title: Barack Obama

text: On October 1, 2009, the Obama administration went ahead with a Bush administration program, increasing nuclear weapons production. The "Complex Modernization" initiative expanded two existing nuclear sites to produce new bomb parts. The administration built new plutonium pits at the Los Alamos lab in New Mexico and expanded enriched uranium processing at the Y-12 facility in Oak Ridge, Tennessee. In November 2013, the Obama administration opened negotiations with Iran to prevent it from acquiring nuclear weapons, which included an interim agreement. Negotiations took two years with numerous delays, with a deal being announced on July 14, 2015. The deal titled the "Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action" saw sanctions removed in exchange for measures that would prevent Iran from producing nuclear weapons. While Obama hailed the agreement as being a step towards a more hopeful world, the deal drew strong criticism from Republican and conservative quarters, and from Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. In addition, the transfer of $1.7billion in cash to Iran shortly after the deal was announced was criticized by the Republican party. The Obama administration said that the payment in cash was because of the "effectiveness of U.S. and international sanctions." In order to advance the deal, the Obama administration shielded Hezbollah from the Drug Enforcement Administration's Project Cassandra investigation regarding drug smuggling and from the Central Intelligence Agency.


title: Barack Obama

text: On a side note, the very same year, in December 2015, Obama started a $348billion worth program to back the biggest U.S. buildup of nuclear arms since Ronald Reagan left the White House.


title: Barack Obama

text: In March 2010, an agreement was reached with the administration of Russian President Dmitry Medvedev to replace the 1991 Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty with a new pact reducing the number of long-range nuclear weapons in the arsenals of both countries by about a third. Obama and Medvedev signed the New START treaty in April 2010, and the U.S. Senate ratified it in December 2010. In December 2011, Obama instructed agencies to consider LGBT rights when issuing financial aid to foreign countries. In August 2013, he criticized Russia's law that discriminates against gays, but he stopped short of advocating a boycott of the upcoming 2014 Winter Olympics in Sochi, Russia.


title: Barack Obama

text: After Russia's invasion of Crimea in 2014, military intervention in Syria in 2015, and the interference in the 2016 U.S. presidential election, George Robertson, a former UK defense secretary and NATO secretary-general, said Obama had "allowed Putin to jump back on the world stage and test the resolve of the West", adding that the legacy of this disaster would last.


title: Barack Obama

text: Obama's family history, upbringing, and Ivy League education differ markedly from those of African-American politicians who launched their careers in the 1960s through participation in the civil rights movement. Expressing puzzlement over questions about whether he is "black enough", Obama told an August 2007 meeting of the National Association of Black Journalists that "we're still locked in this notion that if you appeal to white folks then there must be something wrong." Obama acknowledged his youthful image in an October 2007 campaign speech, saying: "I wouldn't be here if, time and again, the torch had not been passed to a new generation." Additionally, Obama has frequently been referred to as an exceptional orator. During his pre-inauguration transition period and continuing into his presidency, Obama delivered a series of weekly Internet video addresses.


title: Barack Obama

text: According to the Gallup Organization, Obama began his presidency with a 68 percent approval rating before gradually declining for the rest of the year, and eventually bottoming out at 41 percent in August 2010, a trend similar to Ronald Reagan's and Bill Clinton's first years in office. He experienced a small poll bounce shortly after the death of Osama bin Laden on May 2, 2011. This bounce lasted until around June 2011, when his approval numbers dropped back to where they were previously. His approval ratings rebounded around the same time as his reelection in 2012, with polls showing an average job approval of 52 percent shortly after his second inauguration. Despite approval ratings dropping to 39 percent in late-2013 due to the ACA roll-out, they climbed to 50 percent in January 2015 according to Gallup.


title: Barack Obama

text: Polls showed strong support for Obama in other countries both before and during his presidency. In a February 2009 poll conducted in Western Europe and the U.S. by Harris Interactive for France 24 and the "International Herald Tribune", Obama was rated as the most respected world leader, as well as the most powerful. In a similar poll conducted by Harris in May 2009, Obama was rated as the most popular world leader, as well as the one figure most people would pin their hopes on for pulling the world out of the economic downturn.


title: Barack Obama

text: On October 9, 2009, the Norwegian Nobel Committee announced that Obama had won the 2009 Nobel Peace Prize "for his extraordinary efforts to strengthen international diplomacy and cooperation between peoples," which drew a mixture of praise and criticism from world leaders and media figures. He became the fourth U.S. president to be awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, and the third to become a Nobel laureate while in office.


title: Barack Obama

text: Obama's election was also met with hostile reactions connected to his race, birthplace, and religion, and as president, he faced numerous taunts, racist remarks and generally racialized criticisms by some conservative pundits. Some also falsely claimed that Obama practiced Islam – at a time when anti-Muslim sentiments were prevalent in the United States – with a 2015 CNN poll finding that 29% of Americans believed Obama to be a Muslim. Starting in 2011, Donald Trump – who would later directly succeed Obama as president – would regularly promote conspiracy theories that Obama had been born in Kenya, and therefore, was not an American citizen. Trump winning the presidency right after Obama was described by some commentators as the culmination of decades of white backlash against Black Americans achieving social mobility in the face of racist policies against them. Carol Anderson, author of the book "White Rage" and a professor of African-American studies, said that Obama was caught off guard by the backlash, and "was surprised by how racist this country is."


title: Barack Obama

text: In September 2009, former President Jimmy Carter stated that “I think an overwhelming portion of the intensely demonstrated animosity toward President Barack Obama is based on the fact that he is a black man.” Though Obama publicly disagreed with Carter's assessment at the time, in a 2015 interview with "NPR", he also said, when asked about critics who believed he was making their country worse:


title: Barack Obama

text: In the same interview, however, he also stated that, despite the existence of racially motivated criticism against him, others who criticize his policies may still have "perfectly good reasons" for doing so.


title: Barack Obama

text: Obama's presidency ended on January 20, 2017, upon the inauguration of his successor, Donald Trump. The family moved to a house they rented in Kalorama, Washington, D.C. On March 2, 2017, the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum awarded the Profile in Courage Award to Obama "for his enduring commitment to democratic ideals and elevating the standard of political courage." His first public appearance since leaving the office was a seminar at the University of Chicago on April 24, where he appealed for a new generation to participate in politics.


title: Barack Obama

text: Obama hosted the inaugural summit of the Obama Foundation in Chicago from October 31 to November 1, 2017. He intends for the foundation to be the central focus of his post-presidency and part of his ambitions for his subsequent activities following his presidency to be more consequential than his time in office.


title: Barack Obama

text: Barack and Michelle Obama signed a deal on May 22, 2018, to produce docu-series, documentaries and features for Netflix under the Obamas' newly formed production company, Higher Ground Productions. Higher Ground's first film, "American Factory," won the Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature in 2020.


title: Barack Obama

text: He received a 63% approval rating in Gallup's 2018 job approval poll for the past 10 U.S. presidents.


title: Barack Obama

text: A pipe bomb addressed to Obama was intercepted by the Secret Service on October 24, 2018. It was one of several pipe-bombs that had been mailed out to Democratic lawmakers and officials.


title: Barack Obama

text: In 2019, Barack and Michelle Obama bought a home on Martha's Vineyard from Wyc Grousbeck. On October 29, 2019, Obama criticized "wokeness" and call-out culture at the Obama Foundation's annual summit.


title: Barack Obama

text: Obama was reluctant to make an endorsement in the 2020 Democratic presidential primaries because he wanted to position himself to unify the party, no matter who the nominee was. On April 14, 2020, Obama endorsed his former vice president Joe Biden, the presumptive Democratic nominee, for president in the 2020 election, stating that he has "all the qualities we need in a president right now." In May 2020, Obama criticized President Trump for his handling of the COVID-19 pandemic, calling his response to the crisis "an absolute chaotic disaster", and stating that the consequences of the Trump presidency have been "our worst impulses unleashed, our proud reputation around the world badly diminished, and our democratic institutions threatened like never before." Trump retaliated by accusing Obama of having committed "the biggest political crime in American history", although he refused to say what he was talking about, telling reporters: "You know what the crime is, the crime is very obvious to everybody."


title: Barack Obama

text: Obama wrote a presidential memoir, in a $65million deal with Penguin Random House. The book, "A Promised Land", was released on November 17, 2020.


title: Barack Obama

text: In February 2021, Obama and musician Bruce Springsteen started a podcast called "" where the two talk about "their backgrounds, music and their 'enduring love of America. In late 2021, Regina Hicks had signed a deal with Netflix, in a venture with his and Michelle's Higher Ground to develop comedy projects. On March 4, 2022, Obama won an Audio Publishers Association (APA) Award in the best narration by the author category for the narration of his memoir "A Promised Land".


title: Barack Obama

text: On April 5, 2022, Obama visited the White House for the first time since leaving office, in an event celebrating the 12th annual anniversary of the signing of the Affordable Care Act.


title: Barack Obama

text: In 2022, he narrated the Netflix documentary series "Our Great National Parks", which later won him a Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Narrator.


title: Barack Obama

text: In June 2022, it was announced that the Obamas and their podcast production company, Higher Ground, signed a multi-year deal with Audible.


title: Barack Obama

text: In September 2022, Obama visited the White House to unveil his and Michelle's official White House portraits.


title: Barack Obama

text: Historian Julian Zelizer credits Obama with "a keen sense of how the institutions of government work and the ways that his team could design policy proposals." Zelizer notes Obama's policy successes included the economic stimulus package which ended the Great Recession and the Dodd-Frank financial and consumer protection reforms, as well as the Affordable Care Act. Zelizer also notes the Democratic Party lost power and numbers of elected officials during Obama's term, saying that the consensus among historians is that Obama "turned out to be a very effective policymaker but not a tremendously successful party builder." Zelizer calls this the "defining paradox of Obama’s presidency".


title: Barack Obama

text: The Brookings Institution noted that Obama passed "only one major legislative achievement (Obamacare)—and a fragile one at that—the legacy of Obama’s presidency mainly rests on its tremendous symbolic importance and the fate of a patchwork of executive actions." David W. Wise noted that Obama fell short "in areas many Progressives hold dear", including the continuation of drone strikes, not going after big banks during the Great Recession, and failing to strengthen his coalition before pushing for Obamacare. Wise called Obama's legacy that of "a disappointingly conventional president".


