title: Sony

text: On 18 March 2014, at GDC, president of SCE Worldwide Studios Shuhei Yoshida announced their new virtual reality technology dubbed Project Morpheus, and later named PlayStation VR, for PlayStation 4. The headset brought VR gaming and non-gaming software to the company's console. According to a report released by Houston-based patent consulting firm LexInnova in May 2015, Sony is leading the virtual reality patent race. According to the firm's analysis of nearly 12,000 patents or patent applications, Sony has 366 virtual reality patents or patent applications. PlayStation VR was released worldwide on 13 October 2016.


title: Sony

text: On 31 March 2019, the successor to the PlayStation 4 was announced and on 12 November 2020, the PlayStation 5 was released in North America, Australia, New Zealand, Japan, South Korea, and Singapore. The console was launched in Indonesia on 22 January 2021. Upon completion of the fiscal quarter, Sony sold 4.5 million PlayStation 5 consoles, keeping pace with the best selling console of all time, the PlayStation 2.


title: Sony

text: Sony Entertainment has two divisions: Sony Pictures Entertainment, Sony Music Group (Sony Music Entertainment, Sony Music Publishing). Sony USA previously owned and operated Sony Trans Com: a technology business that provided in-flight entertainment programming as well as video and audio playback equipment for the airline industry. Sony had purchased the business from Sundstrand Corp. in 1989 and subsequently sold it to Rockwell Collins in 2000.


title: Sony

text: In 2012, Sony rolled most of its consumer content services (including video, music and gaming) into the Sony Entertainment Network, the predecessor of PlayStation Network.


title: Sony

text: Sony Pictures Entertainment Inc. (SPE) is the television and film production/distribution unit of Sony. With 12.5% box office market share in 2011, the company was ranked third among movie studios. Its group sales in 2010 were US$7.2 billion. The company has produced many notable movie franchises, including "Spider-Man", "The Karate Kid" and "Men in Black". It has also produced the popular television game shows "Jeopardy!" and "Wheel of Fortune".


title: Sony

text: Sony entered the television and film production market when it acquired Columbia Pictures Entertainment in 1989 for $3.4 billion. Columbia lives on in the Sony Pictures Motion Picture Group, a division of SPE which in turn owns Columbia Pictures and TriStar Pictures among other film production and distribution companies such as Screen Gems, Sony Pictures Classics, Sony Pictures Home Entertainment. SPE's television division is known as Sony Pictures Television.


title: Sony

text: For the first several years of its existence, Sony Pictures Entertainment performed poorly, leading many to suspect the company would sell off the division. In 2006 Sony started using ARccOS Protection on some of their film DVDs, but later issued a recall.


title: Sony

text: In late 2014, Sony Pictures became the target of a hack attack from a clandestine group called Guardians of Peace, weeks before releasing the anti-North Korean comedy film "The Interview".


title: Sony

text: Sony Music Entertainment (also known as SME or Sony Music) is the largest global recorded music company of the "big three" record companies and is controlled by Sony Corporation of America, the United States subsidiary of Japan's "Sony".


title: Sony

text: In one of its largest-ever acquisitions, Sony purchased CBS Record Group in 1988 for US$2 billion. In the process, Sony partnered and gained the rights to the ATV catalogue of Michael Jackson, considered by the "Guinness Book of World Records" to be the most successful entertainer of all time. The acquisition of CBS Records provided the foundation for the formation of Sony Music Entertainment, which Sony established in 1991.


title: Sony

text: In 1968, Sony and CBS Records had formed a 50:50 joint-venture CBS/Sony Records, later renamed CBS/Sony Group, in Japan. When CBS Records was acquired, a 50% stake in CBS/Sony Group owned by CBS was also transferred to Sony. In March 1988, four wholly owned subsidiaries were folded into CBS/Sony Group and the company was renamed as Sony Music Entertainment Japan (SMEJ). It operates independently of Sony Music as it is directly owned by Japanese Sony.


title: Sony

text: In 2004, Sony entered into a joint venture with Bertelsmann AG, merging Sony Music Entertainment with Bertelsmann Music Group to create Sony BMG. In 2005, Sony BMG faced a copy protection scandal, because its music CDs had installed malware on users' computers that was posing a security risk to affected customers. In 2007, the company acquired Famous Music for US$370 million, gaining the rights to the catalogues of Eminem and Akon, among others. Sony bought out Bertelsmann's share in Sony BMG and formed a new Sony Music Entertainment in 2008. Since then, the company has undergone management changes.


title: Sony

text: Sony purchased digital music recognition company Gracenote for US$260 million in 2008. Tribune Media Company acquired Gracenote from Sony in 2014 for $170 million.


title: Sony

text: Besides its record label, Sony operates other music businesses. In 1995, Sony merged its publisher with Michael Jackson's ATV Music Publishing, forming Sony/ATV Music Publishing. At the time, the publishing company was the second largest of its kind in the world. The company owns the publishing rights to over 4 million compositions, including The Beatles' Lennon-McCartney catalogue, Bob Dylan, Eminem, Lady Gaga, Sam Smith, Ed Sheeran, and Taylor Swift.


title: Sony

text: In 2012, Sony/ATV acquired a majority stake in EMI Music Publishing, becoming the world's largest music publishing company. In 2018, Sony bought the rest of the shares in the publisher, making it a wholly owned subsidiary. Since 2016, Sony owns all of Sony/ATV.


title: Sony

text: Sony's entering into the Japanese animation, or anime, business happened in 1995 when its Sony Music Entertainment Japan (SMEJ) division established Aniplex as its subsidiary managing creative productions, which founded A-1 Pictures, the first anime studio of Sony, ten years later. Since then, through group-wide and international ventures, Sony has solidified its position in the industry, elevating the business to what is called the "fourth pillar of its entertainment portfolio" according to "The Nikkei".


title: Sony

text: The anime business operations of Sony are scattered around the group, mainly in its Pictures and Music units, as follows: SMEJ's notable related businesses include Aniplex and its subsidiaries CloverWorks and A-1 Pictures while Sony Pictures Entertainment Japan (SPEJ) operates anime-oriented TV channels like Animax, Kids Station; Aniplex and U.S.-headquartered Sony Pictures co-own U.S.-based anime distribution company Crunchyroll, which since 2022, has become the successor company to Funimation, which it acquired in 2017 and included subsidiaries such as Wakanim (absorbing into Crunchyroll itself) and Madman Anime (to be rebranded as Crunchyroll Pty. Ltd.)


title: Sony

text: In December 2020, Funimation announced that it would buy AT&T's animation business Crunchyroll for $1.175 billion, which would help the company to compete more globally with entertainment giants such as Netflix. This acquisition was completed in August 2021.


title: Sony

text: Sony Financial Group is a holding company for Sony's financial services business which includes Sony Life (in Japan and the Philippines), Sony Assurance, Sony Bank, etc. The unit proved to be the most profitable of Sony's businesses in FY 2005, earning $1.7 billion in profit. Sony Financial's low fees have aided the unit's popularity while threatening Sony's premium brand name.


title: Sony

text: A company behind the commercialization of lithium-ion battery, Sony had been exploring the possibility to manufacture the batteries for electric vehicles. In 2014, Sony participated within NRG Energy eVgo Ready for Electric Vehicle (REV) program, for EV charging parking lots. However, the company then decided to sell its lithium-ion battery business to Murata Manufacturing in 2016.


title: Sony

text: In 2015, Sony invested $842 thousand in ZMP INC., drawing speculations that it is contemplating developing self-driving cars. In January 2020, Sony unveiled a concept electric car at the Consumer Electronics Show, named Vision-S, designed in collaboration with components manufacturer Magna International. At the occasion, Sony also stated its goal of developing technology for the automotive sector, especially concerning autonomous driving, sensors, and in-car entertainment.


title: Sony

text: In 2022, Sony Group and Honda launched a joint venture for their electric vehicle partnership, (SHM), which would deliver its first electric vehicles by 2026 and sell them online, starting in the United States and Japan.


title: Sony

text: Sony is a "kabushiki gaisha" registered to the Tokyo Stock Exchange in Japan and the New York Stock Exchange for overseas trading. , the largest shareholders of Sony are as follows:


title: Sony

text: As of July 2020, Sony, one of the largest Japanese companies by market capitalization and operating profit, was valued at over $90 billion. At the same period, it was also recognized as the most cash-rich Japanese company, with its net cash reserves of ¥1.8 trillion.


title: Sony

text: The company was immensely profitable throughout the 1990s and early 2000s in part because of the success of its new PlayStation line. The company encountered financial difficulty in the mid- to late-2000s due to a number of factors: the global financial crisis, increased competition for PlayStation, and the devastating Japanese earthquake of 2011. The company faced three consecutive years of losses leading up to 2011. While noting the negative effects of intervening circumstances such as natural disasters and fluctuating currency exchange rates, the "Financial Times" criticized the company for its "lack of resilience" and "inability to gauge the economy," voicing skepticism about Sony's revitalization efforts, given a lack of tangible results.


title: Sony

text: In September 2000 Sony had a market capitalization of $100 billion; but by December 2011 it had plunged to $18 billion, reflecting falling prospects for Sony but also reflecting grossly inflated share prices of the 'dot-com bubble' years. Net worth, as measured by stockholder equity, has steadily grown from $17.9 billion in March 2002 to $35.6 billion through December 2011. Earnings yield (inverse of the price to earnings ratio) has never been more than 5% and usually much less; thus Sony has always traded in over-priced ranges with the exception of the 2009 market bottom.


title: Sony

text: On 9 December 2008, Sony announced that it would be cutting 8,000 jobs, dropping 8,000 contractors and reducing its global manufacturing sites by 10% to save $1.1 billion per year.


title: Sony

text: In April 2012, Sony announced that it would reduce its workforce by 10,000 (6% of its employee base) as part of CEO Kaz Hirai's effort to get the company back into the black. This came after a loss of 520 billion yen (roughly US$6.36 billion) for fiscal 2012, the worst since the company was founded. Accumulation loss for the past four years was 919.32 billion-yen. Sony planned to increase its marketing expenses by 30% in 2012. 1,000 of the jobs cut come from the company's mobile phone unit's workforce. 700 jobs will be cut in the 2012–2013 fiscal year and the remaining 300 in the following fiscal year. Sony had revenues of ¥6.493 trillion in 2012 and maintained large reserves of cash, with ¥895 billion on hand as of 2012. In May 2012, Sony's market capitalization was valued at about $15 billion.


title: Sony

text: In January 2013, Sony announced it was selling its US headquarters building for $1.1 billion to a consortium led by real estate developer The Chetrit Group.


