title: Thymus

text: The epithelium forms fine lobules, and develops into a sponge-like structure. During this stage, hematopoietic bone-marrow precursors migrate into the thymus. Normal development is dependent on the interaction between the epithelium and the hematopoietic thymocytes. Iodine is also necessary for thymus development and activity.


title: Thymus

text: The thymus continues to grow after birth reaching the relative maximum size by puberty. It is most active in fetal and neonatal life. It increases to a mass of 20 to 50 grams by puberty. It then begins to decrease in size and activity in a process called thymic involution. After the first year of life the amount of T cells produced begins to fall. Fat and connective tissue fills a part of the thymic volume. During involution, the thymus decreases in size and activity. Fat cells are present at birth, but increase in size and number markedly after puberty, invading the gland from the walls between the lobules first, then into the cortex and medulla. This process continues into old age, where whether with a microscope or with the human eye, the thymus may be difficult to detect, although typically weighs 5–15 grams. Additionally, there is an increasing body of evidence showing that age-related thymic involution is found in most, if not all, vertebrate species with a thymus, suggesting that this is an evolutionary process that has been conserved.


title: Thymus

text: The atrophy is due to the increased circulating level of sex hormones, and chemical or physical castration of an adult results in the thymus increasing in size and activity. Severe illness or human immunodeficiency virus infection may also result in involution.


title: Thymus

text: The thymus facilitates the maturation of T cells, an important part of the immune system providing cell-mediated immunity. T cells begin as hematopoietic precursors from the bone-marrow, and migrate to the thymus, where they are referred to as thymocytes. In the thymus they undergo a process of maturation, which involves ensuring the cells react against antigens ("positive selection"), but that they do not react against antigens found on body tissue ("negative selection"). Once mature, T cells emigrate from the thymus to provide vital functions in the immune system.


title: Thymus

text: Each T cell has a distinct T cell receptor, suited to a specific substance, called an antigen. Most T cell receptors bind to the major histocompatibility complex on cells of the body. The MHC presents an antigen to the T cell receptor, which becomes active if this matches the specific T cell receptor. In order to be properly functional, a mature T cell needs to be able to bind to the MHC molecule ("positive selection"), and not to react against antigens that are actually from the tissues of body ("negative selection"). Positive selection occurs in the cortex and negative selection occurs in the medulla of the thymus. After this process T cells that have survived leave the thymus, regulated by sphingosine-1-phosphate. Further maturation occurs in the peripheral circulation. Some of this is because of hormones and cytokines secreted by cells within the thymus, including thymulin, thymopoietin, and thymosins.


title: Thymus

text: T cells have distinct T cell receptors. These distinct receptors are formed by process of V(D)J recombination gene rearrangement stimulated by RAG1 and RAG2 genes. This process is error-prone, and some thymocytes fail to make functional T-cell receptors, whereas other thymocytes make T-cell receptors that are autoreactive. If a functional T cell receptor is formed, the thymocyte will begin to express simultaneously the cell surface proteins CD4 and CD8.


title: Thymus

text: The survival and nature of the T cell then depends on its interaction with surrounding thymic epithelial cells. Here, the T cell receptor interacts with the MHC molecules on the surface of epithelial cells. A T cell with a receptor that doesn't react, or reacts weakly will die by apoptosis. A T cell that does react will survive and proliferate. A mature T cell expresses only CD4 or CD8, but not both. This depends on the strength of binding between the TCR and MHC class 1 or class 2. A T cell receptor that binds mostly to MHC class I tends to produce a mature "cytotoxic" CD8 positive T cell; a T cell receptor that binds mostly to MHC class II tends to produce a CD4 positive T cell.


title: Thymus

text: T cells that attack the body's own proteins are eliminated in the thymus, called "negative selection". Epithelial cells in the medulla and dendritic cells in the thymus express major proteins from elsewhere in the body. The gene that stimulates this is AIRE. Thymocytes that react strongly to self antigens do not survive, and die by apoptosis. Some CD4 positive T cells exposed to self antigens persist as T regulatory cells.