title: Barack Obama

text: Obama's most significant accomplishment is generally considered to be the Affordable Care Act (ACA), provisions of which went into effect from 2010 to 2020. Many attempts by Senate Republicans to repeal the ACA, including a "skinny repeal", have thus far failed. However, in 2017, the penalty for violating the individual mandate was repealed effective 2019. Together with the Health Care and Education Reconciliation Act amendment, it represents the U.S. healthcare system's most significant regulatory overhaul and expansion of coverage since the passage of Medicare and Medicaid in 1965.


title: Barack Obama

text: Many commentators credit Obama with averting a threatened depression and pulling the economy back from the Great Recession. According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, the Obama administration created 11.3 million jobs from the month after his first inauguration to the end of his term. In 2010, Obama signed into effect the Dodd–Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act. Passed as a response to the financial crisis of 2007–08, it brought the most significant changes to financial regulation in the United States since the regulatory reform that followed the Great Depression under Democratic President Franklin D. Roosevelt.


title: Barack Obama

text: In 2009, Obama signed into law the National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2010, which contained in it the Matthew Shepard and James Byrd Jr. Hate Crimes Prevention Act, the first addition to existing federal hate crime law in the United States since Democratic President Bill Clinton signed into law the Church Arson Prevention Act of 1996. The act expanded existing federal hate crime laws in the United States, and made it a federal crime to assault people based on sexual orientation, gender identity, or disability.


title: Barack Obama

text: As president, Obama advanced LGBT rights. In 2010, he signed the Don't Ask, Don't Tell Repeal Act, which brought an end to "don't ask, don't tell" policy in the U.S. armed forces that banned open service from LGB people; the law went into effect the following year. In 2016, his administration brought an end to the ban on transgender people serving openly in the U.S. armed forces. A Gallup poll, taken in the final days of Obama's term, showed that 68 percent of Americans believed the U.S. had made progress on LGBT rights during Obama's eight years in office.


title: Barack Obama

text: Obama substantially escalated the use of drone strikes against suspected militants and terrorists associated with al-Qaeda and the Taliban. In 2016, the last year of his presidency, the U.S. dropped 26,171 bombs on seven different countries. Obama left about 8,400 U.S. troops in Afghanistan, 5,262 in Iraq, 503 in Syria, 133 in Pakistan, 106 in Somalia, seven in Yemen, and two in Libya at the end of his presidency.


title: Barack Obama

text: According to Pew Research Center and United States Bureau of Justice Statistics, from December 31, 2009, to December 31, 2015, inmates sentenced in U.S. federal custody declined by five percent. This is the largest decline in sentenced inmates in U.S. federal custody since Democratic President Jimmy Carter. By contrast, the federal prison population increased significantly under presidents Ronald Reagan, George H. W. Bush, Bill Clinton, and George W. Bush.


title: Barack Obama

text: Human Rights Watch (HRW) called Obama's human rights record "mixed", adding that "he has often treated human rights as a secondary interest — nice to support when the cost was not too high, but nothing like a top priority he championed."


title: Barack Obama

text: Obama left office in January 2017 with a 60 percent approval rating. Obama gained 10 spots from the same survey in 2015 from the Brookings Institution that ranked him the 18th-greatest American president.


title: Barack Obama

text: The Barack Obama Presidential Center is Obama's planned presidential library. It will be hosted by the University of Chicago and located in Jackson Park on the South Side of Chicago.


title: George VI

text: George VI (Albert Frederick Arthur George; 14 December 1895 – 6 February 1952) was King of the United Kingdom and the Dominions of the British Commonwealth from 11 December 1936 until his death in 1952. He was concurrently the last Emperor of India until August 1947, when the British Raj was dissolved.


title: George VI

text: The future George VI was born in the reign of his great-grandmother Queen Victoria; he was named Albert at birth after his great-grandfather Albert, Prince Consort, and was known as "Bertie" to his family and close friends. His father ascended the throne as George V in 1910. As the second son of the king, Albert was not expected to inherit the throne. He spent his early life in the shadow of his elder brother, Prince Edward, the heir apparent. Albert attended naval college as a teenager and served in the Royal Navy and Royal Air Force during the First World War. In 1920, he was made Duke of York. He married Lady Elizabeth Bowes-Lyon in 1923, and they had two daughters, Elizabeth and Margaret. In the mid-1920s, he engaged speech therapist Lionel Logue to treat his stammer, which he learned to manage to some degree. His elder brother ascended the throne as Edward VIII after their father died in 1936, but Edward abdicated later that year to marry the twice-divorced American socialite Wallis Simpson. As heir presumptive to Edward VIII, Albert thereby became the third monarch of the House of Windsor, taking the regnal name George VI.


title: George VI

text: In September 1939, the British Empire and most Commonwealth countries—but not Ireland—declared war on Nazi Germany. War with the Kingdom of Italy and the Empire of Japan followed in 1940 and 1941, respectively. George VI was seen as sharing the hardships of the common people and his popularity soared. Buckingham Palace was bombed during the Blitz while the King and Queen were there, and his younger brother the Duke of Kent was killed on active service. George became known as a symbol of British determination to win the war. Britain and its allies were victorious in 1945, but the British Empire declined. Ireland had largely broken away, followed by the independence of India and Pakistan in 1947. George relinquished the title of Emperor of India in June 1948 and instead adopted the new title of Head of the Commonwealth. He was beset by smoking-related health problems in the later years of his reign and died of a coronary thrombosis in 1952. He was succeeded by his elder daughter, Elizabeth II.


title: George VI

text: The future George VI was born at York Cottage, on the Sandringham Estate in Norfolk, during the reign of his great-grandmother Queen Victoria. His father was Prince George, Duke of York (later King George V), the second and only surviving son of the Prince and Princess of Wales (later King Edward VII and Queen Alexandra). His mother, the Duchess of York (later Queen Mary), was the eldest child and only daughter of Francis, Duke of Teck, and Mary Adelaide, Duchess of Teck. His birthday, 14 December 1895, was the 34th anniversary of the death of his great-grandfather Albert, Prince Consort. Uncertain of how the Prince Consort's widow, Queen Victoria, would take the news of the birth, the Prince of Wales wrote to the Duke of York that the Queen had been "rather distressed". Two days later, he wrote again: "I really think it would gratify her if you yourself proposed the name "Albert" to her."


title: George VI

text: The Queen was mollified by the proposal to name the new baby Albert, and wrote to the Duchess of York: "I am all impatience to see the "new" one, born on such a sad day but rather more dear to me, especially as he will be called by that dear name which is a byword for all that is great and good." Consequently, he was baptised "Albert Frederick Arthur George" at St Mary Magdalene Church, Sandringham on 17 February 1896. Formally he was His Highness Prince Albert of York; within the family he was known informally as "Bertie". The Duchess of Teck did not like the first name her grandson had been given, and she wrote prophetically that she hoped the last name "may supplant the less favoured one". Albert was fourth in line to the throne at birth, after his grandfather, father and elder brother, Edward.


title: George VI

text: Albert was ill often and was described as "easily frightened and somewhat prone to tears". His parents were generally removed from their children's day-to-day upbringing, as was the norm in aristocratic families of that era. He had a stammer that lasted for many years. Although naturally left-handed, he was forced to write with his right hand, as was common practice at the time. He had chronic stomach problems as well as knock knees, for which he was forced to wear painful corrective splints.


title: George VI

text: Queen Victoria died on 22 January 1901, and the Prince of Wales succeeded her as King Edward VII. Prince Albert moved up to third in line to the throne, after his father and elder brother.


title: George VI

text: Beginning in 1909, Albert attended the Royal Naval College, Osborne, as a naval cadet. In 1911 he came bottom of the class in the final examination, but despite this he progressed to the Royal Naval College, Dartmouth. When his grandfather, Edward VII, died in 1910, his father became King George V. Edward became Prince of Wales, with Albert second in line to the throne.


title: George VI

text: Albert spent the first six months of 1913 on the training ship in the West Indies and on the east coast of Canada. He was rated as a midshipman aboard on 15 September 1913. He spent three months in the Mediterranean, but never overcame his seasickness. Three weeks after the outbreak of World War I he was medically evacuated from the ship to Aberdeen, where his appendix was removed by Sir John Marnoch. He was mentioned in dispatches for his actions as a turret officer aboard "Collingwood" in the Battle of Jutland (31 May – 1 June 1916), the great naval battle of the war. He did not see further combat, largely because of ill health caused by a duodenal ulcer, for which he had an operation in November 1917.


title: George VI

text: In February 1918 Albert was appointed Officer in Charge of Boys at the Royal Naval Air Service's training establishment at Cranwell. With the establishment of the Royal Air Force Albert transferred from the Royal Navy to the Royal Air Force. He served as Officer Commanding Number 4 Squadron of the Boys' Wing at Cranwell until August 1918, before reporting for duty on the staff of the RAF's Cadet Brigade at St Leonards-on-Sea and then at Shorncliffe. He completed a fortnight's training and took command of a squadron on the Cadet Wing. He was the first member of the British royal family to be certified as a fully qualified pilot.


title: George VI

text: Albert wanted to serve on the Continent while the war was still in progress and welcomed a posting to General Trenchard's staff in France. On 23 October, he flew across the Channel to Autigny. For the closing weeks of the war, he served on the staff of the RAF's Independent Air Force at its headquarters in Nancy, France. Following the disbanding of the Independent Air Force in November 1918, he remained on the Continent for two months as an RAF staff officer until posted back to Britain. He accompanied Belgian King Albert I on his triumphal re-entry into Brussels on 22 November. Prince Albert qualified as an RAF pilot on 31 July 1919 and was promoted to squadron leader the following day.