title: Sony

text: On 28 January 2014, Moody's Investors Services dropped Sony's credit rating to Ba1—"judged to have speculative elements and a significant credit risk"—saying that the company's "profitability is likely to remain weak and volatile."


title: Sony

text: On 6 February 2014, Sony announced it would trim as many as 5,000 jobs as it attempts to sell its PC business and focus on mobile and tablets.


title: Sony

text: In 2014, Sony South Africa closed its TV, Hi-Fi and camera divisions with the purpose of reconsidering its local distribution model and, in 2017, it returned facilitated by Premium Brand Distributors (Pty) Ltd.


title: Sony

text: In November 2018, Sony posted its earning report for the second quarter showing it has lost about US$480 million in the mobile phone division, prompting another round of downsizing in the unit, including the closure of a manufacturing plant and halving of its workforce.


title: Sony

text: In November 2011, Sony was ranked ninth (jointly with Panasonic) in Greenpeace's Guide to Greener Electronics. This chart grades major electronics companies on their environmental work. The company scored 3.6/10, incurring a penalty point for comments it has made in opposition to energy efficiency standards in California. It also risks a further penalty point in future editions for being a member of trade associations that have commented against energy efficiency standards. Together with Philips, Sony receives the highest score for energy policy advocacy after calling on the EU to adopt an unconditional 30% reduction target for greenhouse gas emissions by 2020. Meanwhile, it receives full marks for the efficiency of its products. In June 2007, Sony ranked 14th on the Greenpeace guide. Sony fell from its earlier 11th-place ranking due to Greenpeace's claims that Sony had double standards in their waste policies.


title: Sony

text: Since 1976, Sony has had an Environmental Conference. Sony's policies address their effects on global warming, the environment, and resources. They are taking steps to reduce the amount of greenhouse gases that they put out as well as regulating the products they get from their suppliers in a process that they call "green procurement". Sony has said that they have signed on to have about 75 percent of their Sony Building running on geothermal power. The "Sony Take Back Recycling Program" allow consumers to recycle the electronics products that they buy from Sony by taking them to eCycle (Recycling) drop-off points around the U.S. The company has also developed a biobattery that runs on sugars and carbohydrates that works similarly to the way living creatures work. This is the most powerful small biobattery to date.


title: Sony

text: In 2000, Sony faced criticism for a document entitled "NGO Strategy" that was leaked to the press. The document involved the company's surveillance of environmental activists in an attempt to plan how to counter their movements. It specifically mentioned environmental groups that were trying to pass laws that held electronics-producing companies responsible for the cleanup of the toxic chemicals contained in their merchandise.


title: Sony

text: In 2007 an investigation launched in 2002 by the European Commission culminated in Sony, Fuji and Maxell receiving a total of 110 million US dollar fine for fixing professional videotape prices between the years 1999 and 2002 through regular meetings and other illegal contracts; at the time the three corporations shared a combined 85% control of the market. Sony's part of the fine was raised by a third for trying to obstruct the investigation by refusing to answer inquiries made by the EU officials and shredding of evidence during the multiple law-enforcement raids. During the year 2001 prior to the investigation Sony sold professional videotapes for a total of 115 million euros inside the EU.


title: Siberia

text: Siberia ( ; ) is an extensive geographical region, constituting all of North Asia, from the Ural Mountains in the west to the Pacific Ocean in the east. It has been a part of Russia since the latter half of the 16th century, after the Russians conquered lands east of the Ural Mountains. Siberia is vast and sparsely populated, covering an area of over , but home to merely one-fifth of Russia's population. Novosibirsk, Krasnoyarsk and Omsk are the largest cities in the region.


title: Siberia

text: Because Siberia is a geographic and historic region and not a political entity, there is no single precise definition of its territorial borders. Traditionally, Siberia extends eastwards from the Ural Mountains to the Pacific Ocean, and includes most of the drainage basin of the Arctic Ocean. The river Yenisey divides Siberia into two parts, Western and Eastern. Siberia stretches southwards from the Arctic Ocean to the hills of north-central Kazakhstan and to the northern parts of Mongolia and China. The central part of Siberia (West and East Siberian economic regions) was considered the core part of the region in the Soviet Union. Beyond the core, Siberia's western part includes some territories of the Ural region, and the far eastern part has been historically called the Russian Far East.


title: Siberia

text: Siberia is known worldwide primarily for its long, harsh winters, with a January average of −25 °C (−13 °F). It is geographically situated in Asia; however, having been colonized and incorporated into Russia, it is culturally and politically a part of Europe. European cultural influences, specifically Russian, predominate throughout the region, due to it having had Russian emigration from Europe since the 16th century, forming the Siberian Russian sub-ethnic group. Over 85% of the region's population is of European descent.


title: Siberia

text: The origin of the name is unknown. Some sources say that "Siberia" originates from the Siberian Tatar word for "sleeping land" (Sib ir). The modern usage of the name was recorded in the Russian language after the Russian conquest of Siberian Khanate. A further variant claims that the region was named after the Sibe people. The Polish historian Chyliczkowski has proposed that the name derives from the proto-Slavic word for "north" (север, "sever"), same as Severia. Anatole Baikaloff has dismissed this explanation. He said that the neighbouring Chinese, Turks, and Mongolians, who have similar names for the region, would not have known Russian. He suggests that the name might be a combination of two words with Turkic origin, ""su"" (water) and ""bir"" (wild land). Another account sees the name as the ancient tribal ethnonym of the (also "Syopyr" (sʲɵpᵻr)), a Paleoasiatic ethnic group assimilated by the Nenets.


title: Siberia

text: The region has paleontological significance, as it contains bodies of prehistoric animals from the Pleistocene Epoch, preserved in ice or in permafrost. Specimens of Goldfuss cave lion cubs, Yuka the mammoth and another woolly mammoth from Oymyakon, a woolly rhinoceros from the Kolyma, and bison and horses from Yukagir have been found.


title: Siberia

text: The Siberian Traps were formed by one of the largest-known volcanic events of the last 251 million years of Earth's geological history. Their activity continued for a million years and some scientists consider it a possible cause of the "Great Dying" about 250 million years ago, – estimated to have killed 90% of species existing at the time.


title: Siberia

text: At least three species of human lived in Southern Siberia around 40,000 years ago: "H. sapiens", "H. neanderthalensis", and the Denisovans.


title: Siberia

text: Late Paleolithic southern Siberians appear to be related to paleolithic Europeans and the paleolithic Jōmon people of Japan. Ancient DNA analysis has revealed that the oldest fossil known to carry the derived KITLG allele, which is responsible for blond hair in modern Europeans, is a 17,000 year old Ancient North Eurasian specimen from Siberia. Ancient North Eurasian populations genetically similar to Mal'ta–Buret' culture and Afontova Gora were an important genetic contributor to Native Americans, Europeans, Ancient Central Asians, South Asians, and some East Asian groups (such as the Ainu people). Evidence from full genomic studies suggests that the first people in the Americas diverged from Ancient East Asians about 36,000 years ago and expanded northwards into Siberia, where they encountered and interacted with Ancient North Eurasians, giving rise to both Paleosiberian peoples and Ancient Native Americans, which later migrated towards the Beringian region, became isolated from other populations, and subsequently populated the Americas.


title: Siberia

text: During past millennia different groups of nomads – such as the Enets, the Nenets, the Huns, the Xiongnu, the Scythians, and the Yugur inhabited various parts of Siberia. The Afanasievo and Tashtyk cultures of the Yenisey valley and Altay Mountains are associated with the Indo-European migrations across Eurasia. The proto-Mongol Khitan people also occupied parts of the region. In the 13th century, during the period of the Mongol Empire, the Mongols conquered a large part of this area.


title: Siberia

text: With the breakup of the Golden Horde, the autonomous Khanate of Sibir formed in the late-15th century. Turkic-speaking Yakut migrated north from the Lake Baikal region under pressure from the Mongol tribes during the 13th to 15th century. Siberia remained a sparsely populated area. Historian John F. Richards wrote: "... it is doubtful that the total early modern Siberian population exceeded 300,000 persons".


title: Siberia

text: The growing power of Russia in the West began to undermine the Siberian Khanate in the 16th century. First, groups of traders and Cossacks began to enter the area. The Russian Army was directed to establish forts farther and farther east to protect new Russian settlers who migrated from Europe. Towns such as Mangazeya, Tara, Yeniseysk, and Tobolsk developed, the last becoming the "de facto" capital of Siberia from 1590. At this time, "Sibir" was the name of a fortress at Qashliq, near Tobolsk. Gerardus Mercator, in a map published in 1595, marks "Sibier" both as the name of a settlement and of the surrounding territory along a left tributary of the Ob. Other sources contend that the Sibe, an indigenous Tungusic people, offered fierce resistance to Russian expansion beyond the Urals. Some suggest that the term "Siberia" is a russification of their ethnonym.


title: Siberia

text: By the mid-17th century, Russia had established areas of control that extended to the Pacific Ocean. Some 230,000 Russians had settled in Siberia by 1709. Siberia became one of the destinations for sending internal exiles. Exile was the main Russian punitive practice with more than 800,000 people exiled during the nineteenth century.


title: Siberia

text: The first great modern change in Siberia was the Trans-Siberian Railway, constructed during 1891–1916. It linked Siberia more closely to the rapidly industrialising Russia of Nicholas II (). Around seven million Russians moved to Siberia from Europe between 1801 and 1914. Between 1859 and 1917 more than half a million people migrated to the Russian Far East. Siberia has extensive natural resources: during the 20th century, large-scale exploitation of these took place, and industrial towns cropped up throughout the region.


title: Siberia

text: At 7:15 a.m. on 30 June 1908 the Tunguska Event felled millions of trees near the Podkamennaya Tunguska (Stony Tunguska) in central Siberia. Most scientists believe this resulted from the air burst of a meteor or a comet. Even though no crater has ever been found, the landscape in the (sparsely inhabited) area still bears the scars of this event.


title: Siberia

text: In the early decades of the Soviet Union (especially in the 1930s and 1940s), the government used the Gulag state agency to administer a system of penal labour camps, replacing the previous katorga system. According to semi-official Soviet estimates, which did not become public until after the fall of the Soviet government in 1991, from 1929 to 1953 more than 14 million people passed through these camps and prisons, many of them in Siberia. Another seven to eight million people were internally deported to remote areas of the Soviet Union (including entire nationalities or ethnicities in several cases).


title: Siberia

text: Half a million (516,841) prisoners died in camps from 1941 to 1943 during World War II. At other periods, mortality was comparatively lower. The size, scope, and scale of the Gulag slave-labour camps remain subjects of much research and debate. Many Gulag camps operated in extremely remote areas of northeastern Siberia. The best-known clusters included "Sevvostlag" ("the North-East Camps") along the Kolyma and "Norillag" near Norilsk, where 69,000 prisoners lived in 1952. Major industrial cities of Northern Siberia, such as Norilsk and Magadan, developed from camps built by prisoners and run by former prisoners.


