title: Vietnam War

text: Ami Pedahzur has written that "the overall volume and lethality of Viet Cong terrorism rivals or exceeds all but a handful of terrorist campaigns waged over the last third of the twentieth century", based on the definition of terrorists as a non-state actor, and examining targeted killings and civilian deaths which are estimated at over 18,000 from 1966 to 1969. The US Department of Defense estimates the VC/PAVN had conducted 36,000 murders and almost 58,000 kidnappings from 1967 to 1972, c. 1973. Benjamin Valentino attributes 45,000–80,000 "terrorist mass killings" to the Viet Cong during the war. Statistics for 1968–1972 suggest that "about 80 percent of the terrorist victims were ordinary civilians and only about 20 percent were government officials, policemen, members of the self-defence forces or pacification cadres." Viet Cong tactics included the frequent mortaring of civilians in refugee camps, and the placing of mines on highways frequented by villagers taking their goods to urban markets. Some mines were set only to go off after heavy vehicle passage, causing extensive slaughter aboard packed civilian buses.


title: Vietnam War

text: Notable Viet Cong atrocities include the massacre of over 3,000 unarmed civilians at Huế during the Tet Offensive and the killing of 252 civilians during the Đắk Sơn massacre. 155,000 refugees fleeing the final North Vietnamese Spring Offensive were reported to have been killed or abducted on the road to Tuy Hòa in 1975. According to Rummel, PAVN and Viet Cong troops killed 164,000 civilians in democide between 1954 and 1975 in South Vietnam, from a range of between 106,000 and 227,000 (50,000 of which were reportedly killed by shelling and mortar on ARVN forces during the retreat to Tuy Hoa). North Vietnam was also known for its abusive treatment of American POWs, most notably in Hỏa Lò Prison (aka the "Hanoi Hilton"), where torture was employed to extract confessions.


title: Vietnam War

text: American women served on active duty performing a variety of jobs. Early in 1963, the Army Nurse Corps (ANC) launched Operation Nightingale, an intensive effort to recruit nurses to serve in Vietnam. First Lieutenant Sharon Lane was the only female military nurse to be killed by enemy gunfire during the war, on 8 June 1969. One civilian doctor, Eleanor Ardel Vietti, who was captured by Viet Cong on 30 May 1962, in Buôn Ma Thuột, remains the only American woman unaccounted for from the Vietnam War.


title: Vietnam War

text: Although a small number of women were assigned to combat zones, they were never allowed directly in the field of battle. Unlike the men, the women who served in the military were solely volunteers. They faced a plethora of challenges, one of which was the relatively small number of female soldiers. Living in a male-dominated environment created tensions between the sexes. By 1973, approximately 7,500 women had served in Vietnam in the Southeast Asian theater. American women serving in Vietnam were subject to societal stereotypes. To address this problem, the ANC released advertisements portraying women in the ANC as "proper, professional and well protected." This effort to highlight the positive aspects of a nursing career reflected the feminism of the 1960s–1970s in the United States. Although female military nurses lived in a heavily male environment, very few cases of sexual harassment were ever reported.


title: Vietnam War

text: Unlike the American women who went to Vietnam, both South and North Vietnamese women were enlisted and served in combat zones. Women were enlisted in both the PAVN and the Viet Cong, many joining due to the promises of female equality and a greater social role within society. Some women also served for the PAVN and Viet Cong intelligence services. The deputy military commander of the Viet Cong, was a female general, Nguyễn Thị Định. All-female units were present throughout the entirety of the war, ranging from front-line combat troops to anti-aircraft, scout and reconnaissance units. Female combat squads were present in the Cu Chi theatre. They also fought in the Battle of Hue. In addition, large numbers of women served in North Vietnam, manning anti-aircraft batteries, providing village security and serving in logistics on the Ho Chi Minh trail. Other women were embedded with troops on the front-lines, serving as doctors and medical personnel. Đặng Thùy Trâm became renowned after her diary was published following her death. The Foreign Minister for the Viet Cong and later the PRG was also a woman, Nguyễn Thị Bình.


title: Vietnam War

text: In South Vietnam, many women voluntarily served in the ARVN's Women's Armed Force Corps (WAFC) and various other Women's corps in the military. Some, like in the WAFC, served in combat with other soldiers. Others served as nurses and doctors in the battlefield and in military hospitals, or served in South Vietnam or America's intelligence agencies. During Diệm's presidency, his sister-in-law Madame Nhu was the commander of the WAFC. Many women joined provincial and voluntary village-level militia in the People's Self-Defense Force especially during the ARVN expansions later in the war.


title: Vietnam War

text: During the war more than one million rural people migrated or fled the fighting in the South Vietnamese countryside to the cities, especially Saigon. Among the internal refugees were many young women who became the ubiquitous "bar girls" of wartime South Vietnam, "hawking her wares—be that cigarettes, liquor, or herself" to American and allied soldiers. American bases were ringed by bars and brothels.


title: Vietnam War

text: 8,040 Vietnamese women came to the United States as war brides between 1964 and 1975. Many mixed-blood Amerasian children were left behind when their American fathers returned to the United States after their tour of duty in South Vietnam; 26,000 of them were permitted to immigrate to the United States in the 1980s and 1990s.


title: Vietnam War

text: Women also played a prominent role as front-line reporters in the conflict, directly reporting on the conflict as it occurred. A number of women volunteered on the North Vietnamese side as embedded journalists, including author Lê Minh Khuê embedded with PAVN forces, on the Ho Chi Minh trail as well as on combat fronts. A number of prominent Western journalists were also involved in covering the war, with Dickey Chapelle being among the first as well as the first American female reporter killed in a war. The French-speaking Australian journalist Kate Webb was captured along with a photographer and others by the Viet Cong in Cambodia and travelled into Laos with them; they were released back into Cambodia after 23 days of captivity. Webb would be the first Western journalist to be captured and released, as well as cover the perspective of the Viet Cong in her memoir "On The Other Side." Another French-speaking journalist, Catherine Leroy, was briefly captured and released by North Vietnamese forces during the Battle of Huế, capturing some famous photos from the battles that would appear on the cover of "Life Magazine".


title: Vietnam War

text: The experience of American military personnel of African ancestry during the Vietnam War had received significant attention. For example, the website "African-American Involvement in the Vietnam War" compiles examples of such coverage, as does the print and broadcast work of journalist Wallace Terry whose book "Bloods: An Oral History of the Vietnam War by Black Veterans" (1984), includes observations about the impact of the war on the black community in general and on black servicemen specifically. Points he makes on the latter topic include: the higher proportion of combat casualties in Vietnam among African American servicemen than among American soldiers of other races, the shift toward and different attitudes of black military volunteers and black conscripts, the discrimination encountered by black servicemen "on the battlefield in decorations, promotion and duty assignments" as well as their having to endure "the racial insults, cross-burnings and Confederate flags of their white comrades"—and the experiences faced by black soldiers stateside, during the war and after America's withdrawal.


title: Vietnam War

text: Civil rights leaders protested the disproportionate casualties and the overrepresentation in hazardous duty and combat roles experienced by African American servicemen, prompting reforms that were implemented beginning in 1967–68. As a result, by the war's completion in 1975, black casualties had declined to 12.5% of US combat deaths, approximately equal to percentage of draft-eligible black men, though still slightly higher than the 10% who served in the military.


title: Vietnam War

text: During the early stages of the war, the Viet Cong mainly sustained itself with captured arms; these were often of American manufacture or were crude, makeshift weapons used alongside shotguns made of galvanized pipes. Most arms were captured from poorly defended ARVN militia outposts. In 1967, all Viet Cong battalions were reequipped with arms of Soviet design such as the AK-47 assault rifle, carbines and the RPG-2 anti-tank weapon. Their weapons were principally of Chinese or Soviet manufacture. In the period up to the conventional phase in 1970, the Viet Cong and PAVN were primarily limited to 81 mm mortars, recoilless rifles, and small arms and had significantly lighter equipment and firepower in comparison with the US arsenal. They relied on ambushes, superior stealth, planning, marksmanship, and small-unit tactics to face the disproportionate US technological advantage.


title: Vietnam War

text: After the Tet Offensive, many PAVN units incorporated light tanks such as the Type 62 Type 59 tank., BTR-60, Type 60 artillery, amphibious tanks (such as the PT-76) and integrated into new war doctrines as a mobile combined-arms force. The PAVN started receiving experimental Soviet weapons against ARVN forces, including MANPADS 9K32 Strela-2 and anti-tank missiles, 9M14 Malyutka. By 1975, they had fully transformed from the strategy of mobile light-infantry and using the people's war concept used against the United States.


title: Vietnam War

text: The US service rifle was initially the M14. The M14 was a powerful, accurate rifle, but it was heavy, hard-recoiling, and especially unwieldy in jungle fighting, as it was unsuited for the combat conditions, often suffering from feed failure. It was gradually replaced by the M16 rifle, designed by Eugene Stoner, between 1964 and 1970. When first deployed, the M16 also suffered from a propensity to jam in combat, leaving the soldier defenseless and potentially killing him. According to a congressional report, the jamming was not related to operator error or to an inherent flaw in the rifle, but instead due to a change in the gunpowder to be used in the rifle's cartridges, which led to rapid powder fouling of the action and failures to extract or feed cartridges. This decision, made after "inadequate testing", proved that "the safety of soldiers was a secondary consideration." The issue was solved in early 1968 with the issuance of the M16A1, featuring a chrome-plated bore, which reduced fouling, and the introduction of a cleaner-burning powder. Incorporating features from the German FG-42 and MG-42, the U.S. replaced their earlier M1919 Browning in most roles with the M60 machine gun, including on helicopters where it was used for suppressive fire. While its issues were not as severe as they were in the M14 or M16, the M60 still could fail to fire at crucial times – spent casings could get stuck inside of the chamber, meaning the barrel would have to be replaced before it could fire again.


title: Vietnam War

text: The AC-130 "Spectre" Gunship and the UH-1 "Huey" gunship were used frequently by the U.S. during the war. The AC-130 was a heavily armed ground-attack aircraft variant of the C-130 Hercules transport plane, while the Huey is a military helicopter powered by a single, turboshaft engine; approximately 7,000 UH-1 aircraft saw service in Vietnam. The U.S. heavily armored, 90 mm M48A3 Patton tank saw extensive action during the Vietnam War, and over 600 were deployed with U.S. Forces. US ground forces also had access to B-52 and F-4 Phantom II and other aircraft to launch napalm, white phosphorus, tear gas, chemical weapons, precision-guided munition and cluster bombs.