title: Thymus

text: As the thymus is where T cells develop, congenital problems with the development of the thymus can lead to immunodeficiency, whether because of a problem with the development of the thymus gland, or a problem specific to thymocyte development. Immunodeficiency can be profound. Loss of the thymus at an early age through genetic mutation (as in DiGeorge syndrome, CHARGE syndrome, or a very rare "nude" thymus causing absence of hair and the thymus) results in severe immunodeficiency and subsequent high susceptibility to infection by viruses, protozoa, and fungi. Nude mice with the very rare "nude" deficiency as a result of FOXN1 mutation are a strain of research mice as a model of T cell deficiency.


title: Thymus

text: The most common congenital cause of thymus-related immune deficiency results from the deletion of the 22nd chromosome, called DiGeorge syndrome. This results in a failure of development of the third and fourth pharyngeal pouches, resulting in failure of development of the thymus, and variable other associated problems, such as congenital heart disease, and abnormalities of mouth (such as cleft palate and cleft lip), failure of development of the parathyroid glands, and the presence of a fistula between the trachea and the oesophagus. Very low numbers of circulating T cells are seen. The condition is diagnosed by fluorescent in situ hybridization and treated with thymus transplantation.


title: Thymus

text: Severe combined immunodeficiency (SCID) are group of rare congenital genetic diseases that can result in combined T, B, and NK cell deficiencies. These syndromes are caused by mutations that affect the maturation of the hematopoietic progenitor cells, which are the precursors of both B and T cells. A number of genetic defects can cause SCID, including IL-2 receptor gene loss of function, and mutation resulting in deficiency of the enzyme adenine deaminase.


title: Thymus

text: Autoimmune polyendocrine syndrome type 1, is a rare genetic autoimmune syndrome that results from a genetic defect of the thymus tissues. Specifically, the disease results from defects in the autoimmune regulator (AIRE) gene, which stimulates expression of self antigens in the epithelial cells within the medulla of the thymus. Because of defects in this condition, self antigens are not expressed, resulting in T cells that are not conditioned to tolerate tissues of the body, and may treat them as foreign, stimulating an immune response and resulting in autoimmunity. People with APECED develop an autoimmune disease that affects multiple endocrine tissues, with the commonly affected organs being hypothyroidism of the thyroid gland, Addison's disease of the adrenal glands, and candida infection of body surfaces including the inner lining of the mouth and of the nails due to dysfunction of TH17 cells, and symptoms often beginning in childhood. Many other autoimmune diseases may also occur. Treatment is directed at the affected organs.


title: Thymus

text: Thymoma-associated multiorgan autoimmunity can occur in people with thymoma. In this condition, the T cells developed in the thymus are directed against the tissues of the body. This is because the malignant thymus is incapable of appropriately educating developing thymocytes to eliminate self-reactive T cells. The condition is virtually indistinguishable from graft versus host disease.


title: Thymus

text: Myasthenia gravis is an autoimmune disease most often due to antibodies that block acetylcholine receptors, involved in signalling between nerves and muscles. It is often associated with thymic hyperplasia or thymoma, with antibodies produced probably because of T cells that develop abnormally. Myasthenia gravis most often develops between young and middle age, causing easy fatiguing of muscle movements. Investigations include demonstrating antibodies (such as against acetylcholine receptors or muscle-specific kinase), and CT scan to detect thymoma or thymectomy. With regard to the thymus, removal of the thymus, called thymectomy may be considered as a treatment, particularly if a thymoma is found. Other treatments include increasing the duration of acetylcholine action at nerve synapses by decreasing the rate of breakdown. This is done by acetylcholinesterase inhibitors such as pyridostigmine.