title: Siberia

text: Siberia spans an area of , covering the vast majority of Russia's total territory, and almost 9% of Earth's land surface (). It geographically falls in Asia, but is culturally and politically considered European, since it is a part of Russia. Major geographical zones within Siberia include the West Siberian Plain and the Central Siberian Plateau.


title: Siberia

text: Eastern and central Sakha comprises numerous north–south mountain ranges of various ages. These mountains extend up to almost , but above a few hundred metres they are almost completely devoid of vegetation. The Verkhoyansk Range was extensively glaciated in the Pleistocene, but the climate was too dry for glaciation to extend to low elevations. At these low elevations are numerous valleys, many of them deep and covered with larch forest, except in the extreme north where the tundra dominates. Soils are mainly turbels (a type of gelisol). The active layer tends to be less than one metre deep, except near rivers.


title: Siberia

text: The highest point in Siberia is the active volcano Klyuchevskaya Sopka, on the Kamchatka Peninsula. Its peak reaches .


title: Siberia

text: The West Siberian Plain, consisting mostly of Cenozoic alluvial deposits, is somewhat flat. In the mid-Pleistocene, many deposits on this plain resulted from ice dams which produced a large glacial lake. This mid- to late-Pleistocene lake blocked the northward flow of the Ob and Yenisey rivers, resulting in a redirection southwest into the Caspian and Aral seas via the Turgai Valley. The area is very swampy, and soils are mostly peaty histosols and, in the treeless northern part, histels. In the south of the plain, where permafrost is largely absent, rich grasslands that are an extension of the Kazakh Steppe formed the original vegetation, most of which is no longer visible.


title: Siberia

text: The Central Siberian Plateau is an ancient craton (sometimes named "Angaraland") that formed an independent continent before the Permian (see the Siberian continent). It is exceptionally rich in minerals, containing large deposits of gold, diamonds, and ores of manganese, lead, zinc, nickel, cobalt, and molybdenum. Much of the area includes the Siberian Traps—a large igneous province. A massive eruptive period approximately coincided with the Permian–Triassic extinction event. The volcanic event is said to be the largest known volcanic eruption in Earth's history. Only the extreme northwest was glaciated during the Quaternary, but almost all is under exceptionally deep permafrost, and the only tree that can thrive, despite the warm summers, is the deciduous Siberian Larch ("Larix sibirica") with its very shallow roots. Outside the extreme northwest, the taiga is dominant, covering a significant fraction of the entirety of Siberia. Soils here are mainly turbels, giving way to spodosols where the active layer becomes thicker and the ice-content lower.


title: Siberia

text: The "Lena-Tunguska petroleum province" includes the Central Siberian platform (some authors refer to it as the "Eastern Siberian platform"), bounded on the northeast and east by the Late Carboniferous through Jurassic Verkhoyansk foldbelt, on the northwest by the Paleozoic Taymr foldbelt, and on the southeast, south and southwest by the Middle Silurian to Middle Devonian Baykalian foldbelt. A regional geologic reconnaissance study begun in 1932 and followed by surface and subsurface mapping revealed the Markova-Angara Arch (anticline). This led to the discovery of the Markovo Oil Field in 1962 with the Markovo—1 well, which produced from the Early Cambrian Osa Horizon bar-sandstone at a depth of . The "Sredne-Botuobin Gas Field" was discovered in 1970, producing from the Osa and the Proterozoic Parfenovo Horizon. The Yaraktin Oil Field was discovered in 1971, producing from the Vendian Yaraktin Horizon at depths of up to , which lies below Permian to Lower Jurassic basalt traps.


title: Siberia

text: The climate of Siberia varies dramatically, but it typically has short summers and long, brutally cold winters. On the north coast, north of the Arctic Circle, there is a very short (about one month long) summer.


title: Siberia

text: Almost all the population lives in the south, along the route of the Trans-Siberian Railway. The climate in this southernmost part is humid continental climate (Köppen "Dfb") with cold winters but fairly warm summers lasting at least four months. The annual average temperature is about . January averages about and July about , while daytime temperatures in summer typically exceed . With a reliable growing season, an abundance of sunshine and exceedingly fertile chernozem soils, southern Siberia is good enough for profitable agriculture, as was demonstrated in the early 20th century.


title: Siberia

text: By far the most commonly occurring climate in Siberia is continental subarctic (Koppen "Dfc" or "Dwc"), with the annual average temperature about and an average for January of and an average for July of , although this varies considerably, with a July average about in the taiga–tundra ecotone. The business-oriented website and blog "Business Insider" lists Verkhoyansk and Oymyakon, in Siberia's Sakha Republic, as being in competition for the title of the Northern Hemisphere's "Pole of Cold". Oymyakon is a village which recorded a temperature of on 6 February 1933. Verkhoyansk, a town further north and further inland, recorded a temperature of for three consecutive nights: 5, 6 and 7 February 1933. Each town is alternately considered the Northern Hemisphere's Pole of Cold – the coldest inhabited point in the Northern hemisphere. Each town also frequently reaches in the summer, giving them, and much of the rest of Russian Siberia, the world's greatest temperature-variation between summer's highs and winter's lows, often well over between the seasons.


title: Siberia

text: Southwesterly winds bring warm air from Central Asia and the Middle East. The climate in West Siberia (Omsk, or Novosibirsk) is several degrees warmer than in the East (Irkutsk, or Chita) where in the north an extreme winter subarctic climate (Köppen "Dfd" or "Dwd") prevails. But summer temperatures in other regions can reach . In general, Sakha is the coldest Siberian region, and the basin of the Yana has the lowest temperatures of all, with permafrost reaching . Nevertheless, Imperial Russian plans of settlement never viewed cold as an impediment. In the winter, southern Siberia sits near the center of the semi-permanent Siberian High, so winds are usually light in the winter.


title: Siberia

text: Precipitation in Siberia is generally low, exceeding only in Kamchatka, where moist winds flow from the Sea of Okhotsk onto high mountains – producing the region's only major glaciers, though volcanic eruptions and low summer temperatures allow only limited forests to grow. Precipitation is high also in most of Primorye in the extreme south, where monsoonal influences can produce quite heavy summer rainfall.


title: Siberia

text: Researchers, including Sergei Kirpotin at Tomsk State University and Judith Marquand at Oxford University, warn that Western Siberia has begun to thaw as a result of global warming. The frozen peat bogs in this region may hold billions of tons of methane gas, which may be released into the atmosphere. Methane is a greenhouse gas 22 times more powerful than carbon dioxide. In 2008 a research expedition for the American Geophysical Union detected levels of methane up to 100 times above normal in the atmosphere above the Siberian Arctic, likely the result of methane clathrates being released through holes in a frozen "lid" of seabed permafrost around the outfall of the Lena and the area between the Laptev Sea and East Siberian Sea.


title: Siberia

text: Since 1988, experimentation at Pleistocene Park has proposed to restore the grasslands of prehistoric times by conducting research on the effects of large herbivores on permafrost, suggesting that animals, rather than climate, maintained the past ecosystem. The nature reserve park also conducts climatic research on the changes expected from the reintroduction of grazing animals or large herbivores, hypothesizing that a transition from tundra to grassland would lead to a net change in energy emission to absorption ratios.


title: Siberia

text: According to Vasily Kryuchkov, approximately 31,000 square kilometers of the Russian Arctic has subjected to severe environmental disturbance.


title: Siberia

text: The term "Siberia" has both a long history and wide significance, and association. The understanding, and association of "Siberia" have gradually changed during the ages. Historically, Siberia was defined as the whole part of Russia and North Kazakhstan to the east of Ural Mountains, including the Russian Far East. According to this definition, Siberia extended eastward from the Ural Mountains to the Pacific coast, and southward from the Arctic Ocean to the border of Central Asia and the national borders of both Mongolia and China.


title: Siberia

text: Soviet-era sources ("Great Soviet Encyclopedia" and others) and modern Russian ones usually define Siberia as a region extending eastward from the Ural Mountains to the watershed between Pacific and Arctic drainage basins, and southward from the Arctic Ocean to the hills of north-central Kazakhstan and the national borders of both Mongolia and China. By this definition, Siberia includes the federal subjects of the Siberian Federal District, and some of the Ural Federal District, as well as Sakha (Yakutia) Republic, which is a part of the Far Eastern Federal District. Geographically, this definition includes subdivisions of several other subjects of Urals and Far Eastern federal districts, but they are not included administratively. This definition excludes Sverdlovsk Oblast and Chelyabinsk Oblast, both of which are included in some wider definitions of Siberia.


title: Siberia

text: Other sources may use either a somewhat wider definition that states the Pacific coast, not the watershed, is the eastern boundary (thus including the whole Russian Far East), as well as all Northern Kazakhstan is its subregion in the south-west or a somewhat narrower one that limits Siberia to the Siberian Federal District (thus excluding all subjects of other districts). In Russian, 'Siberia' is commonly used as a substitute for the name of the federal district by those who live in the district itself, but less commonly used to denote the federal district by people residing outside of it. Due to the different interpretations of Siberia, starting from Tyumen, to Chita, the territory generally defined as 'Siberia', some people will define themselves as 'Siberian', while others not.


title: Siberia

text: A number of factors in recent years, including the fomenting of 'Siberian separatism' have made the definition of the territory of Siberia a potentially controversial subject. In the eastern extent of Siberia there are territories which are not clearly defined as either Siberia or the Far East, making the question of 'what is Siberia?' one with no clear answer, and what is a 'Siberian', one of self-identification.


title: Siberia

text: The most populous city of Siberia, as well as the third most populous city of Russia, is the city of Novosibirsk. Present-day Novosibirsk is an important business, science, manufacturing and cultural center of the Asian part of Russia.


title: Siberia

text: Omsk played an important role in the Russian Civil War serving as a provisional Russian capital, as well in the expansion into and governing of Central Asia. In addition to its cultural status, it has become a major oil-refining, education, transport and agriculture hub.


title: Siberia

text: Other historic cities of Siberia include Tobolsk (the first capital and the only kremlin in Siberia), Tomsk (formerly a wealthy merchant's town) and Irkutsk (former seat of Eastern Siberia's governor general, near lake Baikal).


title: Siberia

text: Wider definitions of geographic Siberia also include the cities of: Chelyabinsk and Yekaterinburg in the Urals, Khabarovsk and Vladivostok in the Russian Far East, and even Petropavlovsk in Kazakhstan and Harbin in China.