title: Vietnam War

text: The Vietnam War was the first conflict where U.S. forces had secure voice communication equipment available at the tactical level. The National Security Agency ran a crash program to provide U.S. forces with a family of security equipment, codenamed NESTOR, fielding 17,000 units initially; eventually 30,000 units were produced. However, limitations of the units, including poor voice quality, reduced range, annoying time delays and logistical support issues, led to only one unit in ten being used. While many in the U.S. military believed that the Viet Cong and PAVN would not be able to exploit insecure communications, interrogation of captured communication intelligence units showed they could understand the jargon and codes used in real time and were often able to warn their side of impending U.S. actions.


title: Vietnam War

text: The U.S. dropped over 7 million tons of bombs on Indochina during the war, more than triple the 2.1 million tons of bombs the U.S. dropped on Europe and Asia during all of World War II and more than ten times the amount dropped by the U.S. during the Korean War. 500 thousand tons were dropped on Cambodia, 1 million tons were dropped on North Vietnam, and 4 million tons were dropped on South Vietnam. On a per capita basis, the 2 million tons dropped on Laos make it the most heavily bombed country in history; "The New York Times" noted this was "nearly a ton for every person in Laos." Due to the particularly heavy impact of cluster bombs during this war, Laos was a strong advocate of the Convention on Cluster Munitions to ban the weapons, and was host to the First Meeting of States Parties to the convention in November 2010.


title: Vietnam War

text: Former U.S. Air Force official Earl Tilford has recounted "repeated bombing runs of a lake in central Cambodia. The B-52s literally dropped their payloads in the lake." The Air Force ran many missions of this kind to secure additional funding during budget negotiations, so the tonnage expended does not directly correlate with the resulting damage.


title: Vietnam War

text: On 2 July 1976, North and South Vietnam were merged to form the Socialist Republic of Vietnam. Despite speculation that the victorious North Vietnamese would, in President Nixon's words, "massacre the civilians there [South Vietnam] by the millions," there is a widespread consensus that no mass executions took place. However, in the years following the war, a vast number of South Vietnamese were sent to re-education camps where many endured torture, starvation, and disease while being forced to perform hard labor. According to Amnesty International Report 1979, this figure varied considerably depend on different observers: "...included such figures as "50,000 to 80,000" ("Le Monde", 19 April 1978), "150,000" (Reuters from Bien Hoa, 2 November 1977), "150,000 to 200,000" ("Washington Post", 20 December 1978), and "300,000" (Agence France Presse from Hanoi, 12 February 1978)." Such variations may be because "Some estimates may include not only detainees but also people sent from the cities to the countryside." According to a native observer, 443,360 people had to register for a period in re-education camps in Saigon alone, and while some of them were released after a few days, others stayed there for more than a decade. Between 1975 and 1980, more than 1 million northerners migrated south to regions formerly in the Republic of Vietnam, while, as part of the New Economic Zones program, around 750,000 to over 1 million southerners were moved mostly to uninhabited mountainous forested areas.


title: Vietnam War

text: Gabriel García Márquez, a Nobel Prize winning writer, described South Vietnam as a "False paradise" after the war, when he visited in 1980:


title: Vietnam War

text: The U.S. used its security council veto to block Vietnam's recognition by the United Nations three times, an obstacle to the country receiving international aid.


title: Vietnam War

text: By 1975, the North Vietnamese had lost influence over the Khmer Rouge. Phnom Penh, the capital of Cambodia, fell to the Khmer Rouge on 17 April 1975. Under the leadership of Pol Pot, the Khmer Rouge would eventually kill 1–3 million Cambodians out of a population of around 8 million, in one of the bloodiest genocides in history.


title: Vietnam War

text: The relationship between Vietnam and Democratic Kampuchea (Cambodia) escalated right after the end of the war. In response to the Khmer Rouge taking over Phu Quoc on 17 April and Tho Chu on 4 May 1975 and the belief that they were responsible for the disappearance of 500 Vietnamese natives on Tho Chu, Vietnam launched a counterattack to take back these islands. After several failed attempts to negotiate by both sides, Vietnam invaded Democratic Kampuchea in 1978 and ousted the Khmer Rouge, who were being supported by China, in the Cambodian–Vietnamese War. In response, China invaded Vietnam in 1979. The two countries fought a brief border war, known as the Sino-Vietnamese War. From 1978 to 1979, some 450,000 ethnic Chinese left Vietnam by boat as refugees or were expelled.


title: Vietnam War

text: The Pathet Lao overthrew the monarchy of Laos in December 1975, establishing the Lao People's Democratic Republic under the leadership of a member of the royal family, Souphanouvong. The change in regime was "quite peaceful, a sort of Asiatic 'velvet revolution'"—although 30,000 former officials were sent to reeducation camps, often enduring harsh conditions for several years. The conflict between Hmong rebels and the Pathet Lao continued in isolated pockets.


title: Vietnam War

text: Unexploded ordnance, mostly from U.S. bombing, continues to detonate and kill people today and has rendered much land hazardous and impossible to cultivate. According to the Vietnamese government, ordnance has killed some 42,000 people since the war officially ended. In Laos, 80 million bombs failed to explode and remain scattered throughout the country. According to the government of Laos, unexploded ordnance has killed or injured over 20,000 Laotians since the end of the war and currently 50 people are killed or maimed every year. It is estimated that the explosives still remaining buried in the ground will not be removed entirely for the next few centuries.


title: Vietnam War

text: Over 3 million people left Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia in the Indochina refugee crisis after 1975. Most Asian countries were unwilling to accept these refugees, many of whom fled by boat and were known as boat people. Between 1975 and 1998, an estimated 1.2 million refugees from Vietnam and other Southeast Asian countries resettled in the United States, while Canada, Australia, and France resettled over 500,000. China accepted 250,000 people. Of all the countries of Indochina, Laos experienced the largest refugee flight in proportional terms, as 300,000 people out of a total population of 3 million crossed the border into Thailand. Included among their ranks were "about 90 percent" of Laos's "intellectuals, technicians, and officials." An estimated 200,000 to 400,000 Vietnamese boat people died at sea, according to the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees.


title: Vietnam War

text: Failure of U.S. goals in the war is often placed at different institutions and levels. Some have suggested that the failure of the war was due to political failures of U.S. leadership. Others point to a failure of U.S. military doctrine. Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara stated that "the achievement of a military victory by U.S. forces in Vietnam was indeed a dangerous illusion." The inability to bring Hanoi to the bargaining table by bombing also illustrated another U.S. miscalculation, and demonstrated the limitations of U.S. military abilities in achieving political goals. As Army Chief of Staff Harold Keith Johnson noted, "if anything came out of Vietnam, it was that air power couldn't do the job." General William Westmoreland admitted that the bombing had been ineffective, saying he doubted "that the North Vietnamese would have relented." U.S. Secretary of State Henry Kissinger wrote in a secret memo to President Gerald Ford that "in terms of military tactics … our armed forces are not suited to this kind of war. Even the Special Forces who had been designed for it could not prevail."


title: Vietnam War

text: Hanoi had persistently sought unification of the country since the Geneva Accords, and the effects of U.S. bombings had negligible impact on the goals of the North Vietnamese government. The effects of U.S. bombing campaigns had mobilised the people throughout North Vietnam and mobilised international support for North Vietnam due to the perception of a super-power attempting to bomb a significantly smaller, agrarian society into submission.


title: Vietnam War

text: In the post-war era, Americans struggled to absorb the lessons of the military intervention. President Ronald Reagan coined the term "Vietnam Syndrome" to describe the reluctance of the American public and politicians to support further military interventions abroad after Vietnam. U.S. public polling in 1978 revealed that nearly 72% of Americans believed the war was "fundamentally wrong and immoral."


title: Vietnam War

text: The Vietnam War POW/MIA issue, concerning the fate of U.S. service personnel listed as missing in action, persisted for many years after the war's conclusion. The costs of the war loom large in American popular consciousness; a 1990 poll showed that the public incorrectly believed that more Americans lost their lives in Vietnam than in World War II.


title: Vietnam War

text: Between 1953 and 1975, the United States was estimated to have spent $168 billion on the war (equivalent to $ trillion in ). This resulted in a large federal budget deficit. Other figures point to $138.9 billion from 1965 to 1974 (not inflation-adjusted), 10 times all education spending in the US and 50 times more than housing and community development spending within that time period. General record-keeping was reported to have been sloppy for government spending during the war. It was stated that war-spending could have paid off every mortgage in the US at that time, with money leftover.


title: Vietnam War

text: As of 2013, the U.S. government is paying Vietnam veterans and their families or survivors more than $22 billion a year in war-related claims.


title: Vietnam War

text: More than 3 million Americans served in the Vietnam War, some 1.5 million of whom actually saw combat in Vietnam. James E. Westheider wrote that "At the height of American involvement in 1968, for example, 543,000 American military personnel were stationed in Vietnam, but only 80,000 were considered combat troops." Conscription in the United States had been controlled by the president since World War II, but ended in 1973.


title: Vietnam War

text: By the war's end, 58,220 American soldiers had been killed, more than 150,000 had been wounded, and at least 21,000 had been permanently disabled. The average age of the U.S. troops killed in Vietnam was 23.11 years. According to Dale Kueter, "Of those killed in combat, 86.3 percent were white, 12.5 percent were black and the remainder from other races." Approximately 830,000 Vietnam veterans suffered some degree of posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD). Vietnam veterans suffered from PTSD in unprecedented numbers, as many as 15.2% of Vietnam veterans, because the U.S. military had routinely provided heavy psychoactive drugs, including amphetamines, to American servicemen, which left them unable to process adequately their traumas at the time. Drug use, racial tensions, and the growing incidence of fragging—attempting to kill unpopular officers and non-commissioned officers with grenades or other weapons—created severe problems for the U.S. military and impacted its capability of undertaking combat operations. Between 1969 and 1971 the U.S. Army recorded more than 900 attacks by troops on their own officers and NCOs with 99 killed. An estimated 125,000 Americans left for Canada to avoid the Vietnam draft, and approximately 50,000 American servicemen deserted. In 1977, United States president Jimmy Carter granted a full and unconditional pardon to all Vietnam-era draft dodgers with Proclamation 4483.