title: Thymus

text: Tumours originating from the thymic epithelial cells are called thymomas. They most often occur in adults older than 40. Tumours are generally detected when they cause symptoms, such as a neck mass or affecting nearby structures such as the superior vena cava; detected because of screening in patients with myasthenia gravis, which has a strong association with thymomas and hyperplasia; and detected as an incidental finding on imaging such as chest x-rays. Hyperplasia and tumours originating form the thymus are associated with other autoimmune diseases – such as hypogammaglobulinemia, Graves disease, pure red cell aplasia, pernicious anaemia and dermatomyositis, likely because of defects in negative selection in proliferating T cells.


title: Thymus

text: Thymomas can be benign; benign but by virtue of expansion, invading beyond the capsule of the thymus ("invasive thyoma"), or malignant (a carcinoma). This classification is based on the appearance of the cells. A WHO classification also exists but is not used as part of standard clinical practice. Benign tumours confined to the thymus are most common; followed by locally invasive tumours, and then by carcinomas. There is variation in reporting, with some sources reporting malignant tumours as more common. Invasive tumours, although not technically malignant, can still spread () to other areas of the body. Even though thymomas occur of epithelial cells, they can also contain thymocytes. Treatment of thymomas often requires surgery to remove the entire thymus. This may also result in temporary remission of any associated autoimmune conditions.


title: Thymus

text: Tumours originating from T cells of the thymus form a subset of acute lymphoblastic leukaemia (ALL). These are similar in symptoms, investigation approach and management to other forms of ALL. Symptoms that develop, like other forms of ALL, relate to deficiency of platelets, resulting in bruising or bleeding; immunosuppression resulting in infections; or infiltration by cells into parts of the body, resulting in an enlarged liver, spleen, lymph nodes or other sites. Blood test might reveal a large amount of white blood cells or lymphoblasts, and deficiency in other cell lines – such as low platelets or anaemia. Immunophenotyping will reveal cells that are CD3, a protein found on T cells, and help further distinguish the maturity of the T cells. Genetic analysis including karyotyping may reveal specific abnormalities that may influence prognosis or treatment, such as the Philadelphia translocation. Management can include multiple courses of chemotherapy, stem cell transplant, and management of associated problems, such as treatment of infections with antibiotics, and blood transfusions. Very high white cell counts may also require cytoreduction with apheresis.


title: Thymus

text: Tumours originating from the small population of B cells present in the thymus lead to primary mediastinal (thymic) large B cell lymphomas. These are a rare subtype of Non-Hodgkins lymphoma, although by the activity of genes and occasionally microscopic shape, unusually they also have the characteristics of Hodgkins lymphomas. that occur most commonly in young and middle-aged, more prominent in females. Most often, when symptoms occur it is because of compression of structures near the thymus, such as the superior vena cava or the upper respiratory tract; when lymph nodes are affected it is often in the mediastinum and neck groups. Such tumours are often detected with a biopsy that is subject to immunohistochemistry. This will show the presence of clusters of differentiation, cell surface proteins – namely CD30, with CD19, CD20 and CD22, and with the absence of CD15. Other markers may also be used to confirm the diagnosis. Treatment usually includes the typical regimens of CHOP or EPOCH or other regimens; regimens generally including cyclophosphamide, an anthracycline, prednisone, and other chemotherapeutics; and potentially also a stem cell transplant.


title: Thymus

text: The thymus may contain cysts, usually less than 4 cm in diameter. Thymic cysts are usually detected incidentally and do not generally cause symptoms. Thymic cysts can occur along the neck or in the chest (mediastinum). Cysts usually just contain fluid and are lined by either many layers of flat cells or column-shaped cells. Despite this, the presence of a cyst can cause problems similar to those of thymomas, by compressing nearby structures, and some may contact internal walls () and be difficult to distinguish from tumours. When cysts are found, investigation may include a workup for tumours, which may include CT or MRI scan of the area the cyst is suspected to be in.


