economic freedom". It said that work, merit, innovation and personal initiative must be encouraged to reduce unemployment and boost economic growth; but at the same time, it maintained that adherence to the rule of law and the authority of the state is necessary. In a Gaullist tradition, the UMP supported solidarity, with the state guaranteeing social protection of less fortunate individuals. But in a more liberal vein, the party always denounced "l'assistanat", a French term which can refer to "welfare handouts".The party took more nationalist positions at times, and often adopted tough stances against immigration and illegal immigration. It strongly supported the integration and assimilation of immigrants into French society and always denounced communitarianism as a danger to the French nation-state. However, the UMP traditionally was a strong proponent of European integration and the European Union, albeit sometimes with a hint of traditional Gaullist souverainism.Under Nicolas Sarkozy's leadership, the UMP adopted a liberal and security-oriented platform. His platform in the 2007 and 2012 presidential elections emphasized the ideas of personal responsibility and individual initiative. He developed the idea of "working more to earn more", promising that overtime hours would not be taxed and employers exonerated from non-wage labour costs. Under his presidency, the government's short-lived tax cap for high-income earners was denounced by the left but also several centrist and centre-right politicians within or outside the UMP.Having gained his popularity as a 'hardliner' Interior minister, Sarkozy's policies also carried a strong law-and-order and tough on crime orientation. He supported tougher sentences for criminals and repeat offenders. As candidate and President, he placed heavy emphasis on immigration and national identity, presenting immigration as a danger to French identity and as source of increased criminality. As President, he imposed stricter limits on family reunification, created a Ministry of Immigration, and National Identity for three years between 2007 and 2010, launched a controversial national dialogue on national identity and expelled thousands of Roma from illegal camps.Critics of the right-wing government denounced what they felt was a rapprochement with the controversial far-right National Front (FN). While several members of the UMP's right-wing have indicated that they would favour local alliances with the FN and prefer to vote for a FN candidate over a Socialist Party or left-wing candidate in runoff elections between the left and the FN; the party's official position continues to reject alliances with the FN at any level but also opposes so-called "republican fronts" with the left against the FN.The UMP's original statutes in 2002 allowed for the organisation of formal factions or movements within the party, to represent the various political families of which it was made up. However, fearing leadership rivalries and divisions, Juppé, Chirac and later Sarkozy 'postponed' the creation of such organised movements indefinitely. Nevertheless, prior to the organisations of formal "movements" in November 2012, there existed informal groupings of like-minded members, either through associations, political clubs, associated political parties or even informal factions.Jean-François Copé allowed for the organisation of formal movements within the party following the November 2012 congress. According to the party's statutes, motions backed by at least 10 parliamentarians from 10 departmental federations and which obtain at least 10% support from members at a congress are recognised as movements. They are granted financial autonomy by way of a fixed grant and additional funding in proportion to the votes they obtained; but the sum of funds transferred by the party to its movements can be no larger than 30% of the annual public subsidies the UMP receives from the state.Six motions representing various ideological tendencies within the party ran to be recognised as official movements following the November 2012 congress. Five of these motions met the conditions to be recognised as such, and their leaders have since integrated the UMP's leadership structure:The Hunting, Fishing, Nature, Tradition, the Christian Democratic Party, the Rally for France and The Progressives are associate parties of the UMP. By adhering to these parties, members also adhered to the UMP and could participate in the UMP's inner organisation. The Radical Party was associated with the UMP from 2002 through 2011.Overseas parties associated with the UMP included O Porinetia To Tatou Ai'a in French Polynesia and The Rally–UMP in New Caledonia.The aforementioned November 2012 congress saw the division of the party between the two candidates who sought the party's presidency, François Fillon and Jean-François Copé – the "fillonistes" and "copéistes".The UMP's electoral base reflects that of the old Rally for the Republic (RPR) and, in some cases, that of the Union for French Democracy (UDF). In the 2007 presidential election, Nicolas Sarkozy performed best in the east of France – particularly Alsace (36.2%); Provence-Alpes-Côte-d'Azur (37.0%) – the wealthy coastal department of the Alpes-Maritimes (43.6%) was his best department in France; Champagne-Ardenne (32.7%) and Rhône-Alpes (32.7%). These areas were among National Front candidate Jean-Marie Le Pen's best regions in 2002 and are conservative on issues such as immigration. Sarkozy received a lot of votes from voters who had supported the far-right in April 2002. For example, in the Alpes-Maritimes, Sarkozy performed 21.6% better than Chirac did in 2002 while Le Pen lost 12.6% in five years. Sarkozy also appealed more than average to blue-collar workers in regions such as northern Meurthe-et-Moselle and the Nord-Pas-de-Calais, although most of these regions, despite his gains, remain reliably left-wing. The party is also strong in every election in very wealthy suburban or coastal (and, in some cases, urban) areas such as Neuilly-sur-Seine (72.6% for Sarkozy in the first round), Saint-Tropez (54.79%), Cannes (48.19%) or Marcq-en-Barœul (47.35%). It is strong in most rural areas, like most conservative parties in the world, but this does not extend to the rural areas of the south of France, areas which are old strongholds of republican and secular ideals. However, in old "clerical" Catholic rural areas, such as parts of Lozère or Cantal, it is very strong, as was the UDF during its hey day.However, the UMP does poorly in one of the UDF's best regions, Brittany, where the decline of religious practice, a moderate electorate and urbanisation has hurt the UMP and also the UDF. Nicolas Sarkozy performed relatively poorly in departments with a large share of moderate Christian democratic (often centrist or centre-right) voters, such as Lozère where the Socialist candidate Ségolène Royal performed better (44.3%) than François Mitterrand had in his 1988 left-wing landslide (43.1%). While former President Jacques Chirac, the right's strongman in normally left-wing Corrèze had always done very well in Corrèze and the surrounding departments, Sarkozy did very poorly and actually lost the department in the 2007 runoff. However, in the 2009 European election, the UMP's results in those departments were superior to Sarkozy's first round result (nationally, they were 4% lower).	[ "Jean-François Copé", "Alain Juppé" ]
Who was the chair of Union for a Popular Movement in 18/12/2014?	December 18, 2014	{ "text": [ "Nicolas Sarkozy" ] }	L2_Q173152_P488_2	Alain Juppé is the chair of Union for a Popular Movement from Nov, 2002 to Jul, 2004. Jean-François Copé is the chair of Union for a Popular Movement from Nov, 2012 to Jun, 2014. Nicolas Sarkozy is the chair of Union for a Popular Movement from Dec, 2014 to May, 2015.	Union for a Popular MovementThe Union for a Popular Movement ( ; UMP ) was a centre-right political party in France that was one of the two major contemporary political parties in France along with the centre-left Socialist Party (PS). The UMP was formed in 2002 as a merger of several centre-right parties under the leadership of President Jacques Chirac. In May 2015, the party was renamed and succeeded by The Republicans ("").Nicolas Sarkozy, then the president of the UMP, was elected President of France in the 2007 presidential election, but was defeated by PS candidate François Hollande in a run-off five years later. After the November 2012 party congress, the UMP experienced internal fractioning and was plagued by monetary scandals which forced its president, Jean-François Copé, to resign. After his re-election as UMP president in November 2014, Sarkozy put forward an amendment to change the name of the party into The Republicans, which was approved and came into effect on 30 May 2015.The UMP enjoyed an absolute majority in the National Assembly from 2002 to 2012 and was a member of the European People's Party (EPP), the Centrist Democrat International (CDI) and the International Democrat Union (IDU).Since the 1980s, the political groups of the parliamentary right have joined forces around the values of economic liberalism and the building of Europe. Their rivalries had contributed to their defeat in the 1981 and 1988 legislative elections.Before the 1993 legislative election, the Gaullist Rally for the Republic (RPR) and the centrist Union for French Democracy (UDF) formed an electoral alliance, the Union for France (UPF). However, in the 1995 presidential campaign they were both divided between followers of Jacques Chirac, who was eventually elected, and supporters of Prime Minister Edouard Balladur. After their defeat in the 1997 legislative election, the RPR and UDF created the Alliance for France in order to coordinate the actions of their parliamentary groups.Before the 2002 presidential campaign, the supporters of President Jacques Chirac, divided in three centre-right parliamentary parties, founded an association named Union on the Move ("Union en mouvement"). After Chirac's re-election, in order to contest the legislative election jointly, the Union for the Presidential Majority ("Union pour la majorité présidentielle") was created. It was renamed "Union for a Popular Movement" and as such established as a permanent organisation.The UMP was the merger of the Gaullist-conservative Rally for the Republic (RPR), the conservative-liberal party Liberal Democracy (DL), a sizeable portion of the Union for French Democracy (UDF), more precisely the UDF's Christian Democrats (such as Philippe Douste-Blazy and Jacques Barrot), the Radical Party and the centrist Popular Party for French Democracy (both associate parties of the UDF until 2002). In the UMP four major French political families were thus represented: Gaullism, republicanism (the kind of liberalism put forward by parties like the Democratic Republican Alliance or the PR, heir of DL), Christian democracy ("Popularism") and radicalism.Chirac's close ally Alain Juppé became the party's first president at the party's founding congress at the Bourget in November 2002. Juppé won 79.42% of the vote, defeating Nicolas Dupont-Aignan, the leader of the party's Eurosceptic Arise the Republic faction, and three other candidates. During the party's earlier years, it was marked by tensions and rivalries between Juppé and other "chiraquiens" and supporters of Nicolas Sarkozy, the then-Minister of the Interior.In the 2004 regional elections the UMP suffered a heavy blow, winning the presidencies of only 2 out of 22 regions in metropolitan France (Alsace and Corsica) and only half of the departments (the right had previously won numerous departmental presidencies) in the simultaneous 2004 cantonal elections. In the 2004 European Parliament election on 13 June 2004, the UMP also suffered another heavy blow, winning 16.6% of the vote, far behind the Socialist Party (PS), and only 16 seats.Juppé resigned the party's presidency on 15 July 2004 after being found guilty in a corruption scandal in January of the same year. Nicolas Sarkozy rapidly announced that he would take over the presidency of the UMP and resign his position as finance minister, ending months of speculation. On 28 November 2004, Sarkozy was elected to the party's presidency with 85.09% of the votes against 9.1% for Dupont-Aignan and 5.82% for Christine Boutin, the leader of the UMP's social conservatives. Having gained control of what had been Chirac's party, Sarkozy focused the party machinery and his energies on the 2007 presidential election.The failure of the referendum on the European Constitution on 25 May 2005 led to the fall of the government of Jean-Pierre Raffarin and to the formation of a new cabinet, presided by another UMP politician, Dominique de Villepin. However, during this time, the UMP under Sarkozy gained a record number of new members and rejuvenated itself in preparation of the 2007 election. On 14 January 2007, Sarkozy was nominated unopposed as the UMP's presidential candidate for the 2007 election.On the issues, the party under Sarkozy publicly disapproved of Turkey's proposed membership in the European Union, which Chirac had previously endorsed several times publicly, and generally took a more right-wing position.On 22 April 2007 Nicolas Sarkozy won the plurality of votes in the first round of the 2007 presidential election. On 6 May he faced the Socialist Party candidate Ségolène Royal in the second round and won, taking 53.06% of the vote. As a consequence, he resigned from the presidency of the UMP on 14 May 2007, two days before becoming President of the French Republic. François Fillon was appointed Prime Minister. On 17 June 2007, at a 2007 legislative election, the UMP gained a majority in the National Assembly with 313 out of 577 seats.Following Sarkozy's election to the presidency, interim leader Jean-Claude Gaudin prevented a leadership struggle between Patrick Devedjian and Jean-Pierre Raffarin by announcing that the UMP should have a collegial leadership while Sarkozy was President of the Republic. In July, the UMP's national council approved an amendment to the party's statute allowing for a collegial leadership around three vice-presidents (Jean-Pierre Raffarin, Jean-Claude Gaudin and Pierre Méhaignerie) and a secretary-general (Patrick Devedjian) and two associate secretary-generals.On 9 March 2008 municipal and cantonal elections, the party performed quite poorly, losing numerous cities, such as Toulouse and Strasbourg, as well as eight departmental presidencies to the left. Xavier Bertrand was selected as secretary-general of the party in late 2008 to replace Patrick Devedjian, who resigned to take up a cabinet position.In the 2009 European Parliament election on 7 June 2009, the UMP ran common lists with its junior allies including Jean-Louis Borloo's Radical Party, the New Centre and Modern Left. The UMP list won 27.9%, a remarkably good result for a governing party in off-year "mid-term" elections, and elected 29 MEPs, significantly improving on the UMP's poor result in the 2004 European election – also an off-year election. However, in the 2010 regional elections on 14 and 21 March 2010, the UMP obtained a very poor result with only 26%. While it lost Corsica, it retained Alsace but also defeated the left in "La Réunion" and French Guiana.In a cabinet reshuffle in November 2010, which disappointed centrists within and outside the UMP, François Fillon was confirmed Prime Minister and Alain Juppé re-joined the government. Among those who resigned from the cabinet were Bernard Kouchner, Hervé Morin and, above all, Jean-Louis Borloo. Xavier Bertrand, who re-joined the government, was replaced as general-secretary of the UMP by Jean-François Copé on 17 November 2010.The party suffered another major electoral defeat in the 2011 cantonal elections held on 20 and 27 March 2011, and in September, the centre-right lost control of the French Senate for the first time in the history of the Fifth Republic.In May 2011, during a party congress, the Radical Party, led by Borloo, decided to leave the UMP and launch The Alliance, a new centrist coalition.The party opted not to organise primaries ahead of the 2012 presidential election and endorsed Nicolas Sarkozy's bid for second term. Sarkozy lost reelection to the Socialist Party candidate François Hollande on 6 May 2012, winning 48.36% in the runoff. The party was defeated by the new President's left-wing majority in the subsequent legislative election.Prior to Sarkozy's defeat on 6 May, the UMP's secretary-general Jean-François Copé announced that he supported the creation of internal "movements" within the party and the organisation of primaries for the next presidential election.The UMP's political bureau announced the organisation of a party congress on 18 and 25 November 2012, leading prominent party leaders to organise factions and "movements" to influence the party's new direction.Ultimately, two candidates amassed the required endorsements to run for the party's presidency: former Prime Minister François Fillon and incumbent party secretary-general Jean-François Copé. Nathalie Kosciusko-Morizet, Bruno Le Maire, Xavier Bertrand, Henri Guaino, and Dominique Dord had also announced their candidacies but did not meet tough candidacy requirements.The campaign between Fillon and Copé lasted two months. Fillon had a strong lead in polls of UMP 'sympathizers' (as opposed to actual members, who would be the only eligible voters) and was backed by most UMP parliamentarians while Copé claimed he was the candidate of party activists rather than party 'barons'. However, Copé remained as secretary-general and retained control of the party machinery.While Fillon's campaign was regarded as more consensual, moderate and centre-right; Copé campaigned as the candidate of the "droite décomplexée" ('uninhibited right') and introduced issues such as anti-white racism. However, both candidates received support from moderate and conservative members of the party and their main differences were in rhetoric, style and temperament. Copé, again, appeared more militant and activist, saying that he would support and participate in street demonstrations while Fillon disagreed with his rival.Six 'motions' (declarations of principles) were submitted to party voters; under the new statutes, motions which won over 10% of the vote at the congress would be recognised as "movements" by the UMP leadership, granted financial autonomy and receive positions in the party structures.The vote on 18 November saw high turnout but was quickly marred by allegations of irregularities and potential fraud on both sides. Both candidates proclaimed victory within 20 minutes of each other on the night of the vote.24 hours later, the control commission in charge of the vote (COCOE) announced Copé's victory by only 98 votes. While Fillon initially conceded defeat, by 21 November his campaign claimed victory anew, with a 26-vote advantage over Copé. Fillon's campaign argued that the COCOE had failed to take into account votes cast in three overseas federations.Party elder Alain Juppé accepted to lead a mediation between both candidates on 23 November, but it failed within two days. Fillon's announced "precautionary seizure" of ballots cast "to protect them from tampering or alteration" and threatened to take the matter to court. On 26 November, the party appeals commission – led by a close supporter of Copé – decided in Copé's favour and rejected Fillon's arguments.On 27 November 72 "filloniste" parliamentarians in the National Assembly announced the creation of a new parliamentary group, the "Rassemblement-UMP", led by Fillon. Copé took up former President Nicolas Sarkozy's proposal of organising a referendum on a revote, but he saw the creation of the dissident "filloniste" group as a casus belli and took back his proposal. Luc Chatel, the new vice-president and a Copé supporter, later announced that he supported a new presidential vote and a modification of party statutes. The next day, Copé announced that he favoured organising a referendum the modification of party statutes and a reduction of his own term as president to two years (until November 2014); while Fillon welcomed the "consensus on the organisation of a new election" he rejected his rival's timeline and called for a new election before 2014. 