title: George VI

text: In October 1919, Albert went up to Trinity College, Cambridge, where he studied history, economics and civics for a year, with the historian R. V. Laurence as his "official mentor". On 4 June 1920 his father created him Duke of York, Earl of Inverness and Baron Killarney. He began to take on more royal duties. He represented his father, and toured coal mines, factories, and railyards. Through such visits he acquired the nickname of the "Industrial Prince". His stammer, and his embarrassment over it, together with a tendency to shyness, caused him to appear less confident in public than his older brother, Edward. However, he was physically active and enjoyed playing tennis. He played at Wimbledon in the Men's Doubles with Louis Greig in 1926, losing in the first round. He developed an interest in working conditions, and was president of the Industrial Welfare Society. His series of annual summer camps for boys between 1921 and 1939 brought together boys from different social backgrounds.


title: George VI

text: In a time when royalty were expected to marry fellow royalty, it was unusual that Albert had a great deal of freedom in choosing a prospective wife. An infatuation with the already-married Australian socialite Lady Loughborough came to an end in April 1920 when the King, with the promise of the dukedom of York, persuaded Albert to stop seeing her. That year, he met for the first time since childhood Lady Elizabeth Bowes-Lyon, the youngest daughter of the Earl and Countess of Strathmore. He became determined to marry her. Elizabeth rejected his proposal twice, in 1921 and 1922, reportedly because she was reluctant to make the sacrifices necessary to become a member of the royal family. In the words of Lady Strathmore, Albert would be "made or marred" by his choice of wife. After a protracted courtship, Elizabeth agreed to marry him.


title: George VI

text: Albert and Elizabeth were married on 26 April 1923 in Westminster Abbey. Albert's marriage to someone not of royal birth was considered a modernising gesture. The newly formed British Broadcasting Company wished to record and broadcast the event on radio, but the Abbey Chapter vetoed the idea (although the Dean, Herbert Edward Ryle, was in favour).


title: George VI

text: From December 1924 to April 1925, the Duke and Duchess toured Kenya, Uganda, and the Sudan, travelling via the Suez Canal and Aden. During the trip, they both went big-game hunting.


title: George VI

text: Because of his stammer, Albert dreaded public speaking. After his closing speech at the British Empire Exhibition at Wembley on 31 October 1925, one which was an ordeal for both him and his listeners, he began to see Lionel Logue, an Australian-born speech therapist. The Duke and Logue practised breathing exercises, and the Duchess rehearsed with him patiently. Subsequently, he was able to speak with less hesitation. With his delivery improved, the Duke opened the new Parliament House in Canberra, Australia, during a tour of the empire with the Duchess in 1927. Their journey by sea to Australia, New Zealand and Fiji took them via Jamaica, where Albert played doubles tennis partnered with a black man, Bertrand Clark, which was unusual at the time and taken locally as a display of equality between races.


title: George VI

text: The Duke and Duchess had two children: Elizabeth (called "Lilibet" by the family, and the future Elizabeth II) who was born in 1926, and Margaret who was born in 1930. The close family lived at 145 Piccadilly, rather than one of the royal palaces. In 1931, the Canadian prime minister, R. B. Bennett, considered the Duke for Governor General of Canada—a proposal that King George V rejected on the advice of the Secretary of State for Dominion Affairs, J. H. Thomas.


title: George VI

text: King George V had severe reservations about Prince Edward, saying "After I am dead, the boy will ruin himself in twelve months" and "I pray God that my eldest son will never marry and that nothing will come between Bertie and Lilibet and the throne." On 20 January 1936, George V died and Edward ascended the throne as King Edward VIII. In the Vigil of the Princes, Prince Albert and his three brothers (the new king, Prince Henry, Duke of Gloucester, and Prince George, Duke of Kent) took a shift standing guard over their father's body as it lay in state, in a closed casket, in Westminster Hall.


title: George VI

text: As Edward was unmarried and had no children, Albert was the heir presumptive to the throne. Less than a year later, on 11 December 1936, Edward abdicated in order to marry Wallis Simpson, who was divorced from her first husband and divorcing her second. Edward had been advised by British prime minister Stanley Baldwin that he could not remain king and marry a divorced woman with two living ex-husbands. He abdicated and Albert, though he had been reluctant to accept the throne, became king. The day before the abdication, Albert went to London to see his mother, Queen Mary. He wrote in his diary, "When I told her what had happened, I broke down and sobbed like a child."


title: George VI

text: On the day of Edward's abdication, the Oireachtas, the parliament of the Irish Free State, removed all direct mention of the monarch from the Irish constitution. The next day, it passed the External Relations Act, which gave the monarch limited authority (strictly on the advice of the government) to appoint diplomatic representatives for Ireland and to be involved in the making of foreign treaties. The two acts made the Irish Free State a republic in essence without removing its links to the Commonwealth.


title: George VI

text: Across Britain, gossip spread that Albert was physically and psychologically incapable of being king. No evidence has been found to support the contemporaneous rumour that the government considered bypassing him, his children and his brother Henry, in favour of their younger brother George, Duke of Kent. This seems to have been suggested on the grounds that George was at that time the only brother with a son.


title: George VI

text: Albert assumed the regnal name "George VI" to emphasise continuity with his father and restore confidence in the monarchy. The beginning of George VI's reign was taken up by questions surrounding his predecessor and brother, whose titles, style and position were uncertain. He had been introduced as "His Royal Highness Prince Edward" for the abdication broadcast, but George VI felt that by abdicating and renouncing the succession, Edward had lost the right to bear royal titles, including "Royal Highness". In settling the issue, George's first act as king was to confer upon his brother the title "Duke of Windsor" with the style "Royal Highness", but the letters patent creating the dukedom prevented any wife or children from bearing royal styles. George VI was forced to buy from Edward the royal residences of Balmoral Castle and Sandringham House, as these were private properties and did not pass to him automatically. Three days after his accession, on his 41st birthday, he invested his wife, the new queen consort, with the Order of the Garter.


title: George VI

text: George VI's coronation at Westminster Abbey took place on 12 May 1937, the date previously intended for Edward's coronation. In a break with tradition, his mother Queen Mary attended the ceremony in a show of support for her son. There was no Durbar held in Delhi for George VI, as had occurred for his father, as the cost would have been a burden to the Government of India. Rising Indian nationalism made the welcome that the royal party would have received likely to be muted at best, and a prolonged absence from Britain would have been undesirable in the tense period before the Second World War. Two overseas tours were undertaken, to France and to North America, both of which promised greater strategic advantages in the event of war.


title: George VI

text: The growing likelihood of war in Europe dominated the early reign of George VI. The King was constitutionally bound to support Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain's appeasement of Hitler. When the King and Queen greeted Chamberlain on his return from negotiating the Munich Agreement in 1938, they invited him to appear on the balcony of Buckingham Palace with them. This public association of the monarchy with a politician was exceptional, as balcony appearances were traditionally restricted to the royal family. While broadly popular among the general public, Chamberlain's policy towards Hitler was the subject of some opposition in the House of Commons, which led historian John Grigg to describe the King's behaviour in associating himself so prominently with a politician as "the most unconstitutional act by a British sovereign in the present century".


title: George VI

text: In May and June 1939, the King and Queen toured Canada and the United States; it was the first visit of a reigning British monarch to North America, although he had been to Canada prior to his accession. From Ottawa, they were accompanied by the Canadian prime minister, William Lyon Mackenzie King, to present themselves in North America as King and Queen of Canada. Both Governor General of Canada Lord Tweedsmuir and Mackenzie King hoped that the King's presence in Canada would demonstrate the principles of the Statute of Westminster 1931, which gave full sovereignty to the British Dominions. On 19 May, George VI personally accepted and approved the Letter of Credence of the new U.S. Ambassador to Canada, Daniel Calhoun Roper; gave Royal Assent to nine parliamentary bills; and ratified two international treaties with the Great Seal of Canada. The official royal tour historian, Gustave Lanctot, wrote "the Statute of Westminster had assumed full reality" and George gave a speech emphasising "the free and equal association of the nations of the Commonwealth".


title: George VI

text: The trip was intended to soften the strong isolationist tendencies among the North American public with regard to the developing tensions in Europe. Although the aim of the tour was mainly political, to shore up Atlantic support for the United Kingdom in any future war, the King and Queen were enthusiastically received by the public. The fear that George would be compared unfavourably to his predecessor was dispelled. They visited the 1939 New York World's Fair and stayed with President Franklin D. Roosevelt at the White House and at his private estate at Hyde Park, New York. A strong bond of friendship was forged between the King and Queen and the President during the tour, which had major significance in the relations between the United States and the United Kingdom through the ensuing war years.


title: George VI

text: Following the German invasion of Poland in September 1939, the United Kingdom and the self-governing Dominions other than Ireland declared war on Nazi Germany. George VI and his wife resolved to stay in London, despite German bombing raids. They officially stayed in Buckingham Palace throughout the war, although they usually spent nights at Windsor Castle. The first night of the Blitz on London, on 7 September 1940, killed about one thousand civilians, mostly in the East End. On 13 September, the King and Queen narrowly avoided death when two German bombs exploded in a courtyard at Buckingham Palace while they were there. In defiance, the Queen declared: "I am glad we have been bombed. It makes me feel we can look the East End in the face." The royal family were portrayed as sharing the same dangers and deprivations as the rest of the country. They were subject to British rationing restrictions, and U.S. First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt remarked on the rationed food served and the limited bathwater that was permitted during a stay at the unheated and boarded-up Palace. In August 1942, the King's brother, the Duke of Kent, was killed on active service.


title: George VI

text: In 1940, Winston Churchill replaced Neville Chamberlain as prime minister, though personally George would have preferred to appoint Lord Halifax. After the King's initial dismay over Churchill's appointment of Lord Beaverbrook to the Cabinet, he and Churchill developed "the closest personal relationship in modern British history between a monarch and a Prime Minister". Every Tuesday for four and a half years from September 1940, the two men met privately for lunch to discuss the war in secret and with frankness. The King related much of what the two discussed in his diary, which is the only extant first-hand account of these conversations.


title: George VI

text: Throughout the war, the King and Queen provided morale-boosting visits throughout the United Kingdom, visiting bomb sites, munitions factories, and troops. The King visited military forces abroad in France in December 1939, North Africa and Malta in June 1943, Normandy in June 1944, southern Italy in July 1944, and the Low Countries in October 1944. Their high public profile and apparently indefatigable determination secured their place as symbols of national resistance. At a social function in 1944, the Chief of the Imperial General Staff, Field Marshal Alan Brooke, revealed that every time he met Field Marshal Bernard Montgomery, he thought Montgomery was after his job. The King replied: "You should worry, when I meet him, I always think he's after mine!"