title: Thymus

text: Thymectomy is the surgical removal of the thymus. The usual reason for removal is to gain access to the heart for surgery to correct congenital heart defects in the neonatal period. Other indications for thymectomy include the removal of thymomas and the treatment of myasthenia gravis. In neonates the relative size of the thymus obstructs surgical access to the heart and its surrounding vessels. Removal of the thymus in infancy results in often fatal immunodeficiency, because functional T cells have not developed. In older children and adults, which have a functioning lymphatic system with mature T cells also situated in other lymphoid organs, the effect is reduced, and limited to failure to mount immune responses against new antigens.


title: Thymus

text: The thymus was known to the ancient Greeks, and its name comes from the Greek word θυμός ("thumos"), meaning "anger", or in Ancient Greek, "heart, soul, desire, life", possibly because of its location in the chest, near where emotions are subjectively felt; or else the name comes from the herb "thyme" (also in Greek "θύμος" or "θυμάρι"), which became the name for a "warty excrescence", possibly due to its resemblance to a bunch of thyme.


title: Thymus

text: In the nineteenth century, a condition was identified as "status thymicolymphaticus" defined by an increase in lymphoid tissue and an enlarged thymus. It was thought to be a cause of sudden infant death syndrome but is now an obsolete term.


title: Thymus

text: The importance of the thymus in the immune system was discovered in 1961 by Jacques Miller, by surgically removing the thymus from one-day-old mice, and observing the subsequent deficiency in a lymphocyte population, subsequently named T cells after the organ of their origin. Until the discovery of its immunological role, the thymus had been dismissed as a "evolutionary accident", without functional importance. The role the thymus played in ensuring mature T cells tolerated the tissues of the body was uncovered in 1962, with the finding that T cells of a transplanted thymus in mice demonstrated tolerance towards tissues of the donor mouse. B cells and T cells were identified as different types of lymphocytes in 1968, and the fact that T cells required maturation in the thymus was understood. The subtypes of T cells (CD8 and CD4) were identified by 1975. The way that these subclasses of T cells matured – positive selection of cells that functionally bound to MHC receptors – was known by the 1990s. The important role of the AIRE gene, and the role of negative selection in preventing autoreactive T cells from maturing, was understood by 1994.


title: Thymus

text: Recently, advances in immunology have allowed the function of the thymus in T-cell maturation to be more fully understood.


title: Thymus

text: The thymus is present in all jawed vertebrates, where it undergoes the same shrinkage with age and plays the same immunological function as in other vertebrates. Recently, in 2011, a discrete thymus-like lympho-epithelial structure, termed the "thymoid", was discovered in the gills of larval lampreys. Hagfish possess a protothymus associated with the pharyngeal velar muscles, which is responsible for a variety of immune responses.


title: Thymus

text: The thymus is also present in most other vertebrates with similar structure and function as the human thymus. A second thymus in the neck has been reported sometimes to occur in the mouse As in humans, the guinea pig's thymus naturally atrophies as the animal reaches adulthood, but the athymic hairless guinea pig (which arose from a spontaneous laboratory mutation) possesses no thymic tissue whatsoever, and the organ cavity is replaced with cystic spaces.


title: Giada De Laurentiis

text: Giada Pamela De Laurentiis (; born August 22, 1970) is an Italian-American chef, writer, and television personality. She was the host of Food Network's "Giada at Home". She also appears regularly as a contributor and guest co-host on NBC's "Today". De Laurentiis is the founder of the catering business GDL Foods. She is a winner of the Daytime Emmy Award for Outstanding Lifestyle Host and the Gracie Award for Best Television Host. She was also recognised by the International Hospitality Institute as one of the Global 100 in Hospitality, a list featuring the 100 Most Powerful People in Global Hospitality.