'Unaligned' members of the UMP led by Bruno Le Maire and Nathalie Kosciusko-Morizet appealed for the organisation of a new election in the spring of 2013 and a reform of the party statutes.Both rivals reached an agreement at the end of December 2012, with Copé agreeing to the organisation of a new election and a modification of party statutes while Fillon agreed to dissolve his parliamentary group.The party's leadership was reorganized in January 2013 to accommodate Copé and Fillon's supporters: Laurent Wauquiez and Valérie Pécresse joined Luc Chatel and Michèle Tabarot as vice-president and secretary-general respectively. Christian Estrosi, Gérard Longuet, Henri de Raincourt (pro-Fillon), Jean-Claude Gaudin, Brice Hortefeux and Roger Karoutchi (pro-Copé) also became vice-presidents. Other positions in the party hierarchy were divided between supporters of both candidates. New leaders were also nominated in February 2013.Several spending scandals appeared in 2014. In early 2014, the Bygmalion scandal () pushed the party's leader Jean-François Copé to resign. In early July, Sarkozy got held in custody due to possible spying and active corruption of the judiciary system. On 8 July 2014, the UMP was discovered to have a hidden debt of €79.1 million for the year 2013. On 20 May 2021, the criminal trial began for Sarkozy and 13 other defendants who were said to have been involved in the Bygmalion scandal. The scandal allegations that Sarkozy diverting tens of millions of euros which was intended to be spent on the his failed 2012 re-election campaign and then hiring a PR firm to cover it up. The illicit campaign finance money which was not reported as being spent on Sarkozy's re-election campaign was instead used to overspend on lavish campaign rallies and events.After the election of Nicolas Sarkozy, the former President of France (2007–2012), as president of the Union for a Popular Movement (UMP) in November 2014, he put forward a request to the party's general committee to change its name to the Republicans as well as the statutes of the party. With the name already chosen Nathalie Kosciusko-Morizet, vice president of the UMP, presented Nicolas Sarkozy and the party's political bureau a project of new statutes. The proposed statutes provided for, among others, the election of the presidents of the departmental federations by direct suffrage, the end of the political currents and consulting members on election nominations.Critics of Sarkozy claimed it was illegal for him to name the party "Republicans" because every French person is a republican in that they support the values and ideals of the French Republic that emanated from the French Revolution, and as such the term is above party politics. The new name was adopted by the bureau on 5 May 2015 and approved by the party membership on 28 May by an online yes vote of 83.28% on a 45.74% participation after a court ruling in favor of Sarkozy. Similarly the new party statutes are adopted by 96.34% of voters and the composition of the new party's political bureau by 94.77%.The Republicans thus became the legal successor of the UMP as the leading centre-right party in France.The UMP was a centre-right party and was created to represent the various families of the French right, uniting the traditions of Gaullism, Christian democracy, conservatism and liberalism. As such, it officially adopted fairly vague policy statements which emphasize consensual common values.The UMP believed that each individual's destiny must be unencumbered and it rejects political systems which "stifle economic freedom". It said that work, merit, innovation and personal initiative must be encouraged to reduce unemployment and boost economic growth; but at the same time, it maintained that adherence to the rule of law and the authority of the state is necessary. In a Gaullist tradition, the UMP supported solidarity, with the state guaranteeing social protection of less fortunate individuals. But in a more liberal vein, the party always denounced "l'assistanat", a French term which can refer to "welfare handouts".The party took more nationalist positions at times, and often adopted tough stances against immigration and illegal immigration. It strongly supported the integration and assimilation of immigrants into French society and always denounced communitarianism as a danger to the French nation-state. However, the UMP traditionally was a strong proponent of European integration and the European Union, albeit sometimes with a hint of traditional Gaullist souverainism.Under Nicolas Sarkozy's leadership, the UMP adopted a liberal and security-oriented platform. His platform in the 2007 and 2012 presidential elections emphasized the ideas of personal responsibility and individual initiative. He developed the idea of "working more to earn more", promising that overtime hours would not be taxed and employers exonerated from non-wage labour costs. Under his presidency, the government's short-lived tax cap for high-income earners was denounced by the left but also several centrist and centre-right politicians within or outside the UMP.Having gained his popularity as a 'hardliner' Interior minister, Sarkozy's policies also carried a strong law-and-order and tough on crime orientation. He supported tougher sentences for criminals and repeat offenders. As candidate and President, he placed heavy emphasis on immigration and national identity, presenting immigration as a danger to French identity and as source of increased criminality. As President, he imposed stricter limits on family reunification, created a Ministry of Immigration, and National Identity for three years between 2007 and 2010, launched a controversial national dialogue on national identity and expelled thousands of Roma from illegal camps.Critics of the right-wing government denounced what they felt was a rapprochement with the controversial far-right National Front (FN). While several members of the UMP's right-wing have indicated that they would favour local alliances with the FN and prefer to vote for a FN candidate over a Socialist Party or left-wing candidate in runoff elections between the left and the FN; the party's official position continues to reject alliances with the FN at any level but also opposes so-called "republican fronts" with the left against the FN.The UMP's original statutes in 2002 allowed for the organisation of formal factions or movements within the party, to represent the various political families of which it was made up. However, fearing leadership rivalries and divisions, Juppé, Chirac and later Sarkozy 'postponed' the creation of such organised movements indefinitely. Nevertheless, prior to the organisations of formal "movements" in November 2012, there existed informal groupings of like-minded members, either through associations, political clubs, associated political parties or even informal factions.Jean-François Copé allowed for the organisation of formal movements within the party following the November 2012 congress. According to the party's statutes, motions backed by at least 10 parliamentarians from 10 departmental federations and which obtain at least 10% support from members at a congress are recognised as movements. They are granted financial autonomy by way of a fixed grant and additional funding in proportion to the votes they obtained; but the sum of funds transferred by the party to its movements can be no larger than 30% of the annual public subsidies the UMP receives from the state.Six motions representing various ideological tendencies within the party ran to be recognised as official movements following the November 2012 congress. Five of these motions met the conditions to be recognised as such, and their leaders have since integrated the UMP's leadership structure:The Hunting, Fishing, Nature, Tradition, the Christian Democratic Party, the Rally for France and The Progressives are associate parties of the UMP. By adhering to these parties, members also adhered to the UMP and could participate in the UMP's inner organisation. The Radical Party was associated with the UMP from 2002 through 2011.Overseas parties associated with the UMP included O Porinetia To Tatou Ai'a in French Polynesia and The Rally–UMP in New Caledonia.The aforementioned November 2012 congress saw the division of the party between the two candidates who sought the party's presidency, François Fillon and Jean-François Copé – the "fillonistes" and "copéistes".The UMP's electoral base reflects that of the old Rally for the Republic (RPR) and, in some cases, that of the Union for French Democracy (UDF). In the 2007 presidential election, Nicolas Sarkozy performed best in the east of France – particularly Alsace (36.2%); Provence-Alpes-Côte-d'Azur (37.0%) – the wealthy coastal department of the Alpes-Maritimes (43.6%) was his best department in France; Champagne-Ardenne (32.7%) and Rhône-Alpes (32.7%). These areas were among National Front candidate Jean-Marie Le Pen's best regions in 2002 and are conservative on issues such as immigration. Sarkozy received a lot of votes from voters who had supported the far-right in April 2002. For example, in the Alpes-Maritimes, Sarkozy performed 21.6% better than Chirac did in 2002 while Le Pen lost 12.6% in five years. Sarkozy also appealed more than average to blue-collar workers in regions such as northern Meurthe-et-Moselle and the Nord-Pas-de-Calais, although most of these regions, despite his gains, remain reliably left-wing. The party is also strong in every election in very wealthy suburban or coastal (and, in some cases, urban) areas such as Neuilly-sur-Seine (72.6% for Sarkozy in the first round), Saint-Tropez (54.79%), Cannes (48.19%) or Marcq-en-Barœul (47.35%). It is strong in most rural areas, like most conservative parties in the world, but this does not extend to the rural areas of the south of France, areas which are old strongholds of republican and secular ideals. However, in old "clerical" Catholic rural areas, such as parts of Lozère or Cantal, it is very strong, as was the UDF during its hey day.However, the UMP does poorly in one of the UDF's best regions, Brittany, where the decline of religious practice, a moderate electorate and urbanisation has hurt the UMP and also the UDF. Nicolas Sarkozy performed relatively poorly in departments with a large share of moderate Christian democratic (often centrist or centre-right) voters, such as Lozère where the Socialist candidate Ségolène Royal performed better (44.3%) than François Mitterrand had in his 1988 left-wing landslide (43.1%). While former President Jacques Chirac, the right's strongman in normally left-wing Corrèze had always done very well in Corrèze and the surrounding departments, Sarkozy did very poorly and actually lost the department in the 2007 runoff. However, in the 2009 European election, the UMP's results in those departments were superior to Sarkozy's first round result (nationally, they were 4% lower).	[ "Jean-François Copé", "Alain Juppé" ]
Who was the chair of Union for a Popular Movement in Dec 18, 2014?	December 18, 2014	{ "text": [ "Nicolas Sarkozy" ] }	L2_Q173152_P488_2	Alain Juppé is the chair of Union for a Popular Movement from Nov, 2002 to Jul, 2004. Jean-François Copé is the chair of Union for a Popular Movement from Nov, 2012 to Jun, 2014. Nicolas Sarkozy is the chair of Union for a Popular Movement from Dec, 2014 to May, 2015.	Union for a Popular MovementThe Union for a Popular Movement ( ; UMP ) was a centre-right political party in France that was one of the two major contemporary political parties in France along with the centre-left Socialist Party (PS). The UMP was formed in 2002 as a merger of several centre-right parties under the leadership of President Jacques Chirac. In May 2015, the party was renamed and succeeded by The Republicans ("").Nicolas Sarkozy, then the president of the UMP, was elected President of France in the 2007 presidential election, but was defeated by PS candidate François Hollande in a run-off five years later. After the November 2012 party congress, the UMP experienced internal fractioning and was plagued by monetary scandals which forced its president, Jean-François Copé, to resign. After his re-election as UMP president in November 2014, Sarkozy put forward an amendment to change the name of the party into The Republicans, which was approved and came into effect on 30 May 2015.The UMP enjoyed an absolute majority in the National Assembly from 2002 to 2012 and was a member of the European People's Party (EPP), the Centrist Democrat International (CDI) and the International Democrat Union (IDU).Since the 1980s, the political groups of the parliamentary right have joined forces around the values of economic liberalism and the building of Europe. Their rivalries had contributed to their defeat in the 1981 and 1988 legislative elections.Before the 1993 legislative election, the Gaullist Rally for the Republic (RPR) and the centrist Union for French Democracy (UDF) formed an electoral alliance, the Union for France (UPF). However, in the 1995 presidential campaign they were both divided between followers of Jacques Chirac, who was eventually elected, and supporters of Prime Minister Edouard Balladur. After their defeat in the 1997 legislative election, the RPR and UDF created the Alliance for France in order to coordinate the actions of their parliamentary groups.Before the 2002 presidential campaign, the supporters of President Jacques Chirac, divided in three centre-right parliamentary parties, founded an association named Union on the Move ("Union en mouvement"). After Chirac's re-election, in order to contest the legislative election jointly, the Union for the Presidential Majority ("Union pour la majorité présidentielle") was created. It was renamed "Union for a Popular Movement" and as such established as a permanent organisation.The UMP was the merger of the Gaullist-conservative Rally for the Republic (RPR), the conservative-liberal party Liberal Democracy (DL), a sizeable portion of the Union for French Democracy (UDF), more precisely the UDF's Christian Democrats (such as Philippe Douste-Blazy and Jacques Barrot), the Radical Party and the centrist Popular Party for French Democracy (both associate parties of the UDF until 2002). In the UMP four major French political families were thus represented: Gaullism, republicanism (the kind of liberalism put forward by parties like the Democratic Republican Alliance or the PR, heir of DL), Christian democracy ("Popularism") and radicalism.Chirac's close ally Alain Juppé became the party's first president at the party's founding congress at the Bourget in November 2002. Juppé won 79.42% of the vote, defeating Nicolas Dupont-Aignan, the leader of the party's Eurosceptic Arise the Republic faction, and three other candidates. During the party's earlier years, it was marked by tensions and rivalries between Juppé and other "chiraquiens" and supporters of Nicolas Sarkozy, the then-Minister of the Interior.In the 2004 regional elections the UMP suffered a heavy blow, winning the presidencies of only 2 out of 22 regions in metropolitan France (Alsace and Corsica) and only half of the departments (the right had previously won numerous departmental presidencies) in the simultaneous 2004 cantonal elections. In the 2004 European Parliament election on 13 June 2004, the UMP also suffered another heavy blow, winning 16.6% of the vote, far behind the Socialist Party (PS), and only 16 seats.Juppé resigned the party's presidency on 15 July 2004 after being found guilty in a corruption scandal in January of the same year. Nicolas Sarkozy rapidly announced that he would take over the presidency of the UMP and resign his position as finance minister, ending months of speculation. On 28 November 2004, Sarkozy was elected to the party's presidency with 85.09% of the votes against 9.1% for Dupont-Aignan and 5.82% for Christine Boutin, the leader of the UMP's social conservatives. Having gained control of what had been Chirac's party, Sarkozy focused the party machinery and his energies on the 2007 presidential election.The failure of the referendum on the European Constitution on 25 May 2005 led to the fall of the government of Jean-Pierre Raffarin and to the formation of a new cabinet, presided by another UMP politician, Dominique de Villepin. However, during this time, the UMP under Sarkozy gained a record number of new members and rejuvenated itself in preparation of the 2007 election. On 14 January 2007, Sarkozy was nominated unopposed as the UMP's presidential candidate for the 2007 election.On the issues, the party under Sarkozy publicly disapproved of Turkey's proposed membership in the European Union, which Chirac had previously endorsed several times publicly, and generally took a more right-wing position.On 22 April 2007 Nicolas Sarkozy won the plurality of votes in the first round of the 2007 presidential election. On 6 May he faced the Socialist Party candidate Ségolène Royal in the second round and won, taking 53.06% of the vote. As a consequence, he resigned from the presidency of the UMP on 14 May 2007, two days before becoming President of the French Republic. François Fillon was appointed Prime Minister. On 17 June 2007, at a 2007 legislative election, the UMP gained a majority in the National Assembly with 313 out of 577 seats.Following Sarkozy's election to the presidency, interim leader Jean-Claude Gaudin prevented a leadership struggle between Patrick Devedjian and Jean-Pierre Raffarin by announcing that the UMP should have a collegial leadership while Sarkozy was President of the Republic. In July, the UMP's national council approved an amendment to the party's statute allowing for a collegial leadership around three vice-presidents (Jean-Pierre Raffarin, Jean-Claude Gaudin and Pierre Méhaignerie) and a secretary-general (Patrick Devedjian) and two associate secretary-generals.On 9 March 2008 municipal and cantonal elections, the party performed quite poorly, losing numerous cities, such as Toulouse and Strasbourg, as well as eight departmental presidencies to the left. Xavier Bertrand was selected as secretary-general of the party in late 2008 to replace Patrick Devedjian, who resigned to take up a cabinet position.In the 2009 European Parliament election on 7 June 2009, the UMP ran common lists with its junior allies including Jean-Louis Borloo's Radical Party, the New Centre and Modern Left. The UMP list won 27.9%, a remarkably good result for a governing party in off-year "mid-term" elections, and elected 29 MEPs, significantly improving on the UMP's poor result in the 2004 European election – also an off-year election. However, in the 2010 regional elections on 14 and 21 March 2010, the UMP obtained a very poor result with only 26%. While it lost Corsica, it retained Alsace but also defeated the left in "La Réunion" and French Guiana.In a cabinet reshuffle in November 2010, which disappointed centrists within and outside the UMP, François Fillon was confirmed Prime Minister and Alain Juppé re-joined the government. Among those who resigned from the cabinet were Bernard Kouchner, Hervé Morin and, above all, Jean-Louis Borloo. Xavier Bertrand, who re-joined the government, was replaced as general-secretary of the UMP by Jean-François Copé on 17 November 2010.The party suffered another major electoral defeat in the 2011 cantonal elections held on 20 and 27 March 2011, and in September, the centre-right lost control of the French Senate for the first time in the history of the Fifth Republic.In May 2011, during a party congress, the Radical Party, led by Borloo, decided to leave the UMP and launch The Alliance, a new centrist coalition.The party opted not to organise primaries ahead of the 2012 presidential election and endorsed Nicolas Sarkozy's bid for second term. Sarkozy lost reelection to the Socialist Party candidate François Hollande on 6 May 2012, winning 48.36% in the runoff. The party was defeated by the new President's left-wing majority in the subsequent legislative election.Prior to Sarkozy's defeat on 6 May, the UMP's secretary-general Jean-François Copé announced that he supported the creation of internal "movements" within the party and the organisation of primaries for the next presidential election.The UMP's political bureau announced the organisation of a party congress on 18 and 25 November 2012, leading prominent party leaders to organise factions and "movements" to influence the party's new direction.Ultimately, two candidates amassed the required endorsements to run for the party's presidency: former Prime Minister François Fillon and incumbent party secretary-general Jean-François Copé. Nathalie Kosciusko-Morizet, Bruno Le Maire, Xavier Bertrand, Henri Guaino, and Dominique Dord had also announced their candidacies but did not meet tough candidacy requirements.The campaign between Fillon and Copé lasted two months. Fillon had a strong lead in polls of UMP 'sympathizers' (as opposed to actual members, who would be the only eligible voters) and was backed by most UMP parliamentarians while Copé claimed he was the candidate of party activists rather than party 'barons'. However, Copé remained as secretary-general and retained control of the party machinery.While Fillon's campaign was regarded as more consensual, moderate and centre-right; Copé campaigned as the candidate of the "droite décomplexée" ('uninhibited right') and introduced issues such as anti-white racism. However, both candidates received support from moderate and conservative members of the party and their main differences were in rhetoric, style and temperament. Copé, again, appeared more militant and activist, saying that he would support and participate in street demonstrations while Fillon disagreed with his rival.Six 'motions' (declarations of principles) were submitted to party voters; under the new statutes, motions which won over 10% of the vote at the congress would be recognised as "movements" by the UMP leadership, granted financial autonomy and receive positions in the party structures.The vote on 18 November saw high turnout but was quickly marred by allegations of irregularities and potential fraud on both sides. Both candidates proclaimed victory within 20 minutes of each other on the night of the vote.24 hours later, the control commission in charge of the vote (COCOE) announced Copé's victory by only 98 votes. While Fillon initially conceded defeat, by 21 November his campaign claimed victory anew, with a 26-vote advantage over Copé. Fillon's campaign argued that the COCOE had failed to take into account votes cast in three overseas federations.Party elder Alain Juppé accepted to lead a mediation between both candidates on 23 November, but it failed within two days. Fillon's announced "precautionary seizure" of ballots cast "to protect them from tampering or alteration" and threatened to take the matter to court. On 26 November, the party appeals commission – led by a close supporter of Copé – decided in Copé's favour and rejected Fillon's arguments.On 27 November 72 "filloniste" parliamentarians in the National Assembly announced the creation of a new parliamentary group, the "Rassemblement-UMP", led by Fillon. Copé took up former President Nicolas Sarkozy's proposal of organising a referendum on a revote, but he saw the creation of the dissident "filloniste" group as a casus belli and took back his proposal. Luc Chatel, the new vice-president and a Copé supporter, later announced that he supported a new presidential vote and a modification of party statutes. The next day, Copé announced that he favoured organising a referendum the modification of party statutes and a reduction of his own term as president to two years (until November 2014); while Fillon welcomed the "consensus on the organisation of a new election" he rejected his rival's timeline and called for a new election before 2014. 