title: George VI

text: In 1945, crowds shouted "We want the King!" in front of Buckingham Palace during the Victory in Europe Day celebrations. In an echo of Chamberlain's appearance, the King invited Churchill to appear with the royal family on the balcony to public acclaim. In January 1946, George addressed the United Nations at its first assembly, which was held in London, and reaffirmed "our faith in the equal rights of men and women and of nations great and small".


title: George VI

text: George VI's reign saw the acceleration of the dissolution of the British Empire. The Statute of Westminster 1931 had already acknowledged the evolution of the Dominions into separate sovereign states. The process of transformation from an empire to a voluntary association of independent states, known as the Commonwealth, gathered pace after the Second World War. During the ministry of Clement Attlee, British India became the two independent Dominions of India and Pakistan in August 1947. George relinquished the title of Emperor of India, and became King of India and King of Pakistan instead. In late April 1949, the Commonwealth leaders issued the London Declaration, which laid the foundation of the modern Commonwealth and recognised the King as Head of the Commonwealth. In January 1950, he ceased to be King of India when it became a republic, and remained King of Pakistan until his death. Other countries left the Commonwealth, such as Burma in January 1948, Palestine (divided between Israel and the Arab states) in May 1948 and the Republic of Ireland in 1949.


title: George VI

text: In 1947, the King and his family toured southern Africa. The prime minister of the Union of South Africa, Jan Smuts, was facing an election and hoped to make political capital out of the visit. George was appalled, however, when instructed by the South African government to shake hands only with whites, and referred to his South African bodyguards as "the Gestapo". Despite the tour, Smuts lost the election the following year, and the new government instituted a strict policy of racial segregation.


title: George VI

text: The stress of the war had taken its toll on the King's health, made worse by his heavy smoking and subsequent development of lung cancer among other ailments, including arteriosclerosis and Buerger's disease. A planned tour of Australia and New Zealand was postponed after the King suffered an arterial blockage in his right leg, which threatened the loss of the leg and was treated with a right lumbar sympathectomy in March 1949. His elder daughter Elizabeth, the heir presumptive, took on more royal duties as her father's health deteriorated. The delayed tour was re-organised, with Elizabeth and her husband, Philip, Duke of Edinburgh, taking the place of the King and Queen.


title: George VI

text: The King was well enough to open the Festival of Britain in May 1951, but on 4 June it was announced that he would need immediate and complete rest for the next four weeks, despite the arrival of Haakon VII of Norway the following afternoon for an official visit. On 23 September 1951, he underwent a surgical operation where his entire left lung was removed by Clement Price Thomas after a malignant tumour was found. In October 1951, Elizabeth and Philip went on a month-long tour of Canada; the trip had been delayed for a week due to the King's illness. At the State Opening of Parliament in November, the King's speech from the throne was read for him by the Lord Chancellor, Lord Simonds. His Christmas broadcast of 1951 was recorded in sections, and then edited together.


title: George VI

text: On 31 January 1952, despite advice from those close to him, the King went to London Airport to see Elizabeth and Philip off on their tour to Australia via Kenya. It was his last public appearance. Six days later, at 07:30 GMT on the morning of 6 February, he was found dead in bed at Sandringham House in Norfolk. He had died in the night from a coronary thrombosis at the age of 56. His daughter flew back to Britain from Kenya as Queen Elizabeth II.


title: George VI

text: From 9 February George VI's coffin rested in St Mary Magdalene Church, Sandringham, before lying in state at Westminster Hall from 11 February. His funeral took place at St George's Chapel, Windsor Castle, on the 15th. He was interred initially in the Royal Vault until he was transferred to the King George VI Memorial Chapel inside St George's on 26 March 1969. In 2002, fifty years after his death, the remains of his widow, Queen Elizabeth The Queen Mother, and the ashes of his younger daughter Princess Margaret, who both died that year, were interred in the chapel alongside him. Twenty years later, in 2022, the remains of his eldest daughter and heir, Queen Elizabeth II, and those of her husband, Prince Philip, were interred in the chapel.


title: George VI

text: In the words of Labour Member of Parliament (MP) George Hardie, the abdication crisis of 1936 did "more for republicanism than fifty years of propaganda". George VI wrote to his brother Edward that in the aftermath of the abdication he had reluctantly assumed "a rocking throne" and tried "to make it steady again". He became king at a point when public faith in the monarchy was at a low ebb. During his reign, his people endured the hardships of war, and imperial power was eroded. However, as a dutiful family man and by showing personal courage, he succeeded in restoring the popularity of the monarchy.


title: George VI

text: The George Cross and the George Medal were founded at the King's suggestion during the Second World War to recognise acts of exceptional civilian bravery. He bestowed the George Cross on the entire "island fortress of Malta" in 1943. He was posthumously awarded the Order of Liberation by the French government in 1960, one of only two people (the other being Churchill in 1958) to be awarded the medal after 1946.


title: George VI

text: Colin Firth won an Academy Award for Best Actor for his performance as George VI in the 2010 film "The King's Speech".


title: George VI

text: As Duke of York, Albert bore the royal arms of the United Kingdom differenced with a label of three points argent, the centre point bearing an anchor azure—a difference earlier awarded to his father, George V, when he was Duke of York, and then later awarded to his grandson Prince Andrew, Duke of York. As king, he bore the royal arms undifferenced.


title: Elizabeth Holmes

text: Elizabeth Anne Holmes (born February 3, 1984) is an American convicted fraudster and former biotechnology entrepreneur. In 2003, Holmes founded and was the chief executive officer (CEO) of Theranos, a now-defunct health technology company that soared in valuation after the company claimed to have revolutionized blood testing by developing methods that could use surprisingly small volumes of blood, such as from a fingerprick. By 2015, "Forbes" had named Holmes the youngest and wealthiest self-made female billionaire in America on the basis of a $9-billion valuation of her company. In the following year, as revelations of potential fraud about Theranos's claims began to surface, "Forbes" revised its estimate of Holmes's net worth to zero, and "Fortune" named her in its feature article on "The World's 19 Most Disappointing Leaders".


title: Elizabeth Holmes

text: The decline of Theranos began in 2015, when a series of journalistic and regulatory investigations revealed doubts about the company's technology claims and whether Holmes had misled investors and the government. In 2018, the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) charged Theranos and Holmes with deceiving investors by "massive fraud" through false or exaggerated claims about the accuracy of the company's blood-testing technology; Holmes settled the charges by paying a $500,000 fine, returning 18.9 million shares to the company, relinquishing her voting control of Theranos, and accepting a ten-year ban from serving as an officer or director of a public company.


title: Elizabeth Holmes

text: In June 2018, a federal grand jury indicted Holmes and former Theranos chief operating officer (COO) Ramesh "Sunny" Balwani on fraud charges. Her trial in the case of "U.S. v. Holmes, et al." ended in January 2022 when Holmes was convicted of defrauding investors, and acquitted of defrauding patients. On November 18, 2022, she was sentenced to serve years (135 months) in prison.


title: Elizabeth Holmes

text: The credibility of Theranos was attributed in part to Holmes's personal connections and ability to recruit the support of influential people, including Henry Kissinger, George Shultz, Jim Mattis, and Betsy DeVos, all of whom had served or would go on to serve as U.S. presidential cabinet officials. Holmes was in a clandestine romantic relationship with Balwani during most of Theranos's history. Following the collapse of Theranos, she started dating hotel heir Billy Evans, with whom she had a son in 2021.


title: Elizabeth Holmes

text: Holmes's career, the rise and dissolution of her company, and the subsequent fallout are the subject of a book, "", by "The Wall Street Journal" reporter John Carreyrou; an HBO documentary feature film, ""; and a Hulu miniseries called "The Dropout".


title: Elizabeth Holmes

text: Elizabeth Holmes was born February 3, 1984, in Washington, D.C. Her father, Christian Rasmus Holmes IV, was a vice president at Enron, an energy company that later went bankrupt after an accounting fraud scandal. Her mother, Noel Anne (née Daoust), worked as a Congressional committee staffer. Christian later held executive positions in government agencies such as USAID, the EPA, and USTDA. Christian is of part Danish ancestry. Her paternal great-great-great-grandfather was Charles Louis Fleischmann, a Hungarian immigrant who founded the Fleischmann's Yeast company. The Holmes family "was very proud of its yeast empire" history, according to a family friend Joseph Fuisz, "I think the parents very much yearned for the days of yore when the family was one of the richest in America. And I think Elizabeth channeled that, and at a young age." Her mother was born in Georgia and has French Canadian ancestry on her father's side.


title: Elizabeth Holmes

text: Holmes attended St. John's School in Houston. During high school, she was interested in computer programming and says she started her first business selling C++ compilers to Chinese universities. Her parents had arranged Mandarin Chinese home tutoring, and partway through high school, Holmes began attending Stanford University's summer Mandarin program. In 2002, Holmes attended Stanford, where she studied chemical engineering and worked as a student researcher and laboratory assistant in the School of Engineering.


title: Elizabeth Holmes

text: After the end of her freshman year, Holmes worked in a laboratory at the Genome Institute of Singapore and tested for severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus (SARS-CoV-1) through the collection of blood samples with syringes. She filed her first patent application on a wearable drug-delivery patch in 2003. In March 2004, she dropped out of Stanford's School of Engineering and used her tuition money as seed funding for a consumer healthcare technology company.


title: Elizabeth Holmes

text: In 2003, Holmes founded the company Real-Time Cures in Palo Alto, California, to "democratize healthcare". Holmes described her fear of needles as a motivation and sought to perform blood tests using only small amounts of blood. When Holmes pitched the idea to reap "vast amounts of data from a few droplets of blood derived from the tip of a finger" to her medicine professor Phyllis Gardner at Stanford, Gardner responded, "I don't think your idea is going to work", explaining it was impossible to do what Holmes was claiming could be done. Several other expert medical professors told Holmes the same thing. However, Holmes did not relent, and she succeeded in getting her advisor and dean at the School of Engineering, Channing Robertson, to back her idea.