title: Vietnam War

text: The Vietnam War called into question the U.S. Army doctrine. Marine Corps general Victor H. Krulak heavily criticised Westmoreland's attrition strategy, calling it "wasteful of American lives... with small likelihood of a successful outcome." In addition, doubts surfaced about the ability of the military to train foreign forces. Furthermore, throughout the war there was found to be considerable flaws and dishonesty by officers and commanders due to promotions being tied to the body count system touted by Westmoreland and McNamara. And behind the scenes Secretary of Defense McNamara wrote in a memo to President Johnson his doubts about the war: "The picture of the world's greatest superpower killing or seriously injuring 1,000 noncombatants a week, while trying to pound a tiny backward nation into submission on an issue whose merits are hotly disputed, is not a pretty one."


title: Vietnam War

text: One of the most controversial aspects of the U.S. military effort in Southeast Asia was the widespread use of chemical defoliants between 1961 and 1971. They were used to large parts of the countryside to prevent the Viet Cong from being able to hide their weapons and encampments under the foliage. These chemicals continue to change the landscape, cause diseases and birth defects, and poison the food chain.


title: Vietnam War

text: Agent Orange and similar chemical substances used by the U.S. have also caused a considerable number of deaths and injuries in the intervening years, including among the US Air Force crews that handled them. Scientific reports have concluded that refugees exposed to chemical sprays while in South Vietnam continued to experience pain in the eyes and skin as well as gastrointestinal upsets. In one study, ninety-two percent of participants suffered incessant fatigue; others reported monstrous births. Meta-analyses of the most current studies on the association between Agent Orange and birth defects have found a statistically significant correlation such that having a parent who was exposed to Agent Orange at any point in their life will increase one's likelihood of either possessing or acting as a genetic carrier of birth defects. Although a variety of birth defects have been observed, the most common deformity appears to be spina bifida. Chloro-dioxins, which are inevitably formed as a byproduct of Agent Orange synthesis, are highly teratogenic, and there is substantial evidence that the birth defects carry on for three generations or more. In 2012, the United States and Vietnam began a cooperative cleaning up of the toxic chemical on part of Danang International Airport, marking the first time Washington has been involved in cleaning up Agent Orange in Vietnam.


title: Vietnam War

text: Vietnamese victims affected by Agent Orange attempted a class action lawsuit against Dow Chemical and other U.S. chemical manufacturers, but the District Court dismissed their case. They appealed, but the dismissal was cemented in February 2008 by the Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit. , the Vietnamese government estimates that there are over 4,000,000 victims of dioxin poisoning in Vietnam, although the United States government denies any conclusive scientific links between Agent Orange and the Vietnamese victims of dioxin poisoning. In some areas of southern Vietnam, dioxin levels remain at over 100 times the accepted international standard.


title: Vietnam War

text: The U.S. Veterans Administration has listed prostate cancer, respiratory cancers, multiple myeloma, Diabetes mellitus type 2, B-cell lymphomas, soft-tissue sarcoma, chloracne, porphyria cutanea tarda, peripheral neuropathy and spina bifida in children of veterans exposed to Agent Orange.


title: Vietnam War

text: Estimates of the number of casualties vary, with one source suggesting up to 3.8 million violent war deaths in Vietnam for the period 1955 to 2002. A detailed demographic study calculated 791,000–1,141,000 war-related deaths during the war for all of Vietnam, for both military and civilians. Between 195,000 and 430,000 South Vietnamese civilians died in the war. Extrapolating from a 1969 US intelligence report, Guenter Lewy estimated 65,000 North Vietnamese civilians died in the war. Estimates of civilian deaths caused by American bombing of North Vietnam in Operation Rolling Thunder range from 30,000 to 182,000. A 1975 US Senate subcommittee estimated 1.4 million South Vietnamese civilians casualties during the war, including 415,000 deaths.


title: Vietnam War

text: The military forces of South Vietnam suffered an estimated 254,256 killed between 1960 and 1974 and additional deaths from 1954 to 1959 and in 1975. Other estimates point to higher figures of 313,000 casualties. The official US Department of Defense figure was 950,765 PAVN/VC forces killed in Vietnam from 1965 to 1974. Defense Department officials believed that these body count figures need to be deflated by 30 percent. Guenter Lewy asserts that one-third of the reported "enemy" killed may have been civilians, concluding that the actual number of deaths of PAVN/VC military forces was probably closer to 444,000.


title: Vietnam War

text: According to figures released by the Vietnamese government there were 849,018 confirmed military deaths on the PAVN/VC side during the war. The Vietnamese government released its estimate of war deaths for the more lengthy period of 1955 to 1975. This figure includes battle deaths of Vietnamese soldiers in the Laotian and Cambodian Civil Wars, in which the PAVN was a major participant. Non-combat deaths account for 30 to 40% of these figures. However, the figures do not include deaths of South Vietnamese and allied soldiers. These do not include the estimated 300,000–500,000 PAVN/VC missing in action. Official figures from the Vietnamese government estimate 1.1 million dead and 300,000 missing from 1945 to 1979, with approximately 849,000 dead and 232,000 missing from 1960 to 1975.


title: Vietnam War

text: US reports of "enemy KIA", referred to as body count were thought to have been subject to "falsification and glorification", and a true estimate of PAVN/VC combat deaths may be difficult to assess, as US victories were assessed by having a "greater kill ratio". It was difficult to distinguish between civilians and military personnel on the Viet Cong side as many persons were part-time guerrillas or impressed labourers who did not wear uniforms and civilians killed were sometimes written off as enemy killed because high enemy casualties was directly tied to promotions and commendation.


title: Vietnam War

text: Between 275,000 and 310,000 Cambodians were estimated to have died during the war including between 50,000 and 150,000 combatants and civilians from US bombings. 20,000–62,000 Laotians also died, and 58,281 U.S. military personnel were killed, of which 1,584 are still listed as missing as of March 2021.


title: Vietnam War

text: The Vietnam War has been featured extensively in television, film, video games, music and literature in the participant countries. In Vietnam, one notable film set during Operation Linebacker II was the film "Girl from Hanoi" (1975) depicting war-time life in Hanoi. Another notable work was the diary of Đặng Thùy Trâm, a Vietnamese doctor who enlisted in the Southern battlefield, and was killed at the age of 27 by U.S. forces near Quảng Ngãi. Her diaries were later published in Vietnam as "Đặng Thùy Trâm's Diary" ("Last Night I Dreamed of Peace"), where it became a best-seller and was later made into a film "Don't Burn" ("Đừng đốt"). In Vietnam, the diary has often been compared to "The Diary of Anne Frank", and both are used in literary education. Another Vietnamese film produced was "" ("Cánh đồng hoang)" in 1979 which weaves the narrative of living on the ground in a US "free-fire zone" as well as perspectives from US helicopters.


title: Vietnam War

text: One of the first major films based on the Vietnam War was John Wayne's pro-war "The Green Berets" (1968). Further cinematic representations were released during the 1970s and 1980s, some of the most noteworthy examples being Michael Cimino's "The Deer Hunter" (1978), Francis Ford Coppola's "Apocalypse Now" (1979), Oliver Stone's "Platoon" (1986) – based on his service in the U.S. Army during the Vietnam War, Stanley Kubrick's "Full Metal Jacket" (1987). Other Vietnam War films include "Hamburger Hill" (1987), "Casualties of War" (1989), "Born on the Fourth of July" (1989), "The Siege of Firebase Gloria" (1989), "Forrest Gump" (1994), "We Were Soldiers" (2002) and "Rescue Dawn" (2007).


title: Vietnam War

text: The war also influenced a generation of musicians and songwriters in Vietnam, the United States, and throughout the world, both pro/anti-war and pro/anti-communist, with the Vietnam War Song Project having identified 5,000+ songs about or referencing the conflict. The band Country Joe and the Fish recorded "The "Fish" Cheer/I-Feel-Like-I'm-Fixin'-to-Die Rag" in 1965, and it became one of the most influential anti-Vietnam protest anthems. Many songwriters and musicians supported the anti-war movement, including Pete Seeger, Joan Baez, Bob Dylan, Peggy Seeger, Ewan MacColl, Barbara Dane, The Critics Group, Phil Ochs, John Lennon, John Fogerty, Nina Simone, Neil Young, Tom Paxton, Jimmy Cliff and Arlo Guthrie. The modern classical composer George Crumb composed a string quartet, a threnody, regarding the war in 1970 titled "Black Angels".


title: Vietnam War

text: Myths play a central role in the historiography of the Vietnam War, and have become a part of the culture of the United States. Much like the general historiography of the war, discussion of myth has focused on U.S. experiences, but changing myths of war have also played a role in Vietnamese and Australian historiography.


title: Vietnam War

text: Recent scholarship has focused on "myth-busting", attacking the previous orthodox and revisionist schools of American historiography of the Vietnam War. This scholarship challenges myths about American society and soldiery in the Vietnam War.


title: Vietnam War

text: Kuzmarov in "The Myth of the Addicted Army: Vietnam and the Modern War on Drugs" challenges the popular and Hollywood narrative that US soldiers were heavy drug users, in particular the notion that the My Lai massacre was caused by drug use. According to Kuzmarov, Richard Nixon is primarily responsible for creating the drug myth.


title: Vietnam War

text: Michael Allen in "Until The Last Man Comes Home" also accuses Nixon of myth making, by exploiting the plight of the League of Wives of American Prisoners in Vietnam and the National League of Families of American Prisoners and Missing in Southeast Asia to allow the government to appear caring as the war was increasingly considered lost. Allen's analysis ties the position of potential missing or prisoner Americans into post-war politics and recent presidential elections, including the Swift boat controversy in US electoral politics.


title: Vietnam War

text: On 25 May 2012, President Barack Obama issued a proclamation of the . On 10 November 2017, President Donald Trump issued an additional .


title: Los Angeles

text: Los Angeles ( ; , ), often referred to by its initials L.A., is the largest city in the state of California and the second most populous city in the United States after New York City, as well as one of the world's most populous megacities. Los Angeles is the commercial, financial, and cultural center of Southern California. With a population of roughly 3.9 million , Los Angeles is known for its Mediterranean climate, ethnic and cultural diversity, Hollywood film industry, and sprawling metropolitan area. The city of Los Angeles lies in a basin in Southern California adjacent to the Pacific Ocean extending through the Santa Monica Mountains and into the San Fernando Valley. It covers about , and is the seat of Los Angeles County, which is the most populous county in the United States with an estimated 9.86 million .


title: Los Angeles

text: Home to the Chumash and Tongva indigenous peoples, the area that became Los Angeles was claimed by Juan Rodríguez Cabrillo for Spain in 1542. The city was founded on September 4, 1781, under Spanish governor Felipe de Neve, on the village of Yaanga. It became a part of Mexico in 1821 following the Mexican War of Independence. In 1848, at the end of the Mexican–American War, Los Angeles and the rest of California were purchased as part of the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, and thus became part of the United States. Los Angeles was incorporated as a municipality on April 4, 1850, five months before California achieved statehood. The discovery of oil in the 1890s brought rapid growth to the city. The city was further expanded with the completion of the Los Angeles Aqueduct in 1913, which delivers water from Eastern California.