'Unaligned' members of the UMP led by Bruno Le Maire and Nathalie Kosciusko-Morizet appealed for the organisation of a new election in the spring of 2013 and a reform of the party statutes.Both rivals reached an agreement at the end of December 2012, with Copé agreeing to the organisation of a new election and a modification of party statutes while Fillon agreed to dissolve his parliamentary group.The party's leadership was reorganized in January 2013 to accommodate Copé and Fillon's supporters: Laurent Wauquiez and Valérie Pécresse joined Luc Chatel and Michèle Tabarot as vice-president and secretary-general respectively. Christian Estrosi, Gérard Longuet, Henri de Raincourt (pro-Fillon), Jean-Claude Gaudin, Brice Hortefeux and Roger Karoutchi (pro-Copé) also became vice-presidents. Other positions in the party hierarchy were divided between supporters of both candidates. New leaders were also nominated in February 2013.Several spending scandals appeared in 2014. In early 2014, the Bygmalion scandal () pushed the party's leader Jean-François Copé to resign. In early July, Sarkozy got held in custody due to possible spying and active corruption of the judiciary system. On 8 July 2014, the UMP was discovered to have a hidden debt of €79.1 million for the year 2013. On 20 May 2021, the criminal trial began for Sarkozy and 13 other defendants who were said to have been involved in the Bygmalion scandal. The scandal allegations that Sarkozy diverting tens of millions of euros which was intended to be spent on the his failed 2012 re-election campaign and then hiring a PR firm to cover it up. The illicit campaign finance money which was not reported as being spent on Sarkozy's re-election campaign was instead used to overspend on lavish campaign rallies and events.After the election of Nicolas Sarkozy, the former President of France (2007–2012), as president of the Union for a Popular Movement (UMP) in November 2014, he put forward a request to the party's general committee to change its name to the Republicans as well as the statutes of the party. With the name already chosen Nathalie Kosciusko-Morizet, vice president of the UMP, presented Nicolas Sarkozy and the party's political bureau a project of new statutes. The proposed statutes provided for, among others, the election of the presidents of the departmental federations by direct suffrage, the end of the political currents and consulting members on election nominations.Critics of Sarkozy claimed it was illegal for him to name the party "Republicans" because every French person is a republican in that they support the values and ideals of the French Republic that emanated from the French Revolution, and as such the term is above party politics. The new name was adopted by the bureau on 5 May 2015 and approved by the party membership on 28 May by an online yes vote of 83.28% on a 45.74% participation after a court ruling in favor of Sarkozy. Similarly the new party statutes are adopted by 96.34% of voters and the composition of the new party's political bureau by 94.77%.The Republicans thus became the legal successor of the UMP as the leading centre-right party in France.The UMP was a centre-right party and was created to represent the various families of the French right, uniting the traditions of Gaullism, Christian democracy, conservatism and liberalism. As such, it officially adopted fairly vague policy statements which emphasize consensual common values.The UMP believed that each individual's destiny must be unencumbered and it rejects political systems which "stifle economic freedom". It said that work, merit, innovation and personal initiative must be encouraged to reduce unemployment and boost economic growth; but at the same time, it maintained that adherence to the rule of law and the authority of the state is necessary. In a Gaullist tradition, the UMP supported solidarity, with the state guaranteeing social protection of less fortunate individuals. But in a more liberal vein, the party always denounced "l'assistanat", a French term which can refer to "welfare handouts".The party took more nationalist positions at times, and often adopted tough stances against immigration and illegal immigration. It strongly supported the integration and assimilation of immigrants into French society and always denounced communitarianism as a danger to the French nation-state. However, the UMP traditionally was a strong proponent of European integration and the European Union, albeit sometimes with a hint of traditional Gaullist souverainism.Under Nicolas Sarkozy's leadership, the UMP adopted a liberal and security-oriented platform. His platform in the 2007 and 2012 presidential elections emphasized the ideas of personal responsibility and individual initiative. He developed the idea of "working more to earn more", promising that overtime hours would not be taxed and employers exonerated from non-wage labour costs. Under his presidency, the government's short-lived tax cap for high-income earners was denounced by the left but also several centrist and centre-right politicians within or outside the UMP.Having gained his popularity as a 'hardliner' Interior minister, Sarkozy's policies also carried a strong law-and-order and tough on crime orientation. He supported tougher sentences for criminals and repeat offenders. As candidate and President, he placed heavy emphasis on immigration and national identity, presenting immigration as a danger to French identity and as source of increased criminality. As President, he imposed stricter limits on family reunification, created a Ministry of Immigration, and National Identity for three years between 2007 and 2010, launched a controversial national dialogue on national identity and expelled thousands of Roma from illegal camps.Critics of the right-wing government denounced what they felt was a rapprochement with the controversial far-right National Front (FN). While several members of the UMP's right-wing have indicated that they would favour local alliances with the FN and prefer to vote for a FN candidate over a Socialist Party or left-wing candidate in runoff elections between the left and the FN; the party's official position continues to reject alliances with the FN at any level but also opposes so-called "republican fronts" with the left against the FN.The UMP's original statutes in 2002 allowed for the organisation of formal factions or movements within the party, to represent the various political families of which it was made up. However, fearing leadership rivalries and divisions, Juppé, Chirac and later Sarkozy 'postponed' the creation of such organised movements indefinitely. Nevertheless, prior to the organisations of formal "movements" in November 2012, there existed informal groupings of like-minded members, either through associations, political clubs, associated political parties or even informal factions.Jean-François Copé allowed for the organisation of formal movements within the party following the November 2012 congress. According to the party's statutes, motions backed by at least 10 parliamentarians from 10 departmental federations and which obtain at least 10% support from members at a congress are recognised as movements. They are granted financial autonomy by way of a fixed grant and additional funding in proportion to the votes they obtained; but the sum of funds transferred by the party to its movements can be no larger than 30% of the annual public subsidies the UMP receives from the state.Six motions representing various ideological tendencies within the party ran to be recognised as official movements following the November 2012 congress. Five of these motions met the conditions to be recognised as such, and their leaders have since integrated the UMP's leadership structure:The Hunting, Fishing, Nature, Tradition, the Christian Democratic Party, the Rally for France and The Progressives are associate parties of the UMP. By adhering to these parties, members also adhered to the UMP and could participate in the UMP's inner organisation. The Radical Party was associated with the UMP from 2002 through 2011.Overseas parties associated with the UMP included O Porinetia To Tatou Ai'a in French Polynesia and The Rally–UMP in New Caledonia.The aforementioned November 2012 congress saw the division of the party between the two candidates who sought the party's presidency, François Fillon and Jean-François Copé – the "fillonistes" and "copéistes".The UMP's electoral base reflects that of the old Rally for the Republic (RPR) and, in some cases, that of the Union for French Democracy (UDF). In the 2007 presidential election, Nicolas Sarkozy performed best in the east of France – particularly Alsace (36.2%); Provence-Alpes-Côte-d'Azur (37.0%) – the wealthy coastal department of the Alpes-Maritimes (43.6%) was his best department in France; Champagne-Ardenne (32.7%) and Rhône-Alpes (32.7%). These areas were among National Front candidate Jean-Marie Le Pen's best regions in 2002 and are conservative on issues such as immigration. Sarkozy received a lot of votes from voters who had supported the far-right in April 2002. For example, in the Alpes-Maritimes, Sarkozy performed 21.6% better than Chirac did in 2002 while Le Pen lost 12.6% in five years. Sarkozy also appealed more than average to blue-collar workers in regions such as northern Meurthe-et-Moselle and the Nord-Pas-de-Calais, although most of these regions, despite his gains, remain reliably left-wing. The party is also strong in every election in very wealthy suburban or coastal (and, in some cases, urban) areas such as Neuilly-sur-Seine (72.6% for Sarkozy in the first round), Saint-Tropez (54.79%), Cannes (48.19%) or Marcq-en-Barœul (47.35%). It is strong in most rural areas, like most conservative parties in the world, but this does not extend to the rural areas of the south of France, areas which are old strongholds of republican and secular ideals. However, in old "clerical" Catholic rural areas, such as parts of Lozère or Cantal, it is very strong, as was the UDF during its hey day.However, the UMP does poorly in one of the UDF's best regions, Brittany, where the decline of religious practice, a moderate electorate and urbanisation has hurt the UMP and also the UDF. Nicolas Sarkozy performed relatively poorly in departments with a large share of moderate Christian democratic (often centrist or centre-right) voters, such as Lozère where the Socialist candidate Ségolène Royal performed better (44.3%) than François Mitterrand had in his 1988 left-wing landslide (43.1%). While former President Jacques Chirac, the right's strongman in normally left-wing Corrèze had always done very well in Corrèze and the surrounding departments, Sarkozy did very poorly and actually lost the department in the 2007 runoff. However, in the 2009 European election, the UMP's results in those departments were superior to Sarkozy's first round result (nationally, they were 4% lower).	[ "Jean-François Copé", "Alain Juppé" ]
Who was the chair of Union for a Popular Movement in 12/18/2014?	December 18, 2014	{ "text": [ "Nicolas Sarkozy" ] }	L2_Q173152_P488_2	Alain Juppé is the chair of Union for a Popular Movement from Nov, 2002 to Jul, 2004. Jean-François Copé is the chair of Union for a Popular Movement from Nov, 2012 to Jun, 2014. Nicolas Sarkozy is the chair of Union for a Popular Movement from Dec, 2014 to May, 2015.	Union for a Popular MovementThe Union for a Popular Movement ( ; UMP ) was a centre-right political party in France that was one of the two major contemporary political parties in France along with the centre-left Socialist Party (PS). The UMP was formed in 2002 as a merger of several centre-right parties under the leadership of President Jacques Chirac. In May 2015, the party was renamed and succeeded by The Republicans ("").Nicolas Sarkozy, then the president of the UMP, was elected President of France in the 2007 presidential election, but was defeated by PS candidate François Hollande in a run-off five years later. After the November 2012 party congress, the UMP experienced internal fractioning and was plagued by monetary scandals which forced its president, Jean-François Copé, to resign. After his re-election as UMP president in November 2014, Sarkozy put forward an amendment to change the name of the party into The Republicans, which was approved and came into effect on 30 May 2015.The UMP enjoyed an absolute majority in the National Assembly from 2002 to 2012 and was a member of the European People's Party (EPP), the Centrist Democrat International (CDI) and the International Democrat Union (IDU).Since the 1980s, the political groups of the parliamentary right have joined forces around the values of economic liberalism and the building of Europe. Their rivalries had contributed to their defeat in the 1981 and 1988 legislative elections.Before the 1993 legislative election, the Gaullist Rally for the Republic (RPR) and the centrist Union for French Democracy (UDF) formed an electoral alliance, the Union for France (UPF). However, in the 1995 presidential campaign they were both divided between followers of Jacques Chirac, who was eventually elected, and supporters of Prime Minister Edouard Balladur. After their defeat in the 1997 legislative election, the RPR and UDF created the Alliance for France in order to coordinate the actions of their parliamentary groups.Before the 2002 presidential campaign, the supporters of President Jacques Chirac, divided in three centre-right parliamentary parties, founded an association named Union on the Move ("Union en mouvement"). After Chirac's re-election, in order to contest the legislative election jointly, the Union for the Presidential Majority ("Union pour la majorité présidentielle") was created. It was renamed "Union for a Popular Movement" and as such established as a permanent organisation.The UMP was the merger of the Gaullist-conservative Rally for the Republic (RPR), the conservative-liberal party Liberal Democracy (DL), a sizeable portion of the Union for French Democracy (UDF), more precisely the UDF's Christian Democrats (such as Philippe Douste-Blazy and Jacques Barrot), the Radical Party and the centrist Popular Party for French Democracy (both associate parties of the UDF until 2002). In the UMP four major French political families were thus represented: Gaullism, republicanism (the kind of liberalism put forward by parties like the Democratic Republican Alliance or the PR, heir of DL), Christian democracy ("Popularism") and radicalism.Chirac's close ally Alain Juppé became the party's first president at the party's founding congress at the Bourget in November 2002. Juppé won 79.42% of the vote, defeating Nicolas Dupont-Aignan, the leader of the party's Eurosceptic Arise the Republic faction, and three other candidates. During the party's earlier years, it was marked by tensions and rivalries between Juppé and other "chiraquiens" and supporters of Nicolas Sarkozy, the then-Minister of the Interior.In the 2004 regional elections the UMP suffered a heavy blow, winning the presidencies of only 2 out of 22 regions in metropolitan France (Alsace and Corsica) and only half of the departments (the right had previously won numerous departmental presidencies) in the simultaneous 2004 cantonal elections. In the 2004 European Parliament election on 13 June 2004, the UMP also suffered another heavy blow, winning 16.6% of the vote, far behind the Socialist Party (PS), and only 16 seats.Juppé resigned the party's presidency on 15 July 2004 after being found guilty in a corruption scandal in January of the same year. Nicolas Sarkozy rapidly announced that he would take over the presidency of the UMP and resign his position as finance minister, ending months of speculation. On 28 November 2004, Sarkozy was elected to the party's presidency with 85.09% of the votes against 9.1% for Dupont-Aignan and 5.82% for Christine Boutin, the leader of the UMP's social conservatives. Having gained control of what had been Chirac's party, Sarkozy focused the party machinery and his energies on the 2007 presidential election.The failure of the referendum on the European Constitution on 25 May 2005 led to the fall of the government of Jean-Pierre Raffarin and to the formation of a new cabinet, presided by another UMP politician, Dominique de Villepin. However, during this time, the UMP under Sarkozy gained a record number of new members and rejuvenated itself in preparation of the 2007 election. On 14 January 2007, Sarkozy was nominated unopposed as the UMP's presidential candidate for the 2007 election.On the issues, the party under Sarkozy publicly disapproved of Turkey's proposed membership in the European Union, which Chirac had previously endorsed several times publicly, and generally took a more right-wing position.On 22 April 2007 Nicolas Sarkozy won the plurality of votes in the first round of the 2007 presidential election. On 6 May he faced the Socialist Party candidate Ségolène Royal in the second round and won, taking 53.06% of the vote. As a consequence, he resigned from the presidency of the UMP on 14 May 2007, two days before becoming President of the French Republic. François Fillon was appointed Prime Minister. On 17 June 2007, at a 2007 legislative election, the UMP gained a majority in the National Assembly with 313 out of 577 seats.Following Sarkozy's election to the presidency, interim leader Jean-Claude Gaudin prevented a leadership struggle between Patrick Devedjian and Jean-Pierre Raffarin by announcing that the UMP should have a collegial leadership while Sarkozy was President of the Republic. In July, the UMP's national council approved an amendment to the party's statute allowing for a collegial leadership around three vice-presidents (Jean-Pierre Raffarin, Jean-Claude Gaudin and Pierre Méhaignerie) and a secretary-general (Patrick Devedjian) and two associate secretary-generals.On 9 March 2008 municipal and cantonal elections, the party performed quite poorly, losing numerous cities, such as Toulouse and Strasbourg, as well as eight departmental presidencies to the left. Xavier Bertrand was selected as secretary-general of the party in late 2008 to replace Patrick Devedjian, who resigned to take up a cabinet position.In the 2009 European Parliament election on 7 June 2009, the UMP ran common lists with its junior allies including Jean-Louis Borloo's Radical Party, the New Centre and Modern Left. The UMP list won 27.9%, a remarkably good result for a governing party in off-year "mid-term" elections, and elected 29 MEPs, significantly improving on the UMP's poor result in the 2004 European election – also an off-year election. However, in the 2010 regional elections on 14 and 21 March 2010, the UMP obtained a very poor result with only 26%. While it lost Corsica, it retained Alsace but also defeated the left in "La Réunion" and French Guiana.In a cabinet reshuffle in November 2010, which disappointed centrists within and outside the UMP, François Fillon was confirmed Prime Minister and Alain Juppé re-joined the government. Among those who resigned from the cabinet were Bernard Kouchner, Hervé Morin and, above all, Jean-Louis Borloo. Xavier Bertrand, who re-joined the government, was replaced as general-secretary of the UMP by Jean-François Copé on 17 November 2010.The party suffered another major electoral defeat in the 2011 cantonal elections held on 20 and 27 March 2011, and in September, the centre-right lost control of the French Senate for the first time in the history of the Fifth Republic.In May 2011, during a party congress, the Radical Party, led by Borloo, decided to leave the UMP and launch The Alliance, a new centrist coalition.The party opted not to organise primaries ahead of the 2012 presidential election and endorsed Nicolas Sarkozy's bid for second term. Sarkozy lost reelection to the Socialist Party candidate François Hollande on 6 May 2012, winning 48.36% in the runoff. The party was defeated by the new President's left-wing majority in the subsequent legislative election.Prior to Sarkozy's defeat on 6 May, the UMP's secretary-general Jean-François Copé announced that he supported the creation of internal "movements" within the party and the organisation of primaries for the next presidential election.The UMP's political bureau announced the organisation of a party congress on 18 and 25 November 2012, leading prominent party leaders to organise factions and "movements" to influence the party's new direction.Ultimately, two candidates amassed the required endorsements to run for the party's presidency: former Prime Minister François Fillon and incumbent party secretary-general Jean-François Copé. Nathalie Kosciusko-Morizet, Bruno Le Maire, Xavier Bertrand, Henri Guaino, and Dominique Dord had also announced their candidacies but did not meet tough candidacy requirements.The campaign between Fillon and Copé lasted two months. Fillon had a strong lead in polls of UMP 'sympathizers' (as opposed to actual members, who would be the only eligible voters) and was backed by most UMP parliamentarians while Copé claimed he was the candidate of party activists rather than party 'barons'. However, Copé remained as secretary-general and retained control of the party machinery.While Fillon's campaign was regarded as more consensual, moderate and centre-right; Copé campaigned as the candidate of the "droite décomplexée" ('uninhibited right') and introduced issues such as anti-white racism. However, both candidates received support from moderate and conservative members of the party and their main differences were in rhetoric, style and temperament. Copé, again, appeared more militant and activist, saying that he would support and participate in street demonstrations while Fillon disagreed with his rival.Six 'motions' (declarations of principles) were submitted to party voters; under the new statutes, motions which won over 10% of the vote at the congress would be recognised as "movements" by the UMP leadership, granted financial autonomy and receive positions in the party structures.The vote on 18 November saw high turnout but was quickly marred by allegations of irregularities and potential fraud on both sides. Both candidates proclaimed victory within 20 minutes of each other on the night of the vote.24 hours later, the control commission in charge of the vote (COCOE) announced Copé's victory by only 98 votes. While Fillon initially conceded defeat, by 21 November his campaign claimed victory anew, with a 26-vote advantage over Copé. Fillon's campaign argued that the COCOE had failed to take into account votes cast in three overseas federations.Party elder Alain Juppé accepted to lead a mediation between both candidates on 23 November, but it failed within two days. Fillon's announced "precautionary seizure" of ballots cast "to protect them from tampering or alteration" and threatened to take the matter to court. On 26 November, the party appeals commission – led by a close supporter of Copé – decided in Copé's favour and rejected Fillon's arguments.On 27 November 72 "filloniste" parliamentarians in the National Assembly announced the creation of a new parliamentary group, the "Rassemblement-UMP", led by Fillon. Copé took up former President Nicolas Sarkozy's proposal of organising a referendum on a revote, but he saw the creation of the dissident "filloniste" group as a casus belli and took back his proposal. Luc Chatel, the new vice-president and a Copé supporter, later announced that he supported a new presidential vote and a modification of party statutes. The next day, Copé announced that he favoured organising a referendum the modification of party statutes and a reduction of his own term as president to two years (until November 2014); while Fillon welcomed the "consensus on the organisation of a new election" he rejected his rival's timeline and called for a new election before 2014. 