title: Elizabeth Holmes

text: In 2003, Holmes renamed the company Theranos (a portmanteau of "therapy" and "diagnosis"). Robertson became the company's first board member and introduced Holmes to venture capitalists.


title: Elizabeth Holmes

text: Holmes was an admirer of Apple founder Steve Jobs, and deliberately copied his style, frequently dressing in a black turtleneck sweater, as Jobs did. Holmes says her mother dressed her in black turtlenecks when she was young, but an employee says she suggested copying Jobs's famous Issey Miyake turtleneck look in 2007.


title: Elizabeth Holmes

text: During most of her public appearances, she spoke in a deep baritone voice, although a former Theranos colleague later claimed he heard her speak in a voice stereotypical of a woman her age to welcome him when he was hired. Gardner of Stanford also denies that Holmes has a naturally deep voice. Her family, however, has maintained that her deep voice is authentic.


title: Elizabeth Holmes

text: By December 2004, Holmes had raised $6 million to fund the firm. By the end of 2010, Theranos had more than $92 million in venture capital. In July 2011, Holmes was introduced to former secretary of state George Shultz. After a two-hour meeting, he joined the Theranos board of directors. Holmes was recognized for forming "the most illustrious board in U.S. corporate history" over the next three years.


title: Elizabeth Holmes

text: Holmes operated Theranos in "stealth mode" without press releases or a company website until September 2013, when the company announced a partnership with Walgreens to launch in-store blood sample collection centers. She was interviewed for Medscape by its editor-in-chief, Eric Topol, who praised her for "this phenomenal rebooting of laboratory medicine". Media attention increased in 2014, when Holmes appeared on the covers of "Fortune", "Forbes", "", and "Inc." "Forbes" recognized Holmes as the world's youngest self-made female billionaire and ranked her #110 on the Forbes 400 in 2014. Theranos was valued at $9 billion and had raised more than $400 million in venture capital. By the end of 2014, her name appeared on 18 U.S. patents and 66 foreign patents. During 2015, Holmes established agreements with Cleveland Clinic, Capital BlueCross, and AmeriHealth Caritas to use Theranos technology.


title: Elizabeth Holmes

text: John Carreyrou of "The Wall Street Journal" initiated a secret, months-long investigation of Theranos after he received a tip from a medical expert who thought that Theranos's Edison blood testing device seemed suspicious. Carreyrou spoke to ex-employee whistleblowers and obtained company documents. When Holmes learned of the investigation, she initiated a campaign through her lawyer David Boies to stop Carreyrou from publishing, which included legal and financial threats against both the "Journal" and the whistleblowers.


title: Elizabeth Holmes

text: In October 2015, despite Boies's legal threats and strong-arm tactics, the "Journal" published Carreyrou's "bombshell article" detailing how the Edison device gave inaccurate results, and revealing that the company had been using commercially available machines manufactured by other companies for most of its testing. Carreyrou continued to report problems with the company and Holmes's conduct in a series of articles and, in 2018, published a book titled "", detailing his investigation of Theranos.


title: Elizabeth Holmes

text: Holmes denied all the claims, calling the "Journal" a "tabloid" and promising the company would publish data on the accuracy of its tests. She appeared on CNBC's "Mad Money" the same evening the article was published. Jim Cramer said, "The article was pretty brutal", to which Holmes responded, "This is what happens when you work to change things, first they think you're crazy, then they fight you, and then all of a sudden you change the world."


title: Elizabeth Holmes

text: In January 2016, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) sent a warning letter to Theranos after an inspection of its Newark, California, laboratory uncovered irregularities with staff proficiency, procedures, and equipment. CMS regulators proposed a two-year ban on Holmes from owning or operating a certified clinical laboratory after the company had not fixed problems in its California lab in March 2016. On "The Today Show", Holmes said she was "devastated we did not catch and fix these issues faster" and said the lab would be rebuilt with help from a new scientific and medical advisory board.


title: Elizabeth Holmes

text: In July 2016, CMS banned Holmes from owning, operating, or directing a blood-testing service for a period of two years. Theranos appealed that decision to a U.S. Department of Health and Human Services appeals board. Shortly thereafter, Walgreens ended its relationship with Theranos and closed its in-store blood collection centers. The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) also ordered the company to cease use of its Capillary Tube Nanotainer device, one of its core inventions.


title: Elizabeth Holmes

text: In 2017, the State of Arizona filed suit against Theranos, alleging that the company had sold 1.5 million blood tests to Arizonans while concealing or misrepresenting important facts about those tests. In April 2017, the company settled the lawsuit by agreeing to refund the cost of the tests to consumers, and to pay $225,000 in civil fines and attorney fees, for a total of $4.65 million. Other reported ongoing actions include an unspecified investigation by the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and two class action fraud lawsuits. Holmes denied any wrongdoing.


title: Elizabeth Holmes

text: On May 16, 2017, approximately 99 percent of Theranos shareholders reached an agreement with the company to dismiss all current and potential litigation in exchange for shares of preferred stock. Holmes released a portion of her equity to offset any dilution of stock value to non-participating shareholders.


title: Elizabeth Holmes

text: In March 2018, the SEC charged Holmes and Theranos's former president, Ramesh Balwani, with fraud by taking more than $700 million from investors while advertising a false product. On March 14, 2018, Holmes settled an SEC lawsuit. The charges of fraud included the company's false claim that its technology was being used by the U.S. Department of Defense in combat situations. The company also lied when it claimed to have a $100 million revenue stream in 2014. That year, the company only made $100,000. The terms of Holmes's settlement included surrendering voting control of Theranos, returning 18.9 million shares to the company, a ban on holding an officer or director position in a public company for 10 years, and a $500,000 fine.


title: Elizabeth Holmes

text: At its height in 2015, Theranos had more than 800 employees. It dismissed 340 people in October 2016 and an additional 155 in January 2017. In April 2018, Theranos filed a WARN Act notice with the State of California, announcing its plans to permanently lay off 105 employees, leaving it with fewer than two dozen employees. Most of the remaining employees were laid off in August 2018. On September 5, 2018, the company announced that it had begun the process of formally dissolving, with its remaining cash and assets to be distributed to its creditors.


title: Elizabeth Holmes

text: On June 15, 2018, following an investigation by the U.S. Attorney's Office for the Northern District of California in San Francisco that lasted more than two years, a federal grand jury indicted Holmes and former Theranos chief operating officer and president, Ramesh "Sunny" Balwani, on nine counts of wire fraud and two counts of conspiracy to commit wire fraud. Both pleaded not guilty. Prosecutors allege that Holmes and Balwani engaged in two criminal schemes, one to defraud investors, the other to defraud doctors and patients. After the indictment was issued, Holmes stepped down as CEO of Theranos but remained chair of the board.


title: Elizabeth Holmes

text: Holmes was tried in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California, with U.S. district judge Edward Davila presiding. Holmes retained defense lawyers from Williams & Connolly, a prominent American law firm that specializes in white-collar crime defense. The trial began on August 31, 2021, after being delayed for over a year due to the COVID-19 pandemic and Holmes's pregnancy. The case was prosecuted by the United States Attorney for the Northern District of California. Holmes testified in self-defense for seven days, claiming among other things that she was misled by her staff about the technology, and that her ex-romantic partner Sunny Balwani, who was also facing trial, held influence over her during the romantic relationship they had and which was still ongoing when the alleged criminal acts happened. The case's evidence outlined Holmes's role in faked demonstrations, falsified validation reports, misleading claims about contracts, and overstated financials at Theranos.


title: Elizabeth Holmes

text: On January 3, 2022, Holmes was found guilty on four counts of defrauding investors three counts of wire fraud, and one of conspiracy to commit wire fraud. She was found not guilty on four counts of defrauding patients three counts of wire fraud and one of conspiracy to commit wire fraud. The jury returned a "no verdict" on three counts of wire fraud against investors the judge declared a mistrial on those counts and the government soon after agreed to dismiss them. Holmes waited on sentencing while remaining 'at liberty' on $500,000 bail, secured with property. She faced a maximum sentence of 20 years in prison, and a fine of $250,000, plus restitution, for each count of wire fraud and for each conspiracy count.


title: Elizabeth Holmes

text: On November 18, 2022, U.S. District Judge Edward Davila sentenced Holmes to years (135 months) in prison, and ordered her to surrender by April 27, 2023. The sentence included a fine of $400, or $100 for each count of fraud, and a three-year supervised release after the prison term. She could get about a 15% reduction on prison time with good behavior, which would put her sentence at years with no possibility for parole. Davila recommended she be incarcerated at Federal Prison Camp, Bryan, in Texas, a minimum security facility with limited or no perimeter fencing. "No one wants to get kicked out because compared to other places in the prison system, this place is heaven. If you have to go it's a good place to go," said a criminal defense lawyer.


title: Elizabeth Holmes

text: Holmes partnered with Carlos Slim in June 2015 to improve blood testing in Mexico. In October 2015, she announced #IronSisters to help women in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics careers. In 2015, she helped to draft and pass a law in Arizona to let people obtain and pay for lab tests without requiring insurance or healthcare provider approval, while misrepresenting the accuracy and effectiveness of the Theranos device.


title: Elizabeth Holmes

text: Theranos's board and investors included many influential figures. Holmes's first major investor was Tim Draper – Silicon Valley venture capitalist and father of Holmes's childhood friend Jesse Draper – who "cut Holmes a check" for $1 million upon hearing her initial pitch for the firm that would become Theranos. Theranos's pool of major investors expanded to include Rupert Murdoch, the Walton family, the DeVos family including Betsy DeVos, the Cox family of Cox Enterprises and Carlos Slim Helú. Each of these investors lost tens to hundreds of millions of dollars when Theranos folded.