title: Los Angeles

text: Los Angeles has a diverse economy, and hosts businesses in a broad range of professional and cultural fields. It also has the busiest container port in the Americas. In 2018, the Los Angeles metropolitan area had a gross metropolitan product of over $1.0 trillion, making it the city with the third-largest GDP in the world, after New York City and Tokyo. Los Angeles hosted the 1932 and 1984 Summer Olympics and will host the 2028 Summer Olympics. More recently, statewide droughts in California have strained both the city’s and Los Angeles County’s water security.


title: Los Angeles

text: The local English pronunciation of the name of the city has varied over time. A 1953 article in the journal of the American Name Society asserts that the pronunciation was established following the 1850 incorporation of the city and that since the 1880s the pronunciation emerged out of a trend in California to give places Spanish, or Spanish-sounding, names and pronunciations. In 1908, librarian Charles Fletcher Lummis, who argued for the name's pronunciation with a hard "g" (), reported that there were at least 12 pronunciation variants. In the early 1900s, the "Los Angeles Times" advocated for pronouncing it "Loce AHNG-hayl-ais" (), approximating Spanish , by printing the respelling under its masthead for several years. This did not find favor.


title: Los Angeles

text: Since the 1930s, has been most common. In 1934, the United States Board on Geographic Names decreed that this pronunciation be used. This was also endorsed in 1952 by a "jury" appointed by Mayor Fletcher Bowron to devise an official pronunciation.


title: Los Angeles

text: The Los Angeles coastal area was settled by the Tongva ("Gabrieleño") and Chumash tribes. Los Angeles would eventually be founded on the village of "iyáanga’" or Yaanga (written "Yang-na" by the Spanish), meaning "poison oak place".


title: Los Angeles

text: Maritime explorer Juan Rodríguez Cabrillo claimed the area of southern California for the Spanish Empire in 1542 while on an official military exploring expedition moving northward along the Pacific coast from earlier colonizing bases of New Spain in Central and South America. Gaspar de Portolà and Franciscan missionary Juan Crespí reached the present site of Los Angeles on August 2, 1769.


title: Los Angeles

text: In 1771, Franciscan friar Junípero Serra directed the building of the Mission San Gabriel Arcángel, the first mission in the area. On September 4, 1781, a group of forty-four settlers known as "Los Pobladores" founded the (town) they called . The original name of the settlement is disputed; the Guinness Book of World Records rendered it as "El Pueblo de Nuestra Señora la Reina de los Ángeles de Porciúncula"; other sources have shortened or alternate versions of the longer name. The present-day city has the largest Roman Catholic archdiocese in the United States. Two-thirds of the Mexican or (New Spain) settlers were mestizo or mulatto, a mixture of African, indigenous and European ancestry. The settlement remained a small ranch town for decades, but by 1820, the population had increased to about 650 residents. Today, the pueblo is commemorated in the historic district of Los Angeles Pueblo Plaza and Olvera Street, the oldest part of Los Angeles.


title: Los Angeles

text: New Spain achieved its independence from the Spanish Empire in 1821, and the pueblo now existed within the new Mexican Republic. During Mexican rule, Governor Pío Pico made Los Angeles, Alta California's regional capital. By this time, the new republic introduced more secularization acts within the Los Angeles region. In 1846, during the wider Mexican-American war, marines from the United States occupied the pueblo. This resulted in the siege of Los Angeles where 150 Mexican militias fought the occupiers which eventually surrendered.


title: Los Angeles

text: Mexican rule ended during the Mexican–American War: Americans took control from the Californios after a series of battles, culminating with the signing of the Treaty of Cahuenga on January 13, 1847.


title: Los Angeles

text: Railroads arrived with the completion of the transcontinental Southern Pacific line from New Orleans to Los Angeles in 1876 and the Santa Fe Railroad in 1885. Petroleum was discovered in the city and surrounding area in 1892, and by 1923, the discoveries had helped California become the country's largest oil producer, accounting for about one-quarter of the world's petroleum output.


title: Los Angeles

text: By 1900, the population had grown to more than 102,000, putting pressure on the city's water supply. The completion of the Los Angeles Aqueduct in 1913, under the supervision of William Mulholland, ensured the continued growth of the city. Because of clauses in the city's charter that prevented the City of Los Angeles from selling or providing water from the aqueduct to any area outside its borders, many adjacent cities and communities felt compelled to join Los Angeles.


title: Los Angeles

text: Los Angeles created the first municipal zoning ordinance in the United States. On September 14, 1908, the Los Angeles City Council promulgated residential and industrial land use zones. The new ordinance established three residential zones of a single type, where industrial uses were prohibited. The proscriptions included barns, lumber yards, and any industrial land use employing machine-powered equipment. These laws were enforced against industrial properties after the fact. These prohibitions were in addition to existing activities that were already regulated as nuisances. These included explosives warehousing, gas works, oil drilling, slaughterhouses, and tanneries. Los Angeles City Council also designated seven industrial zones within the city. However, between 1908 and 1915, the Los Angeles City Council created various exceptions to the broad proscriptions that applied to these three residential zones, and as a consequence, some industrial uses emerged within them. There are two differences between the 1908 Residence District Ordinance and later zoning laws in the United States. First, the 1908 laws did not establish a comprehensive zoning map as the 1916 New York City Zoning Ordinance did. Second, the residential zones did not distinguish types of housing; they treated apartments, hotels, and detached-single-family housing equally.


title: Los Angeles

text: In 1910, Hollywood merged into Los Angeles, with 10 movie companies already operating in the city at the time. By 1921, more than 80 percent of the world's film industry was concentrated in L.A. The money generated by the industry kept the city insulated from much of the economic loss suffered by the rest of the country during the Great Depression.


title: Los Angeles

text: During World War II Los Angeles was a major center of wartime manufacturing, such as shipbuilding and aircraft. Calship built hundreds of Liberty Ships and Victory Ships on Terminal Island, and the Los Angeles area was the headquarters of six of the country's major aircraft manufacturers (Douglas Aircraft Company, Hughes Aircraft, Lockheed, North American Aviation, Northrop Corporation, and Vultee). During the war, more aircraft were produced in one year than in all the pre-war years since the Wright brothers flew the first airplane in 1903, combined. Manufacturing in Los Angeles skyrocketed, and as William S. Knudsen, of the National Defense Advisory Commission put it, "We won because we smothered the enemy in an avalanche of production, the like of which he had never seen, nor dreamed possible."


title: Los Angeles

text: After the end of World War II Los Angeles grew more rapidly than ever, sprawling into the San Fernando Valley. The expansion of the Interstate Highway System during the 1950s and 1960s helped propel suburban growth and signaled the demise of the city's electrified rail system, once the world's largest.


title: Los Angeles

text: As a consequence of World War II, suburban growth, and population density, many amusement parks were built and operated in this area. An example is Beverly Park, which was located at the corner of Beverly Boulevard and La Cienega before being closed and substituted by the Beverly Center.


title: Los Angeles

text: In 1969, California became the birthplace of the Internet, as the first ARPANET transmission was sent from the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) to the Stanford Research Institute in Menlo Park.


title: Los Angeles

text: In 1973, Tom Bradley was elected as the city's first African American mayor, serving for five terms until retiring in 1993. Other events in the city during the 1970s included the Symbionese Liberation Army's South Central standoff in 1974 and the Hillside Stranglers murder cases in 1977–1978.


title: Los Angeles

text: In 1984, the city hosted the Summer Olympic Games for the second time. Despite being boycotted by 14 Communist countries, the 1984 Olympics became more financially successful than any previous, and the second Olympics to turn a profit; the other, according to an analysis of contemporary newspaper reports, was the 1932 Summer Olympics, also held in Los Angeles.


title: Los Angeles

text: Racial tensions erupted on April 29, 1992, with the acquittal by a Simi Valley jury of four Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD) officers captured on videotape beating Rodney King, culminating in large-scale riots.


title: Los Angeles

text: In 1994, the magnitude 6.7 Northridge earthquake shook the city, causing $12.5 billion in damage and 72 deaths. The century ended with the Rampart scandal, one of the most extensive documented cases of police misconduct in American history.


title: Los Angeles

text: In 2002, Mayor James Hahn led the campaign against secession, resulting in voters defeating efforts by the San Fernando Valley and Hollywood to secede from the city.


title: Los Angeles

text: In 2022, Karen Bass became the city's first female mayor, making Los Angeles the largest US city to have ever had a woman as mayor.


title: Los Angeles

text: Los Angeles will host the 2028 Summer Olympics and Paralympic Games, making Los Angeles the third city to host the Olympics three times.


title: Los Angeles

text: The city of Los Angeles covers a total area of , comprising of land and of water. The city extends for north-south and for east-west. The perimeter of the city is .


title: Los Angeles

text: Los Angeles is both flat and hilly. The highest point in the city proper is Mount Lukens at , located at the northeastern end of the San Fernando Valley. The eastern end of the Santa Monica Mountains stretches from Downtown to the Pacific Ocean and separates the Los Angeles Basin from the San Fernando Valley. Other hilly parts of Los Angeles include the Mt. Washington area north of Downtown, eastern parts such as Boyle Heights, the Crenshaw district around the Baldwin Hills, and the San Pedro district.


title: Los Angeles

text: Surrounding the city are much higher mountains. Immediately to the north lie the San Gabriel Mountains, which is a popular recreation area for Angelenos. Its high point is Mount San Antonio, locally known as Mount Baldy, which reaches . Further afield, the highest point in southern California is San Gorgonio Mountain, east of downtown Los Angeles, with a height of .


title: Los Angeles

text: The Los Angeles River, which is largely seasonal, is the primary drainage channel. It was straightened and lined in of concrete by the Army Corps of Engineers to act as a flood control channel. The river begins in the Canoga Park district of the city, flows east from the San Fernando Valley along the north edge of the Santa Monica Mountains, and turns south through the city center, flowing to its mouth in the Port of Long Beach at the Pacific Ocean. The smaller Ballona Creek flows into the Santa Monica Bay at Playa del Rey.