'Unaligned' members of the UMP led by Bruno Le Maire and Nathalie Kosciusko-Morizet appealed for the organisation of a new election in the spring of 2013 and a reform of the party statutes.Both rivals reached an agreement at the end of December 2012, with Copé agreeing to the organisation of a new election and a modification of party statutes while Fillon agreed to dissolve his parliamentary group.The party's leadership was reorganized in January 2013 to accommodate Copé and Fillon's supporters: Laurent Wauquiez and Valérie Pécresse joined Luc Chatel and Michèle Tabarot as vice-president and secretary-general respectively. Christian Estrosi, Gérard Longuet, Henri de Raincourt (pro-Fillon), Jean-Claude Gaudin, Brice Hortefeux and Roger Karoutchi (pro-Copé) also became vice-presidents. Other positions in the party hierarchy were divided between supporters of both candidates. New leaders were also nominated in February 2013.Several spending scandals appeared in 2014. In early 2014, the Bygmalion scandal () pushed the party's leader Jean-François Copé to resign. In early July, Sarkozy got held in custody due to possible spying and active corruption of the judiciary system. On 8 July 2014, the UMP was discovered to have a hidden debt of €79.1 million for the year 2013. On 20 May 2021, the criminal trial began for Sarkozy and 13 other defendants who were said to have been involved in the Bygmalion scandal. The scandal allegations that Sarkozy diverting tens of millions of euros which was intended to be spent on the his failed 2012 re-election campaign and then hiring a PR firm to cover it up. The illicit campaign finance money which was not reported as being spent on Sarkozy's re-election campaign was instead used to overspend on lavish campaign rallies and events.After the election of Nicolas Sarkozy, the former President of France (2007–2012), as president of the Union for a Popular Movement (UMP) in November 2014, he put forward a request to the party's general committee to change its name to the Republicans as well as the statutes of the party. With the name already chosen Nathalie Kosciusko-Morizet, vice president of the UMP, presented Nicolas Sarkozy and the party's political bureau a project of new statutes. The proposed statutes provided for, among others, the election of the presidents of the departmental federations by direct suffrage, the end of the political currents and consulting members on election nominations.Critics of Sarkozy claimed it was illegal for him to name the party "Republicans" because every French person is a republican in that they support the values and ideals of the French Republic that emanated from the French Revolution, and as such the term is above party politics. The new name was adopted by the bureau on 5 May 2015 and approved by the party membership on 28 May by an online yes vote of 83.28% on a 45.74% participation after a court ruling in favor of Sarkozy. Similarly the new party statutes are adopted by 96.34% of voters and the composition of the new party's political bureau by 94.77%.The Republicans thus became the legal successor of the UMP as the leading centre-right party in France.The UMP was a centre-right party and was created to represent the various families of the French right, uniting the traditions of Gaullism, Christian democracy, conservatism and liberalism. As such, it officially adopted fairly vague policy statements which emphasize consensual common values.The UMP believed that each individual's destiny must be unencumbered and it rejects political systems which "stifle economic freedom". It said that work, merit, innovation and personal initiative must be encouraged to reduce unemployment and boost economic growth; but at the same time, it maintained that adherence to the rule of law and the authority of the state is necessary. In a Gaullist tradition, the UMP supported solidarity, with the state guaranteeing social protection of less fortunate individuals. But in a more liberal vein, the party always denounced "l'assistanat", a French term which can refer to "welfare handouts".The party took more nationalist positions at times, and often adopted tough stances against immigration and illegal immigration. It strongly supported the integration and assimilation of immigrants into French society and always denounced communitarianism as a danger to the French nation-state. However, the UMP traditionally was a strong proponent of European integration and the European Union, albeit sometimes with a hint of traditional Gaullist souverainism.Under Nicolas Sarkozy's leadership, the UMP adopted a liberal and security-oriented platform. His platform in the 2007 and 2012 presidential elections emphasized the ideas of personal responsibility and individual initiative. He developed the idea of "working more to earn more", promising that overtime hours would not be taxed and employers exonerated from non-wage labour costs. Under his presidency, the government's short-lived tax cap for high-income earners was denounced by the left but also several centrist and centre-right politicians within or outside the UMP.Having gained his popularity as a 'hardliner' Interior minister, Sarkozy's policies also carried a strong law-and-order and tough on crime orientation. He supported tougher sentences for criminals and repeat offenders. As candidate and President, he placed heavy emphasis on immigration and national identity, presenting immigration as a danger to French identity and as source of increased criminality. As President, he imposed stricter limits on family reunification, created a Ministry of Immigration, and National Identity for three years between 2007 and 2010, launched a controversial national dialogue on national identity and expelled thousands of Roma from illegal camps.Critics of the right-wing government denounced what they felt was a rapprochement with the controversial far-right National Front (FN). While several members of the UMP's right-wing have indicated that they would favour local alliances with the FN and prefer to vote for a FN candidate over a Socialist Party or left-wing candidate in runoff elections between the left and the FN; the party's official position continues to reject alliances with the FN at any level but also opposes so-called "republican fronts" with the left against the FN.The UMP's original statutes in 2002 allowed for the organisation of formal factions or movements within the party, to represent the various political families of which it was made up. However, fearing leadership rivalries and divisions, Juppé, Chirac and later Sarkozy 'postponed' the creation of such organised movements indefinitely. Nevertheless, prior to the organisations of formal "movements" in November 2012, there existed informal groupings of like-minded members, either through associations, political clubs, associated political parties or even informal factions.Jean-François Copé allowed for the organisation of formal movements within the party following the November 2012 congress. According to the party's statutes, motions backed by at least 10 parliamentarians from 10 departmental federations and which obtain at least 10% support from members at a congress are recognised as movements. They are granted financial autonomy by way of a fixed grant and additional funding in proportion to the votes they obtained; but the sum of funds transferred by the party to its movements can be no larger than 30% of the annual public subsidies the UMP receives from the state.Six motions representing various ideological tendencies within the party ran to be recognised as official movements following the November 2012 congress. Five of these motions met the conditions to be recognised as such, and their leaders have since integrated the UMP's leadership structure:The Hunting, Fishing, Nature, Tradition, the Christian Democratic Party, the Rally for France and The Progressives are associate parties of the UMP. By adhering to these parties, members also adhered to the UMP and could participate in the UMP's inner organisation. The Radical Party was associated with the UMP from 2002 through 2011.Overseas parties associated with the UMP included O Porinetia To Tatou Ai'a in French Polynesia and The Rally–UMP in New Caledonia.The aforementioned November 2012 congress saw the division of the party between the two candidates who sought the party's presidency, François Fillon and Jean-François Copé – the "fillonistes" and "copéistes".The UMP's electoral base reflects that of the old Rally for the Republic (RPR) and, in some cases, that of the Union for French Democracy (UDF). In the 2007 presidential election, Nicolas Sarkozy performed best in the east of France – particularly Alsace (36.2%); Provence-Alpes-Côte-d'Azur (37.0%) – the wealthy coastal department of the Alpes-Maritimes (43.6%) was his best department in France; Champagne-Ardenne (32.7%) and Rhône-Alpes (32.7%). These areas were among National Front candidate Jean-Marie Le Pen's best regions in 2002 and are conservative on issues such as immigration. Sarkozy received a lot of votes from voters who had supported the far-right in April 2002. For example, in the Alpes-Maritimes, Sarkozy performed 21.6% better than Chirac did in 2002 while Le Pen lost 12.6% in five years. Sarkozy also appealed more than average to blue-collar workers in regions such as northern Meurthe-et-Moselle and the Nord-Pas-de-Calais, although most of these regions, despite his gains, remain reliably left-wing. The party is also strong in every election in very wealthy suburban or coastal (and, in some cases, urban) areas such as Neuilly-sur-Seine (72.6% for Sarkozy in the first round), Saint-Tropez (54.79%), Cannes (48.19%) or Marcq-en-Barœul (47.35%). It is strong in most rural areas, like most conservative parties in the world, but this does not extend to the rural areas of the south of France, areas which are old strongholds of republican and secular ideals. However, in old "clerical" Catholic rural areas, such as parts of Lozère or Cantal, it is very strong, as was the UDF during its hey day.However, the UMP does poorly in one of the UDF's best regions, Brittany, where the decline of religious practice, a moderate electorate and urbanisation has hurt the UMP and also the UDF. Nicolas Sarkozy performed relatively poorly in departments with a large share of moderate Christian democratic (often centrist or centre-right) voters, such as Lozère where the Socialist candidate Ségolène Royal performed better (44.3%) than François Mitterrand had in his 1988 left-wing landslide (43.1%). While former President Jacques Chirac, the right's strongman in normally left-wing Corrèze had always done very well in Corrèze and the surrounding departments, Sarkozy did very poorly and actually lost the department in the 2007 runoff. However, in the 2009 European election, the UMP's results in those departments were superior to Sarkozy's first round result (nationally, they were 4% lower).	[ "Jean-François Copé", "Alain Juppé" ]
Who was the chair of Union for a Popular Movement in 18-Dec-201418-December-2014?	December 18, 2014	{ "text": [ "Nicolas Sarkozy" ] }	L2_Q173152_P488_2	Alain Juppé is the chair of Union for a Popular Movement from Nov, 2002 to Jul, 2004. Jean-François Copé is the chair of Union for a Popular Movement from Nov, 2012 to Jun, 2014. Nicolas Sarkozy is the chair of Union for a Popular Movement from Dec, 2014 to May, 2015.	Union for a Popular MovementThe Union for a Popular Movement ( ; UMP ) was a centre-right political party in France that was one of the two major contemporary political parties in France along with the centre-left Socialist Party (PS). The UMP was formed in 2002 as a merger of several centre-right parties under the leadership of President Jacques Chirac. In May 2015, the party was renamed and succeeded by The Republicans ("").Nicolas Sarkozy, then the president of the UMP, was elected President of France in the 2007 presidential election, but was defeated by PS candidate François Hollande in a run-off five years later. After the November 2012 party congress, the UMP experienced internal fractioning and was plagued by monetary scandals which forced its president, Jean-François Copé, to resign. After his re-election as UMP president in November 2014, Sarkozy put forward an amendment to change the name of the party into The Republicans, which was approved and came into effect on 30 May 2015.The UMP enjoyed an absolute majority in the National Assembly from 2002 to 2012 and was a member of the European People's Party (EPP), the Centrist Democrat International (CDI) and the International Democrat Union (IDU).Since the 1980s, the political groups of the parliamentary right have joined forces around the values of economic liberalism and the building of Europe. Their rivalries had contributed to their defeat in the 1981 and 1988 legislative elections.Before the 1993 legislative election, the Gaullist Rally for the Republic (RPR) and the centrist Union for French Democracy (UDF) formed an electoral alliance, the Union for France (UPF). However, in the 1995 presidential campaign they were both divided between followers of Jacques Chirac, who was eventually elected, and supporters of Prime Minister Edouard Balladur. After their defeat in the 1997 legislative election, the RPR and UDF created the Alliance for France in order to coordinate the actions of their parliamentary groups.Before the 2002 presidential campaign, the supporters of President Jacques Chirac, divided in three centre-right parliamentary parties, founded an association named Union on the Move ("Union en mouvement"). After Chirac's re-election, in order to contest the legislative election jointly, the Union for the Presidential Majority ("Union pour la majorité présidentielle") was created. It was renamed "Union for a Popular Movement" and as such established as a permanent organisation.The UMP was the merger of the Gaullist-conservative Rally for the Republic (RPR), the conservative-liberal party Liberal Democracy (DL), a sizeable portion of the Union for French Democracy (UDF), more precisely the UDF's Christian Democrats (such as Philippe Douste-Blazy and Jacques Barrot), the Radical Party and the centrist Popular Party for French Democracy (both associate parties of the UDF until 2002). In the UMP four major French political families were thus represented: Gaullism, republicanism (the kind of liberalism put forward by parties like the Democratic Republican Alliance or the PR, heir of DL), Christian democracy ("Popularism") and radicalism.Chirac's close ally Alain Juppé became the party's first president at the party's founding congress at the Bourget in November 2002. Juppé won 79.42% of the vote, defeating Nicolas Dupont-Aignan, the leader of the party's Eurosceptic Arise the Republic faction, and three other candidates. During the party's earlier years, it was marked by tensions and rivalries between Juppé and other "chiraquiens" and supporters of Nicolas Sarkozy, the then-Minister of the Interior.In the 2004 regional elections the UMP suffered a heavy blow, winning the presidencies of only 2 out of 22 regions in metropolitan France (Alsace and Corsica) and only half of the departments (the right had previously won numerous departmental presidencies) in the simultaneous 2004 cantonal elections. In the 2004 European Parliament election on 13 June 2004, the UMP also suffered another heavy blow, winning 16.6% of the vote, far behind the Socialist Party (PS), and only 16 seats.Juppé resigned the party's presidency on 15 July 2004 after being found guilty in a corruption scandal in January of the same year. Nicolas Sarkozy rapidly announced that he would take over the presidency of the UMP and resign his position as finance minister, ending months of speculation. On 28 November 2004, Sarkozy was elected to the party's presidency with 85.09% of the votes against 9.1% for Dupont-Aignan and 5.82% for Christine Boutin, the leader of the UMP's social conservatives. Having gained control of what had been Chirac's party, Sarkozy focused the party machinery and his energies on the 2007 presidential election.The failure of the referendum on the European Constitution on 25 May 2005 led to the fall of the government of Jean-Pierre Raffarin and to the formation of a new cabinet, presided by another UMP politician, Dominique de Villepin. However, during this time, the UMP under Sarkozy gained a record number of new members and rejuvenated itself in preparation of the 2007 election. On 14 January 2007, Sarkozy was nominated unopposed as the UMP's presidential candidate for the 2007 election.On the issues, the party under Sarkozy publicly disapproved of Turkey's proposed membership in the European Union, which Chirac had previously endorsed several times publicly, and generally took a more right-wing position.On 22 April 2007 Nicolas Sarkozy won the plurality of votes in the first round of the 2007 presidential election. On 6 May he faced the Socialist Party candidate Ségolène Royal in the second round and won, taking 53.06% of the vote. As a consequence, he resigned from the presidency of the UMP on 14 May 2007, two days before becoming President of the French Republic. François Fillon was appointed Prime Minister. On 17 June 2007, at a 2007 legislative election, the UMP gained a majority in the National Assembly with 313 out of 577 seats.Following Sarkozy's election to the presidency, interim leader Jean-Claude Gaudin prevented a leadership struggle between Patrick Devedjian and Jean-Pierre Raffarin by announcing that the UMP should have a collegial leadership while Sarkozy was President of the Republic. In July, the UMP's national council approved an amendment to the party's statute allowing for a collegial leadership around three vice-presidents (Jean-Pierre Raffarin, Jean-Claude Gaudin and Pierre Méhaignerie) and a secretary-general (Patrick Devedjian) and two associate secretary-generals.On 9 March 2008 municipal and cantonal elections, the party performed quite poorly, losing numerous cities, such as Toulouse and Strasbourg, as well as eight departmental presidencies to the left. Xavier Bertrand was selected as secretary-general of the party in late 2008 to replace Patrick Devedjian, who resigned to take up a cabinet position.In the 2009 European Parliament election on 7 June 2009, the UMP ran common lists with its junior allies including Jean-Louis Borloo's Radical Party, the New Centre and Modern Left. The UMP list won 27.9%, a remarkably good result for a governing party in off-year "mid-term" elections, and elected 29 MEPs, significantly improving on the UMP's poor result in the 2004 European election – also an off-year election. However, in the 2010 regional elections on 14 and 21 March 2010, the UMP obtained a very poor result with only 26%. While it lost Corsica, it retained Alsace but also defeated the left in "La Réunion" and French Guiana.In a cabinet reshuffle in November 2010, which disappointed centrists within and outside the UMP, François Fillon was confirmed Prime Minister and Alain Juppé re-joined the government. Among those who resigned from the cabinet were Bernard Kouchner, Hervé Morin and, above all, Jean-Louis Borloo. Xavier Bertrand, who re-joined the government, was replaced as general-secretary of the UMP by Jean-François Copé on 17 November 2010.The party suffered another major electoral defeat in the 2011 cantonal elections held on 20 and 27 March 2011, and in September, the centre-right lost control of the French Senate for the first time in the history of the Fifth Republic.In May 2011, during a party congress, the Radical Party, led by Borloo, decided to leave the UMP and launch The Alliance, a new centrist coalition.The party opted not to organise primaries ahead of the 2012 presidential election and endorsed Nicolas Sarkozy's bid for second term. Sarkozy lost reelection to the Socialist Party candidate François Hollande on 6 May 2012, winning 48.36% in the runoff. The party was defeated by the new President's left-wing majority in the subsequent legislative election.Prior to Sarkozy's defeat on 6 May, the UMP's secretary-general Jean-François Copé announced that he supported the creation of internal "movements" within the party and the organisation of primaries for the next presidential election.The UMP's political bureau announced the organisation of a party congress on 18 and 25 November 2012, leading prominent party leaders to organise factions and "movements" to influence the party's new direction.Ultimately, two candidates amassed the required endorsements to run for the party's presidency: former Prime Minister François Fillon and incumbent party secretary-general Jean-François Copé. Nathalie Kosciusko-Morizet, Bruno Le Maire, Xavier Bertrand, Henri Guaino, and Dominique Dord had also announced their candidacies but did not meet tough candidacy requirements.The campaign between Fillon and Copé lasted two months. Fillon had a strong lead in polls of UMP 'sympathizers' (as opposed to actual members, who would be the only eligible voters) and was backed by most UMP parliamentarians while Copé claimed he was the candidate of party activists rather than party 'barons'. However, Copé remained as secretary-general and retained control of the party machinery.While Fillon's campaign was regarded as more consensual, moderate and centre-right; Copé campaigned as the candidate of the "droite décomplexée" ('uninhibited right') and introduced issues such as anti-white racism. However, both candidates received support from moderate and conservative members of the party and their main differences were in rhetoric, style and temperament. Copé, again, appeared more militant and activist, saying that he would support and participate in street demonstrations while Fillon disagreed with his rival.Six 'motions' (declarations of principles) were submitted to party voters; under the new statutes, motions which won over 10% of the vote at the congress would be recognised as "movements" by the UMP leadership, granted financial autonomy and receive positions in the party structures.The vote on 18 November saw high turnout but was quickly marred by allegations of irregularities and potential fraud on both sides. Both candidates proclaimed victory within 20 minutes of each other on the night of the vote.24 hours later, the control commission in charge of the vote (COCOE) announced Copé's victory by only 98 votes. While Fillon initially conceded defeat, by 21 November his campaign claimed victory anew, with a 26-vote advantage over Copé. Fillon's campaign argued that the COCOE had failed to take into account votes cast in three overseas federations.Party elder Alain Juppé accepted to lead a mediation between both candidates on 23 November, but it failed within two days. Fillon's announced "precautionary seizure" of ballots cast "to protect them from tampering or alteration" and threatened to take the matter to court. On 26 November, the party appeals commission – led by a close supporter of Copé – decided in Copé's favour and rejected Fillon's arguments.On 27 November 72 "filloniste" parliamentarians in the National Assembly announced the creation of a new parliamentary group, the "Rassemblement-UMP", led by Fillon. Copé took up former President Nicolas Sarkozy's proposal of organising a referendum on a revote, but he saw the creation of the dissident "filloniste" group as a casus belli and took back his proposal. Luc Chatel, the new vice-president and a Copé supporter, later announced that he supported a new presidential vote and a modification of party statutes. The next day, Copé announced that he favoured organising a referendum the modification of party statutes and a reduction of his own term as president to two years (until November 2014); while Fillon welcomed the "consensus on the organisation of a new election" he rejected his rival's timeline and called for a new election before 2014. 