title: Elizabeth Holmes

text: One of Holmes's first board members was George Shultz. With Shultz's early involvement aiding Holmes's recruitment efforts, the 12-member Theranos board eventually included: Henry Kissinger, a former secretary of state; William Perry, a former secretary of defense; James Mattis, a future secretary of defense; Gary Roughead, a retired U.S. Navy admiral; Bill Frist, a former U.S. senator (R-TN); Sam Nunn, a former U.S. senator (D-GA); and former CEOs Dick Kovacevich of Wells Fargo and Riley Bechtel of Bechtel.


title: Elizabeth Holmes

text: Before the collapse of Theranos, Holmes received widespread acclaim. In 2015, she was appointed a member of the Harvard Medical School Board of Fellows and was named one of "Time" magazine's ""Time" 100 most influential people". Holmes received the Under 30 Doers Award from "Forbes" and was ranked number 73 in its 2015 list of "the world's most powerful women". She was also named Woman of the Year by "Glamour" and received an Honorary Doctor of Humane Letters from Pepperdine University. Holmes was awarded the 2015 Horatio Alger Award of the Horatio Alger Association of Distinguished Americans, making her its youngest recipient in history. She previously had been named "Fortune"s Businessperson of the Year and had been listed in its 40 Under 40 feature. In 2015 she was a member of "Bloomberg's" 50 Most Influential.


title: Elizabeth Holmes

text: Holmes was romantically involved with technology entrepreneur Ramesh "Sunny" Balwani, a Pakistani-born Hindu who immigrated to India and then the US. She met him in 2002 during a trip to Beijing as part of Stanford University's Mandarin program. Holmes was 18 at the time, and had just graduated from high school; Balwani was 19 years older than she was and was married to another woman at the time.


title: Elizabeth Holmes

text: Balwani divorced his wife in 2002 and became romantically involved with Holmes in 2003, about the same time Holmes dropped out of university. The couple moved into an apartment together in 2005. Although Balwani did not officially join Theranos until 2009, when he was given the title of chief operating officer, he was advising Holmes behind the scenes from the company's inception. Holmes and Balwani jointly ran the company with a corporate culture of "secrecy and fear" according to employees. Their romantic relationship was kept secret for much of their time running the company. Balwani left Theranos in 2016 in the wake of investigations. The circumstances of his departure are unclear; Holmes has stated that she fired him, but Balwani says that he left of his own accord.


title: Elizabeth Holmes

text: On November 29, 2021, Holmes testified that she had been raped while she was a student at Stanford and that she sought solace from Balwani in the aftermath of the incident. She also said Balwani was very controlling during their romantic relationship, which lasted more than a decade, and at times he berated and sexually abused her. In her testimony, she stated he also wanted to "kill the person" she was and create a "new Elizabeth". However, she also testified that Balwani had not forced her to make the false statements to investors, business partners, journalists and company directors that had been described in the case. In court filings, Balwani has "categorically" denied abuse allegations, calling them "false and inflammatory."


title: Elizabeth Holmes

text: Before the March 2018 settlement, Holmes owned half of Theranos's stock. "Forbes" listed her as one of America's Richest Self-Made Women in 2015 with a net worth of $4.5 billion. In June 2016, "Forbes" released an updated valuation of $800 million for Theranos, which made Holmes's stake essentially worthless, because other investors owned preferred shares and would have been paid before Holmes, who owned only common stock. Holmes reportedly owed a $25 million debt to Theranos in connection with exercising stock options. She did not receive any company cash from the arrangement, nor did she sell any of her shares, including those associated with the debt.


title: Elizabeth Holmes

text: In early 2019, Holmes became engaged to William "Billy" Evans, a 27-year-old heir to Evans Hotels, a family-owned group of hotels in the San Diego area. In mid-2019, Holmes and Evans reportedly married in a private ceremony. Holmes and Evans have not directly confirmed whether the two are legally married, and several sources continue to refer to him as her "partner" rather than her husband. The couple live in San Francisco. Holmes gave birth to a son in July 2021. In October 2022, weeks before her sentencing hearing, it was reported she was pregnant again.


title: Elizabeth Holmes

text: In January 2022, NPR obtained a copy of a partial police report from the evening of October 5, 2003, in which Holmes called the police and alleged she was sexually assaulted at a fraternity house at Stanford between 1 a.m. and 3 a.m. that morning. The police report supported claims made by Holmes during the trial, in which she said: "I was questioning how I was going to be able to process that [rape] experience and what I wanted to do with my life, and I decided that I was going to build a life by building [a company]." She had started Theranos later that year. The report written by the deputies who responded to the call was withheld from release, and the partial information obtained by NPR does not identify an alleged perpetrator or other details about the incident, but identifies the street address of the Sigma Chi fraternity house as the location.


title: Elizabeth Holmes

text: The case of Holmes is said to have created a stigma for other women entrepreneurs, particularly in the sciences and health care industries, who are often compared to her. Writing in "The New York Times", technology journalist Erin Griffith commented that "Holmes continues to loom large across the start-up world because of the audacity of her story, which has permeated popular culture," with women entrepreneurs reporting that "the frequent comparisons [to Holmes] are pernicious". Investor and executive Ellen Pao wrote in a "New York Times" opinion piece that Holmes was targeted for prosecution because of "sexism", and that her trial was a "wake-up call for sexism in tech."


title: Twitter

text: Twitter is an online social media and social networking service owned and operated by American company Twitter, Inc., on which users post and interact with 280-character-long messages known as "tweets". Registered users can post, like, and 'retweet' tweets, while unregistered users only have the ability to read public tweets. Users interact with Twitter through browser or mobile frontend software, or programmatically via its APIs.


title: Twitter

text: Twitter was created by Jack Dorsey, Noah Glass, Biz Stone, and Evan Williams in March 2006 and launched in July of that year. Twitter, Inc. is based in San Francisco, California and has more than 25 offices around the world. , more than 100 million users posted 340 million tweets a day, and the service handled an average of 1.6 billion search queries per day. In 2013, it was one of the ten most-visited websites and has been described as "the SMS of the Internet". , Twitter had more than 330 million monthly active users. In practice, the vast majority of tweets are written by a minority of users. In 2020, it was estimated that approximately 48 million accounts (15% of all accounts) were fake.


title: Twitter

text: On October 27, 2022, business magnate Elon Musk acquired Twitter, Inc. for US$44 billion, gaining control of the platform.


title: Twitter

text: Twitter's origins lie in a "daylong brainstorming session" held by board members of the podcasting company Odeo. Jack Dorsey, then an undergraduate student at New York University, introduced the idea of an individual using an SMS service to communicate with a small group. The original project code name for the service was "twttr", an idea that Williams later ascribed to Noah Glass, inspired by Flickr and the five-character length of American SMS short codes. The decision was also partly due to the fact that the domain twitter.com was already in use, and it was six months after the launch of twttr that the crew purchased the domain and changed the name of the service to "Twitter". The developers initially considered "10958" as the service's short code for SMS text messaging, but later changed it to "40404" for "ease of use and memorability". Work on the project started on March 21, 2006, when Dorsey published the first Twitter message at 12:50 p.m. PST (): "just setting up my twttr". Dorsey has explained the origin of the "Twitter" title:


title: Twitter

text: ...we came across the word "twitter", and it was just perfect. The definition was "a short burst of inconsequential information", and "chirps from birds". And that's exactly what the product was.


title: Twitter

text: The first Twitter prototype, developed by Dorsey and contractor Florian Weber, was used as an internal service for Odeo employees. The full version was introduced publicly on July 15, 2006. In October 2006, Biz Stone, Evan Williams, Dorsey, and other members of Odeo formed Obvious Corporation and acquired Odeo, together with its assets—including Odeo.com and Twitter.com—from the investors and shareholders. Williams fired Glass, who was silent about his part in Twitter's startup until 2011. Twitter spun off into its own company in April 2007. Williams provided insight into the ambiguity that defined this early period in a 2013 interview:


title: Twitter

text: With Twitter, it wasn't clear what it was. They called it a social network, they called it microblogging, but it was hard to define, because it didn't replace anything. There was this path of discovery with something like that, where over time you figure out what it is. Twitter actually changed from what we thought it was in the beginning, which we described as status updates and a social utility. It is that, in part, but the insight we eventually came to was Twitter was really more of an information network than it is a social network.


title: Twitter

text: The tipping point for Twitter's popularity was the 2007 South by Southwest Interactive (SXSWi) conference. During the event, Twitter usage increased from 20,000 tweets per day to 60,000. "The Twitter people cleverly placed two 60-inch plasma screens in the conference hallways, exclusively streaming Twitter messages," remarked "Newsweek"s Steven Levy. "Hundreds of conference-goers kept tabs on each other via constant twitters. Panelists and speakers mentioned the service, and the bloggers in attendance touted it." Reaction at the conference was highly positive. Twitter staff received the festival's Web Award prize with the remark "we'd like to thank you in 140 characters or less. And we just did!"


title: Twitter

text: The company experienced rapid initial growth. It had 400,000 tweets posted per quarter in 2007. This grew to tweets posted per quarter in 2008. In February 2010, Twitter users were sending tweets per day. In 2009, Twitter won the "Breakout of the Year" Webby Award. On November 29, 2009, Twitter was named the Word of the Year by the Global Language Monitor, declaring it "a new form of social interaction". By March 2010, the company recorded over 70,000 registered applications. As of June 2010, about tweets were posted each day, equaling about 750 tweets sent each second, according to Twitter. As of March 2011, that was about tweets posted daily. As noted on Compete.com, Twitter moved up to the third-highest-ranking social networking site in January 2009 from its previous rank of twenty-second.


title: Twitter

text: Twitter's usage spikes during prominent events. For example, a record was set during the 2010 FIFA World Cup when fans wrote 2,940 tweets per second in the thirty-second period after Japan scored against Cameroon on June 14, 2010. The record was broken again when 3,085 tweets per second were posted after the Los Angeles Lakers' victory in the 2010 NBA Finals on June 17, 2010, and then again at the close of Japan's victory over Denmark in the World Cup when users published 3,283 tweets per second. The record was set again during the 2011 FIFA Women's World Cup Final between Japan and the United States, when 7,196 tweets per second were published. When American singer Michael Jackson died on June 25, 2009, Twitter servers crashed after users were updating their status to include the words "Michael Jackson" at a rate of 100,000 tweets per hour. The current record as of August 3, 2013, was set in Japan, with 143,199 tweets per second during a television screening of the movie "Castle in the Sky" (beating the previous record of 33,388, also set by Japan for the television screening of the same movie).