title: Los Angeles

text: Los Angeles is rich in native plant species partly because of its diversity of habitats, including beaches, wetlands, and mountains. The most prevalent plant communities are coastal sage scrub, chaparral shrubland, and riparian woodland. Native plants include: the California poppy, matilija poppy, toyon, Ceanothus, Chamise, Coast Live Oak, sycamore, willow and Giant Wildrye. Many of these native species, such as the Los Angeles sunflower, have become so rare as to be considered endangered. Although it is not native to the area, the official tree of Los Angeles is the Coral Tree ("Erythrina caffra") and the official flower of Los Angeles is the Bird of Paradise ("Strelitzia reginae"). Mexican Fan Palms, Canary Island Palms, Queen Palms, Date Palms, and California Fan Palms are common in the Los Angeles area, although only the last is native to California, though still not native to the City of Los Angeles.


title: Los Angeles

text: Los Angeles is subject to earthquakes because of its location on the Pacific Ring of Fire. The geologic instability has produced numerous faults, which cause approximately 10,000 earthquakes annually in Southern California, though most of them are too small to be felt. The strike-slip San Andreas Fault system, which sits at the boundary between the Pacific Plate and the North American Plate, passes through the Los Angeles metropolitan area. The segment of the fault passing through Southern California experiences a major earthquake roughly every 110 to 140 years, and seismologists have warned about the next "big one", as the last major earthquake was the 1857 Fort Tejon earthquake. The Los Angeles basin and metropolitan area are also at risk from blind thrust earthquakes. Major earthquakes that have hit the Los Angeles area include the 1933 Long Beach, 1971 San Fernando, 1987 Whittier Narrows, and the 1994 Northridge events. All but a few are of low intensity and are not felt. The USGS has released the UCERF California earthquake forecast, which models earthquake occurrence in California. Parts of the city are also vulnerable to tsunamis; harbor areas were damaged by waves from Aleutian Islands earthquake in 1946, Valdivia earthquake in 1960, Alaska earthquake in 1964, Chile earthquake in 2010 and Japan earthquake in 2011.


title: Los Angeles

text: The city is divided into many different districts and neighborhoods, some of which were incorporated cities that have merged with Los Angeles. These neighborhoods were developed piecemeal, and are well-defined enough that the city has signage which marks nearly all of them.


title: Los Angeles

text: The city's street patterns generally follow a grid plan, with uniform block lengths and occasional roads that cut across blocks. However, this is complicated by rugged terrain, which has necessitated having different grids for each of the valleys that Los Angeles covers. Major streets are designed to move large volumes of traffic through many parts of the city, many of which are extremely long; Sepulveda Boulevard is long, while Foothill Boulevard is over long, reaching as far east as San Bernardino. Drivers in Los Angeles suffer from one of the worst rush hour periods in the world, according to an annual traffic index by navigation system maker, TomTom. LA drivers spend an additional 92 hours in traffic each year. During the peak rush hour, there is 80% congestion, according to the index.


title: Los Angeles

text: Los Angeles is often characterized by the presence of low-rise buildings, in contrast to New York City. Outside of a few centers such as Downtown, Warner Center, Century City, Koreatown, Miracle Mile, Hollywood, and Westwood, skyscrapers and high-rise buildings are not common in Los Angeles. The few skyscrapers built outside of those areas often stand out above the rest of the surrounding landscape. Most construction is done in separate units, rather than wall-to-wall. That being said Downtown Los Angeles itself has many buildings over 30 stories, with fourteen over 50 stories, and two over 70 stories, the tallest of which is the Wilshire Grand Center. Also Los Angeles is increasingly becoming a city of apartments rather than single-family dwellings, especially in the dense inner city and Westside neighborhoods.


title: Los Angeles

text: Los Angeles has a two-season Mediterranean climate of dry summer and very mild winter (Köppen "Csb" on the coast and most of downtown, "Csa" near the metropolitan region to the west), and receives just enough annual precipitation to avoid being classified as a semi-arid climate ("BSh)". Daytime temperatures are generally temperate all year round. In winter, they average around giving it a tropical feel although it is a few degrees too cool to be a true tropical climate on average due to cool night temperatures. Los Angeles has plenty of sunshine throughout the year, with an average of only 35 days with measurable precipitation annually.


title: Los Angeles

text: Temperatures in the coastal basin exceed on a dozen or so days in the year, from one day a month in April, May, June and November to three days a month in July, August, October and to five days in September. Temperatures in the San Fernando and San Gabriel Valleys are considerably warmer. Temperatures are subject to substantial daily swings; in inland areas the difference between the average daily low and the average daily high is over . The average annual temperature of the sea is , from in January to in August. Hours of sunshine total more than 3,000 per year, from an average of 7 hours of sunshine per day in December to an average of 12 in July.


title: Los Angeles

text: The Los Angeles area is also subject to phenomena typical of a microclimate, causing extreme variations in temperature in close physical proximity to each other. For example, the average July maximum temperature at the Santa Monica Pier is whereas it is in Canoga Park, away. The city, like much of the Southern Californian coast, is subject to a late spring/early summer weather phenomenon called "June Gloom". This involves overcast or foggy skies in the morning that yield to sun by early afternoon.


title: Los Angeles

text: More recently, statewide droughts in California have further strained the city's water security. Downtown Los Angeles averages of precipitation annually, mainly occurring between November and March, generally in the form of moderate rain showers, but sometimes as heavy rainfall during winter storms. Rainfall is usually higher in the hills and coastal slopes of the mountains because of orographic uplift. Summer days are usually rainless. Rarely, an incursion of moist air from the south or east can bring brief thunderstorms in late summer, especially to the mountains. The coast gets slightly less rainfall, while the inland and mountain areas get considerably more. Years of average rainfall are rare. The usual pattern is a year-to-year variability, with a short string of dry years of rainfall, followed by one or two wet years with more than . Wet years are usually associated with warm water El Niño conditions in the Pacific, dry years with cooler water La Niña episodes. A series of rainy days can bring floods to the lowlands and mudslides to the hills, especially after wildfires have denuded the slopes.


title: Los Angeles

text: Both freezing temperatures and snowfall are extremely rare in the city basin and along the coast, with the last occurrence of a reading at the downtown station being January 29, 1979; freezing temperatures occur nearly every year in valley locations while the mountains within city limits typically receive snowfall every winter. The greatest snowfall recorded in downtown Los Angeles was on January 15, 1932. While the most recent snowfall occurred in February 2019, the first snowfall since 1962, with snow falling in areas adjacent to Los Angeles as recently as January 2021. At the official downtown station, the highest recorded temperature is on September 27, 2010, while the lowest is , on January 4, 1949. Within the City of Los Angeles, the highest temperature ever officially recorded is , on September 6, 2020, at the weather station at Pierce College in the San Fernando Valley neighborhood of Woodland Hills. During autumn and winter, Santa Ana winds sometimes bring much warmer and drier conditions to Los Angeles, and raise wildfire risk.


title: Los Angeles

text: A Gabrielino settlement in the area was called "iyáangẚ" (written "Yang-na" by the Spanish), which has been translated as "poison oak place". "Yang-na" has also been translated as "the valley of smoke". Owing to geography, heavy reliance on automobiles, and the Los Angeles/Long Beach port complex, Los Angeles suffers from air pollution in the form of smog. The Los Angeles Basin and the San Fernando Valley are susceptible to atmospheric inversion, which holds in the exhausts from road vehicles, airplanes, locomotives, shipping, manufacturing, and other sources. The percentage of small particle pollution (the kind that penetrates into the lungs) coming from vehicles in the city can get as high as 55 percent.


title: Los Angeles

text: The smog season lasts from approximately May to October. While other large cities rely on rain to clear smog, Los Angeles gets only of rain each year: pollution accumulates over many consecutive days. Issues of air quality in Los Angeles and other major cities led to the passage of early national environmental legislation, including the Clean Air Act. When the act was passed, California was unable to create a State Implementation Plan that would enable it to meet the new air quality standards, largely because of the level of pollution in Los Angeles generated by older vehicles. More recently, the state of California has led the nation in working to limit pollution by mandating low-emission vehicles. Smog is expected to continue to drop in the coming years because of aggressive steps to reduce it, which include electric and hybrid cars, improvements in mass transit, and other measures.


title: Los Angeles

text: The number of Stage 1 smog alerts in Los Angeles has declined from over 100 per year in the 1970s to almost zero in the new millennium. Despite improvement, the 2006 and 2007 annual reports of the American Lung Association ranked the city as the most polluted in the country with short-term particle pollution and year-round particle pollution. In 2008, the city was ranked the second most polluted and again had the highest year-round particulate pollution. The city met its goal of providing 20 percent of the city's power from renewable sources in 2010. The American Lung Association's 2013 survey ranks the metro area as having the nation's worst smog, and fourth in both short-term and year-round pollution amounts.


title: Los Angeles

text: Los Angeles is also home to the nation's largest urban oil field. There are more than 700 active oil wells within of homes, churches, schools and hospitals in the city, a situation about which the EPA has voiced serious concerns.


title: Los Angeles

text: The city has an urban population of bobcats ("Lynx rufus"). Mange is a common problem in this population. Although Serieys "et al." 2014 find selection of immune genetics at several loci they do not demonstrate that this produces a real difference which helps the bobcats to survive future mange outbreaks.


title: Los Angeles

text: The 2010 U.S. census reported Los Angeles had a population of 3,792,621. The population density was 8,092.3 people per square mile (2,913.0/km). The age distribution was 874,525 people (23.1%) under 18, 434,478 people (11.5%) from 18 to 24, 1,209,367 people (31.9%) from 25 to 44, 877,555 people (23.1%) from 45 to 64, and 396,696 people (10.5%) who were 65 or older. The median age was 34.1 years. For every 100 females, there were 99.2 males. For every 100 females age 18 and over, there were 97.6 males.


title: Los Angeles

text: There were 1,413,995 housing units—up from 1,298,350 during 2005–2009—at an average density of 2,812.8 households per square mile (1,086.0/km), of which 503,863 (38.2%) were owner-occupied, and 814,305 (61.8%) were occupied by renters. The homeowner vacancy rate was 2.1%; the rental vacancy rate was 6.1%. 1,535,444 people (40.5% of the population) lived in owner-occupied housing units and 2,172,576 people (57.3%) lived in rental housing units.


title: Los Angeles

text: According to the 2010 United States Census, Los Angeles had a median household income of $49,497, with 22.0% of the population living below the federal poverty line.