'Unaligned' members of the UMP led by Bruno Le Maire and Nathalie Kosciusko-Morizet appealed for the organisation of a new election in the spring of 2013 and a reform of the party statutes.Both rivals reached an agreement at the end of December 2012, with Copé agreeing to the organisation of a new election and a modification of party statutes while Fillon agreed to dissolve his parliamentary group.The party's leadership was reorganized in January 2013 to accommodate Copé and Fillon's supporters: Laurent Wauquiez and Valérie Pécresse joined Luc Chatel and Michèle Tabarot as vice-president and secretary-general respectively. Christian Estrosi, Gérard Longuet, Henri de Raincourt (pro-Fillon), Jean-Claude Gaudin, Brice Hortefeux and Roger Karoutchi (pro-Copé) also became vice-presidents. Other positions in the party hierarchy were divided between supporters of both candidates. New leaders were also nominated in February 2013.Several spending scandals appeared in 2014. In early 2014, the Bygmalion scandal () pushed the party's leader Jean-François Copé to resign. In early July, Sarkozy got held in custody due to possible spying and active corruption of the judiciary system. On 8 July 2014, the UMP was discovered to have a hidden debt of €79.1 million for the year 2013. On 20 May 2021, the criminal trial began for Sarkozy and 13 other defendants who were said to have been involved in the Bygmalion scandal. The scandal allegations that Sarkozy diverting tens of millions of euros which was intended to be spent on the his failed 2012 re-election campaign and then hiring a PR firm to cover it up. The illicit campaign finance money which was not reported as being spent on Sarkozy's re-election campaign was instead used to overspend on lavish campaign rallies and events.After the election of Nicolas Sarkozy, the former President of France (2007–2012), as president of the Union for a Popular Movement (UMP) in November 2014, he put forward a request to the party's general committee to change its name to the Republicans as well as the statutes of the party. With the name already chosen Nathalie Kosciusko-Morizet, vice president of the UMP, presented Nicolas Sarkozy and the party's political bureau a project of new statutes. The proposed statutes provided for, among others, the election of the presidents of the departmental federations by direct suffrage, the end of the political currents and consulting members on election nominations.Critics of Sarkozy claimed it was illegal for him to name the party "Republicans" because every French person is a republican in that they support the values and ideals of the French Republic that emanated from the French Revolution, and as such the term is above party politics. The new name was adopted by the bureau on 5 May 2015 and approved by the party membership on 28 May by an online yes vote of 83.28% on a 45.74% participation after a court ruling in favor of Sarkozy. Similarly the new party statutes are adopted by 96.34% of voters and the composition of the new party's political bureau by 94.77%.The Republicans thus became the legal successor of the UMP as the leading centre-right party in France.The UMP was a centre-right party and was created to represent the various families of the French right, uniting the traditions of Gaullism, Christian democracy, conservatism and liberalism. As such, it officially adopted fairly vague policy statements which emphasize consensual common values.The UMP believed that each individual's destiny must be unencumbered and it rejects political systems which "stifle economic freedom". It said that work, merit, innovation and personal initiative must be encouraged to reduce unemployment and boost economic growth; but at the same time, it maintained that adherence to the rule of law and the authority of the state is necessary. In a Gaullist tradition, the UMP supported solidarity, with the state guaranteeing social protection of less fortunate individuals. But in a more liberal vein, the party always denounced "l'assistanat", a French term which can refer to "welfare handouts".The party took more nationalist positions at times, and often adopted tough stances against immigration and illegal immigration. It strongly supported the integration and assimilation of immigrants into French society and always denounced communitarianism as a danger to the French nation-state. However, the UMP traditionally was a strong proponent of European integration and the European Union, albeit sometimes with a hint of traditional Gaullist souverainism.Under Nicolas Sarkozy's leadership, the UMP adopted a liberal and security-oriented platform. His platform in the 2007 and 2012 presidential elections emphasized the ideas of personal responsibility and individual initiative. He developed the idea of "working more to earn more", promising that overtime hours would not be taxed and employers exonerated from non-wage labour costs. Under his presidency, the government's short-lived tax cap for high-income earners was denounced by the left but also several centrist and centre-right politicians within or outside the UMP.Having gained his popularity as a 'hardliner' Interior minister, Sarkozy's policies also carried a strong law-and-order and tough on crime orientation. He supported tougher sentences for criminals and repeat offenders. As candidate and President, he placed heavy emphasis on immigration and national identity, presenting immigration as a danger to French identity and as source of increased criminality. As President, he imposed stricter limits on family reunification, created a Ministry of Immigration, and National Identity for three years between 2007 and 2010, launched a controversial national dialogue on national identity and expelled thousands of Roma from illegal camps.Critics of the right-wing government denounced what they felt was a rapprochement with the controversial far-right National Front (FN). While several members of the UMP's right-wing have indicated that they would favour local alliances with the FN and prefer to vote for a FN candidate over a Socialist Party or left-wing candidate in runoff elections between the left and the FN; the party's official position continues to reject alliances with the FN at any level but also opposes so-called "republican fronts" with the left against the FN.The UMP's original statutes in 2002 allowed for the organisation of formal factions or movements within the party, to represent the various political families of which it was made up. However, fearing leadership rivalries and divisions, Juppé, Chirac and later Sarkozy 'postponed' the creation of such organised movements indefinitely. Nevertheless, prior to the organisations of formal "movements" in November 2012, there existed informal groupings of like-minded members, either through associations, political clubs, associated political parties or even informal factions.Jean-François Copé allowed for the organisation of formal movements within the party following the November 2012 congress. According to the party's statutes, motions backed by at least 10 parliamentarians from 10 departmental federations and which obtain at least 10% support from members at a congress are recognised as movements. They are granted financial autonomy by way of a fixed grant and additional funding in proportion to the votes they obtained; but the sum of funds transferred by the party to its movements can be no larger than 30% of the annual public subsidies the UMP receives from the state.Six motions representing various ideological tendencies within the party ran to be recognised as official movements following the November 2012 congress. Five of these motions met the conditions to be recognised as such, and their leaders have since integrated the UMP's leadership structure:The Hunting, Fishing, Nature, Tradition, the Christian Democratic Party, the Rally for France and The Progressives are associate parties of the UMP. By adhering to these parties, members also adhered to the UMP and could participate in the UMP's inner organisation. The Radical Party was associated with the UMP from 2002 through 2011.Overseas parties associated with the UMP included O Porinetia To Tatou Ai'a in French Polynesia and The Rally–UMP in New Caledonia.The aforementioned November 2012 congress saw the division of the party between the two candidates who sought the party's presidency, François Fillon and Jean-François Copé – the "fillonistes" and "copéistes".The UMP's electoral base reflects that of the old Rally for the Republic (RPR) and, in some cases, that of the Union for French Democracy (UDF). In the 2007 presidential election, Nicolas Sarkozy performed best in the east of France – particularly Alsace (36.2%); Provence-Alpes-Côte-d'Azur (37.0%) – the wealthy coastal department of the Alpes-Maritimes (43.6%) was his best department in France; Champagne-Ardenne (32.7%) and Rhône-Alpes (32.7%). These areas were among National Front candidate Jean-Marie Le Pen's best regions in 2002 and are conservative on issues such as immigration. Sarkozy received a lot of votes from voters who had supported the far-right in April 2002. For example, in the Alpes-Maritimes, Sarkozy performed 21.6% better than Chirac did in 2002 while Le Pen lost 12.6% in five years. Sarkozy also appealed more than average to blue-collar workers in regions such as northern Meurthe-et-Moselle and the Nord-Pas-de-Calais, although most of these regions, despite his gains, remain reliably left-wing. The party is also strong in every election in very wealthy suburban or coastal (and, in some cases, urban) areas such as Neuilly-sur-Seine (72.6% for Sarkozy in the first round), Saint-Tropez (54.79%), Cannes (48.19%) or Marcq-en-Barœul (47.35%). It is strong in most rural areas, like most conservative parties in the world, but this does not extend to the rural areas of the south of France, areas which are old strongholds of republican and secular ideals. However, in old "clerical" Catholic rural areas, such as parts of Lozère or Cantal, it is very strong, as was the UDF during its hey day.However, the UMP does poorly in one of the UDF's best regions, Brittany, where the decline of religious practice, a moderate electorate and urbanisation has hurt the UMP and also the UDF. Nicolas Sarkozy performed relatively poorly in departments with a large share of moderate Christian democratic (often centrist or centre-right) voters, such as Lozère where the Socialist candidate Ségolène Royal performed better (44.3%) than François Mitterrand had in his 1988 left-wing landslide (43.1%). While former President Jacques Chirac, the right's strongman in normally left-wing Corrèze had always done very well in Corrèze and the surrounding departments, Sarkozy did very poorly and actually lost the department in the 2007 runoff. However, in the 2009 European election, the UMP's results in those departments were superior to Sarkozy's first round result (nationally, they were 4% lower).	[ "Jean-François Copé", "Alain Juppé" ]
Which team did Ferro Tontini play for in Aug, 1990?	August 12, 1990	{ "text": [ "Cosenza Calcio 1914", "Cosenza Calcio" ] }	L2_Q3743212_P54_1	Ferro Tontini plays for Cosenza Calcio from Jan, 1990 to Jan, 1991. Ferro Tontini plays for Cosenza Calcio 1914 from Jan, 1990 to Jan, 1991. Ferro Tontini plays for Calcio Catania from Jan, 1992 to Jan, 1993. Ferro Tontini plays for Modena F.C. from Jan, 1993 to Jan, 1994. Ferro Tontini plays for A.S. Roma from Jan, 1994 to Jan, 1994. Ferro Tontini plays for S.S.D. Lucchese 1905 from Jan, 1994 to Jan, 1995.	Ferro TontiniFerro Tontini (born August 14, 1969 in Anzio) is a retired Italian professional football player.He played his only Serie A game in the 1989/90 season for A.S. Roma.	[ "A.S. Roma", "Modena F.C.", "S.S.D. Lucchese 1905", "Calcio Catania" ]
Which team did Ferro Tontini play for in 1990-08-12?	August 12, 1990	{ "text": [ "Cosenza Calcio 1914", "Cosenza Calcio" ] }	L2_Q3743212_P54_1	Ferro Tontini plays for Cosenza Calcio from Jan, 1990 to Jan, 1991. Ferro Tontini plays for Cosenza Calcio 1914 from Jan, 1990 to Jan, 1991. Ferro Tontini plays for Calcio Catania from Jan, 1992 to Jan, 1993. Ferro Tontini plays for Modena F.C. from Jan, 1993 to Jan, 1994. Ferro Tontini plays for A.S. Roma from Jan, 1994 to Jan, 1994. Ferro Tontini plays for S.S.D. Lucchese 1905 from Jan, 1994 to Jan, 1995.	Ferro TontiniFerro Tontini (born August 14, 1969 in Anzio) is a retired Italian professional football player.He played his only Serie A game in the 1989/90 season for A.S. Roma.	[ "A.S. Roma", "Modena F.C.", "S.S.D. Lucchese 1905", "Calcio Catania" ]
Which team did Ferro Tontini play for in 12/08/1990?	August 12, 1990	{ "text": [ "Cosenza Calcio 1914", "Cosenza Calcio" ] }	L2_Q3743212_P54_1	Ferro Tontini plays for Cosenza Calcio from Jan, 1990 to Jan, 1991. Ferro Tontini plays for Cosenza Calcio 1914 from Jan, 1990 to Jan, 1991. Ferro Tontini plays for Calcio Catania from Jan, 1992 to Jan, 1993. Ferro Tontini plays for Modena F.C. from Jan, 1993 to Jan, 1994. Ferro Tontini plays for A.S. Roma from Jan, 1994 to Jan, 1994. Ferro Tontini plays for S.S.D. Lucchese 1905 from Jan, 1994 to Jan, 1995.	Ferro TontiniFerro Tontini (born August 14, 1969 in Anzio) is a retired Italian professional football player.He played his only Serie A game in the 1989/90 season for A.S. Roma.	[ "A.S. Roma", "Modena F.C.", "S.S.D. Lucchese 1905", "Calcio Catania" ]
Which team did Ferro Tontini play for in Aug 12, 1990?	August 12, 1990	{ "text": [ "Cosenza Calcio 1914", "Cosenza Calcio" ] }	L2_Q3743212_P54_1	Ferro Tontini plays for Cosenza Calcio from Jan, 1990 to Jan, 1991. Ferro Tontini plays for Cosenza Calcio 1914 from Jan, 1990 to Jan, 1991. Ferro Tontini plays for Calcio Catania from Jan, 1992 to Jan, 1993. Ferro Tontini plays for Modena F.C. from Jan, 1993 to Jan, 1994. Ferro Tontini plays for A.S. Roma from Jan, 1994 to Jan, 1994. Ferro Tontini plays for S.S.D. Lucchese 1905 from Jan, 1994 to Jan, 1995.	Ferro TontiniFerro Tontini (born August 14, 1969 in Anzio) is a retired Italian professional football player.He played his only Serie A game in the 1989/90 season for A.S. Roma.	[ "A.S. Roma", "Modena F.C.", "S.S.D. Lucchese 1905", "Calcio Catania" ]
Which team did Ferro Tontini play for in 08/12/1990?	August 12, 1990	{ "text": [ "Cosenza Calcio 1914", "Cosenza Calcio" ] }	L2_Q3743212_P54_1	Ferro Tontini plays for Cosenza Calcio from Jan, 1990 to Jan, 1991. Ferro Tontini plays for Cosenza Calcio 1914 from Jan, 1990 to Jan, 1991. Ferro Tontini plays for Calcio Catania from Jan, 1992 to Jan, 1993. Ferro Tontini plays for Modena F.C. from Jan, 1993 to Jan, 1994. Ferro Tontini plays for A.S. Roma from Jan, 1994 to Jan, 1994. Ferro Tontini plays for S.S.D. Lucchese 1905 from Jan, 1994 to Jan, 1995.	Ferro TontiniFerro Tontini (born August 14, 1969 in Anzio) is a retired Italian professional football player.He played his only Serie A game in the 1989/90 season for A.S. Roma.	[ "A.S. Roma", "Modena F.C.", "S.S.D. Lucchese 1905", "Calcio Catania" ]
Which team did Ferro Tontini play for in 12-Aug-199012-August-1990?	August 12, 1990	{ "text": [ "Cosenza Calcio 1914", "Cosenza Calcio" ] }	L2_Q3743212_P54_1	Ferro Tontini plays for Cosenza Calcio from Jan, 1990 to Jan, 1991. Ferro Tontini plays for Cosenza Calcio 1914 from Jan, 1990 to Jan, 1991. Ferro Tontini plays for Calcio Catania from Jan, 1992 to Jan, 1993. Ferro Tontini plays for Modena F.C. from Jan, 1993 to Jan, 1994. Ferro Tontini plays for A.S. Roma from Jan, 1994 to Jan, 1994. Ferro Tontini plays for S.S.D. Lucchese 1905 from Jan, 1994 to Jan, 1995.	Ferro TontiniFerro Tontini (born August 14, 1969 in Anzio) is a retired Italian professional football player.He played his only Serie A game in the 1989/90 season for A.S. Roma.	[ "A.S. Roma", "Modena F.C.", "S.S.D. Lucchese 1905", "Calcio Catania" ]
Which position did Richard Winfred Anane hold in Jul, 2002?	July 27, 2002	{ "text": [ "Minister for Health of Ghana", "Member of the 3rd Parliament of the 4th Republic of Ghana" ] }	L2_Q2150918_P39_1	Richard Winfred Anane holds the position of Member of the 6th Parliament of the 4th Republic of Ghana from Jan, 2013 to Jan, 2017. Richard Winfred Anane holds the position of Member of the 2nd Parliament of the 4th Republic of Ghana from Jan, 1997 to Jan, 2001. Richard Winfred Anane holds the position of Minister for Health of Ghana from Jan, 2001 to Jan, 2003. Richard Winfred Anane holds the position of Member of the 4th Parliament of the 4th Republic of Ghana from Jan, 2005 to Jan, 2009. Richard Winfred Anane holds the position of Member of the 3rd Parliament of the 4th Republic of Ghana from Jan, 2001 to Jan, 2005. Richard Winfred Anane holds the position of Member of the 5th Parliament of the 4th Republic of Ghana from Jan, 2009 to Jan, 2013.	Richard Winfred AnaneRichard Winfred Anane (born March 12, 1954) is a physician and former Ghanaian politician who served as Minister for Roads and Highways, Minister for Health, and Member of Parliament for Nhyiaeso serving from 1997 to 2017.Anane was born on 12 March 1954. He hails from Santasi in the Ashanti Region. He received his high school education in Asanteman Senior High School. In 1983, Anane received an MB CHB from Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology (KNUST) in Kumasi.Anane was the doctor of Hebron Clinic, Bantama before he became a Member of Parliament in 1997.Anane is a member of the New Patriotic Party. He contested in the 2012 Ghanaian general elections on the ticket of the New Patriotic Party and won. He obtained 36,067 votes out of the 47, 535 valid votes cast, representing 75.9% of the total votes cast in the 2012 election, exemplifying his popularity in his constituency. Anane served in multiple cabinet-level positions under John Agyekum Kufuor, being Minister for Health and Minister for Roads and Highways respectively from 2001 to 2006.Anane was elected as the member of parliament for the Nhyiaeso constituency of the Ashanti Region of Ghana in the 2004 Ghanaian general elections. He won on the ticket of the New Patriotic Party. His constituency was a part of the 36 parliamentary seats out of 39 seats won by the New Patriotic Party in that election for the Ashanti Region. The New Patriotic Party won a majority total of 128 parliamentary seats out of 230 seats. He was elected with 36,307 votes out of 46,626 total valid votes cast. This was equivalent to 77.9% of total valid votes cast. He was elected over Eric Baah-Nuako of the National Democratic Congress and Kwame Appiah Boateng of the Convention People's Party. These obtained 8,908 and 1,411 votes respectively of total valid votes cast. These were equivalent to 19.1% and 3% respectively of total valid votes cast.In 2008, he won the general elections on the ticket of the New Patriotic Party for the same constituency. His constituency was part of the 34 parliamentary seats out of 39 seats won by the New Patriotic Party in that election for the Ashanti Region. The New Patriotic Party won a minority total of 109 parliamentary seats out of 230 seats. He was elected with 36,067 votes out of 47,535 total valid votes cast. This was equivalent to 75.87% of total valid votes cast. He was elected over Joseph Bernard Boadu of the National Democratic Congress, Kwame Appiah Boateng of the Convention People’s Party, Kwaku Bonsu of the Reformed Patriotic Democrats and Kwame Owusu an independent candidate. These obtained 9,426, 1,055, 197 and 790 votes respectively of the total valid votes cast. These were equivalent to 19.83%, 2.22%, 0.41% and 1.66% respectively of the total votes cast.In 2012, he won the general elections on the ticket of the New Patriotic Party for the same constituency. He was elected with 45,389 votes out of 56,558 total valid votes cast. This was equivalent to 76.21% of total valid votes cast. He was elected over Nana Afua Anima of the National Democratic Congress, Yaw Sekyere of the Progressive People's Party, Emmanuel Dapaah of the Convention People's Party and Peter Boakye-Yiadom of the National Democratic Party. These obtained 12,304, 666, 807 and 392 votes respectively of the total valid votes cast. These were equivalent to 20.66%, 1.12%, 1.35% and 0.66% respectively of the total votes cast.Anane is a Roman Catholic. He is married with four children.	[ "Member of the 6th Parliament of the 4th Republic of Ghana", "Member of the 2nd Parliament of the 4th Republic of Ghana", "Member of the 4th Parliament of the 4th Republic of Ghana", "Member of the 5th Parliament of the 4th Republic of Ghana" ]
Which position did Richard Winfred Anane hold in 2002-07-27?	July 27, 2002	{ "text": [ "Minister for Health of Ghana", "Member of the 3rd Parliament of the 4th Republic of Ghana" ] }	L2_Q2150918_P39_1	Richard Winfred Anane holds the position of Member of the 6th Parliament of the 4th Republic of Ghana from Jan, 2013 to Jan, 2017. Richard Winfred Anane holds the position of Member of the 2nd Parliament of the 4th Republic of Ghana from Jan, 1997 to Jan, 2001. Richard Winfred Anane holds the position of Minister for Health of Ghana from Jan, 2001 to Jan, 2003. Richard Winfred Anane holds the position of Member of the 4th Parliament of the 4th Republic of Ghana from Jan, 2005 to Jan, 2009. Richard Winfred Anane holds the position of Member of the 3rd Parliament of the 4th Republic of Ghana from Jan, 2001 to Jan, 2005. Richard Winfred Anane holds the position of Member of the 5th Parliament of the 4th Republic of Ghana from Jan, 2009 to Jan, 2013.	Richard Winfred AnaneRichard Winfred Anane (born March 12, 1954) is a physician and former Ghanaian politician who served as Minister for Roads and Highways, Minister for Health, and Member of Parliament for Nhyiaeso serving from 1997 to 2017.Anane was born on 12 March 1954. He hails from Santasi in the Ashanti Region. He received his high school education in Asanteman Senior High School. In 1983, Anane received an MB CHB from Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology (KNUST) in Kumasi.Anane was the doctor of Hebron Clinic, Bantama before he became a Member of Parliament in 1997.Anane is a member of the New Patriotic Party. He contested in the 2012 Ghanaian general elections on the ticket of the New Patriotic Party and won. He obtained 36,067 votes out of the 47, 535 valid votes cast, representing 75.9% of the total votes cast in the 2012 election, exemplifying his popularity in his constituency. Anane served in multiple cabinet-level positions under John Agyekum Kufuor, being Minister for Health and Minister for Roads and Highways respectively from 2001 to 2006.Anane was elected as the member of parliament for the Nhyiaeso constituency of the Ashanti Region of Ghana in the 2004 Ghanaian general elections. He won on the ticket of the New Patriotic Party. His constituency was a part of the 36 parliamentary seats out of 39 seats won by the New Patriotic Party in that election for the Ashanti Region. The New Patriotic Party won a majority total of 128 parliamentary seats out of 230 seats. He was elected with 36,307 votes out of 46,626 total valid votes cast. This was equivalent to 77.9% of total valid votes cast. He was elected over Eric Baah-Nuako of the National Democratic Congress and Kwame Appiah Boateng of the Convention People's Party. These obtained 8,908 and 1,411 votes respectively of total valid votes cast. These were equivalent to 19.1% and 3% respectively of total valid votes cast.In 2008, he won the general elections on the ticket of the New Patriotic Party for the same constituency. His constituency was part of the 34 parliamentary seats out of 39 seats won by the New Patriotic Party in that election for the Ashanti Region. The New Patriotic Party won a minority total of 109 parliamentary seats out of 230 seats. He was elected with 36,067 votes out of 47,535 total valid votes cast. This was equivalent to 75.87% of total valid votes cast. He was elected over Joseph Bernard Boadu of the National Democratic Congress, Kwame Appiah Boateng of the Convention People’s Party, Kwaku Bonsu of the Reformed Patriotic Democrats and Kwame Owusu an independent candidate. These obtained 9,426, 1,055, 197 and 790 votes respectively of the total valid votes cast. These were equivalent to 19.83%, 2.22%, 0.41% and 1.66% respectively of the total votes cast.In 2012, he won the general elections on the ticket of the New Patriotic Party for the same constituency. He was elected with 45,389 votes out of 56,558 total valid votes cast. This was equivalent to 76.21% of total valid votes cast. He was elected over Nana Afua Anima of the National Democratic Congress, Yaw Sekyere of the Progressive People's Party, Emmanuel Dapaah of the Convention People's Party and Peter Boakye-Yiadom of the National Democratic Party. These obtained 12,304, 666, 807 and 392 votes respectively of the total valid votes cast. These were equivalent to 20.66%, 1.12%, 1.35% and 0.66% respectively of the total votes cast.Anane is a Roman Catholic. He is married with four children.	[ "Member of the 6th Parliament of the 4th Republic of Ghana", "Member of the 2nd Parliament of the 4th Republic of Ghana", "Member of the 4th Parliament of the 4th Republic of Ghana", "Member of the 5th Parliament of the 4th Republic of Ghana" ]