title: Twitter

text: The first unassisted off-Earth Twitter message was posted from the International Space Station by NASA astronaut T. J. Creamer on January 22, 2010. By late November 2010, an average of a dozen updates per day were posted on the astronauts' communal account, @NASA_Astronauts. NASA has also hosted over 25 "tweetups", events that provide guests with VIP access to NASA facilities and speakers with the goal of leveraging participants' social networks to further the outreach goals of NASA.


title: Twitter

text: Twitter acquired application developer Atebits on April 11, 2010. Atebits had developed the Apple Design Award-winning Twitter client Tweetie for the Mac and iPhone. The application, became the official Twitter client for the iPhone, iPad and Mac.


title: Twitter

text: From September through October 2010, the company began rolling out "New Twitter", an entirely revamped edition of twitter.com. Changes included the ability to see pictures and videos without leaving Twitter itself by clicking on individual tweets which contain links to images and clips from a variety of supported websites, including YouTube and Flickr, and a complete overhaul of the interface, which shifted links such as '@mentions' and 'Retweets' above the Twitter stream, while 'Messages' and 'Log Out' became accessible via a black bar at the very top of twitter.com. As of November 1, 2010, the company confirmed that the "New Twitter experience" had been rolled out to all users. In 2019, Twitter was announced to be the 10th most downloaded mobile app of the decade, from 2010 to 2019.


title: Twitter

text: On April 5, 2011, Twitter tested a new homepage and phased out the "Old Twitter". However, a glitch came about after the page was launched, so the previous "retro" homepage was still in use until the issues were resolved; the new homepage was reintroduced on April 20. On December 8, 2011, Twitter overhauled its website once more to feature the "Fly" design, which the service says is easier for new users to follow and promotes advertising. In addition to the "Home" tab, the "Connect" and "Discover" tabs were introduced along with a redesigned profile and timeline of Tweets. The site's layout has been compared to that of Facebook. On February 21, 2012, it was announced that Twitter and Yandex agreed to a partnership. Yandex, a Russian search engine, finds value within the partnership due to Twitter's real time news feeds. Twitter's director of business development explained that it is important to have Twitter content where Twitter users go. On March 21, 2012, Twitter celebrated its sixth birthday by announcing that it had 140 million users, a 40% rise from September 2011, who were sending 340 million tweets per day.


title: Twitter

text: On June 5, 2012, a modified logo was unveiled through the company blog, removing the text to showcase the slightly redesigned bird as the sole symbol of Twitter. On December 18, 2012, Twitter announced it had surpassed 200 million monthly active users.


title: Twitter

text: On January 28, 2013, Twitter acquired Crashlytics in order to build out its mobile developer products. On April 18, 2013, Twitter launched a music app called Twitter Music for the iPhone. On August 28, 2013, Twitter acquired Trendrr, followed by the acquisition of MoPub on September 9, 2013. As of September 2013, the company's data showed that 200 million users sent over 400 million tweets daily, with nearly 60% of tweets sent from mobile devices.


title: Twitter

text: During Super Bowl XLVII on February 3, 2013, when the power went out in the Mercedes-Benz Superdome Mondelez International, vice president Lisa Mann was asked to tweet, "You can still dunk in the dark", referring to Oreo cookies. She approved, and as she told "Ad Age" in 2020, "literally the world [had] changed when I woke up the next morning." This became a milestone in the development of commenting daily on culture.


title: Twitter

text: In April 2014, Twitter underwent a redesign that made the site resemble Facebook somewhat, with profile picture and biography in a column left to the timeline, and a full-width header image with parallax scrolling effect. That layout was used as main for the desktop front end until July 2019, undergoing changes over time such as removal of shortcut buttons to jump to the previous or next tweet in early 2017, and rounded profile pictures since June 2017.


title: Twitter

text: In April 2015, the Twitter.com desktop homepage changed. Later in the year it became apparent that growth had slowed, according to Fortune, Business Insider, Marketing Land and other news websites including Quartz (in 2016).


title: Twitter

text: Since May 2018, tweet replies deemed by an algorithm to be detractive from conversation are initially hidden, and only loaded through actuating a "Show more replies" element at the bottom.


title: Twitter

text: In 2019, Twitter released another redesign of its user interface and ended support for TLS 1.0 and 1.1 connections.


title: Twitter

text: Twitter experienced considerable growth during the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020. The platform also was increasingly used for misinformation related to the pandemic. Twitter started marking tweets which contained misleading information, and adding links to fact-checks. In May 2020, Twitter moderators marked two tweets from U.S. President Donald Trump as "potentially misleading" and linked to a fact-check. Trump responded by signing an executive order to weaken Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, which limits social media sites' liability for content moderation decisions. Twitter later banned Trump, claiming that he violated "the glorification of violence policy". The ban was criticized by conservatives and some European leaders, who saw it as an interference on freedom of speech.


title: Twitter

text: On June 5, 2021, the Nigerian government issued an indefinite ban on Twitter usage in the country, citing "misinformation and fake news spread through it have had real world violent consequences", after the platform removed tweets made by the Nigerian President Muhammadu Buhari. Nigeria's ban was criticized by Amnesty International.


title: Twitter

text: In 2021, Twitter began the research phase of Bluesky"," an open source decentralized social media protocol where users can choose which algorithmic curation they want. The same year, Twitter also released Twitter Spaces, a social audio feature; "super follows", a way to subscribe to creators for exclusive content; and a beta of "ticketed Spaces", which makes access to certain audio rooms paid. Twitter unveiled a redesign in August 2021, with adjusted colors and a new Chirp font, which improves the left-alignment of most Western languages.


title: Twitter

text: In June 2022, Twitter announced a partnership with e-commerce giant Shopify, and its plans to launch a sales channel app for U.S. Shopify merchants.


title: Twitter

text: Business magnate Elon Musk began speaking of buying Twitter, Inc. in early 2022, stating his concerns with the company's commitment to free speech and whether Twitter's moderation policies were undermining democracy. Musk reportedly planned major changes to Twitter's treatment of spambots, a more lenient content moderation policy, revamp of its offered services, and cost cuts. In the long-run, Musk expressed an intention to turn Twitter into an "everything app" like WeChat.


title: Twitter

text: Initially, Musk sought a position on the Twitter, Inc. Board of Directors by buying shares of the company, but the Board created a "poison pill" to prevent Musk from gaining sufficient shares. Subsequently, Musk made an unsolicited offer to buy Twitter, Inc. for $43 billion on April 14, 2022. This process went through a number of business and legal confrontations, but ultimately, Musk completed the acquisition on October 27, 2022, for $44 billion. Musk immediately fired the top three Twitter executives. About a week later, he began laying off about half of the company's approximately 7,500 employees.


title: Twitter

text: A week after the takeover, Musk revamped Twitter Blue, increasing its price to $8 per month and adding new features, including the "blue checkmark" verification that had previously been reserved for high-profile confirmed users. This plan was criticized by several outlets, fearing that the potential for misinformation would increase since anyone could pay to appear to be verified through Twitter Blue. Musk opted to delay the changes to blue checkmarks until after the 2022 midterm elections in the U.S. over these concerns, and stated that accounts that were faking identities, outside of parody accounts, would be terminated. Following the takeover, various brands and companies paused advertising on the platform.


title: Twitter

text: Musk undid the prior ban on Donald Trump on November 19, 2022, following a poll Musk posted in favor of lifting the ban. Musk also unbanned other notable accounts that had been banned for misinformation previously, including The Babylon Bee and Jordan Peterson. Musk also unbanned Kanye West, but a few weeks later re-instituted his ban after he posted a series of tweets that Musk said were incitement to violence, including one that posted a swastika within the Jewish star.


title: Twitter

text: During December 2022, Musk provided internal documentation to a number of independent journalists and writers which were then publicly disseminated through a series of posts known as the "Twitter Files". The files describe internal discussion as related to Twitter's moderation steps in events such as the breaking of the Hunter Biden laptop story, shadow banning of some conservative commentators' accounts, and the decision to block Trump. While some on the right saw the documents as evidence of Twitter's liberal bias and hostility to free speech, many people on the left described them as a reflection of how difficult it is for social media platforms to make tough decisions about content moderation.


title: Twitter

text: The Twitter accounts of a number of journalists were permanently suspended on December 15, 2022. These journalists, including Mashable's Matt Binder, Aaron Rupar, "The New York Times"' Ryan Mac, and CNN's Donie O'Sullivan, have covered Twitter and recently wrote articles about Musk's takeover. Several of the reporters had recently tweeted about the controversy over Musk's banning of ElonJet and other accounts which track private jets. In response, Twitter Head of Trust and Safety Ella Irwin told The Verge "we will suspend any accounts that violate our privacy policies and put other users at risk." Binder denied violating any of Twitter's policies, saying "I did not share any location data, as per Twitter’s new terms. Nor did I share any links to ElonJet or other location tracking accounts." CNN journalist Oliver Darcy wrote that the bannings "called into serious question Musk’s supposed commitment to free speech." A group of the suspended users created a Space where they discussed the actions (a function they were still able to use); after Musk joined the space and continued to criticize the ElonJet account, Spaces was abruptly disabled site-wide, with employees citing a "legacy bug".


title: Twitter

text: The "Washington Post" said in a statement that suspending reporter Drew Harwell “undermines Elon Musk’s claim that he intends to run Twitter as a platform dedicated to free speech”. European Union commissioner Vera Jourova stated that the EU Digital Services Act insists on media freedom. Jourova stated "Elon Musk should be aware of that. There are red lines. And sanctions, soon." On 17 December 2022 in a u-turn several banned journalists' accounts were reinstated. Twitter also apeared to block links to Mastodon as malware or potentially harmful.