title: Los Angeles

text: According to the 2010 census, the racial makeup of Los Angeles included: 1,888,158 Whites (49.8%), 365,118 African Americans (9.6%), 28,215 Native Americans (0.7%), 426,959 Asians (11.3%), 5,577 Pacific Islanders (0.1%), 902,959 from other races (23.8%), and 175,635 (4.6%) from two or more races. Hispanics or Latinos of any race were 1,838,822 persons (48.5%). Los Angeles is home to people from more than 140 countries speaking 224 different identified languages. Ethnic enclaves like Chinatown, Historic Filipinotown, Koreatown, Little Armenia, Little Ethiopia, Tehrangeles, Little Tokyo, Little Bangladesh, and Thai Town provide examples of the polyglot character of Los Angeles.


title: Los Angeles

text: Non-Hispanic Whites were 28.7% of the population in 2010, compared to 86.3% in 1940. The majority of the Non-Hispanic White population is living in areas along the Pacific coast as well as in neighborhoods near and on the Santa Monica Mountains from the Pacific Palisades to Los Feliz.


title: Los Angeles

text: Mexican ancestry make up the largest ethnic group of Hispanics at 31.9% of the city's population, followed by those of Salvadoran (6.0%) and Guatemalan (3.6%) heritage. The Hispanic population has a long established Mexican-American and Central American community and is spread well-nigh throughout the entire city of Los Angeles and its metropolitan area. It is most heavily concentrated in regions around Downtown as East Los Angeles, Northeast Los Angeles and Westlake. Furthermore, a vast majority of residents in neighborhoods in eastern South Los Angeles towards Downey are of Hispanic origin.


title: Los Angeles

text: The largest Asian ethnic groups are Filipinos (3.2%) and Koreans (2.9%), which have their own established ethnic enclaves—Koreatown in the Wilshire Center and Historic Filipinotown. Chinese people, which make up 1.8% of Los Angeles's population, reside mostly outside of Los Angeles city limits and rather in the San Gabriel Valley of eastern Los Angeles County, but make a sizable presence in the city, notably in Chinatown. Chinatown and Thaitown are also home to many Thais and Cambodians, which make up 0.3% and 0.1% of Los Angeles's population, respectively. The Japanese comprise 0.9% of LA's population and have an established Little Tokyo in the city's downtown, and another significant community of Japanese Americans is in the Sawtelle district of West Los Angeles. Vietnamese make up 0.5% of Los Angeles's population. Indians make up 0.9% of the city's population. The city is also home to Armenians, Assyrians, and Iranians, many of whom live in enclaves like Little Armenia and Tehrangeles.


title: Los Angeles

text: African Americans have been the predominant ethnic group in South Los Angeles, which has emerged as the largest African American community in the western United States since the 1960s. The neighborhoods of South Los Angeles with highest concentration of African Americans include Crenshaw, Baldwin Hills, Leimert Park, Hyde Park, Gramercy Park, Manchester Square and Watts. Apart from South Los Angeles, neighborhoods in the Central region of Los Angeles, as Mid-City and Mid-Wilshire have a moderate concentration of African Americans as well.


title: Los Angeles

text: Los Angeles has the second largest Mexican, Armenian, Salvadoran, Filipino and Guatemalan population by city in the world, the third largest Canadian population in the world, and has the largest Japanese, Iranian/Persian, Cambodian and Romani (Gypsy) population in the country.


title: Los Angeles

text: According to a 2014 study by the Pew Research Center, Christianity is the most prevalently practiced religion in Los Angeles (65%). The Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Los Angeles is the largest archdiocese in the country. Cardinal Roger Mahony, as the archbishop, oversaw construction of the Cathedral of Our Lady of the Angels, which opened in September 2002 in Downtown Los Angeles.


title: Los Angeles

text: In 2011, the once common, but ultimately lapsed, custom of conducting a procession and Mass in honor of Nuestra Señora de los Ángeles, in commemoration of the founding of the City of Los Angeles in 1781, was revived by the Queen of Angels Foundation and its founder Mark Albert, with the support of the Archdiocese of Los Angeles as well as several civic leaders. The recently revived custom is a continuation of the original processions and Masses that commenced on the first anniversary of the founding of Los Angeles in 1782 and continued for nearly a century thereafter.


title: Los Angeles

text: With 621,000 Jews in the metropolitan area, the region has the second-largest population of Jews in the United States, after New York City. Many of Los Angeles's Jews now live on the Westside and in the San Fernando Valley, though Boyle Heights once had a large Jewish population prior to World War II due to restrictive housing covenants. Major Orthodox Jewish neighborhoods include Hancock Park, Pico-Robertson, and Valley Village, while Jewish Israelis are well represented in the Encino and Tarzana neighborhoods, and Persian Jews in Beverly Hills. Many varieties of Judaism are represented in the greater Los Angeles area, including Reform, Conservative, Orthodox, and Reconstructionist. The Breed Street Shul in East Los Angeles, built in 1923, was the largest synagogue west of Chicago in its early decades; it is no longer in daily use as a synagogue and is being converted to a museum and community center. The Kabbalah Centre also has a presence in the city.


title: Los Angeles

text: The International Church of the Foursquare Gospel was founded in Los Angeles by Aimee Semple McPherson in 1923 and remains headquartered there to this day. For many years, the church convened at Angelus Temple, which, at its construction, was one of the largest churches in the country.


title: Los Angeles

text: Los Angeles has had a rich and influential Protestant tradition. The first Protestant service in Los Angeles was a Methodist meeting held in a private home in 1850 and the oldest Protestant church still operating, First Congregational Church, was founded in 1867. In the early 1900s the Bible Institute Of Los Angeles published the founding documents of the Christian Fundamentalist movement and the Azusa Street Revival launched Pentecostalism. The Metropolitan Community Church also had its origins in the Los Angeles area. Important churches in the city include First Presbyterian Church of Hollywood, Bel Air Presbyterian Church, First African Methodist Episcopal Church of Los Angeles, West Angeles Church of God in Christ, Second Baptist Church, Crenshaw Christian Center, McCarty Memorial Christian Church, and First Congregational Church.


title: Los Angeles

text: The Los Angeles California Temple, the second-largest temple operated by the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, is on Santa Monica Boulevard in the Westwood neighborhood of Los Angeles. Dedicated in 1956, it was the first temple of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints built in California and it was the largest in the world when completed.


title: Los Angeles

text: The Hollywood region of Los Angeles also has several significant headquarters, churches, and the Celebrity Center of Scientology.


title: Los Angeles

text: Because of Los Angeles's large multi-ethnic population, a wide variety of faiths are practiced, including Buddhism, Hinduism, Islam, Zoroastrianism, Sikhism, Baháʼí, various Eastern Orthodox Churches, Sufism, Shintoism, Taoism, Confucianism, Chinese folk religion and countless others. Immigrants from Asia for example, have formed a number of significant Buddhist congregations making the city home to the greatest variety of Buddhists in the world. The first Buddhist joss house was founded in the city in 1875. Atheism and other secular beliefs are also common, as the city is the largest in the Western U.S. Unchurched Belt.


title: Los Angeles

text: As of January 2020, there are 41,290 homeless people in the City of Los Angeles, comprising roughly 62% of the homeless population of LA County. This is an increase of 14.2% over the previous year (with a 12.7% increase in the overall homeless population of LA County). The epicenter of homelessness in Los Angeles is the Skid Row neighborhood, which contains 8,000 homeless people, one of the largest stable populations of homeless people in the United States. The increased homeless population in Los Angeles has been attributed to lack of housing affordability and to substance abuse. Almost 60 percent of the 82,955 people who became newly homeless in 2019 said their homelessness was because of economic hardship. In Los Angeles, black people are roughly four times more likely to experience homelessness.


title: Los Angeles

text: In 1992, the city of Los Angeles recorded 1,092 murders. Los Angeles experienced a significant decline in crime in the 1990s and late 2000s and reached a 50-year low in 2009 with 314 homicides. This is a rate of 7.85 per 100,000 population—a major decrease from 1980 when a homicide rate of 34.2 per 100,000 was reported. This included 15 officer-involved shootings. One shooting led to the death of a SWAT team member, Randal Simmons, the first in LAPD's history. Los Angeles in the year of 2013 totaled 251 murders, a decrease of 16 percent from the previous year. Police speculate the drop resulted from a number of factors, including young people spending more time online. In 2021, murders rose to the highest level since 2008 and there were 348.


title: Los Angeles

text: In 2015, it was revealed that the LAPD had been under-reporting crime for eight years, making the crime rate in the city appear much lower than it really is.


title: Los Angeles

text: The Dragna crime family and the Cohen crime family dominated organized crime in the city during the Prohibition era and reached its peak during the 1940s and 1950s with the battle of Sunset Strip as part of the American Mafia, but has gradually declined since then with the rise of various black and Hispanic gangs in the late 1960s and early 1970s.


title: Los Angeles

text: According to the Los Angeles Police Department, the city is home to 45,000 gang members, organized into 450 gangs. Among them are the Crips and Bloods, which are both African American street gangs that originated in the South Los Angeles region. Latino street gangs such as the Sureños, a Mexican American street gang, and Mara Salvatrucha, which has mainly members of Salvadoran descent, all originated in Los Angeles. This has led to the city being referred to as the "Gang Capital of America".


title: Los Angeles

text: The economy of Los Angeles is driven by international trade, entertainment (television, motion pictures, video games, music recording, and production), aerospace, technology, petroleum, fashion, apparel, and tourism. Other significant industries include finance, telecommunications, law, healthcare, and transportation. In the 2017 Global Financial Centres Index, Los Angeles was ranked as having the 19th most competitive financial center in the world, and sixth most competitive in the United States (after New York City, San Francisco, Chicago, Boston, and Washington, D.C.).


title: Los Angeles

text: One of the five major film studios, Paramount Pictures, is within the city limits, its location being part of the so-called "Thirty-Mile Zone" of entertainment headquarters in Southern California.


title: Los Angeles

text: Los Angeles is the largest manufacturing center in the United States. The contiguous ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach together comprise the busiest port in the United States by some measures and the fifth-busiest port in the world, vital to trade within the Pacific Rim.


title: Los Angeles

text: The Los Angeles metropolitan area has a gross metropolitan product of over $1.0 trillion (), making it the third-largest economic metropolitan area in the world after Tokyo and New York. Los Angeles has been classified an "alpha world city" according to a 2012 study by a group at Loughborough University.


title: Los Angeles

text: The Department of Cannabis Regulation enforces cannabis legislation after the legalization of the sale and distribution of cannabis in 2016. , more than 300 existing cannabis businesses (both retailers and their suppliers) have been granted approval to operate in what is considered the nation's largest market.