Which position did Richard Winfred Anane hold in 27/07/2002?	July 27, 2002	{ "text": [ "Minister for Health of Ghana", "Member of the 3rd Parliament of the 4th Republic of Ghana" ] }	L2_Q2150918_P39_1	Richard Winfred Anane holds the position of Member of the 6th Parliament of the 4th Republic of Ghana from Jan, 2013 to Jan, 2017. Richard Winfred Anane holds the position of Member of the 2nd Parliament of the 4th Republic of Ghana from Jan, 1997 to Jan, 2001. Richard Winfred Anane holds the position of Minister for Health of Ghana from Jan, 2001 to Jan, 2003. Richard Winfred Anane holds the position of Member of the 4th Parliament of the 4th Republic of Ghana from Jan, 2005 to Jan, 2009. Richard Winfred Anane holds the position of Member of the 3rd Parliament of the 4th Republic of Ghana from Jan, 2001 to Jan, 2005. Richard Winfred Anane holds the position of Member of the 5th Parliament of the 4th Republic of Ghana from Jan, 2009 to Jan, 2013.	Richard Winfred AnaneRichard Winfred Anane (born March 12, 1954) is a physician and former Ghanaian politician who served as Minister for Roads and Highways, Minister for Health, and Member of Parliament for Nhyiaeso serving from 1997 to 2017.Anane was born on 12 March 1954. He hails from Santasi in the Ashanti Region. He received his high school education in Asanteman Senior High School. In 1983, Anane received an MB CHB from Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology (KNUST) in Kumasi.Anane was the doctor of Hebron Clinic, Bantama before he became a Member of Parliament in 1997.Anane is a member of the New Patriotic Party. He contested in the 2012 Ghanaian general elections on the ticket of the New Patriotic Party and won. He obtained 36,067 votes out of the 47, 535 valid votes cast, representing 75.9% of the total votes cast in the 2012 election, exemplifying his popularity in his constituency. Anane served in multiple cabinet-level positions under John Agyekum Kufuor, being Minister for Health and Minister for Roads and Highways respectively from 2001 to 2006.Anane was elected as the member of parliament for the Nhyiaeso constituency of the Ashanti Region of Ghana in the 2004 Ghanaian general elections. He won on the ticket of the New Patriotic Party. His constituency was a part of the 36 parliamentary seats out of 39 seats won by the New Patriotic Party in that election for the Ashanti Region. The New Patriotic Party won a majority total of 128 parliamentary seats out of 230 seats. He was elected with 36,307 votes out of 46,626 total valid votes cast. This was equivalent to 77.9% of total valid votes cast. He was elected over Eric Baah-Nuako of the National Democratic Congress and Kwame Appiah Boateng of the Convention People's Party. These obtained 8,908 and 1,411 votes respectively of total valid votes cast. These were equivalent to 19.1% and 3% respectively of total valid votes cast.In 2008, he won the general elections on the ticket of the New Patriotic Party for the same constituency. His constituency was part of the 34 parliamentary seats out of 39 seats won by the New Patriotic Party in that election for the Ashanti Region. The New Patriotic Party won a minority total of 109 parliamentary seats out of 230 seats. He was elected with 36,067 votes out of 47,535 total valid votes cast. This was equivalent to 75.87% of total valid votes cast. He was elected over Joseph Bernard Boadu of the National Democratic Congress, Kwame Appiah Boateng of the Convention People’s Party, Kwaku Bonsu of the Reformed Patriotic Democrats and Kwame Owusu an independent candidate. These obtained 9,426, 1,055, 197 and 790 votes respectively of the total valid votes cast. These were equivalent to 19.83%, 2.22%, 0.41% and 1.66% respectively of the total votes cast.In 2012, he won the general elections on the ticket of the New Patriotic Party for the same constituency. He was elected with 45,389 votes out of 56,558 total valid votes cast. This was equivalent to 76.21% of total valid votes cast. He was elected over Nana Afua Anima of the National Democratic Congress, Yaw Sekyere of the Progressive People's Party, Emmanuel Dapaah of the Convention People's Party and Peter Boakye-Yiadom of the National Democratic Party. These obtained 12,304, 666, 807 and 392 votes respectively of the total valid votes cast. These were equivalent to 20.66%, 1.12%, 1.35% and 0.66% respectively of the total votes cast.Anane is a Roman Catholic. He is married with four children.	[ "Member of the 6th Parliament of the 4th Republic of Ghana", "Member of the 2nd Parliament of the 4th Republic of Ghana", "Member of the 4th Parliament of the 4th Republic of Ghana", "Member of the 5th Parliament of the 4th Republic of Ghana" ]
Which position did Richard Winfred Anane hold in Jul 27, 2002?	July 27, 2002	{ "text": [ "Minister for Health of Ghana", "Member of the 3rd Parliament of the 4th Republic of Ghana" ] }	L2_Q2150918_P39_1	Richard Winfred Anane holds the position of Member of the 6th Parliament of the 4th Republic of Ghana from Jan, 2013 to Jan, 2017. Richard Winfred Anane holds the position of Member of the 2nd Parliament of the 4th Republic of Ghana from Jan, 1997 to Jan, 2001. Richard Winfred Anane holds the position of Minister for Health of Ghana from Jan, 2001 to Jan, 2003. Richard Winfred Anane holds the position of Member of the 4th Parliament of the 4th Republic of Ghana from Jan, 2005 to Jan, 2009. Richard Winfred Anane holds the position of Member of the 3rd Parliament of the 4th Republic of Ghana from Jan, 2001 to Jan, 2005. Richard Winfred Anane holds the position of Member of the 5th Parliament of the 4th Republic of Ghana from Jan, 2009 to Jan, 2013.	Richard Winfred AnaneRichard Winfred Anane (born March 12, 1954) is a physician and former Ghanaian politician who served as Minister for Roads and Highways, Minister for Health, and Member of Parliament for Nhyiaeso serving from 1997 to 2017.Anane was born on 12 March 1954. He hails from Santasi in the Ashanti Region. He received his high school education in Asanteman Senior High School. In 1983, Anane received an MB CHB from Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology (KNUST) in Kumasi.Anane was the doctor of Hebron Clinic, Bantama before he became a Member of Parliament in 1997.Anane is a member of the New Patriotic Party. He contested in the 2012 Ghanaian general elections on the ticket of the New Patriotic Party and won. He obtained 36,067 votes out of the 47, 535 valid votes cast, representing 75.9% of the total votes cast in the 2012 election, exemplifying his popularity in his constituency. Anane served in multiple cabinet-level positions under John Agyekum Kufuor, being Minister for Health and Minister for Roads and Highways respectively from 2001 to 2006.Anane was elected as the member of parliament for the Nhyiaeso constituency of the Ashanti Region of Ghana in the 2004 Ghanaian general elections. He won on the ticket of the New Patriotic Party. His constituency was a part of the 36 parliamentary seats out of 39 seats won by the New Patriotic Party in that election for the Ashanti Region. The New Patriotic Party won a majority total of 128 parliamentary seats out of 230 seats. He was elected with 36,307 votes out of 46,626 total valid votes cast. This was equivalent to 77.9% of total valid votes cast. He was elected over Eric Baah-Nuako of the National Democratic Congress and Kwame Appiah Boateng of the Convention People's Party. These obtained 8,908 and 1,411 votes respectively of total valid votes cast. These were equivalent to 19.1% and 3% respectively of total valid votes cast.In 2008, he won the general elections on the ticket of the New Patriotic Party for the same constituency. His constituency was part of the 34 parliamentary seats out of 39 seats won by the New Patriotic Party in that election for the Ashanti Region. The New Patriotic Party won a minority total of 109 parliamentary seats out of 230 seats. He was elected with 36,067 votes out of 47,535 total valid votes cast. This was equivalent to 75.87% of total valid votes cast. He was elected over Joseph Bernard Boadu of the National Democratic Congress, Kwame Appiah Boateng of the Convention People’s Party, Kwaku Bonsu of the Reformed Patriotic Democrats and Kwame Owusu an independent candidate. These obtained 9,426, 1,055, 197 and 790 votes respectively of the total valid votes cast. These were equivalent to 19.83%, 2.22%, 0.41% and 1.66% respectively of the total votes cast.In 2012, he won the general elections on the ticket of the New Patriotic Party for the same constituency. He was elected with 45,389 votes out of 56,558 total valid votes cast. This was equivalent to 76.21% of total valid votes cast. He was elected over Nana Afua Anima of the National Democratic Congress, Yaw Sekyere of the Progressive People's Party, Emmanuel Dapaah of the Convention People's Party and Peter Boakye-Yiadom of the National Democratic Party. These obtained 12,304, 666, 807 and 392 votes respectively of the total valid votes cast. These were equivalent to 20.66%, 1.12%, 1.35% and 0.66% respectively of the total votes cast.Anane is a Roman Catholic. He is married with four children.	[ "Member of the 6th Parliament of the 4th Republic of Ghana", "Member of the 2nd Parliament of the 4th Republic of Ghana", "Member of the 4th Parliament of the 4th Republic of Ghana", "Member of the 5th Parliament of the 4th Republic of Ghana" ]
Which position did Richard Winfred Anane hold in 07/27/2002?	July 27, 2002	{ "text": [ "Minister for Health of Ghana", "Member of the 3rd Parliament of the 4th Republic of Ghana" ] }	L2_Q2150918_P39_1	Richard Winfred Anane holds the position of Member of the 6th Parliament of the 4th Republic of Ghana from Jan, 2013 to Jan, 2017. Richard Winfred Anane holds the position of Member of the 2nd Parliament of the 4th Republic of Ghana from Jan, 1997 to Jan, 2001. Richard Winfred Anane holds the position of Minister for Health of Ghana from Jan, 2001 to Jan, 2003. Richard Winfred Anane holds the position of Member of the 4th Parliament of the 4th Republic of Ghana from Jan, 2005 to Jan, 2009. Richard Winfred Anane holds the position of Member of the 3rd Parliament of the 4th Republic of Ghana from Jan, 2001 to Jan, 2005. Richard Winfred Anane holds the position of Member of the 5th Parliament of the 4th Republic of Ghana from Jan, 2009 to Jan, 2013.	Richard Winfred AnaneRichard Winfred Anane (born March 12, 1954) is a physician and former Ghanaian politician who served as Minister for Roads and Highways, Minister for Health, and Member of Parliament for Nhyiaeso serving from 1997 to 2017.Anane was born on 12 March 1954. He hails from Santasi in the Ashanti Region. He received his high school education in Asanteman Senior High School. In 1983, Anane received an MB CHB from Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology (KNUST) in Kumasi.Anane was the doctor of Hebron Clinic, Bantama before he became a Member of Parliament in 1997.Anane is a member of the New Patriotic Party. He contested in the 2012 Ghanaian general elections on the ticket of the New Patriotic Party and won. He obtained 36,067 votes out of the 47, 535 valid votes cast, representing 75.9% of the total votes cast in the 2012 election, exemplifying his popularity in his constituency. Anane served in multiple cabinet-level positions under John Agyekum Kufuor, being Minister for Health and Minister for Roads and Highways respectively from 2001 to 2006.Anane was elected as the member of parliament for the Nhyiaeso constituency of the Ashanti Region of Ghana in the 2004 Ghanaian general elections. He won on the ticket of the New Patriotic Party. His constituency was a part of the 36 parliamentary seats out of 39 seats won by the New Patriotic Party in that election for the Ashanti Region. The New Patriotic Party won a majority total of 128 parliamentary seats out of 230 seats. He was elected with 36,307 votes out of 46,626 total valid votes cast. This was equivalent to 77.9% of total valid votes cast. He was elected over Eric Baah-Nuako of the National Democratic Congress and Kwame Appiah Boateng of the Convention People's Party. These obtained 8,908 and 1,411 votes respectively of total valid votes cast. These were equivalent to 19.1% and 3% respectively of total valid votes cast.In 2008, he won the general elections on the ticket of the New Patriotic Party for the same constituency. His constituency was part of the 34 parliamentary seats out of 39 seats won by the New Patriotic Party in that election for the Ashanti Region. The New Patriotic Party won a minority total of 109 parliamentary seats out of 230 seats. He was elected with 36,067 votes out of 47,535 total valid votes cast. This was equivalent to 75.87% of total valid votes cast. He was elected over Joseph Bernard Boadu of the National Democratic Congress, Kwame Appiah Boateng of the Convention People’s Party, Kwaku Bonsu of the Reformed Patriotic Democrats and Kwame Owusu an independent candidate. These obtained 9,426, 1,055, 197 and 790 votes respectively of the total valid votes cast. These were equivalent to 19.83%, 2.22%, 0.41% and 1.66% respectively of the total votes cast.In 2012, he won the general elections on the ticket of the New Patriotic Party for the same constituency. He was elected with 45,389 votes out of 56,558 total valid votes cast. This was equivalent to 76.21% of total valid votes cast. He was elected over Nana Afua Anima of the National Democratic Congress, Yaw Sekyere of the Progressive People's Party, Emmanuel Dapaah of the Convention People's Party and Peter Boakye-Yiadom of the National Democratic Party. These obtained 12,304, 666, 807 and 392 votes respectively of the total valid votes cast. These were equivalent to 20.66%, 1.12%, 1.35% and 0.66% respectively of the total votes cast.Anane is a Roman Catholic. He is married with four children.	[ "Member of the 6th Parliament of the 4th Republic of Ghana", "Member of the 2nd Parliament of the 4th Republic of Ghana", "Member of the 4th Parliament of the 4th Republic of Ghana", "Member of the 5th Parliament of the 4th Republic of Ghana" ]
Which position did Richard Winfred Anane hold in 27-Jul-200227-July-2002?	July 27, 2002	{ "text": [ "Minister for Health of Ghana", "Member of the 3rd Parliament of the 4th Republic of Ghana" ] }	L2_Q2150918_P39_1	Richard Winfred Anane holds the position of Member of the 6th Parliament of the 4th Republic of Ghana from Jan, 2013 to Jan, 2017. Richard Winfred Anane holds the position of Member of the 2nd Parliament of the 4th Republic of Ghana from Jan, 1997 to Jan, 2001. Richard Winfred Anane holds the position of Minister for Health of Ghana from Jan, 2001 to Jan, 2003. Richard Winfred Anane holds the position of Member of the 4th Parliament of the 4th Republic of Ghana from Jan, 2005 to Jan, 2009. Richard Winfred Anane holds the position of Member of the 3rd Parliament of the 4th Republic of Ghana from Jan, 2001 to Jan, 2005. Richard Winfred Anane holds the position of Member of the 5th Parliament of the 4th Republic of Ghana from Jan, 2009 to Jan, 2013.	Richard Winfred AnaneRichard Winfred Anane (born March 12, 1954) is a physician and former Ghanaian politician who served as Minister for Roads and Highways, Minister for Health, and Member of Parliament for Nhyiaeso serving from 1997 to 2017.Anane was born on 12 March 1954. He hails from Santasi in the Ashanti Region. He received his high school education in Asanteman Senior High School. In 1983, Anane received an MB CHB from Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology (KNUST) in Kumasi.Anane was the doctor of Hebron Clinic, Bantama before he became a Member of Parliament in 1997.Anane is a member of the New Patriotic Party. He contested in the 2012 Ghanaian general elections on the ticket of the New Patriotic Party and won. He obtained 36,067 votes out of the 47, 535 valid votes cast, representing 75.9% of the total votes cast in the 2012 election, exemplifying his popularity in his constituency. Anane served in multiple cabinet-level positions under John Agyekum Kufuor, being Minister for Health and Minister for Roads and Highways respectively from 2001 to 2006.Anane was elected as the member of parliament for the Nhyiaeso constituency of the Ashanti Region of Ghana in the 2004 Ghanaian general elections. He won on the ticket of the New Patriotic Party. His constituency was a part of the 36 parliamentary seats out of 39 seats won by the New Patriotic Party in that election for the Ashanti Region. The New Patriotic Party won a majority total of 128 parliamentary seats out of 230 seats. He was elected with 36,307 votes out of 46,626 total valid votes cast. This was equivalent to 77.9% of total valid votes cast. He was elected over Eric Baah-Nuako of the National Democratic Congress and Kwame Appiah Boateng of the Convention People's Party. These obtained 8,908 and 1,411 votes respectively of total valid votes cast. These were equivalent to 19.1% and 3% respectively of total valid votes cast.In 2008, he won the general elections on the ticket of the New Patriotic Party for the same constituency. His constituency was part of the 34 parliamentary seats out of 39 seats won by the New Patriotic Party in that election for the Ashanti Region. The New Patriotic Party won a minority total of 109 parliamentary seats out of 230 seats. He was elected with 36,067 votes out of 47,535 total valid votes cast. This was equivalent to 75.87% of total valid votes cast. He was elected over Joseph Bernard Boadu of the National Democratic Congress, Kwame Appiah Boateng of the Convention People’s Party, Kwaku Bonsu of the Reformed Patriotic Democrats and Kwame Owusu an independent candidate. These obtained 9,426, 1,055, 197 and 790 votes respectively of the total valid votes cast. These were equivalent to 19.83%, 2.22%, 0.41% and 1.66% respectively of the total votes cast.In 2012, he won the general elections on the ticket of the New Patriotic Party for the same constituency. He was elected with 45,389 votes out of 56,558 total valid votes cast. This was equivalent to 76.21% of total valid votes cast. He was elected over Nana Afua Anima of the National Democratic Congress, Yaw Sekyere of the Progressive People's Party, Emmanuel Dapaah of the Convention People's Party and Peter Boakye-Yiadom of the National Democratic Party. These obtained 12,304, 666, 807 and 392 votes respectively of the total valid votes cast. These were equivalent to 20.66%, 1.12%, 1.35% and 0.66% respectively of the total votes cast.Anane is a Roman Catholic. He is married with four children.	[ "Member of the 6th Parliament of the 4th Republic of Ghana", "Member of the 2nd Parliament of the 4th Republic of Ghana", "Member of the 4th Parliament of the 4th Republic of Ghana", "Member of the 5th Parliament of the 4th Republic of Ghana" ]
Which team did Olivier Quint play for in Feb, 1995?	February 19, 1995	{ "text": [ "RC Épernay Champagne" ] }	L2_Q3351316_P54_0	Olivier Quint plays for F.C. Nantes from Jan, 2001 to Jan, 2006. Olivier Quint plays for CS Sedan Ardennes from Jan, 1996 to Jan, 2001. Olivier Quint plays for RC Épernay Champagne from Jan, 1995 to Jan, 1996.	Olivier QuintOlivier Quint (born 29 November 1971) is a French former professional footballer and football coach.Quint was born in Saint-Quentin, Aisne. He played professionally for CS Sedan Ardennes and Nantes. While at Nantes he scored as they won the 2001 Trophée des Champions.	[ "CS Sedan Ardennes", "F.C. Nantes" ]
Which team did Olivier Quint play for in 1995-02-19?	February 19, 1995	{ "text": [ "RC Épernay Champagne" ] }	L2_Q3351316_P54_0	Olivier Quint plays for F.C. Nantes from Jan, 2001 to Jan, 2006. Olivier Quint plays for CS Sedan Ardennes from Jan, 1996 to Jan, 2001. Olivier Quint plays for RC Épernay Champagne from Jan, 1995 to Jan, 1996.	Olivier QuintOlivier Quint (born 29 November 1971) is a French former professional footballer and football coach.Quint was born in Saint-Quentin, Aisne. He played professionally for CS Sedan Ardennes and Nantes. While at Nantes he scored as they won the 2001 Trophée des Champions.	[ "CS Sedan Ardennes", "F.C. Nantes" ]
Which team did Olivier Quint play for in 19/02/1995?	February 19, 1995	{ "text": [ "RC Épernay Champagne" ] }	L2_Q3351316_P54_0	Olivier Quint plays for F.C. Nantes from Jan, 2001 to Jan, 2006. Olivier Quint plays for CS Sedan Ardennes from Jan, 1996 to Jan, 2001. Olivier Quint plays for RC Épernay Champagne from Jan, 1995 to Jan, 1996.	Olivier QuintOlivier Quint (born 29 November 1971) is a French former professional footballer and football coach.Quint was born in Saint-Quentin, Aisne. He played professionally for CS Sedan Ardennes and Nantes. While at Nantes he scored as they won the 2001 Trophée des Champions.	[ "CS Sedan Ardennes", "F.C. Nantes" ]
Which team did Olivier Quint play for in Feb 19, 1995?	February 19, 1995	{ "text": [ "RC Épernay Champagne" ] }	L2_Q3351316_P54_0	Olivier Quint plays for F.C. Nantes from Jan, 2001 to Jan, 2006. Olivier Quint plays for CS Sedan Ardennes from Jan, 1996 to Jan, 2001. Olivier Quint plays for RC Épernay Champagne from Jan, 1995 to Jan, 1996.	Olivier QuintOlivier Quint (born 29 November 1971) is a French former professional footballer and football coach.Quint was born in Saint-Quentin, Aisne. He played professionally for CS Sedan Ardennes and Nantes. While at Nantes he scored as they won the 2001 Trophée des Champions.	[ "CS Sedan Ardennes", "F.C. Nantes" ]