title: Siberia

text: Novosibirsk is the largest by population and the most important city for the Siberian economy; with an extra boost since 2000 when it was designated a regional center for the executive bureaucracy (Siberian Federal District). Omsk is a historic and currently the second largest city in the region, and since 1950s hosting Russia's largest oil refinery.


title: Siberia

text: Siberia is extraordinarily rich in minerals, containing ores of almost all economically valuable metals. It has some of the world's largest deposits of nickel, gold, lead, coal, molybdenum, gypsum, diamonds, diopside, silver and zinc, as well as extensive unexploited resources of oil and natural gas. Around 70% of Russia's developed oil fields are in the Khanty-Mansiysk region. Russia contains about 40% of the world's known resources of nickel at the Norilsk deposit in Siberia. Norilsk Nickel is the world's biggest nickel and palladium producer.


title: Siberia

text: Siberian agriculture is severely restricted by the short growing season of most of the region. However, in the southwest where soils consist of exceedingly fertile black earths and the climate is a little more moderate, there is extensive cropping of wheat, barley, rye and potatoes, along with the grazing of large numbers of sheep and cattle. Elsewhere food production, owing to the poor fertility of the podzolic soils and the extremely short growing seasons, is restricted to the herding of reindeer in the tundra—which has been practiced by natives for over 10,000 years. Siberia has the world's largest forests. Timber remains an important source of revenue, even though many forests in the east have been logged much more rapidly than they are able to recover. The Sea of Okhotsk is one of the two or three richest fisheries in the world owing to its cold currents and very large tidal ranges, and thus Siberia produces over 10% of the world's annual fish catch, although fishing has declined somewhat since the collapse of the USSR in 1991.


title: Siberia

text: Reported in 2009, the development of renewable energy in Russia is held back by the lack of a conducive government policy framework, , Siberia still offers special opportunities for off-grid renewable energy developments. Remote parts of Siberia are too costly to connect to central electricity and gas grids, and have therefore historically been supplied with costly diesel, sometimes flown in by helicopter. In such cases renewable energy is often cheaper.


title: Siberia

text: Russia's third most popular sport, bandy, is important in Siberia. In the 2015–16 Russian Bandy Super League season Yenisey from Krasnoyarsk became champions for the third year in a row by beating Baykal-Energiya from Irkutsk in the final. Two or three more teams (depending on the definition of Siberia) play in the Super League, the 2016–17 champions SKA-Neftyanik from Khabarovsk as well as Kuzbass from Kemerovo and Sibselmash from Novosibirsk. In 2007 Kemerovo got Russia's first indoor arena specifically built for bandy. Now Khabarovsk has the world's largest indoor arena specifically built for bandy, Arena Yerofey. It was venue for Division A of the 2018 World Championship. In time for the 2020 World Championship, an indoor arena will be ready for use in Irkutsk. That one will also have a speed skating oval.


title: Siberia

text: According to the Russian Census of 2010, the Siberian and Far Eastern Federal Districts, located entirely east of the Ural Mountains, together have a population of about 25.6 million. Tyumen and Kurgan Oblasts, which are geographically in Siberia but administratively part of the Urals Federal District, together have a population of about 4.3 million. Thus, the whole region of Siberia (in the broadest usage of the term) is home to approximately 30 million people. It has a population density of about three people per square kilometre.


title: Siberia

text: The largest ethnic group in Siberia is Slavic-origin Russians, including their sub-ethnic group Siberians, and russified Ukrainians. There are also other groups of indigenous Siberian and non-indigenous ethnic origin. A minority of the current population are descendants of Mongol or Turkic people (Buryats, Yakuts) or northern indigenous people.


title: Siberia

text: The largest non-Slavic groups are the Volga Germans and Russified Romanians with ancestral origins in Bessarabia (present-day Moldova). The original indigenous groups of Siberia, including Mongol and Turkic groups such as Buryats, Tuvinians and Siberian Tatars, are minorities outnumbered by all other non-indigenous Siberians. Indeed, Slavic-origin Russians by themselves outnumber all of the indigenous peoples combined, both in Siberia as a whole and its cities, except in the Republics of Tuva and Sakha.


title: Siberia

text: Slavic-origin Russians make up the majority in the Buryat and Altai Republics, outnumbering indigenous Buryats and Altai. The Buryat make up only 30% of their own republic, and the Altai each are only one-third, and the Chukchi, Evenk, Khanty, Mansi, and Nenets are outnumbered by non-indigenous peoples by 90% of the population.


title: Siberia

text: According to the 2002 census there are 500,000 Tatars in Siberia, but of these, 300,000 are Volga Tatars who also settled in Siberia during periods of colonization and are thus also non-indigenous Siberians, in contrast to the 200,000 Siberian Tatars which are indigenous to Siberia.


title: Siberia

text: Of the indigenous Siberians, the Mongol-speaking Buryats, numbering approximately 500,000, are the most numerous group in Siberia, and they are mainly concentrated in their homeland, the Buryat Republic. According to the 2010 census there were 478,085 indigenous Turkic-speaking Yakuts. Other ethnic groups indigenous to Siberia include Kets, Evenks, Chukchis, Koryaks, Yupiks, and Yukaghirs.


title: Siberia

text: About seventy percent of Siberia's people live in cities, mainly in apartments. Many people also live in rural areas, in simple, spacious, log houses. Novosibirsk is the largest city in Siberia, with a population of about 1.6 million. Tobolsk, Tomsk, Tyumen, Krasnoyarsk, Irkutsk, and Omsk are the older, historical centers.


title: Siberia

text: There are a variety of beliefs throughout Siberia, including Orthodox Christianity, other denominations of Christianity, Tibetan Buddhism and Islam. The Siberian Federal District alone has an estimation of 250,000 Muslims.


title: Siberia

text: An estimated 70,000 Jews live in Siberia, some in the Jewish Autonomous Region. The predominant religious group is the Russian Orthodox Church.


title: Siberia

text: Tradition regards Siberia the archetypal home of shamanism, and polytheism is popular. These native sacred practices are considered by the tribes to be very ancient. There are records of Siberian tribal healing practices dating back to the 13th century. The vast territory of Siberia has many different local traditions of gods. These include: Ak Ana, Anapel, Bugady Musun, Kara Khan, Khaltesh-Anki, Kini'je, Ku'urkil, Nga, Nu'tenut, Num-Torum, Pon, Pugu, Todote, Toko'yoto, Tomam, Xaya Iccita and Zonget. Places with sacred areas include Olkhon, an island in Lake Baikal.


title: Siberia

text: Many cities in northern Siberia, such as Petropavlovsk-Kamchatsky, cannot be reached by road, as there are virtually none connecting from other major cities in Russia or Asia. Siberia can be reached through the Trans-Siberian Railway. The Trans-Siberian Railway operates from Moscow in the west to Vladivostok in the east. Cities that are located far from the railway are reached by air or by the separate Baikal–Amur Railway (BAM).


title: Siberia

text: Stroganina is a raw fish dish of the indigenous people of northern Arctic Siberia made from raw, thin, long-sliced frozen fish. It is a popular dish with native Siberians. Siberia is also known for its pelmeni dumpling; which in the winter are traditionally frozen and stored outdoors. In addition, there are various berry, nut and mushroom dishes making use of the riches of abundant nature.


title: Czechoslovakia

text: Czechoslovakia (; Czech and , "Česko-Slovensko") was a sovereign state in Central Europe, created in 1918, when it declared its independence from Austria-Hungary. In 1938, after the Munich Agreement, the Sudetenland became part of Germany, while the country lost further territories to Hungary and Poland. Between 1939 and 1945 the state ceased to exist, as Slovakia proclaimed its independence and the remaining territories in the east became part of Hungary, while in the remainder of the Czech Lands the German Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia was proclaimed. In 1939, after the outbreak of World War II, former Czechoslovak President Edvard Beneš formed a government-in-exile and sought recognition from the Allies.


title: Czechoslovakia

text: After World War II, the pre-1938 Czechoslovakia was reestablished, with the exception of Carpathian Ruthenia, which became part of the Ukrainian SSR (a republic of the Soviet Union). From 1948 to 1989, Czechoslovakia was part of the Eastern Bloc with a command economy. Its economic status was formalized in membership of Comecon from 1949 and its defense status in the Warsaw Pact of 1955. A period of political liberalization in 1968, the Prague Spring, ended violently when the Soviet Union, assisted by other Warsaw Pact countries, invaded Czechoslovakia. In 1989, as Marxist–Leninist governments and communism were ending all over Central and Eastern Europe, Czechoslovaks peacefully deposed their communist government on 17 November 1989 in the Velvet Revolution. On 1 January 1993, Czechoslovakia peacefully split into the two sovereign states of the Czech Republic and Slovakia as the result of national tensions of the Slovaks.


title: Czechoslovakia

text: The country was of generally irregular terrain. The western area was part of the north-central European uplands. The eastern region was composed of the northern reaches of the Carpathian Mountains and lands of the Danube River basin.


title: Czechoslovakia

text: The weather is mild winters and mild summers. Influenced by the Atlantic Ocean from the west, the Baltic Sea from the north, and Mediterranean Sea from the south. There is no continental weather.


title: Czechoslovakia

text: The area was part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire until it collapsed at the end of World War I. The new state was founded by Tomáš Garrigue Masaryk, who served as its first president from 14 November 1918 to 14 December 1935. He was succeeded by his close ally Edvard Beneš (1884–1948).


title: Czechoslovakia

text: The roots of Czech nationalism go back to the 19th century, when philologists and educators, influenced by Romanticism, promoted the Czech language and pride in the Czech people. Nationalism became a mass movement in the second half of the 19th century. Taking advantage of the limited opportunities for participation in political life under Austrian rule, Czech leaders such as historian František Palacký (1798–1876) founded various patriotic, self-help organizations which provided a chance for many of their compatriots to participate in communal life before independence. Palacký supported Austro-Slavism and worked for a reorganized federal Austrian Empire, which would protect the Slavic speaking peoples of Central Europe against Russian and German threats.


title: Czechoslovakia

text: An advocate of democratic reform and Czech autonomy within Austria-Hungary, Masaryk was elected twice to the "Reichsrat" (Austrian Parliament), from 1891 to 1893 for the Young Czech Party, and from 1907 to 1914 for the Czech Realist Party, which he had founded in 1889 with Karel Kramář and Josef Kaizl.


title: Czechoslovakia

text: During World War I a number of Czechs and Slovaks, the Czechoslovak Legions, fought with the Allies in France and Italy, while large numbers deserted to Russia in exchange for its support for the independence of Czechoslovakia from the Austrian Empire. With the outbreak of World War I, Masaryk began working for Czech independence in a union with Slovakia. With Edvard Beneš and Milan Rastislav Štefánik, Masaryk visited several Western countries and won support from influential publicists. The Czechoslovak National Council was the main organization that advanced the claims for a Czechoslovak state.