title: Los Angeles

text: , Los Angeles is home to three Fortune 500 companies: AECOM, CBRE Group, and Reliance Steel & Aluminum Co. Other companies headquartered in Los Angeles and the surrounding metropolitan area include The Aerospace Corporation, California Pizza Kitchen, Capital Group Companies, Deluxe Entertainment Services Group, Dine Brands Global, DreamWorks Animation, Dollar Shave Club, Fandango Media, Farmers Insurance Group, Forever 21, Hulu, Panda Express, SpaceX, Ubisoft Film & Television, The Walt Disney Company, Universal Pictures, Warner Bros., Warner Music Group, and Trader Joe's.


title: Los Angeles

text: Los Angeles is often billed as the "Creative Capital of the World" because one in every six of its residents works in a creative industry and there are more artists, writers, filmmakers, actors, dancers and musicians living and working in Los Angeles than any other city at any other time in history.


title: Los Angeles

text: The city's Hollywood neighborhood has become recognized as the center of the motion picture industry and the Los Angeles area is also associated with being the center of the television industry. The city is home to major film studios as well as major record labels. Los Angeles plays host to the annual Academy Awards, the Primetime Emmy Awards, the Grammy Awards as well as many other entertainment industry awards shows. Los Angeles is the site of the USC School of Cinematic Arts which is the oldest film school in the United States. The performing arts play a major role in Los Angeles's cultural identity. According to the USC Stevens Institute for Innovation, "there are more than 1,100 annual theatrical productions and 21 openings every week." The Los Angeles Music Center is "one of the three largest performing arts centers in the nation", with more than 1.3 million visitors per year. The Walt Disney Concert Hall, centerpiece of the Music Center, is home to the prestigious Los Angeles Philharmonic. Notable organizations such as Center Theatre Group, the Los Angeles Master Chorale, and the Los Angeles Opera are also resident companies of the Music Center. Talent is locally cultivated at premier institutions such as the Colburn School and the USC Thornton School of Music.


title: Los Angeles

text: There are 841 museums and art galleries in Los Angeles County, more museums per capita than any other city in the U.S. Some of the notable museums are the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (the largest art museum in the Western United States), the Getty Center (part of the J. Paul Getty Trust, the world's wealthiest art institution), the Petersen Automotive Museum, the Huntington Library, the Natural History Museum, the Battleship Iowa, and the Museum of Contemporary Art. A significant number of art galleries are on Gallery Row, and tens of thousands attend the monthly Downtown Art Walk there.


title: Los Angeles

text: The Los Angeles Public Library system operates 72 public libraries in the city. Enclaves of unincorporated areas are served by branches of the County of Los Angeles Public Library, many of which are within walking distance to residents.


title: Los Angeles

text: Important landmarks in Los Angeles include the Hollywood Sign, Walt Disney Concert Hall, Capitol Records Building, the Cathedral of Our Lady of the Angels, Angels Flight, Grauman's Chinese Theatre, Dolby Theatre, Griffith Observatory, Getty Center, Getty Villa, Stahl House, the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum, L.A. Live, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Venice Canal Historic District and boardwalk, Theme Building, Bradbury Building, U.S. Bank Tower, Wilshire Grand Center, Hollywood Boulevard, Los Angeles City Hall, Hollywood Bowl, battleship , Watts Towers, Staples Center, Dodger Stadium, and Olvera Street.


title: Los Angeles

text: Los Angeles's food culture is a fusion of global cuisine brought on by the city's rich immigrant history and population. Latin American immigrants, particularly Mexican immigrants, brought tacos, burritos, quesadillas, tortas, tamales, and enchiladas served from food trucks and stands, taquerias, and cafés. Asian restaurants, many immigrant-owned, exist throughout the city with hotspots in Chinatown, Koreatown, and Little Tokyo. Los Angeles also carries an outsized offering of vegan, vegetarian, and plant-based options. As of 2022, the Michelin Guide recognized 10 restaurants granting 2 restaurants two stars and eight restaurants one star.


title: Los Angeles

text: The city of Los Angeles and its metropolitan area are the home of eleven top-level professional sports teams, several of which play in neighboring communities but use Los Angeles in their name. These teams include the Los Angeles Dodgers and Los Angeles Angels of Major League Baseball (MLB), the Los Angeles Rams and Los Angeles Chargers of the National Football League (NFL), the Los Angeles Lakers and Los Angeles Clippers of the National Basketball Association (NBA), the Los Angeles Kings and Anaheim Ducks of the National Hockey League (NHL), the Los Angeles Galaxy and Los Angeles FC of Major League Soccer (MLS), and the Los Angeles Sparks of the Women's National Basketball Association (WNBA).


title: Los Angeles

text: Other notable sports teams include the UCLA Bruins and the USC Trojans in the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA), both of which are Division I teams in the Pac-12 Conference, but will soon be moved to the Big Ten Conference.


title: Los Angeles

text: Los Angeles is the second-largest city in the United States but hosted no NFL team between 1995 and 2015. At one time, the Los Angeles area hosted two NFL teams: the Rams and the Raiders. Both left the city in 1995, with the Rams moving to St. Louis, and the Raiders moving back to their original home of Oakland. After 21 seasons in St. Louis, on January 12, 2016, the NFL announced the Rams would be moving back to Los Angeles for the 2016 NFL season with its home games played at the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum for four seasons. Prior to 1995, the Rams played their home games in the Coliseum from 1946 to 1979 which made them the first professional sports team to play in Los Angeles, and then moved to Anaheim Stadium from 1980 until 1994. The San Diego Chargers announced on January 12, 2017, that they would also relocate back to Los Angeles (the first since its inaugural season in 1960) and become the Los Angeles Chargers beginning in the 2017 NFL season and played at Dignity Health Sports Park in Carson, California for three seasons. The Rams and the Chargers would soon move to the newly built SoFi Stadium, located in nearby Inglewood during the 2020 season.


title: Los Angeles

text: Los Angeles boasts a number of sports venues, including Dodger Stadium, the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum, Banc of California Stadium and the Crypto.com Arena. The Forum, SoFi Stadium, Dignity Health Sports Park, the Rose Bowl, Angel Stadium, and the Honda Center are also in adjacent cities and cities in Los Angeles's metropolitan area.


title: Los Angeles

text: Los Angeles has twice hosted the Summer Olympic Games: in 1932 and in 1984, and will host the games for a third time in 2028. Los Angeles will be the third city after London (1908, 1948 and 2012) and Paris (1900, 1924 and 2024) to host the Olympic Games three times. When the tenth Olympic Games were hosted in 1932, the former 10th Street was renamed Olympic Blvd. Los Angeles also hosted the Deaflympics in 1985 and Special Olympics World Summer Games in 2015.


title: Los Angeles

text: 8 NFL Super Bowls were also held in the city and its surrounding areas- 2 at the Memorial Coliseum (the first Super Bowl, I and VII), 5 at the Rose Bowl in suburban Pasadena (XI, XIV, XVII, XXI, and XXVII), and 1 at the suburban Inglewood (LVI) . The Rose Bowl also hosts an annual and highly prestigious NCAA college football game called the Rose Bowl, which happens every New Year's Day.


title: Los Angeles

text: Los Angeles also hosted 8 FIFA World Cup soccer games at the Rose Bowl in 1994, including the final, where Brazil won. The Rose Bowl also hosted 4 matches in the 1999 FIFA Women's World Cup, including the final, where the United States won against China on penalty kicks. This was the game where Brandi Chastain took her shirt off after she scored the tournament-winning penalty kick, creating an iconic image. Los Angeles will be one of eleven US host cities for the 2026 FIFA World Cup with matches set to be held at SoFi Stadium.


title: Los Angeles

text: Los Angeles is one of six North American cities to have won championships in all five of its major leagues (MLB, NFL, NHL, NBA and MLS), having completed the feat with the Kings' 2012 Stanley Cup title.


title: Los Angeles

text: Los Angeles is a charter city as opposed to a general law city. The current charter was adopted on June 8, 1999, and has been amended many times. The elected government consists of the Los Angeles City Council and the mayor of Los Angeles, which operate under a mayor–council government, as well as the city attorney (not to be confused with the district attorney, a county office) and controller. The mayor is Karen Bass. There are 15 city council districts.


title: Los Angeles

text: The city has many departments and appointed officers, including the Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD), the Los Angeles Board of Police Commissioners, the Los Angeles Fire Department (LAFD), the Housing Authority of the City of Los Angeles (HACLA), the Los Angeles Department of Transportation (LADOT), and the Los Angeles Public Library (LAPL).


title: Los Angeles

text: The charter of the City of Los Angeles ratified by voters in 1999 created a system of advisory neighborhood councils that would represent the diversity of stakeholders, defined as those who live, work or own property in the neighborhood. The neighborhood councils are relatively autonomous and spontaneous in that they identify their own boundaries, establish their own bylaws, and elect their own officers. There are about 90 neighborhood councils.


title: Los Angeles

text: In the California State Assembly, Los Angeles is split between fourteen districts. In the California State Senate, the city is split between eight districts. In the United States House of Representatives, it is split among ten congressional districts.


title: Los Angeles

text: There are three public universities within the city limits: California State University, Los Angeles (CSULA), California State University, Northridge (CSUN) and University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA).


title: Los Angeles

text: The community college system consists of nine campuses governed by the trustees of the Los Angeles Community College District:


title: Los Angeles

text: There are numerous additional colleges and universities outside the city limits in the Greater Los Angeles area, including the Claremont Colleges consortium, which includes the most selective liberal arts colleges in the U.S., and the California Institute of Technology (Caltech), one of the top STEM-focused research institutions in the world.


title: Los Angeles

text: Los Angeles Unified School District serves almost all of the city of Los Angeles, as well as several surrounding communities, with a student population around 800,000. After Proposition 13 was approved in 1978, urban school districts had considerable trouble with funding. LAUSD has become known for its underfunded, overcrowded and poorly maintained campuses, although its 162 Magnet schools help compete with local private schools.


title: Los Angeles

text: Several small sections of Los Angeles are in the Inglewood Unified School District, and the Las Virgenes Unified School District. The Los Angeles County Office of Education operates the Los Angeles County High School for the Arts.


title: Los Angeles

text: The Los Angeles metro area is the second-largest broadcast designated market area in the U.S. (after New York) with 5,431,140 homes (4.956% of the U.S.), which is served by a wide variety of local AM and FM radio and television stations. Los Angeles and New York City are the only two media markets to have seven VHF allocations assigned to them.