Which team did Olivier Quint play for in 02/19/1995?	February 19, 1995	{ "text": [ "RC Épernay Champagne" ] }	L2_Q3351316_P54_0	Olivier Quint plays for F.C. Nantes from Jan, 2001 to Jan, 2006. Olivier Quint plays for CS Sedan Ardennes from Jan, 1996 to Jan, 2001. Olivier Quint plays for RC Épernay Champagne from Jan, 1995 to Jan, 1996.	Olivier QuintOlivier Quint (born 29 November 1971) is a French former professional footballer and football coach.Quint was born in Saint-Quentin, Aisne. He played professionally for CS Sedan Ardennes and Nantes. While at Nantes he scored as they won the 2001 Trophée des Champions.	[ "CS Sedan Ardennes", "F.C. Nantes" ]
Which team did Olivier Quint play for in 19-Feb-199519-February-1995?	February 19, 1995	{ "text": [ "RC Épernay Champagne" ] }	L2_Q3351316_P54_0	Olivier Quint plays for F.C. Nantes from Jan, 2001 to Jan, 2006. Olivier Quint plays for CS Sedan Ardennes from Jan, 1996 to Jan, 2001. Olivier Quint plays for RC Épernay Champagne from Jan, 1995 to Jan, 1996.	Olivier QuintOlivier Quint (born 29 November 1971) is a French former professional footballer and football coach.Quint was born in Saint-Quentin, Aisne. He played professionally for CS Sedan Ardennes and Nantes. While at Nantes he scored as they won the 2001 Trophée des Champions.	[ "CS Sedan Ardennes", "F.C. Nantes" ]
Which employer did Anna K. Panorska work for in Aug, 2000?	August 09, 2000	{ "text": [ "Desert Research Institute" ] }	L2_Q63430495_P108_3	Anna K. Panorska works for Desert Research Institute from Jan, 2000 to Jan, 2002. Anna K. Panorska works for University of California, Santa Barbara from Jan, 1999 to Jan, 2000. Anna K. Panorska works for University of Tennessee at Chattanooga from Jan, 1992 to Jan, 1997. Anna K. Panorska works for University of Nevada, Reno from Jan, 2002 to Dec, 2022. Anna K. Panorska works for BlueCross BlueShield of Tennessee from Jan, 1997 to Jan, 1999.	Anna PanorskaAnna Katarzyna Panorska is a Polish mathematician and statistician who works as a professor in the department of mathematics and statistics at the University of Nevada, Reno.Panorska's research interests include studying extreme events in the stochastic processes used to model weather, water, and biology. She has also studied the effects of weather conditions on baseball performance, concluding that temperature has a larger effect than wind and humidity.Panorska studied mathematics at the University of Warsaw, completing a degree in 1986. After earning a master's degree in statistics at the University of Texas at El Paso in 1988, she returned to mathematics for her doctoral studies, completing a Ph.D. at the University of California, Santa Barbara in 1992. Her dissertation, "Generalized Convolutions", was supervised by Svetlozar Rachev.She became an assistant professor of mathematics at the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga in 1992, but left academia in 1997 to work as a biostatistician for BlueCross BlueShield of Tennessee. After visiting the University of California, Santa Barbara in 1999–2000, she took a research faculty position in 2000 at the Desert Research Institute, associated with the University of Nevada, Reno. In 2002 she became a regular faculty member in mathematics and statistics at the university, and in 2011 she was promoted to full professor.	[ "BlueCross BlueShield of Tennessee", "University of Tennessee at Chattanooga", "University of California, Santa Barbara", "University of Nevada, Reno" ]
Which employer did Anna K. Panorska work for in 2000-08-09?	August 09, 2000	{ "text": [ "Desert Research Institute" ] }	L2_Q63430495_P108_3	Anna K. Panorska works for Desert Research Institute from Jan, 2000 to Jan, 2002. Anna K. Panorska works for University of California, Santa Barbara from Jan, 1999 to Jan, 2000. Anna K. Panorska works for University of Tennessee at Chattanooga from Jan, 1992 to Jan, 1997. Anna K. Panorska works for University of Nevada, Reno from Jan, 2002 to Dec, 2022. Anna K. Panorska works for BlueCross BlueShield of Tennessee from Jan, 1997 to Jan, 1999.	Anna PanorskaAnna Katarzyna Panorska is a Polish mathematician and statistician who works as a professor in the department of mathematics and statistics at the University of Nevada, Reno.Panorska's research interests include studying extreme events in the stochastic processes used to model weather, water, and biology. She has also studied the effects of weather conditions on baseball performance, concluding that temperature has a larger effect than wind and humidity.Panorska studied mathematics at the University of Warsaw, completing a degree in 1986. After earning a master's degree in statistics at the University of Texas at El Paso in 1988, she returned to mathematics for her doctoral studies, completing a Ph.D. at the University of California, Santa Barbara in 1992. Her dissertation, "Generalized Convolutions", was supervised by Svetlozar Rachev.She became an assistant professor of mathematics at the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga in 1992, but left academia in 1997 to work as a biostatistician for BlueCross BlueShield of Tennessee. After visiting the University of California, Santa Barbara in 1999–2000, she took a research faculty position in 2000 at the Desert Research Institute, associated with the University of Nevada, Reno. In 2002 she became a regular faculty member in mathematics and statistics at the university, and in 2011 she was promoted to full professor.	[ "BlueCross BlueShield of Tennessee", "University of Tennessee at Chattanooga", "University of California, Santa Barbara", "University of Nevada, Reno" ]
Which employer did Anna K. Panorska work for in 09/08/2000?	August 09, 2000	{ "text": [ "Desert Research Institute" ] }	L2_Q63430495_P108_3	Anna K. Panorska works for Desert Research Institute from Jan, 2000 to Jan, 2002. Anna K. Panorska works for University of California, Santa Barbara from Jan, 1999 to Jan, 2000. Anna K. Panorska works for University of Tennessee at Chattanooga from Jan, 1992 to Jan, 1997. Anna K. Panorska works for University of Nevada, Reno from Jan, 2002 to Dec, 2022. Anna K. Panorska works for BlueCross BlueShield of Tennessee from Jan, 1997 to Jan, 1999.	Anna PanorskaAnna Katarzyna Panorska is a Polish mathematician and statistician who works as a professor in the department of mathematics and statistics at the University of Nevada, Reno.Panorska's research interests include studying extreme events in the stochastic processes used to model weather, water, and biology. She has also studied the effects of weather conditions on baseball performance, concluding that temperature has a larger effect than wind and humidity.Panorska studied mathematics at the University of Warsaw, completing a degree in 1986. After earning a master's degree in statistics at the University of Texas at El Paso in 1988, she returned to mathematics for her doctoral studies, completing a Ph.D. at the University of California, Santa Barbara in 1992. Her dissertation, "Generalized Convolutions", was supervised by Svetlozar Rachev.She became an assistant professor of mathematics at the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga in 1992, but left academia in 1997 to work as a biostatistician for BlueCross BlueShield of Tennessee. After visiting the University of California, Santa Barbara in 1999–2000, she took a research faculty position in 2000 at the Desert Research Institute, associated with the University of Nevada, Reno. In 2002 she became a regular faculty member in mathematics and statistics at the university, and in 2011 she was promoted to full professor.	[ "BlueCross BlueShield of Tennessee", "University of Tennessee at Chattanooga", "University of California, Santa Barbara", "University of Nevada, Reno" ]
Which employer did Anna K. Panorska work for in Aug 09, 2000?	August 09, 2000	{ "text": [ "Desert Research Institute" ] }	L2_Q63430495_P108_3	Anna K. Panorska works for Desert Research Institute from Jan, 2000 to Jan, 2002. Anna K. Panorska works for University of California, Santa Barbara from Jan, 1999 to Jan, 2000. Anna K. Panorska works for University of Tennessee at Chattanooga from Jan, 1992 to Jan, 1997. Anna K. Panorska works for University of Nevada, Reno from Jan, 2002 to Dec, 2022. Anna K. Panorska works for BlueCross BlueShield of Tennessee from Jan, 1997 to Jan, 1999.	Anna PanorskaAnna Katarzyna Panorska is a Polish mathematician and statistician who works as a professor in the department of mathematics and statistics at the University of Nevada, Reno.Panorska's research interests include studying extreme events in the stochastic processes used to model weather, water, and biology. She has also studied the effects of weather conditions on baseball performance, concluding that temperature has a larger effect than wind and humidity.Panorska studied mathematics at the University of Warsaw, completing a degree in 1986. After earning a master's degree in statistics at the University of Texas at El Paso in 1988, she returned to mathematics for her doctoral studies, completing a Ph.D. at the University of California, Santa Barbara in 1992. Her dissertation, "Generalized Convolutions", was supervised by Svetlozar Rachev.She became an assistant professor of mathematics at the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga in 1992, but left academia in 1997 to work as a biostatistician for BlueCross BlueShield of Tennessee. After visiting the University of California, Santa Barbara in 1999–2000, she took a research faculty position in 2000 at the Desert Research Institute, associated with the University of Nevada, Reno. In 2002 she became a regular faculty member in mathematics and statistics at the university, and in 2011 she was promoted to full professor.	[ "BlueCross BlueShield of Tennessee", "University of Tennessee at Chattanooga", "University of California, Santa Barbara", "University of Nevada, Reno" ]
Which employer did Anna K. Panorska work for in 08/09/2000?	August 09, 2000	{ "text": [ "Desert Research Institute" ] }	L2_Q63430495_P108_3	Anna K. Panorska works for Desert Research Institute from Jan, 2000 to Jan, 2002. Anna K. Panorska works for University of California, Santa Barbara from Jan, 1999 to Jan, 2000. Anna K. Panorska works for University of Tennessee at Chattanooga from Jan, 1992 to Jan, 1997. Anna K. Panorska works for University of Nevada, Reno from Jan, 2002 to Dec, 2022. Anna K. Panorska works for BlueCross BlueShield of Tennessee from Jan, 1997 to Jan, 1999.	Anna PanorskaAnna Katarzyna Panorska is a Polish mathematician and statistician who works as a professor in the department of mathematics and statistics at the University of Nevada, Reno.Panorska's research interests include studying extreme events in the stochastic processes used to model weather, water, and biology. She has also studied the effects of weather conditions on baseball performance, concluding that temperature has a larger effect than wind and humidity.Panorska studied mathematics at the University of Warsaw, completing a degree in 1986. After earning a master's degree in statistics at the University of Texas at El Paso in 1988, she returned to mathematics for her doctoral studies, completing a Ph.D. at the University of California, Santa Barbara in 1992. Her dissertation, "Generalized Convolutions", was supervised by Svetlozar Rachev.She became an assistant professor of mathematics at the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga in 1992, but left academia in 1997 to work as a biostatistician for BlueCross BlueShield of Tennessee. After visiting the University of California, Santa Barbara in 1999–2000, she took a research faculty position in 2000 at the Desert Research Institute, associated with the University of Nevada, Reno. In 2002 she became a regular faculty member in mathematics and statistics at the university, and in 2011 she was promoted to full professor.	[ "BlueCross BlueShield of Tennessee", "University of Tennessee at Chattanooga", "University of California, Santa Barbara", "University of Nevada, Reno" ]
Which employer did Anna K. Panorska work for in 09-Aug-200009-August-2000?	August 09, 2000	{ "text": [ "Desert Research Institute" ] }	L2_Q63430495_P108_3	Anna K. Panorska works for Desert Research Institute from Jan, 2000 to Jan, 2002. Anna K. Panorska works for University of California, Santa Barbara from Jan, 1999 to Jan, 2000. Anna K. Panorska works for University of Tennessee at Chattanooga from Jan, 1992 to Jan, 1997. Anna K. Panorska works for University of Nevada, Reno from Jan, 2002 to Dec, 2022. Anna K. Panorska works for BlueCross BlueShield of Tennessee from Jan, 1997 to Jan, 1999.	Anna PanorskaAnna Katarzyna Panorska is a Polish mathematician and statistician who works as a professor in the department of mathematics and statistics at the University of Nevada, Reno.Panorska's research interests include studying extreme events in the stochastic processes used to model weather, water, and biology. She has also studied the effects of weather conditions on baseball performance, concluding that temperature has a larger effect than wind and humidity.Panorska studied mathematics at the University of Warsaw, completing a degree in 1986. After earning a master's degree in statistics at the University of Texas at El Paso in 1988, she returned to mathematics for her doctoral studies, completing a Ph.D. at the University of California, Santa Barbara in 1992. Her dissertation, "Generalized Convolutions", was supervised by Svetlozar Rachev.She became an assistant professor of mathematics at the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga in 1992, but left academia in 1997 to work as a biostatistician for BlueCross BlueShield of Tennessee. After visiting the University of California, Santa Barbara in 1999–2000, she took a research faculty position in 2000 at the Desert Research Institute, associated with the University of Nevada, Reno. In 2002 she became a regular faculty member in mathematics and statistics at the university, and in 2011 she was promoted to full professor.	[ "BlueCross BlueShield of Tennessee", "University of Tennessee at Chattanooga", "University of California, Santa Barbara", "University of Nevada, Reno" ]
Which team did Kily González play for in Mar, 2004?	March 15, 2004	{ "text": [ "Argentina national football team", "FC Inter Milan" ] }	L2_Q314761_P54_1	Kily González plays for Valencia CF from Jan, 1999 to Jan, 2003. Kily González plays for Argentina national under-23 football team from Jan, 2004 to Jan, 2004. Kily González plays for Boca Juniors from Jan, 1995 to Jan, 1996. Kily González plays for Argentina national football team from Jan, 1995 to Jan, 2005. Kily González plays for San Lorenzo de Almagro from Jan, 2009 to Jan, 2010. Kily González plays for FC Inter Milan from Jan, 2003 to Jan, 2006. Kily González plays for Real Zaragoza from Jan, 1996 to Jan, 1999.	Kily GonzálezCristian Alberto 'Kily' González Peret (born 4 August 1974) is an Argentine football manager and former professional footballer who played mainly as a left winger, and is currently head coach of Rosario Central.He started his career with Rosario Central which he would represent in three different spells, moving to Spain in 1996 where he appeared for Zaragoza and Valencia, amassing La Liga totals of 182 matches and 23 goals during seven seasons and winning the national championship with the latter. He also spent three years in Italy with Inter Milan.González's spell in the Argentine national team lasted for ten years, in which he was selected for the 2002 World Cup and two Copa América tournaments, for a total of 56 caps.Born in Rosario, Santa Fe, González started playing with local Rosario Central, making his Argentine Primera División debut on 18 December 1993 in a 0–2 away loss against Club de Gimnasia y Esgrima La Plata.After two years he moved to Boca Juniors, spending the 1995–96 season there and playing alongside Diego Maradona.In 1996, González was transferred to Real Zaragoza. He appeared in his first game in La Liga on 8 September by playing 19 minutes in a 2–1 win at Sevilla FC and, during his three-year spell in Aragon, shared teams with countryman Gustavo López who was also a winger.Subsequently, González joined fellow league club Valencia CF for 1,300,000 pesetas, being teammate to also Argentines Pablo Aimar and Roberto Ayala for several seasons and contributing with 31 matches and two goals in the 2001–02 campaign as his team won the league title after a 31-year wait. Following the emergence of younger Vicente he became surplus to requirements – only 13 appearances and 546 minutes of action in his last year, which also included a run-in with manager Rafael Benítez– and left the "Che" as a free agent; additionally, he amassed UEFA Champions League combined totals of 31 matches and five goals as they reached the final in 2000 and 2001, and was granted Spanish nationality in early January 2001.In summer 2003, González followed Valencia coach Héctor Cuper to Inter Milan, and again shared teams with several compatriots.He was used mainly as a substitute during his tenure, playing 75 official games and failing to find the net.Aged 32, González returned to his country and Rosario Central, going on to still be an important first-team member during three top flight seasons. On 4 August 2009, he joined San Lorenzo de Almagro who was managed by former national teammate Diego Simeone; after the former's relegation, however, he decided to rejoin for a third spell and help in the Primera B Nacional campaign, following which he retired at 37.In June 2020, after over a year in charge of its reserve team, González became Rosario Central's manager on an 18-month contract. On his debut on 3 November, the club won 2–1 at home to Godoy Cruz Antonio Tomba.An Argentine international since 1995, González made his debut on 8 November in a 0–1 home defeat to Brazil. He was selected by manager Marcelo Bielsa for his 1999 Copa América squad, scoring one of his nine goals in the nation's 2–0 group stage win against Uruguay as the former went on to reach the quarter finals only to be eliminated by eventual champions Brazil. He went on to become a regular member of the starting eleven under that coach, and also participated in the 2002 FIFA World Cup in Japan and South Korea, starting against England (and being replaced) and also appearing against Nigeria and Sweden in an eventual group stage exit.Two years later, again under Bielsa, González was selected for the 2004 Summer Olympics tournament as one of three overaged players. He featured in all games and scored in the opener against Serbia (6–0), helping the "Albiceleste" win gold in Athens.González also took part in the 2004 Copa América, netting three times in the tournament: his first two came in the group stage, in Argentina's victories against Ecuador and Uruguay, and his last was a penalty in regulation time in the final against Brazil, which eventually ended in a shootout loss with the player again converting his attempt.González was a quick, strong and versatile midfielder, who was capable of playing both as a winger and as an attacking midfielder. His main attributes were his technical ability, vision, range of passing, determination and his powerful and accurate striking ability from distance, which enabled him both to create and score goals."As of 16 June 2021"ValenciaInter Milan	[ "Real Zaragoza", "San Lorenzo de Almagro", "Argentina national under-23 football team", "Valencia CF", "Boca Juniors" ]
Which team did Kily González play for in 2004-03-15?	March 15, 2004	{ "text": [ "Argentina national football team", "FC Inter Milan" ] }	L2_Q314761_P54_1	Kily González plays for Valencia CF from Jan, 1999 to Jan, 2003. Kily González plays for Argentina national under-23 football team from Jan, 2004 to Jan, 2004. Kily González plays for Boca Juniors from Jan, 1995 to Jan, 1996. Kily González plays for Argentina national football team from Jan, 1995 to Jan, 2005. Kily González plays for San Lorenzo de Almagro from Jan, 2009 to Jan, 2010. Kily González plays for FC Inter Milan from Jan, 2003 to Jan, 2006. Kily González plays for Real Zaragoza from Jan, 1996 to Jan, 1999.	Kily GonzálezCristian Alberto 'Kily' González Peret (born 4 August 1974) is an Argentine football manager and former professional footballer who played mainly as a left winger, and is currently head coach of Rosario Central.He started his career with Rosario Central which he would represent in three different spells, moving to Spain in 1996 where he appeared for Zaragoza and Valencia, amassing La Liga totals of 182 matches and 23 goals during seven seasons and winning the national championship with the latter. He also spent three years in Italy with Inter Milan.González's spell in the Argentine national team lasted for ten years, in which he was selected for the 2002 World Cup and two Copa América tournaments, for a total of 56 caps.Born in Rosario, Santa Fe, González started playing with local Rosario Central, making his Argentine Primera División debut on 18 December 1993 in a 0–2 away loss against Club de Gimnasia y Esgrima La Plata.After two years he moved to Boca Juniors, spending the 1995–96 season there and playing alongside Diego Maradona.In 1996, González was transferred to Real Zaragoza. He appeared in his first game in La Liga on 8 September by playing 19 minutes in a 2–1 win at Sevilla FC and, during his three-year spell in Aragon, shared teams with countryman Gustavo López who was also a winger.Subsequently, González joined fellow league club Valencia CF for 1,300,000 pesetas, being teammate to also Argentines Pablo Aimar and Roberto Ayala for several seasons and contributing with 31 matches and two goals in the 2001–02 campaign as his team won the league title after a 31-year wait. Following the emergence of younger Vicente he became surplus to requirements – only 13 appearances and 546 minutes of action in his last year, which also included a run-in with manager Rafael Benítez– and left the "Che" as a free agent; additionally, he amassed UEFA Champions League combined totals of 31 matches and five goals as they reached the final in 2000 and 2001, and was granted Spanish nationality in early January 2001.In summer 2003, González followed Valencia coach Héctor Cuper to Inter Milan, and again shared teams with several compatriots.He was used mainly as a substitute during his tenure, playing 75 official games and failing to find the net.Aged 32, González returned to his country and Rosario Central, going on to still be an important first-team member during three top flight seasons. On 4 August 2009, he joined San Lorenzo de Almagro who was managed by former national teammate Diego Simeone; after the former's relegation, however, he decided to rejoin for a third spell and help in the Primera B Nacional campaign, following which he retired at 37.In June 2020, after over a year in charge of its reserve team, González became Rosario Central's manager on an 18-month contract. On his debut on 3 November, the club won 2–1 at home to Godoy Cruz Antonio Tomba.An Argentine international since 1995, González made his debut on 8 November in a 0–1 home defeat to Brazil. He was selected by manager Marcelo Bielsa for his 1999 Copa América squad, scoring one of his nine goals in the nation's 2–0 group stage win against Uruguay as the former went on to reach the quarter finals only to be eliminated by eventual champions Brazil. He went on to become a regular member of the starting eleven under that coach, and also participated in the 2002 FIFA World Cup in Japan and South Korea, starting against England (and being replaced) and also appearing against Nigeria and Sweden in an eventual group stage exit.Two years later, again under Bielsa, González was selected for the 2004 Summer Olympics tournament as one of three overaged players. He featured in all games and scored in the opener against Serbia (6–0), helping the "Albiceleste" win gold in Athens.González also took part in the 2004 Copa América, netting three times in the tournament: his first two came in the group stage, in Argentina's victories against Ecuador and Uruguay, and his last was a penalty in regulation time in the final against Brazil, which eventually ended in a shootout loss with the player again converting his attempt.González was a quick, strong and versatile midfielder, who was capable of playing both as a winger and as an attacking midfielder. His main attributes were his technical ability, vision, range of passing, determination and his powerful and accurate striking ability from distance, which enabled him both to create and score goals."As of 16 June 2021"ValenciaInter Milan	[ "Real Zaragoza", "San Lorenzo de Almagro", "Argentina national under-23 football team", "Valencia CF", "Boca Juniors" ]