title: Czechoslovakia

text: The Bohemian Kingdom ceased to exist in 1918 when it was incorporated into Czechoslovakia. Czechoslovakia was founded in October 1918, as one of the successor states of the Austro-Hungarian Empire at the end of World War I and as part of the Treaty of Saint-Germain-en-Laye. It consisted of the present day territories of Bohemia, Moravia, Slovakia and Carpathian Ruthenia. Its territory included some of the most industrialized regions of the former Austria-Hungary. "The land consisted of modern day Czechia, Slovakia, and a region of Ukraine called Carpathian Ruthnia


title: Czechoslovakia

text: The new country was a multi-ethnic state, with Czechs and Slovaks as "constituent peoples". The population consisted of Czechs (51%), Slovaks (16%), Germans (22%), Hungarians (5%) and Rusyns (4%). Many of the Germans, Hungarians, Ruthenians and Poles and some Slovaks, felt oppressed because the political elite did not generally allow political autonomy for minority ethnic groups. This policy led to unrest among the non-Czech population, particularly in German-speaking Sudetenland, which initially had proclaimed itself part of the Republic of German-Austria in accordance with the self-determination principle.


title: Czechoslovakia

text: The state proclaimed the official ideology that there were no separate Czech and Slovak nations, but only one nation of Czechoslovaks (see Czechoslovakism), to the disagreement of Slovaks and other ethnic groups. Once a unified Czechoslovakia was restored after World War II (after the country had been divided during the war), the conflict between the Czechs and the Slovaks surfaced again. The governments of Czechoslovakia and other Central European nations deported ethnic Germans, reducing the presence of minorities in the nation. Most of the Jews had been killed during the war by the Nazis.


title: Czechoslovakia

text: During the period between the two world wars Czechoslovakia was a democratic state. The population was generally literate, and contained fewer alienated groups. The influence of these conditions was augmented by the political values of Czechoslovakia's leaders and the policies they adopted. Under Tomas Masaryk, Czech and Slovak politicians promoted progressive social and economic conditions that served to defuse discontent.


title: Czechoslovakia

text: Foreign minister Beneš became the prime architect of the Czechoslovak-Romanian-Yugoslav alliance (the "Little Entente", 1921–38) directed against Hungarian attempts to reclaim lost areas. Beneš worked closely with France. Far more dangerous was the German element, which after 1933 became allied with the Nazis in Germany.


title: Czechoslovakia

text: Czech-Slovak relations came to be a central issue in Czechoslovak politics during the 1930s. The increasing feeling of inferiority among the Slovaks, who were hostile to the more numerous Czechs, weakened the country in the late 1930s. Slovakia became autonomous in the fall of 1938, and by mid-1939, Slovakia had become independent, with the First Slovak Republic set up as a satellite state of Nazi Germany and the far-right Slovak People’s Party in power .


title: Czechoslovakia

text: In September 1938, Adolf Hitler demanded control of the Sudetenland. On 29 September 1938, Britain and France ceded control in the Appeasement at the Munich Conference; France ignored the military alliance it had with Czechoslovakia. During October 1938, Nazi Germany occupied the Sudetenland border region, effectively crippling Czechoslovak defences.


title: Czechoslovakia

text: The First Vienna Award assigned a strip of southern Slovakia and Carpathian Ruthenia to Hungary. Poland occupied Zaolzie, an area whose population was majority Polish, in October 1938.


title: Czechoslovakia

text: On 14 March 1939, the remainder ("rump") of Czechoslovakia was dismembered by the proclamation of the Slovak State, the next day the rest of Carpathian Ruthenia was occupied and annexed by Hungary, while the following day the German Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia was proclaimed.


title: Czechoslovakia

text: The eventual goal of the German state under Nazi leadership was to eradicate Czech nationality through assimilation, deportation, and extermination of the Czech intelligentsia; the intellectual elites and middle class made up a considerable number of the 200,000 people who passed through concentration camps and the 250,000 who died during German occupation. Under Generalplan Ost, it was assumed that around 50% of Czechs would be fit for Germanization. The Czech intellectual elites were to be removed not only from Czech territories but from Europe completely. The authors of Generalplan Ost believed it would be best if they emigrated overseas, as even in Siberia they were considered a threat to German rule. Just like Jews, Poles, Serbs, and several other nations, Czechs were considered to be untermenschen by the Nazi state. In 1940, in a secret Nazi plan for the Germanization of the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia it was declared that those considered to be of racially Mongoloid origin and the Czech intelligentsia were not to be Germanized.


title: Czechoslovakia

text: The deportation of Jews to concentration camps was organized under the direction of Reinhard Heydrich, and the fortress town of Terezín was made into a ghetto way station for Jewish families. On 4 June 1942 Heydrich died after being wounded by an assassin in Operation Anthropoid. Heydrich's successor, Colonel General Kurt Daluege, ordered mass arrests and executions and the destruction of the villages of Lidice and Ležáky. In 1943 the German war effort was accelerated. Under the authority of Karl Hermann Frank, German minister of state for Bohemia and Moravia, some 350,000 Czech laborers were dispatched to the Reich. Within the protectorate, all non-war-related industry was prohibited. Most of the Czech population obeyed quiescently up until the final months preceding the end of the war, while thousands were involved in the resistance movement.


title: Czechoslovakia

text: For the Czechs of the Protectorate Bohemia and Moravia, German occupation was a period of brutal oppression. Czech losses resulting from political persecution and deaths in concentration camps totaled between 36,000 and 55,000. The Jewish populations of Bohemia and Moravia (118,000 according to the 1930 census) were virtually annihilated. Many Jews emigrated after 1939; more than 70,000 were killed; 8,000 survived at Terezín. Several thousand Jews managed to live in freedom or in hiding throughout the occupation.


title: Czechoslovakia

text: Despite the estimated 136,000 deaths at the hands of the Nazi regime, the population in the Reichsprotektorate saw a net increase during the war years of approximately 250,000 in line with an increased birth rate.


title: Czechoslovakia

text: On 6 May 1945, the third US Army of General Patton entered Pilsen from the south west. On 9 May 1945, Soviet Red Army troops entered Prague.


title: Czechoslovakia

text: After World War II, pre-war Czechoslovakia was re-established, with the exception of Subcarpathian Ruthenia, which was annexed by the Soviet Union and incorporated into the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic. The Beneš decrees were promulgated concerning ethnic Germans (see Potsdam Agreement) and ethnic Hungarians. Under the decrees, citizenship was abrogated for people of German and Hungarian ethnic origin who had accepted German or Hungarian citizenship during the occupations. In 1948, this provision was cancelled for the Hungarians, but only partially for the Germans. The government then confiscated the property of the Germans and expelled about 90% of the ethnic German population, over 2 million people. Those who remained were collectively accused of supporting the Nazis after the Munich Agreement, as 97.32% of Sudeten Germans had voted for the NSDAP in the December 1938 elections. Almost every decree explicitly stated that the sanctions did not apply to antifascists. Some 250,000 Germans, many married to Czechs, some antifascists, and also those required for the post-war reconstruction of the country, remained in Czechoslovakia. The Beneš Decrees still cause controversy among nationalist groups in the Czech Republic, Germany, Austria and Hungary.


title: Czechoslovakia

text: Following the expulsion of the ethnic German population from Czechoslovakia, parts of the former Sudetenland, especially around Krnov and the surrounding villages of the Jesenik mountain region in northeastern Czechoslovakia, were settled in 1949 by Communist refugees from Northern Greece who had left their homeland as a result of the Greek Civil War. These Greeks made up a large proportion of the town and region's population until the late 1980s/early 1990s. Although defined as "Greeks", the Greek Communist community of Krnov and the Jeseniky region actually consisted of an ethnically diverse population, including Greek Macedonians, Slavo-Macedonians, Vlachs, Pontic Greeks and Turkish speaking Urums or Caucasus Greeks.


title: Czechoslovakia

text: Carpathian Ruthenia (Podkarpatská Rus) was occupied by (and in June 1945 formally ceded to) the Soviet Union. In the 1946 parliamentary election, the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia was the winner in the Czech lands, and the Democratic Party won in Slovakia. In February 1948 the Communists seized power. Although they would maintain the fiction of political pluralism through the existence of the National Front, except for a short period in the late 1960s (the Prague Spring) the country had no liberal democracy. Since citizens lacked significant electoral methods of registering protest against government policies, periodically there were street protests that became violent. For example, there were riots in the town of Plzeň in 1953, reflecting economic discontent. Police and army units put down the rebellion, and hundreds were injured but no one was killed. While its economy remained more advanced than those of its neighbors in Eastern Europe, Czechoslovakia grew increasingly economically weak relative to Western Europe.


title: Czechoslovakia

text: The currency reform of 1953 caused dissatisfaction among Czechoslovak laborers. To equalize the wage rate, Czechoslovaks had to turn in their old money for new at a decreased value. The banks also confiscated savings and bank deposits to control the amount of money in circulation. In the 1950s, Czechoslovakia experienced high economic growth (averaging 7% per year), which allowed for a substantial increase in wages and living standards, thus promoting the stability of the regime.


title: Czechoslovakia

text: In 1968, when the reformer Alexander Dubček was appointed to the key post of First Secretary of the Czechoslovak Communist Party, there was a brief period of liberalization known as the Prague Spring. In response, after failing to persuade the Czechoslovak leaders to change course, five other members of the Warsaw Pact invaded. Soviet tanks rolled into Czechoslovakia on the night of 20–21 August 1968. Soviet Communist Party General Secretary Leonid Brezhnev viewed this intervention as vital for the preservation of the Soviet, socialist system and vowed to intervene in any state that sought to replace Marxism-Leninism with capitalism.


title: Czechoslovakia

text: In the week after the invasion there was a spontaneous campaign of civil resistance against the occupation. This resistance involved a wide range of acts of non-cooperation and defiance: this was followed by a period in which the Czechoslovak Communist Party leadership, having been forced in Moscow to make concessions to the Soviet Union, gradually put the brakes on their earlier liberal policies.


title: Czechoslovakia

text: Meanwhile, one plank of the reform program had been carried out: in 1968–69, Czechoslovakia was turned into a federation of the Czech Socialist Republic and Slovak Socialist Republic. The theory was that under the federation, social and economic inequities between the Czech and Slovak halves of the state would be largely eliminated. A number of ministries, such as education, now became two formally equal bodies in the two formally equal republics. However, the centralized political control by the Czechoslovak Communist Party severely limited the effects of federalization.


title: Czechoslovakia

text: The 1970s saw the rise of the dissident movement in Czechoslovakia, represented among others by Václav Havel. The movement sought greater political participation and expression in the face of official disapproval, manifested in limitations on work activities, which went as far as a ban on professional employment, the refusal of higher education for the dissidents' children, police harassment and prison.