title: Twitter

text: On December 18, 2022 Twitter announced that it was banning users linking to what were referred to as "prohibited platforms" including Facebook, Mastodon, Instagram and Truth Social, as well as third party link aggregators such as Linktree. Six hours after his announcement Musk tweeted "Going forward, there will be a vote for major policy changes. My apologies. Won't happen again" although it is unclear if the earlier policy will be reversed. He also tweeted a poll asking users if he should remain as head of Twitter promising to abide by its results, in which 57.5% of the 17.5m votes were in favour of him stepping down.


title: Twitter

text: On August 23, 2022, the contents of a whistleblower complaint by former information security head Peiter Zatko to the United States Congress were published. Zatko had been fired by Twitter in January 2022. The complaint alleges that Twitter failed to disclose several data breaches, had negligent security measures, violated United States securities regulations, and broke the terms of a previous settlement with the Federal Trade Commission over the safeguarding of user data. The report also claims that the Indian government forced Twitter to hire one of its agents to gain direct access to user data.


title: Twitter

text: Tweets are publicly visible by default, but senders can restrict message delivery to only their followers. Users can mute users they do not wish to interact with, block accounts from viewing their tweets, and remove accounts from their followers list. Users can tweet via the Twitter website, compatible external applications (such as for smartphones), or by Short Message Service (SMS) available in certain countries. Users may subscribe to other users' tweets—this is known as "following" and subscribers are known as "followers" or "tweeps", a portmanteau of Twitter and peeps. Individual tweets can be forwarded by other users to their own feed, a process known as a "retweet". In 2015, Twitter launched "quote tweet" (originally called "retweet with comment"), a feature that allows users to add a comment to their retweet, nesting one tweet in the other. Users can also "like" (formerly "favorite") individual tweets.


title: Twitter

text: The counters for "likes", "retweets", and replies appear next to the respective buttons in timelines such as on profile pages and search results. Counters for likes and retweets exist on a tweet's standalone page too. Since September 2020, quote tweets, formerly known as "retweet with comment", have their own counter on their tweet page. Until the legacy desktop front end that was discontinued in 2020, a row with miniature profile pictures of up to ten liking or retweeting users was displayed (earliest documented implementation in December 2011 overhaul), as well as a tweet reply counter next to the according button on a tweet's page.


title: Twitter

text: Twitter allows users to update their profile via their mobile phone either by text messaging or by apps released for certain smartphones and tablets. Twitter has been compared to a web-based Internet Relay Chat (IRC) client. In a 2009 "Time" magazine essay, technology author Steven Johnson described the basic mechanics of Twitter as "remarkably simple":


title: Twitter

text: Twitter announced in a tweet on September 1, 2022, that the ability to edit a tweet was being tested for a few users. The company said the feature was being tested first to determine whether it could be abused. Editing would be allowed for 30 minutes, and previous versions of an edited post would be available. Eventually, all Twitter Blue subscribers would be able to use the feature.


title: Twitter

text: Users can group posts together by topic or type by use of hashtags – words or phrases prefixed with a "codice_1" sign. Similarly, the "codice_2" sign followed by a username is used for mentioning or replying to other users.


title: Twitter

text: In 2014, in anticipation for the FIFA World Cup, Twitter introduced hashflags, special hashtags that automatically generate a custom emoji next to them for a certain period of time, following the success of a similar campaign during the 2010 World Cup. Hashflags may be generated by Twitter themselves (such as to raise awareness for social issues) or be purchased by corporations (such as to promote products and events).


title: Twitter

text: To repost a message from another Twitter user and share it with one's own followers, a user can click the retweet button within the Tweet. Users can reply to other accounts' replies. Since November 2019, users can hide replies to their messages. Since May 2020, users can select who can reply to each of their tweets before sending them: anyone, accounts who follow the poster, specific accounts, and none. This ability was upgraded in July 2021 to make the feature retroactively applicable to tweets after they have been sent out.


title: Twitter

text: Through SMS, users can communicate with Twitter through five gateway numbers: short codes for the United States, Canada, India, New Zealand, and an Isle of Man-based number for international use. There is also a short code in the United Kingdom which is only accessible to those on the Vodafone, O2 and Orange networks. In India, since Twitter only supports tweets from Bharti Airtel, an alternative platform called smsTweet was set up by a user to work on all networks. A similar platform called GladlyCast exists for mobile phone users in Singapore and Malaysia.


title: Twitter

text: The tweets were set to a largely constrictive 140-character limit for compatibility with SMS messaging, introducing the shorthand notation and slang commonly used in SMS messages. The 140-character limit also increased the usage of URL shortening services such as bit.ly, goo.gl, tinyurl.com, tr.im, and other content-hosting services such as TwitPic, memozu.com and NotePub to accommodate multimedia content and text longer than 140 characters. Since June 2011, Twitter has used its own t.co domain for automatic shortening of all URLs posted on its site, making other link shorteners unnecessary for staying within Twitter's 140 character limit.


title: Twitter

text: In April 2020, Twitter discontinued the ability to receive SMS messages containing the text of new tweets in most countries.


title: Twitter

text: In 2016, Twitter announced that media such as photos, videos, and the person's handle, would not count against the already constrictive 140 character limit. A user photo post used to count for a large chunk of a Tweet, about 24 characters. Attachments and links would also no longer be part of the character limit.


title: Twitter

text: Since March 30, 2017, the Twitter handles are outside the tweet itself, therefore they no longer count towards the character limit. Only new Twitter handles added to the conversation count towards the limit.


title: Twitter

text: In 2017, Twitter doubled its historical 140-character-limitation to 280. Under the new limit, glyphs are counted as a variable number of characters, depending upon the script they are from: most European letters and punctuation forms count as one character, while each CJK glyph counts as two so that only 140 such glyphs can be used in a tweet.


title: Twitter

text: t.co is a URL shortening service created by Twitter. It is only available for links posted to Twitter and not available for general use. All links posted to Twitter use a t.co wrapper. Twitter hopes that the service will be able to protect users from malicious sites, and will use it to track clicks on links within tweets.


title: Twitter

text: Having used the services of third parties TinyURL and bit.ly, Twitter began experimenting with its own URL shortening service for private messages in March 2010 using the twt.tl domain, before it purchased the t.co domain. On June 7, 2011, Twitter announced that it was rolling out the feature.


title: Twitter

text: On June 1, 2011, Twitter announced its own integrated photo-sharing service that enables users to upload a photo and attach it to a Tweet right from Twitter.com. Users now also have the ability to add pictures to Twitter's search by adding hashtags to the tweet. Twitter also plans to provide photo galleries designed to gather and syndicate all photos that a user has uploaded on Twitter and third-party services such as TwitPic.


title: Twitter

text: On March 29, 2016, Twitter introduced the ability to add a caption of up to 480 characters to each image attached to a tweet, accessible via screen reading software or by hovering the mouse above a picture inside TweetDeck. In April 2022, Twitter made the ability to add and view captions globally available. Descriptions can be added to any uploaded image with a limit of 1000 characters. Images that have a description will feature a badge that says "ALT" in the bottom left corner, which will bring up the description when clicked.


title: Twitter

text: In 2015, Twitter began to roll out the ability to attach poll questions to tweets. Polls are open for up to 7 days, and voters are not personally identified. Initially, polls could have only two options with a maximum of twenty characters per option. Later, the ability to add four options with up to 25 characters per option, was added.


title: Twitter

text: In 2016, Twitter began to place a larger focus on live streaming video programming, hosting various events including streams of the Republican and Democratic conventions during the U.S. presidential campaign as part of a partnership with CBS News, Dreamhack and ESL esports events, and winning a bid for non-exclusive streaming rights to ten NFL "Thursday Night Football" games in the 2016 season.


title: Twitter

text: During an event in New York in May 2017, Twitter announced that it planned to construct a 24-hour streaming video channel hosted within the service, featuring content from various partners. CEO Jack Dorsey stated that the digital video strategy was part of a goal for Twitter to be "the first place that anyone hears of anything going on that matters to them"; as of the first quarter of 2017, Twitter had over 200 content partners, who streamed over 800 hours of video over 450 events.


title: Twitter

text: Twitter announced a number of new and expanded partnerships for its streaming video services at the event, including Bloomberg, BuzzFeed, Cheddar ("Opening Bell" and "Closing Bell" shows; the latter was introduced in October 2016) IMG Fashion (coverage of fashion events), Live Nation Entertainment (streaming concert events), Major League Baseball (weekly online game stream, plus a weekly program with live look-ins and coverage of trending stories), MTV and BET (red carpet coverage for their MTV Video Music Awards, MTV Movie & TV Awards, and BET Awards), NFL Network (the Monday-Thursday news program "NFL Blitz Live", and Sunday "Fantasy Gameday"), the PGA Tour ("PGA Tour Live" coverage of early tournament rounds preceding television coverage), "The Players' Tribune", Ben Silverman and Howard T. Owens' Propagate (daily entertainment show "#WhatsHappening"), "The Verge" (weekly technology show "Circuit Breaker: The Verge's Gadget Show"), Stadium (a new digital sports network being formed by Silver Chalice and Sinclair Broadcast Group) and the WNBA (weekly game).


title: Twitter

text: Twitter Spaces is a social audio feature that enables users to host or participate in a live-audio virtual environment called "space" for conversation. Spaces can accommodate an unlimited number of listeners. A maximum of 13 people (1 host, 2 co-hosts and 10 speakers) are allowed onstage. The feature was initially limited to users with at least 600 followers. Since October 21, 2021, any Twitter user can create a Space from the Android or iOS app.


title: Twitter

text: Spaces was temporarily disabled on December 16, 2022 after it was discovered that suspended users could still participate in them.


title: Twitter

text: In March 2020, Twitter began to test a stories feature known as "fleets" in some markets, which officially launched on November 17, 2020. Similarly to equivalent features, fleets can contain text and media, are only accessible for 24 hours after they are posted, and are accessed within the Twitter app via an area above the timeline.


title: Twitter

text: In June 2021, Twitter announced it would start implementing advertising into fleets, integrating full-screen ads among user-created content. On July 14, 2021, Twitter stated that it would remove Fleets by August 3. Twitter had intended for fleets to encourage more users to tweet regularly, rather than simply consume other folks' tweets, but instead fleets were generally used by users who already tweeted a lot. The company stated that their spot at the top of the screen would now be occupied by currently active Spaces from the user's feed.