title: Los Angeles

text: As part of the region's aforementioned creative industry, the Big Four major broadcast television networks, ABC, CBS, FOX, and NBC, all have production facilities and offices throughout various areas of Los Angeles. All four major broadcast television networks, plus major Spanish-language networks Telemundo and Univision, also own and operate stations that both serve the Los Angeles market and serve as each network's West Coast flagship station: ABC's KABC-TV (Channel 7), CBS's KCBS-TV (Channel 2), Fox's KTTV-TV (Channel 11), NBC's KNBC-TV (Channel 4), MyNetworkTV's KCOP-TV (Channel 13), Telemundo's KVEA-TV (Channel 52), and Univision's KMEX-TV (Channel 34). The region also has four PBS stations, with KCET, re-joining the network as secondary affiliate in August 2019, after spending the previous eight years as the nation's largest independent public television station. KTBN (Channel 40) is the flagship station of the religious Trinity Broadcasting Network, based out of Santa Ana. A variety of independent television stations, such as KCAL-TV (Channel 9) and KTLA-TV (Channel 5), also operate in the area.


title: Los Angeles

text: The major daily English-language newspaper in the area is the "Los Angeles Times". "La Opinión" is the city's major daily Spanish-language paper. "The Korea Times" is the city's major daily Korean-language paper while "The World Journal" is the city and county's major Chinese newspaper. The "Los Angeles Sentinel" is the city's major African-American weekly paper, boasting the largest African-American readership in the Western United States. "Investor's Business Daily" is distributed from its LA corporate offices, which are headquartered in Playa del Rey.


title: Los Angeles

text: There are also a number of smaller regional newspapers, alternative weeklies and magazines, including the "Los Angeles Register", Los Angeles Community News, (which focuses on coverage of the greater Los Angeles area), "Los Angeles Daily News" (which focuses coverage on the San Fernando Valley), "LA Weekly", "L.A. Record" (which focuses coverage on the music scene in the Greater Los Angeles Area), "Los Angeles Magazine", the "Los Angeles Business Journal", the "Los Angeles Daily Journal" (legal industry paper), "The Hollywood Reporter", "Variety" (both entertainment industry papers), and "Los Angeles Downtown News". In addition to the major papers, numerous local periodicals serve immigrant communities in their native languages, including Armenian, English, Korean, Persian, Russian, Chinese, Japanese, Hebrew, and Arabic. Many cities adjacent to Los Angeles also have their own daily newspapers whose coverage and availability overlaps with certain Los Angeles neighborhoods. Examples include "The Daily Breeze" (serving the South Bay), and "The Long Beach Press-Telegram".


title: Los Angeles

text: Los Angeles arts, culture and nightlife news is also covered by a number of local and national online guides, including "Time Out Los Angeles", "Thrillist", "Kristin's List", "DailyCandy", "Diversity News Magazine", "LAist", and "Flavorpill".


title: Los Angeles

text: The city and the rest of the Los Angeles metropolitan area are served by an extensive network of freeways and highways. Texas Transportation Institute's annual Urban Mobility Report ranked Los Angeles area roads the most congested in the United States in 2019 as measured by annual delay per traveler, area residents experiencing a cumulative average of 119 hours waiting in traffic that year. Los Angeles was followed by San Francisco/Oakland, Washington, D.C., and Miami. Despite the congestion in the city, the mean daily travel time for commuters in Los Angeles is shorter than other major cities, including New York City, Philadelphia and Chicago. Los Angeles's mean travel time for work commutes in 2006 was 29.2 minutes, similar to those of San Francisco and Washington, D.C.


title: Los Angeles

text: The major highways that connect LA to the rest of the nation include Interstate 5, which runs south through San Diego to Tijuana in Mexico and north through Sacramento, Portland, and Seattle to the Canada–US border; Interstate 10, the southernmost east–west, coast-to-coast Interstate Highway in the United States, going to Jacksonville, Florida; and U.S. Route 101, which heads to the California Central Coast, San Francisco, the Redwood Empire, and the Oregon and Washington coasts.


title: Los Angeles

text: The LA County Metropolitan Transportation Authority (LA County Metro) and other agencies operate an extensive system of bus lines, as well as subway and light rail lines across Los Angeles County, with a combined monthly ridership (measured in individual boardings) of 38.8 million . The majority of this (30.5 million) is taken up by the city's bus system, the second busiest in the country. The subway and light rail combined average the remaining roughly 8.2 million boardings per month. LA County Metro recorded over 397 million boardings for the 2017 calendar year, including about 285 million bus riders and about 113 million riding on rail transit. For the first quarter of 2018, there were just under 95 million system-wide boardings, down from about 98 million in 2017, and about 105 million in 2016. In 2005, 10.2% of Los Angeles commuters rode some form of public transportation. According to the 2016 American Community Survey, 9.2% of working Los Angeles (city) residents made the journey to work via public transportation.


title: Los Angeles

text: The city's subway system is the ninth busiest in the United States and its light rail system is the country's busiest. The rail system includes the B and D subway lines, as well as the A, C, E, and L light rail lines. In 2016, the E Line was extended to the Pacific Ocean at Santa Monica. The Metro G and J lines are bus rapid transit lines with stops and frequency similar to those of light rail. , the total number of light rail stations is 99. The city is also central to the commuter rail system Metrolink, which links Los Angeles to all neighboring counties as well as many suburbs.


title: Los Angeles

text: Besides the rail service provided by Metrolink and the Los Angeles County Metropolitan Transportation Authority, Los Angeles is served by inter-city passenger trains from Amtrak. The main rail station in the city is Union Station just north of Downtown.


title: Los Angeles

text: In addition, the city directly contracts for local and commuter bus service through the Los Angeles Department of Transportation, or LADOT.


title: Los Angeles

text: The main international and domestic airport serving Los Angeles is Los Angeles International Airport , commonly referred to by its airport code, LAX.


title: Los Angeles

text: The Port of Los Angeles is in San Pedro Bay in the San Pedro neighborhood, approximately south of Downtown. Also called Los Angeles Harbor and WORLDPORT LA, the port complex occupies of land and water along of waterfront. It adjoins the separate Port of Long Beach.


title: Los Angeles

text: The sea ports of the Port of Los Angeles and Port of Long Beach together make up the "Los Angeles/Long Beach Harbor". Together, both ports are the fifth busiest container port in the world, with a trade volume of over 14.2 million TEU's in 2008. Singly, the Port of Los Angeles is the busiest container port in the United States and the largest cruise ship center on the West Coast of the United States – The Port of Los Angeles's World Cruise Center served about 590,000 passengers in 2014.


title: Los Angeles

text: There are also smaller, non-industrial harbors along Los Angeles's coastline. The port includes four bridges: the Vincent Thomas Bridge, Henry Ford Bridge, Gerald Desmond Bridge, and Commodore Schuyler F. Heim Bridge. Passenger ferry service from San Pedro to the city of Avalon on Santa Catalina Island is provided by Catalina Express.


title: Los Angeles

text: As home to Hollywood and its entertainment industry, numerous singers, actors, celebrities and other entertainers live in various districts of Los Angeles.


title: The Walking Dead (TV series)

text: The Walking Dead is an American post-apocalyptic horror television series based on the comic book series of the same name by Robert Kirkman, Tony Moore, and Charlie Adlard—together forming the core of "The Walking Dead" franchise. The series features a large ensemble cast as survivors of a zombie apocalypse trying to stay alive under near-constant threat of attacks from zombies known as "walkers" (among other nicknames). With the collapse of modern civilization, these survivors must confront other human survivors who have formed groups and communities with their own sets of laws and morals, sometimes leading to open, hostile conflict between them.


title: The Walking Dead (TV series)

text: Andrew Lincoln played the lead character Rick Grimes until his departure in the ninth season. Other long-standing cast members have included Norman Reedus, Steven Yeun, Chandler Riggs, Melissa McBride, Lauren Cohan, Danai Gurira, Josh McDermitt, Christian Serratos, Seth Gilliam, Ross Marquand and Jeffrey Dean Morgan. "The Walking Dead" is produced by AMC Studios in the state of Georgia, with most filming taking place in the outdoor spaces of Riverwood Studios near Senoia, Georgia. The series was initially adapted from the comic by Frank Darabont, who also served as showrunner for the first season. However, conflicts between Darabont and AMC forced his departure from the series and resulted in multiple lawsuits by Darabont and others. Glen Mazzara, Scott M. Gimple, and Angela Kang served as subsequent showrunners.


title: The Walking Dead (TV series)

text: The series premiered on October 31, 2010, and is exclusively broadcast on cable channel AMC in the United States and internationally through the Fox Networks Group and Disney+. The eleventh and final season premiered on August 22, 2021 and concluded on November 20, 2022. Beginning with its third season, "The Walking Dead" has attracted the most 18- to 49-year-old viewers of any cable or broadcast television series, though viewership has declined in later seasons. In addition, the series has been overall positively received by critics. It has been nominated for several awards, including the Golden Globe Award for Best Television Series – Drama and the Writers Guild of America Award for .


title: The Walking Dead (TV series)

text: AMC has also expanded the series into related media, including the spin-off series "Fear the Walking Dead" (2015–present), "" (2020–2021), and "Tales of the Walking Dead" (2022) as well as several webisodes and video games. Three further spinoffs have been announced: "" featuring Maggie and Negan, "The Walking Dead: Daryl Dixon" featuring the titular character and an untitled series featuring Rick and Michonne.


title: The Walking Dead (TV series)

text: "The Walking Dead" takes place after the onset of a worldwide zombie apocalypse. The zombies, referred to as "walkers", shamble towards living humans and other creatures to eat them; they are attracted to noise, such as gunshots, and to different scents, e.g. humans. Although it initially seems that only humans that are bitten or scratched by walkers can turn into other walkers, it is revealed early in the series that all living humans carry the pathogen responsible for the mutation. The mutation is activated after the death of the pathogen's host, and the only way to permanently kill a walker is to damage its brain or destroy the body entirely, such as by cremating it.


title: The Walking Dead (TV series)

text: The series centers on sheriff's deputy Rick Grimes, who wakes up from a coma. While in a coma, the world has been taken over by walkers. He becomes the leader of a group of survivors from the Atlanta, Georgia, region as they attempt to sustain and protect themselves not only against attacks by walkers but by other groups of survivors willing to use any means necessary to stay alive.


title: The Walking Dead (TV series)

text: When sheriff's deputy Rick Grimes of King County, Georgia, wakes from a coma, he discovers the world has been overrun by zombies ("walkers"). After befriending Morgan Jones, Rick travels alone to Atlanta before finding his wife Lori, son Carl, and his police partner and best friend Shane Walsh in the woods with other survivors. After being attacked by walkers at night, the whole group travels back to Atlanta to the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) building, but find from the sole remaining scientist that no cure yet exists for the pandemic.