title: Czechoslovakia

text: In 1989, the Velvet Revolution restored democracy. This occurred at around the same time as the fall of communism in Romania, Bulgaria, Hungary, East Germany and Poland.


title: Czechoslovakia

text: The word "socialist" was removed from the country's full name on 29 March 1990 and replaced by "federal".


title: Czechoslovakia

text: Pope John Paul II made a papal visit to Czechoslovakia on 21 April 1990, hailing it as a symbolic step of reviving Christianity in the newly-formed post-communist state.


title: Czechoslovakia

text: Czechoslovakia participated in the Gulf War with a small force of 200 troops under the command of the U.S.-led coalition.


title: Czechoslovakia

text: In 1992, because of growing nationalist tensions in the government, Czechoslovakia was peacefully dissolved by parliament. On 31 December 1992 it formally separated into two independent countries, the Czech Republic and the Slovak Republic.


title: Czechoslovakia

text: After World War II, a political monopoly was held by the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia (KSČ). The leader of the KSČ was "de facto" the most powerful person in the country during this period. Gustáv Husák was elected first secretary of the KSČ in 1969 (changed to general secretary in 1971) and president of Czechoslovakia in 1975. Other parties and organizations existed but functioned in subordinate roles to the KSČ. All political parties, as well as numerous mass organizations, were grouped under umbrella of the National Front. Human rights activists and religious activists were severely repressed.


title: Czechoslovakia

text: In the 1930s, the nation formed a military alliance with France, which collapsed in the Munich Agreement of 1938. After World War II, an active participant in Council for Mutual Economic Assistance (Comecon), Warsaw Pact, United Nations and its specialized agencies; signatory of conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe.


title: Czechoslovakia

text: Before World War II, the economy was about the fourth in all industrial countries in Europe. The state was based on strong economy, manufacturing cars (Škoda, Tatra), trams, aircraft (Aero, Avia), ships, ship engines (Škoda), cannons, shoes (Baťa), turbines, guns (Zbrojovka Brno). It was the industrial workshop for the Austro-Hungarian empire. The Slovak lands relied more heavily on agriculture than the Czech lands.


title: Czechoslovakia

text: After World War II, the economy was centrally planned, with command links controlled by the communist party, similarly to the Soviet Union. The large metallurgical industry was dependent on imports of iron and non-ferrous ores.


title: Czechoslovakia

text: After World War II, the country was short of energy, relying on imported crude oil and natural gas from the Soviet Union, domestic brown coal, and nuclear and hydroelectric energy. Energy constraints were a major factor in the 1980s.


title: Czechoslovakia

text: Slightly after the foundation of Czechoslovakia in 1918, there was a lack of essential infrastructure in many areas – paved roads, railways, bridges, etc. Massive improvement in the following years enabled Czechoslovakia to develop its industry. Prague's civil airport in Ruzyně became one of the most modern terminals in the world when it was finished in 1937. Tomáš Baťa, a Czech entrepreneur and visionary, outlined his ideas in the publication "Budujme stát pro 40 milionů lidí", where he described the future motorway system. Construction of the first motorways in Czechoslovakia begun in 1939, nevertheless, they were stopped after German occupation during World War II.


title: Czechoslovakia

text: Education was free at all levels and compulsory from ages 6 to 15. The vast majority of the population was literate. There was a highly developed system of apprenticeship training and vocational schools supplemented general secondary schools and institutions of higher education.


title: Czechoslovakia

text: In 1991, 46% of the population were Roman Catholics, 5.3% were Evangelical Lutheran, 30% were Atheist, and other religions made up 17% of the country, but there were huge differences in religious practices between the two constituent republics; see Czech Republic and Slovakia.


title: Czechoslovakia

text: After World War II, free health care was available to all citizens. National health planning emphasized preventive medicine; factory and local health care centres supplemented hospitals and other inpatient institutions. There was a substantial improvement in rural health care during the 1960s and 1970s.


title: Czechoslovakia

text: During the era between the World Wars, Czechoslovak democracy and liberalism facilitated conditions for free publication. The most significant daily newspapers in these times were Lidové noviny, Národní listy, Český deník and Československá Republika.


title: Czechoslovakia

text: During Communist rule, the mass media in Czechoslovakia were controlled by the Communist Party. Private ownership of any publication or agency of the mass media was generally forbidden, although churches and other organizations published small periodicals and newspapers. Even with this information monopoly in the hands of organizations under KSČ control, all publications were reviewed by the government's Office for Press and Information.


title: Czechoslovakia

text: The Czechoslovakia national football team was a consistent performer on the international scene, with eight appearances in the FIFA World Cup Finals, finishing in second place in 1934 and 1962. The team also won the European Football Championship in 1976, came in third in 1980 and won the Olympic gold in 1980.


title: Czechoslovakia

text: Well-known football players such as Pavel Nedvěd, Antonín Panenka, Milan Baroš, Tomáš Rosický, Vladimír Šmicer or Petr Čech were all born in Czechoslovakia.


title: Czechoslovakia

text: The International Olympic Committee code for Czechoslovakia is TCH, which is still used in historical listings of results.


title: Czechoslovakia

text: The Czechoslovak national ice hockey team won many medals from the world championships and Olympic Games. Peter Šťastný, Jaromír Jágr, Dominik Hašek, Peter Bondra, Petr Klíma, Marián Gáborík, Marián Hossa, Miroslav Šatan and Pavol Demitra all come from Czechoslovakia.


title: Czechoslovakia

text: Emil Zátopek, winner of four Olympic gold medals in athletics, is considered one of the top athletes in Czechoslovak history.


title: Czechoslovakia

text: Věra Čáslavská was an Olympic gold medallist in gymnastics, winning seven gold medals and four silver medals. She represented Czechoslovakia in three consecutive Olympics.


title: Czechoslovakia

text: Several accomplished professional tennis players including Jaroslav Drobný, Ivan Lendl, Jan Kodeš, Miloslav Mečíř, Hana Mandlíková, Martina Hingis, Martina Navratilova, Jana Novotna, Petra Kvitová and Daniela Hantuchová were born in Czechoslovakia.


title: Downton Abbey: A New Era

text: Downton Abbey: A New Era is a 2022 historical drama film and the sequel to the 2019 film "Downton Abbey". Both films were written by Julian Fellowes, the creator and writer of the television series of the same name, with the sequel being directed by Simon Curtis, replacing Michael Engler who directed the first film.


title: Downton Abbey: A New Era

text: "Downton Abbey: A New Era" was released in the United Kingdom on 29 April 2022 by Universal Pictures and was released in the United States on 20 May by Focus Features. Like the first film, it received generally positive reviews from critics.


title: Downton Abbey: A New Era

text: In 1928, Tom Branson, the Earl of Grantham's widowed son-in-law, marries Lucy Smith, the illegitimate daughter of and sole heir to Lady Maud Bagshaw, Queen Mary's lady-in-waiting. Violet Crawley, the Dowager Countess of Grantham, astonishes the family by revealing that long ago she was gifted a villa in the South of France by the Marquis de Montmirail, who has recently passed away. She is leaving it to her great-granddaughter, Sybbie, Tom's daughter with the late Lady Sybil Crawley, to ensure that she has a more equal social and financial standing to her cousins.


title: Downton Abbey: A New Era

text: A film production company wants to use Downton to shoot a silent film called "The Gambler". Robert declines, until his eldest daughter and estate manager, Lady Mary Talbot, convinces him that the fee would be enough to replace Downton's leaking roof. The household staff are eager to see the film stars, but lead actress Myrna Dalgliesh's haughtiness offends them.


title: Downton Abbey: A New Era

text: The new marquis invites the family to visit the villa. The ailing Violet is unable to travel, but Tom and Lucy, Lady Bagshaw, Robert Crawley and his wife Cora, and their daughter Edith (the Marchioness of Hexham) and her husband, Bertie Pelham (the Marquess of Hexham), accept. Lady Mary remains at Downton to oversee the filming.


title: Downton Abbey: A New Era

text: Montmirail welcomes the family to the villa. His mother wants to contest Violet Crawley's ownership. However, the family lawyer states that there is no basis for a claim and so the villa is legally Violet's. The marquis speaks privately with Robert and stuns him by implying that Robert's birth date, nine months after the Dowager Countess visited in 1864, could mean they are half-brothers. That night, Cora reveals to Robert she may be fatally ill. Robert breaks down at the prospect of losing his mother, the Crawley name, and his wife in short succession.


title: Downton Abbey: A New Era

text: At Downton, the studio cancels "The Gambler" because silent films are no longer profitable in the wake of "talkie" films. Lady Mary suggests salvaging the project by dubbing in the dialogue for the completed scenes. Lead actor Guy Dexter's voice is suitable, but Myrna Dalgleish's cockney accent is inappropriate for her upper-class character. Mrs Hughes suggests that Lady Mary could dub Dalgleish's voice. Fearing her career is ruined, Dalgleish quits, but Downton servants Anna and Daisy persuade her to complete the film. Former Downton footman Mr Molesley, who can lip-read, reconstructs the dialogue for dubbing, and creates a dialogued script for the remaining story.


title: Downton Abbey: A New Era

text: The family returns to Downton while filming continues. Lady Mary rebuffs director Jack Barber's flirtations, although her husband Henry's prolonged absence for a car rally has strained their marriage. Downton's closeted butler, Thomas Barrow, accepts Dexter's offer to manage his Hollywood house and be a travelling companion. Dr Clarkson diagnoses Cora with pernicious anaemia, a treatable condition. Cora helps Dalgleish develop an American accent, potentially saving her career. Edith, unfulfilled and constrained as a marchioness, intends to resume working at her London-based magazine. Newlywed servants Daisy and Andy scheme to match up Daisy's former father-in-law, Mr Mason, and Downton cook Mrs Patmore. When the film's unpaid extras walk out, the Downton staff replace them, ensuring its completion. Barber offers Molesley a lucrative deal as a screenwriter. Molesley then proposes to Miss Baxter, unaware that he is being overheard on an open microphone.


title: Downton Abbey: A New Era

text: Violet assures Robert that the late Lord Grantham was his father and that nothing happened between her and Montmirail. Violet's health deteriorates further, and she dies surrounded by loved ones. Mary asks Mr Carson to train footman Andy as the new butler. Months later, Tom and Lucy return to Downton with their infant. A new portrait hangs in the main hall, that of the late Dowager Countess.