Which team did Kily González play for in 15/03/2004?	March 15, 2004	{ "text": [ "Argentina national football team", "FC Inter Milan" ] }	L2_Q314761_P54_1	Kily González plays for Valencia CF from Jan, 1999 to Jan, 2003. Kily González plays for Argentina national under-23 football team from Jan, 2004 to Jan, 2004. Kily González plays for Boca Juniors from Jan, 1995 to Jan, 1996. Kily González plays for Argentina national football team from Jan, 1995 to Jan, 2005. Kily González plays for San Lorenzo de Almagro from Jan, 2009 to Jan, 2010. Kily González plays for FC Inter Milan from Jan, 2003 to Jan, 2006. Kily González plays for Real Zaragoza from Jan, 1996 to Jan, 1999.	Kily GonzálezCristian Alberto 'Kily' González Peret (born 4 August 1974) is an Argentine football manager and former professional footballer who played mainly as a left winger, and is currently head coach of Rosario Central.He started his career with Rosario Central which he would represent in three different spells, moving to Spain in 1996 where he appeared for Zaragoza and Valencia, amassing La Liga totals of 182 matches and 23 goals during seven seasons and winning the national championship with the latter. He also spent three years in Italy with Inter Milan.González's spell in the Argentine national team lasted for ten years, in which he was selected for the 2002 World Cup and two Copa América tournaments, for a total of 56 caps.Born in Rosario, Santa Fe, González started playing with local Rosario Central, making his Argentine Primera División debut on 18 December 1993 in a 0–2 away loss against Club de Gimnasia y Esgrima La Plata.After two years he moved to Boca Juniors, spending the 1995–96 season there and playing alongside Diego Maradona.In 1996, González was transferred to Real Zaragoza. He appeared in his first game in La Liga on 8 September by playing 19 minutes in a 2–1 win at Sevilla FC and, during his three-year spell in Aragon, shared teams with countryman Gustavo López who was also a winger.Subsequently, González joined fellow league club Valencia CF for 1,300,000 pesetas, being teammate to also Argentines Pablo Aimar and Roberto Ayala for several seasons and contributing with 31 matches and two goals in the 2001–02 campaign as his team won the league title after a 31-year wait. Following the emergence of younger Vicente he became surplus to requirements – only 13 appearances and 546 minutes of action in his last year, which also included a run-in with manager Rafael Benítez– and left the "Che" as a free agent; additionally, he amassed UEFA Champions League combined totals of 31 matches and five goals as they reached the final in 2000 and 2001, and was granted Spanish nationality in early January 2001.In summer 2003, González followed Valencia coach Héctor Cuper to Inter Milan, and again shared teams with several compatriots.He was used mainly as a substitute during his tenure, playing 75 official games and failing to find the net.Aged 32, González returned to his country and Rosario Central, going on to still be an important first-team member during three top flight seasons. On 4 August 2009, he joined San Lorenzo de Almagro who was managed by former national teammate Diego Simeone; after the former's relegation, however, he decided to rejoin for a third spell and help in the Primera B Nacional campaign, following which he retired at 37.In June 2020, after over a year in charge of its reserve team, González became Rosario Central's manager on an 18-month contract. On his debut on 3 November, the club won 2–1 at home to Godoy Cruz Antonio Tomba.An Argentine international since 1995, González made his debut on 8 November in a 0–1 home defeat to Brazil. He was selected by manager Marcelo Bielsa for his 1999 Copa América squad, scoring one of his nine goals in the nation's 2–0 group stage win against Uruguay as the former went on to reach the quarter finals only to be eliminated by eventual champions Brazil. He went on to become a regular member of the starting eleven under that coach, and also participated in the 2002 FIFA World Cup in Japan and South Korea, starting against England (and being replaced) and also appearing against Nigeria and Sweden in an eventual group stage exit.Two years later, again under Bielsa, González was selected for the 2004 Summer Olympics tournament as one of three overaged players. He featured in all games and scored in the opener against Serbia (6–0), helping the "Albiceleste" win gold in Athens.González also took part in the 2004 Copa América, netting three times in the tournament: his first two came in the group stage, in Argentina's victories against Ecuador and Uruguay, and his last was a penalty in regulation time in the final against Brazil, which eventually ended in a shootout loss with the player again converting his attempt.González was a quick, strong and versatile midfielder, who was capable of playing both as a winger and as an attacking midfielder. His main attributes were his technical ability, vision, range of passing, determination and his powerful and accurate striking ability from distance, which enabled him both to create and score goals."As of 16 June 2021"ValenciaInter Milan	[ "Real Zaragoza", "San Lorenzo de Almagro", "Argentina national under-23 football team", "Valencia CF", "Boca Juniors" ]
Which team did Kily González play for in Mar 15, 2004?	March 15, 2004	{ "text": [ "Argentina national football team", "FC Inter Milan" ] }	L2_Q314761_P54_1	Kily González plays for Valencia CF from Jan, 1999 to Jan, 2003. Kily González plays for Argentina national under-23 football team from Jan, 2004 to Jan, 2004. Kily González plays for Boca Juniors from Jan, 1995 to Jan, 1996. Kily González plays for Argentina national football team from Jan, 1995 to Jan, 2005. Kily González plays for San Lorenzo de Almagro from Jan, 2009 to Jan, 2010. Kily González plays for FC Inter Milan from Jan, 2003 to Jan, 2006. Kily González plays for Real Zaragoza from Jan, 1996 to Jan, 1999.	Kily GonzálezCristian Alberto 'Kily' González Peret (born 4 August 1974) is an Argentine football manager and former professional footballer who played mainly as a left winger, and is currently head coach of Rosario Central.He started his career with Rosario Central which he would represent in three different spells, moving to Spain in 1996 where he appeared for Zaragoza and Valencia, amassing La Liga totals of 182 matches and 23 goals during seven seasons and winning the national championship with the latter. He also spent three years in Italy with Inter Milan.González's spell in the Argentine national team lasted for ten years, in which he was selected for the 2002 World Cup and two Copa América tournaments, for a total of 56 caps.Born in Rosario, Santa Fe, González started playing with local Rosario Central, making his Argentine Primera División debut on 18 December 1993 in a 0–2 away loss against Club de Gimnasia y Esgrima La Plata.After two years he moved to Boca Juniors, spending the 1995–96 season there and playing alongside Diego Maradona.In 1996, González was transferred to Real Zaragoza. He appeared in his first game in La Liga on 8 September by playing 19 minutes in a 2–1 win at Sevilla FC and, during his three-year spell in Aragon, shared teams with countryman Gustavo López who was also a winger.Subsequently, González joined fellow league club Valencia CF for 1,300,000 pesetas, being teammate to also Argentines Pablo Aimar and Roberto Ayala for several seasons and contributing with 31 matches and two goals in the 2001–02 campaign as his team won the league title after a 31-year wait. Following the emergence of younger Vicente he became surplus to requirements – only 13 appearances and 546 minutes of action in his last year, which also included a run-in with manager Rafael Benítez– and left the "Che" as a free agent; additionally, he amassed UEFA Champions League combined totals of 31 matches and five goals as they reached the final in 2000 and 2001, and was granted Spanish nationality in early January 2001.In summer 2003, González followed Valencia coach Héctor Cuper to Inter Milan, and again shared teams with several compatriots.He was used mainly as a substitute during his tenure, playing 75 official games and failing to find the net.Aged 32, González returned to his country and Rosario Central, going on to still be an important first-team member during three top flight seasons. On 4 August 2009, he joined San Lorenzo de Almagro who was managed by former national teammate Diego Simeone; after the former's relegation, however, he decided to rejoin for a third spell and help in the Primera B Nacional campaign, following which he retired at 37.In June 2020, after over a year in charge of its reserve team, González became Rosario Central's manager on an 18-month contract. On his debut on 3 November, the club won 2–1 at home to Godoy Cruz Antonio Tomba.An Argentine international since 1995, González made his debut on 8 November in a 0–1 home defeat to Brazil. He was selected by manager Marcelo Bielsa for his 1999 Copa América squad, scoring one of his nine goals in the nation's 2–0 group stage win against Uruguay as the former went on to reach the quarter finals only to be eliminated by eventual champions Brazil. He went on to become a regular member of the starting eleven under that coach, and also participated in the 2002 FIFA World Cup in Japan and South Korea, starting against England (and being replaced) and also appearing against Nigeria and Sweden in an eventual group stage exit.Two years later, again under Bielsa, González was selected for the 2004 Summer Olympics tournament as one of three overaged players. He featured in all games and scored in the opener against Serbia (6–0), helping the "Albiceleste" win gold in Athens.González also took part in the 2004 Copa América, netting three times in the tournament: his first two came in the group stage, in Argentina's victories against Ecuador and Uruguay, and his last was a penalty in regulation time in the final against Brazil, which eventually ended in a shootout loss with the player again converting his attempt.González was a quick, strong and versatile midfielder, who was capable of playing both as a winger and as an attacking midfielder. His main attributes were his technical ability, vision, range of passing, determination and his powerful and accurate striking ability from distance, which enabled him both to create and score goals."As of 16 June 2021"ValenciaInter Milan	[ "Real Zaragoza", "San Lorenzo de Almagro", "Argentina national under-23 football team", "Valencia CF", "Boca Juniors" ]
Which team did Kily González play for in 03/15/2004?	March 15, 2004	{ "text": [ "Argentina national football team", "FC Inter Milan" ] }	L2_Q314761_P54_1	Kily González plays for Valencia CF from Jan, 1999 to Jan, 2003. Kily González plays for Argentina national under-23 football team from Jan, 2004 to Jan, 2004. Kily González plays for Boca Juniors from Jan, 1995 to Jan, 1996. Kily González plays for Argentina national football team from Jan, 1995 to Jan, 2005. Kily González plays for San Lorenzo de Almagro from Jan, 2009 to Jan, 2010. Kily González plays for FC Inter Milan from Jan, 2003 to Jan, 2006. Kily González plays for Real Zaragoza from Jan, 1996 to Jan, 1999.	Kily GonzálezCristian Alberto 'Kily' González Peret (born 4 August 1974) is an Argentine football manager and former professional footballer who played mainly as a left winger, and is currently head coach of Rosario Central.He started his career with Rosario Central which he would represent in three different spells, moving to Spain in 1996 where he appeared for Zaragoza and Valencia, amassing La Liga totals of 182 matches and 23 goals during seven seasons and winning the national championship with the latter. He also spent three years in Italy with Inter Milan.González's spell in the Argentine national team lasted for ten years, in which he was selected for the 2002 World Cup and two Copa América tournaments, for a total of 56 caps.Born in Rosario, Santa Fe, González started playing with local Rosario Central, making his Argentine Primera División debut on 18 December 1993 in a 0–2 away loss against Club de Gimnasia y Esgrima La Plata.After two years he moved to Boca Juniors, spending the 1995–96 season there and playing alongside Diego Maradona.In 1996, González was transferred to Real Zaragoza. He appeared in his first game in La Liga on 8 September by playing 19 minutes in a 2–1 win at Sevilla FC and, during his three-year spell in Aragon, shared teams with countryman Gustavo López who was also a winger.Subsequently, González joined fellow league club Valencia CF for 1,300,000 pesetas, being teammate to also Argentines Pablo Aimar and Roberto Ayala for several seasons and contributing with 31 matches and two goals in the 2001–02 campaign as his team won the league title after a 31-year wait. Following the emergence of younger Vicente he became surplus to requirements – only 13 appearances and 546 minutes of action in his last year, which also included a run-in with manager Rafael Benítez– and left the "Che" as a free agent; additionally, he amassed UEFA Champions League combined totals of 31 matches and five goals as they reached the final in 2000 and 2001, and was granted Spanish nationality in early January 2001.In summer 2003, González followed Valencia coach Héctor Cuper to Inter Milan, and again shared teams with several compatriots.He was used mainly as a substitute during his tenure, playing 75 official games and failing to find the net.Aged 32, González returned to his country and Rosario Central, going on to still be an important first-team member during three top flight seasons. On 4 August 2009, he joined San Lorenzo de Almagro who was managed by former national teammate Diego Simeone; after the former's relegation, however, he decided to rejoin for a third spell and help in the Primera B Nacional campaign, following which he retired at 37.In June 2020, after over a year in charge of its reserve team, González became Rosario Central's manager on an 18-month contract. On his debut on 3 November, the club won 2–1 at home to Godoy Cruz Antonio Tomba.An Argentine international since 1995, González made his debut on 8 November in a 0–1 home defeat to Brazil. He was selected by manager Marcelo Bielsa for his 1999 Copa América squad, scoring one of his nine goals in the nation's 2–0 group stage win against Uruguay as the former went on to reach the quarter finals only to be eliminated by eventual champions Brazil. He went on to become a regular member of the starting eleven under that coach, and also participated in the 2002 FIFA World Cup in Japan and South Korea, starting against England (and being replaced) and also appearing against Nigeria and Sweden in an eventual group stage exit.Two years later, again under Bielsa, González was selected for the 2004 Summer Olympics tournament as one of three overaged players. He featured in all games and scored in the opener against Serbia (6–0), helping the "Albiceleste" win gold in Athens.González also took part in the 2004 Copa América, netting three times in the tournament: his first two came in the group stage, in Argentina's victories against Ecuador and Uruguay, and his last was a penalty in regulation time in the final against Brazil, which eventually ended in a shootout loss with the player again converting his attempt.González was a quick, strong and versatile midfielder, who was capable of playing both as a winger and as an attacking midfielder. His main attributes were his technical ability, vision, range of passing, determination and his powerful and accurate striking ability from distance, which enabled him both to create and score goals."As of 16 June 2021"ValenciaInter Milan	[ "Real Zaragoza", "San Lorenzo de Almagro", "Argentina national under-23 football team", "Valencia CF", "Boca Juniors" ]
Which team did Kily González play for in 15-Mar-200415-March-2004?	March 15, 2004	{ "text": [ "Argentina national football team", "FC Inter Milan" ] }	L2_Q314761_P54_1	Kily González plays for Valencia CF from Jan, 1999 to Jan, 2003. Kily González plays for Argentina national under-23 football team from Jan, 2004 to Jan, 2004. Kily González plays for Boca Juniors from Jan, 1995 to Jan, 1996. Kily González plays for Argentina national football team from Jan, 1995 to Jan, 2005. Kily González plays for San Lorenzo de Almagro from Jan, 2009 to Jan, 2010. Kily González plays for FC Inter Milan from Jan, 2003 to Jan, 2006. Kily González plays for Real Zaragoza from Jan, 1996 to Jan, 1999.	Kily GonzálezCristian Alberto 'Kily' González Peret (born 4 August 1974) is an Argentine football manager and former professional footballer who played mainly as a left winger, and is currently head coach of Rosario Central.He started his career with Rosario Central which he would represent in three different spells, moving to Spain in 1996 where he appeared for Zaragoza and Valencia, amassing La Liga totals of 182 matches and 23 goals during seven seasons and winning the national championship with the latter. He also spent three years in Italy with Inter Milan.González's spell in the Argentine national team lasted for ten years, in which he was selected for the 2002 World Cup and two Copa América tournaments, for a total of 56 caps.Born in Rosario, Santa Fe, González started playing with local Rosario Central, making his Argentine Primera División debut on 18 December 1993 in a 0–2 away loss against Club de Gimnasia y Esgrima La Plata.After two years he moved to Boca Juniors, spending the 1995–96 season there and playing alongside Diego Maradona.In 1996, González was transferred to Real Zaragoza. He appeared in his first game in La Liga on 8 September by playing 19 minutes in a 2–1 win at Sevilla FC and, during his three-year spell in Aragon, shared teams with countryman Gustavo López who was also a winger.Subsequently, González joined fellow league club Valencia CF for 1,300,000 pesetas, being teammate to also Argentines Pablo Aimar and Roberto Ayala for several seasons and contributing with 31 matches and two goals in the 2001–02 campaign as his team won the league title after a 31-year wait. Following the emergence of younger Vicente he became surplus to requirements – only 13 appearances and 546 minutes of action in his last year, which also included a run-in with manager Rafael Benítez– and left the "Che" as a free agent; additionally, he amassed UEFA Champions League combined totals of 31 matches and five goals as they reached the final in 2000 and 2001, and was granted Spanish nationality in early January 2001.In summer 2003, González followed Valencia coach Héctor Cuper to Inter Milan, and again shared teams with several compatriots.He was used mainly as a substitute during his tenure, playing 75 official games and failing to find the net.Aged 32, González returned to his country and Rosario Central, going on to still be an important first-team member during three top flight seasons. On 4 August 2009, he joined San Lorenzo de Almagro who was managed by former national teammate Diego Simeone; after the former's relegation, however, he decided to rejoin for a third spell and help in the Primera B Nacional campaign, following which he retired at 37.In June 2020, after over a year in charge of its reserve team, González became Rosario Central's manager on an 18-month contract. On his debut on 3 November, the club won 2–1 at home to Godoy Cruz Antonio Tomba.An Argentine international since 1995, González made his debut on 8 November in a 0–1 home defeat to Brazil. He was selected by manager Marcelo Bielsa for his 1999 Copa América squad, scoring one of his nine goals in the nation's 2–0 group stage win against Uruguay as the former went on to reach the quarter finals only to be eliminated by eventual champions Brazil. He went on to become a regular member of the starting eleven under that coach, and also participated in the 2002 FIFA World Cup in Japan and South Korea, starting against England (and being replaced) and also appearing against Nigeria and Sweden in an eventual group stage exit.Two years later, again under Bielsa, González was selected for the 2004 Summer Olympics tournament as one of three overaged players. He featured in all games and scored in the opener against Serbia (6–0), helping the "Albiceleste" win gold in Athens.González also took part in the 2004 Copa América, netting three times in the tournament: his first two came in the group stage, in Argentina's victories against Ecuador and Uruguay, and his last was a penalty in regulation time in the final against Brazil, which eventually ended in a shootout loss with the player again converting his attempt.González was a quick, strong and versatile midfielder, who was capable of playing both as a winger and as an attacking midfielder. His main attributes were his technical ability, vision, range of passing, determination and his powerful and accurate striking ability from distance, which enabled him both to create and score goals."As of 16 June 2021"ValenciaInter Milan	[ "Real Zaragoza", "San Lorenzo de Almagro", "Argentina national under-23 football team", "Valencia CF", "Boca Juniors" ]

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