title: Downton Abbey: A New Era

text: After the release of the first film in 2019, creator Julian Fellowes and the cast stated that they already had ideas about doing a sequel. In January 2020, it was reported that Fellowes would begin working on it after he finished scripting drama series "The Gilded Age". In September 2020, Jim Carter, who plays Carson, said that the script for the sequel had been written, and in February 2021, Hugh Bonneville, who plays Robert, stated in an interview with BBC Radio 2 that once the cast and crew had been vaccinated for COVID-19, the film would be made.


title: Downton Abbey: A New Era

text: Principal photography was originally scheduled to take place from 12 June to 12 August 2021, in Hampshire, England, but "Deadline Hollywood" confirmed that production had started in mid-April 2021.


title: Downton Abbey: A New Era

text: On 16 July 2021, Elizabeth McGovern announced on Instagram that she had completed filming. On 25 August 2021, the film's title "Downton Abbey: A New Era" was announced.


title: Downton Abbey: A New Era

text: The principal cast of the first film returned. Joining the cast are Hugh Dancy, Laura Haddock, Nathalie Baye, Dominic West and Jonathan Zaccaï.


title: Downton Abbey: A New Era

text: Downton Abbey: A New Era (Original Motion Picture Soundtrack) is the film's soundtrack album and musical score album of the same name, composed by John Lunn and performed by The Chamber Orchestra of London with the voice of Cherise Roberts featured on two tracks. It was released on 29 April 2022 on CD, digital download and vinyl by Decca Gold, Decca Records and Universal Music.


title: Downton Abbey: A New Era

text: "Downton Abbey: A New Era" was scheduled originally to be released in cinemas on 22 December 2021, before having its release date moved to 18 March 2022, and subsequently to 29 April in the UK, and 20 May in North America. The film premiered at Leicester Square in London on 25 April 2022.


title: Downton Abbey: A New Era

text: The film was originally set to stream in the United States on Peacock on 4 July, 45 days after its American theatrical release, but was released to the streaming service on 24 June 2022, earlier than planned.


title: Downton Abbey: A New Era

text: It was released on Blu-ray 4K, Blu-ray and DVD and digital download on 5 July 2022 by Universal Pictures Home Entertainment (through Studio Distribution Services LLC) in the United States, and was released on Blu-ray and DVD on 15 August 2022 by Universal through Warner Bros. Home Entertainment in the United Kingdom.


title: Downton Abbey: A New Era

text: "Downton Abbey: A New Era" grossed $43.9million in the United States and Canada and $48.5million in other countries, for a worldwide total of $92.4million.


title: Downton Abbey: A New Era

text: In the United States and Canada, the film was released alongside "Men", and was projected to gross $16–21 million from 3,820 cinemas over its opening weekend. It made $7.4 million on its first day, including $1 million from Thursday night previews. The film went on to debut at $16 million and finished second at the box office, thus opening at the lower end of projections. 48% of the opening weekend audience was over the age of 55 and "Deadline Hollywood" said it "repped the first time [exhibitors] saw older patrons since pre-pandemic". In its second weekend the film fell 64% to $5.8 million (and a total of $7.4 million over the four-day Memorial Day frame), finishing fourth. The large drop was attributed in-part to newcomer "", whose audience was 55% over the age of 35, sharing much of the same demographics as "A New Era". It then made $3.2 million in its third weekend, $1.8 million in its fourth, and $828,265 in its fifth, before dropping out of the box office top ten in its sixth.


title: Downton Abbey: A New Era

text: Outside of the United States and Canada, the film earned $9.3 million from 33 markets in its opening weekend. This included $3.8 million in the United Kingdom from 746 cinemas (the second-widest release of all-time, after "No Time to Die" in 2021), and $1.3 million in Australia. The film added $6.6 million in its second weekend, $3.6 million in its third, $3.8 million in its fourth, and $2.2 million in its fifth. It made an additional $715,000 in its seventh weekend.


title: Downton Abbey: A New Era

text: Audiences polled by CinemaScore gave the film an average grade of "A" on an A+ to F scale (same as the first film), while PostTrak reported 93% of audience members gave it a positive score, with 79% saying they would definitely recommend it.


title: 2022 NFL season

text: The 2022 NFL season is the 103rd season of the National Football League (NFL). The season began on September 8, 2022, with the defending Super Bowl LVI champion Los Angeles Rams falling to Buffalo in the NFL Kickoff Game, and will end on January 8, 2023. The playoffs are scheduled to start on January 14 and will conclude with Super Bowl LVII, the league's championship game, at State Farm Stadium in Glendale, Arizona, on February 12.


title: 2022 NFL season

text: The former Washington Redskins, after two seasons of using the placeholder name Washington Football Team, were renamed the Washington Commanders prior to the start of the season.


title: 2022 NFL season

text: The 2022 NFL league year and trading period began on March 16. On March 14, teams were allowed to exercise options for 2022 on players with option clauses in their contracts, submit qualifying offers to their pending restricted free agents, and submit a Minimum Salary Tender to retain exclusive negotiating rights to their players with expiring 2021 contracts and fewer than three accrued seasons of free agent credit. Teams were required to be under the salary cap using the "top 51" definition (in which the 51 highest paid-players on the team's payroll must have a combined salary cap). On March 16, clubs were allowed to contact and begin contract negotiations with players whose contracts had expired and thus became unrestricted free agents.


title: 2022 NFL season

text: The 2022 NFL Draft was held in Las Vegas, Nevada from April 28–30. Jacksonville, by virtue of having the worst record in , held the first overall selection and selected pass rusher Travon Walker out of Georgia.


title: 2022 NFL season

text: The NFL Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Committee announced the following policy changes on March 28:


title: 2022 NFL season

text: The following change to the concussion protocol was made on October 8, following Tua Tagovailoa's injury in week 3:


title: 2022 NFL season

text: The following enhancements and updates to diversity, equity and inclusion efforts was announced at the NFL Fall League Meeting on October 18:


title: 2022 NFL season

text: The majority of training camps began on July 27. The preseason began on August 4 with the Pro Football Hall of Fame Game, in which Las Vegas (represented in the Hall of Fame Class of 2022 by Richard Seymour and Cliff Branch) defeated Jacksonville (represented by Tony Boselli).


title: 2022 NFL season

text: In March, the league passed a resolution to require the use of "Guardian Caps," oversized outer layers of padding placed on the helmet, from the start of training camp through the second preseason game for offensive linemen, defensive linemen, linebackers, and tight ends. A guardian cap is a soft-shell padding aimed to decrease forces sustained during head-to-head contact and limit head injuries that may come with such contact.


title: 2022 NFL season

text: The NFL released the 2022 regular season schedule on May 12, with select games announced in advance of the full schedule release.


title: 2022 NFL season

text: The season is planned to be played over an 18-week schedule beginning on September 8. Each of the league's 32 teams plays 17 games, with one bye week for each team. The regular season is scheduled to end on January 8, 2023; all games during the final weekend will be intra-division games, as it has been since .


title: 2022 NFL season

text: Each team plays the other three teams in its own division twice, one game against each of the four teams from a division in its own conference, one game against each of the four teams from a division in the other conference, one game against each of the remaining two teams in its conference that finished in the same position in their respective divisions the previous season (e.g., the team that finished fourth in its division would play all three other teams in its conference that also finished fourth in their divisions), and one game against a team in another division in the other conference that also finished in the same position in their respective division the previous season.


title: 2022 NFL season

text: Week 18: All games during the final week of the regular season were initially listed as "TBD" instead of having tentative start times on Sunday afternoon of either 1:00 p.m. or 4:25 p.m. ET like in previous seasons. Two games with playoff implications will be moved to Saturday, January 7, at 4:30 p.m. and 8:15 p.m. ET, both airing on ESPN, ABC, and ESPN+. A third game with playoff implications will be moved into "NBC Sunday Night Football" at 8:20 p.m. ET. The rest will be scheduled as Sunday afternoon games on CBS or Fox.


title: 2022 NFL season

text: The 2022 playoffs are scheduled to begin with the wild-card round, with three wild-card games played in each conference. Wild Card Weekend is planned for January 14–16, 2023. In the Divisional round scheduled for January 21–22, the top seed in the conference will play the lowest remaining seed and the other two remaining teams will play each other. The winners of those games will advance to the Conference Championship games scheduled for January 29. Super Bowl LVII is scheduled for February 12 at State Farm Stadium in Glendale, Arizona.


title: 2022 NFL season

text: On February 1, former Miami Dolphins head coach Brian Flores sued the NFL, the Dolphins, the New York Giants, and the Denver Broncos, alleging racism, violations of federal employment law, and that his interviews were a sham meant solely to fulfill the Rooney Rule. The lawsuit also alleges that during Flores' tenure with the Dolphins, team owner Stephen M. Ross pressured him to deliberately lose games, offering him $100,000 for each game he lost in order for the Dolphins to get better draft picks for the following season and that Ross fired Flores after he refused to comply with this pressure. The lawsuit seeks damages and injunctive relief in the form of changes to hiring, retention, termination, and pay transparency practices for coaching and executive positions in the NFL.


title: 2022 NFL season

text: On April 6, former Arizona Cardinals head coach Steve Wilks and former assistant coach Ray Horton joined the lawsuit with similar allegations against the league, the Arizona Cardinals, Houston Texans, and Tennessee Titans.


title: 2022 NFL season

text: In March and April 2021, then-Houston Texans quarterback Deshaun Watson was accused by 22 massage therapists of sexual misconduct.


title: 2022 NFL season

text: On March 11, 2022, a grand jury declined to indict Watson on criminal charges related to "harassment and sexual misconduct." On that date he still faced 22 civil lawsuits, many alleging sexual misconduct and assault. After being cleared of criminal charges, Watson was traded to the Cleveland Browns and agreed to a new, fully guaranteed, five-year, $230 million contract with the Browns, the most guaranteed money in NFL history.


title: 2022 NFL season

text: After two more accusers joined the lawsuit in June 2022, Watson settled 23 of the 24 lawsuits in July and August.


title: 2022 NFL season

text: On August 1, as a result of these allegations, Watson was suspended for six regular season games to start the 2022 season by judge Sue Lewis Robinson. Two days later, the NFL appealed the suspension, seeking to extend the suspension to at least a full season as well as seeking a fine and establishing a requirement for Watson to seek treatment for his conduct. The appeal was reviewed by former New Jersey Attorney General Peter C. Harvey.


title: 2022 NFL season

text: On August 18, after the NFL and the NFLPA reached a settlement, Watson was suspended for the first 11 games of the season and was fined $5 million.


title: 2022 NFL season

text: On August 2, it was announced that following a six-month independent investigation by Mary Jo White and a team of lawyers, the Miami Dolphins would forfeit their 2023 first-round draft pick and a 2024 third-round pick for violating the league's anti-tampering policy on three occasions from 2019 to 2022 by engaging in impermissible conversations with quarterback Tom Brady and coach Sean Payton, both of whom were under contract with other teams. Dolphins owner Stephen M. Ross was also fined $1.5 million and suspended through October 17, and was prohibited from being at the Dolphins' facility or representing the team at any event until then. He was also prohibited from attending any league meeting before the annual meeting in 2023 and was removed from all league committees indefinitely. Vice chairman/limited partner Bruce Beal was fined $500,000 and will not be permitted to attend any league meetings for the rest of the 2022 season.


title: 2022 NFL season

text: On August 9, the league owners unanimously approved the sale of the Denver Broncos from the Pat Bowlen Trust to the Walton-Penner Family Ownership Group, led by Greg Penner, for a price of $4.65 billion. The new owners were formally introduced the next day.


title: 2022 NFL season

text: On November 2, it was announced that Commanders' owner Dan Snyder and his wife had engaged Bank of America Securities to facilitate the potential sale of the team. Any potential transaction would have to be presented to the NFL Finance Committee for review and require an affirmative vote by 75% of the owners (24 of 32). The team is currently valued at $5.6 billion, according to "Forbes".


title: 2022 NFL season

text: In June 2021, the NFL approved a rule that would allow teams to wear alternate helmets for the 2022 season, repealing a one-helmet rule put in place in 2013. Alternate helmets are required to be accompanied with alternate uniforms.


title: 2022 NFL season

text: During Weeks 4 and 5, players, executives, and coaches wore patches and decals of international flags to represent their national heritage. Over 50 countries and territories were represented, with over 200 individuals participating.


title: 2022 NFL season

text: This is the ninth and final season under the current broadcast contracts with CBS, Fox, and NBC, before new 11-year contracts for all three networks begin in 2023. This includes "cross-flexing" (switching) Sunday afternoon games between CBS and Fox before or during the season, regardless of the conference of the visiting team. Super Bowl LVII will be televised by Fox.


title: 2022 NFL season

text: Following the expiration of their eight-year contract, ESPN and ABC agreed to a one-year bridge contract. As with the previous season, ESPN will hold rights to a Saturday doubleheader during the final week of the season, simulcast with ABC, along with more simulcasts of MNF games on ABC, Also this year, ABC aired its first exclusive game since on September 19, as part of a doubleheader with ESPN. ESPN will begin a new 11-year contract in 2023.


title: 2022 NFL season

text: NFL Network will continue to televise select regular season games, including three International Series games.


title: 2022 NFL season

text: Fox Deportes will air Spanish-language coverage of Fox games. ESPN Deportes will do the same for ESPN, ABC, and CBS games. Universo and Telemundo Deportes (select games) will do the same for NBC games.


title: 2022 NFL season

text: ESPN2's "Monday Night Football with Peyton and Eli" was renewed for an additional season, taking it through the 2024 NFL season. CBS will continue to produce alternative, youth-oriented telecasts of selected games on sister channel Nickelodeon; the channel will simulcast CBS's Christmas Day game, marking its first regular-season broadcast.


title: 2022 NFL season

text: DirecTV signed a multi-year deal with Amazon Prime Video to allow "Thursday Night Football" to be shown on DirecTV's packages for business customers. This agreement is independent of DirecTV's expiring NFL Sunday Ticket deal, primarily to allow bars, restaurants, casinos, and other venues to continue offering the games without reconfiguring their systems to accommodate a streaming-only platform.


title: 2022 NFL season

text: This is the first year in which "Thursday Night Football" exclusively streams on Amazon Prime Video and Twitch. Fox and NFL Network opted out of their final season of the 2018–2022 "TNF" deal, allowing Amazon to take over one season before its 2023–2033 "TNF" agreement was to go into effect.


title: 2022 NFL season

text: This will also be the first year in which ESPN+ exclusively streams one International Series game per year along with simulcasts of all ABC games.


title: 2022 NFL season

text: This is the final season under DirecTV's deal for exclusive rights to the NFL Sunday Ticket out-of-market sports package. DirecTV has held exclusive rights since the package's launch in 1994. DirecTV executives have questioned the current value of NFL Sunday Ticket after losing money over the past few years. In September 2021, NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell suggested that NFL Sunday Ticket could be more attractive on a digital platform. In June, it was reported that Disney, Apple, and Amazon submitted bids. In July, Google submitted a bid. In October, CNBC reported that Apple wanted flexible and unrestricted global streaming rights, something that the NFL cannot offer due its existing deals with CBS and Fox.


title: 2022 NFL season

text: The NFL's mobile streaming contract with Verizon expired following the 2021 season (which included mobile streaming of live local and nationally televised games along with cellular streaming of NFL Network); it was reported that the league was preparing to move these rights behind a paywall of an in-house subscription service. In July, the NFL announced that NFL Game Pass would be replaced in the United States by NFL+, which will stream in-market games and the NFL Network on mobile devices only, radio broadcasts for all games, and most out-of-market preseason games. The on-demand full, condensed, and "All 22" bird's-eye view game replays offered by NFL Game Pass will now be under a premium tier of NFL+.


title: 2022 NFL season

text: In March, the NFL renewed its national radio contract with Westwood One, maintaining its package of radio rights to all primetime, marquee, and playoff games, while adding audio coverage of other events such as the NFL Draft and NFL Honors. It also greatly expands the ability for its broadcasts to be distributed for free via digital platforms, including via local affiliates' "primary digital platforms", and via the NFL app. Compass Media, ESPN Radio and Sports USA will continue to broadcast select Sunday afternoon games nationally on radio.


title: 2022 NFL season

text: With Brian Griese leaving ESPN for a coaching job with San Francisco, on March 16, ESPN signed Joe Buck and Troy Aikman — who were Fox's lead commentary team for 20 seasons — to a multi-year deal to become the new lead commentators of "Monday Night Football". ESPN's previous "MNF" broadcasters Steve Levy and Louis Riddick continue as ESPN's secondary NFL broadcast team, with Dan Orlovsky replacing Griese.


title: 2022 NFL season

text: On March 23, Amazon announced that longtime NBC play-by-play announcer Al Michaels and ESPN college football analyst Kirk Herbstreit would serve as its lead broadcast team for "Thursday Night Football". Amazon later added ABC News reporter Kaylee Hartung as its sideline reporter. Mike Tirico—who had been NBC's secondary play-by-play announcer and Michaels' designated fill-in since joining the network in 2016—will succeed Michaels as the lead commentator for "Sunday Night Football", with Maria Taylor succeeding him as lead studio host and Jason Garrett replacing Drew Brees on the "Football Night in America" panel. Melissa Stark is also replacing Michele Tafoya (who departed after Super Bowl LVI to pursue a political career) as sideline reporter. Amazon's studio panel will be led by Fox’s Charissa Thompson, with analysts Tony Gonzalez, Ryan Fitzpatrick, Richard Sherman, and Andrew Whitworth. Bleacher Report and Turner Sports’ Taylor Rooks and NBC’s Michael Smith also make contributions.


title: 2022 NFL season

text: With Buck and Aikman's departure, Fox's number-2 commentary team of Kevin Burkhardt and Greg Olsen were promoted to the network's top pairing. Replacing Burkhardt and Olsen are Joe Davis, who is also Buck’s replacement for Fox’s MLB coverage, and Daryl Johnston, starting his third stint as Fox’s number 2 analyst. Kristina Pink, who was one of Fox’s two TNF reporters from 2018–2021, returns to Sunday reporting duties to join the team of Adam Amin and Mark Schlereth. Robert Smith also transfers from Fox’s college football coverage to join Chris Myers.


title: Daft Punk

text: Daft Punk were a French electronic music duo formed in 1993 in Paris by Thomas Bangalter and Guy-Manuel de Homem-Christo. Widely regarded as one of the most influential acts in dance music history, they achieved popularity in the late 1990s as part of the French house movement. They garnered critical acclaim and commercial success in the years following, combining elements of house music with funk, disco, indie rock and pop.


title: Daft Punk

text: After Bangalter and Homem-Christo's indie rock band Darlin' disbanded, they began experimenting with drum machines and synthesisers. Their debut studio album "Homework" was released by Virgin Records in 1997 to positive reviews, backed by singles "Around the World" and "Da Funk". From 1999, they assumed robot personas for their public appearances, with helmets, outfits and gloves to disguise their identities; they made few media appearances. They were managed from 1996 to 2008 by Pedro Winter, the head of Ed Banger Records.


title: Daft Punk

text: Daft Punk's second album, "Discovery" (2001), had further success, supported by hit singles "One More Time", "Digital Love" and "Harder, Better, Faster, Stronger". It became the basis for an animated film, "," supervised by Japanese artist Leiji Matsumoto. Daft Punk's third album, "Human After All" (2005), received mixed reviews, though the singles "Robot Rock" and "Technologic" achieved success in the United Kingdom. The duo directed their first film, "Electroma", an avant-garde science fiction film, in 2006. They toured throughout 2006 and 2007 and released the live album "Alive 2007", which won a Grammy Award for Best Electronic/Dance Album; the tour is credited for popularising dance music in North America. Daft Punk composed for the 2010 film "".


title: Daft Punk

text: In 2013, Daft Punk left Virgin for Columbia Records and released their fourth and final album, "Random Access Memories", to acclaim; the lead single, "Get Lucky", reached the top 10 in the charts of 27 countries. "Random Access Memories" won five Grammy Awards in 2014, including Album of the Year and Record of the Year for "Get Lucky". In 2016, Daft Punk gained their only number one on the "Billboard" Hot 100 with "Starboy", a collaboration with the Weeknd. In 2015, "Rolling Stone" ranked them the 12th greatest musical duo of all time. They announced their split in 2021.


title: Daft Punk

text: Guy-Manuel de Homem-Christo and Thomas Bangalter met in 1987 while attending the Lycée Carnot secondary school in Paris. The two became friends and recorded demos with others from the school. In 1992, they formed a guitar group, Darlin', with Bangalter on bass, Homem-Christo on guitar, and guitarist and drummer Laurent Brancowitz. The trio named themselves after the Beach Boys song "Darlin", which they covered along with an original composition. Both tracks were released on a multi-artist EP under Duophonic Records, a label owned by the London-based band Stereolab, who invited Darlin' to open for shows in the United Kingdom.


title: Daft Punk

text: Darlin' disbanded after around six months, having produced four songs and played two gigs. Bangalter described the project as "pretty average". Brancowitz pursued music with another band, Phoenix. Bangalter and Homem-Christo formed Daft Punk and experimented with drum machines and synthesizers. The name was taken from a negative review of Darlin' in "Melody Maker" by Dave Jennings, who dubbed their music "a daft punky thrash". The band found the review amusing. Homem-Christo said, "We struggled so long to find [the name] Darlin', and [this name] happened so quickly."