title: Giada De Laurentiis

text: Giada Pamela De Benedetti was born on August 22, 1970, in Rome, Italy, the eldest child of actress Veronica De Laurentiis and her first husband, actor-producer Alex De Benedetti. De Benedetti was a close associate of Giada's maternal grandfather, film producer Dino De Laurentiis. As a child, Giada often found herself in the family's kitchen and spent a great deal of time at her grandfather's restaurant, DDL Foodshow. Her parents were married in February 1970 but were later divorced. After her parents' divorce, Giada and her siblings moved to Southern California, where they took their mother's surname. After graduating from Marymount High School in Los Angeles, De Laurentiis attended the University of California, Los Angeles, earning her bachelor's degree in social anthropology in 1996.


title: Giada De Laurentiis

text: Her maternal great-grandmother was English and her grandmother was British-Italian film star Silvana Mangano. Her paternal grandmother, Pamela De Benedetti née Leslie-Jones (1923-1998), was also English. Her siblings include sister Eloisa, a makeup artist, and brothers Igor and Dino Alexander II, a Hollywood film editor who died of melanoma in 2003. Her stepfather is producer Ivan Kavalsky.


title: Giada De Laurentiis

text: De Laurentiis studied at Le Cordon Bleu in Paris, with aspirations of becoming a pastry chef. After returning to the United States, she became a professional chef working in several Los Angeles restaurants, notably the Wolfgang Puck-owned Spago. She later worked as a food stylist and was contacted by the Food Network after styling a piece in "Food & Wine" magazine in 2002.


title: Giada De Laurentiis

text: Her daytime cooking show on the Food Network, "Everyday Italian", premiered April 5, 2003. On "Chefography", a Food Network biography program, she said she never wanted to be in her "family business" of show business, and that she felt uncomfortable in front of the camera when she first began hosting "Everyday Italian". When the program first aired, the Food Network received mail accusing the network of hiring a model or actress pretending to cook instead of a real chef.


title: Giada De Laurentiis

text: De Laurentiis began hosting "Behind the Bash" in October 2005. The program examines the catering process behind big event extravaganzas such as the Grammy Awards. In January 2007, a third De Laurentiis-hosted show, "Giada's Weekend Getaways", debuted on Food Network. On this show, De Laurentiis travels to a featured locale (including Seattle, South Beach, San Francisco, Napa, and Jackson Hole, Wyoming) and visits her favorite local culinary destinations. On a November 2006 episode of "Iron Chef America", De Laurentiis and Bobby Flay competed against, and were defeated by, Rachael Ray and Mario Batali.


title: Giada De Laurentiis

text: In 2007, De Laurentiis appeared as a presenter at the inaugural "Food Network Awards." In June 2007, she hosted a two-part Food Network special entitled "Giada in Paradise", featuring the two locales of Santorini, Greece and Capri, Italy. De Laurentiis also made several appearances as a guest judge on the third season of "The Next Food Network Star", which aired in 2007. That year she was dubbed a "petite powerhouse" by "Town & Country" magazine, standing "just under five-foot two". In 2008, she won a Daytime Emmy Award for Outstanding Lifestyle Host.


title: Giada De Laurentiis

text: In 2008, De Laurentiis and the Barilla Group, launched an Italian gourmet line under the Academia Barilla name—Barilla's first-ever gourmet celebrity product line. That same year, "Giada at Home" premiered, showing De Laurentiis in a kitchen preparing meals and parties for family and friends. The show is shot on a set that is very similar to her own home. She joined fellow chef Bobby Flay as a judge in season 7 of Food Network Star and took on a new role in season 8 as a team leader of five cooks competing against Bobby Flay's and Alton Brown's respective teams.


title: Giada De Laurentiis

text: In 2009, De Laurentiis became the voice of "Paulette", a character on the animated children's show "Handy Manny". In early 2010, De Laurentiis came out with a line of kitchen supplies, exclusively for Target. That same year, "CafeMom" ranked her as #6 on their yearly "Sexiest Moms Alive" list. In June 2010, De Laurentiis became a regularly appearing mentor to the finalists on the popular Food Network competition show "The Next Food Network Star".


title: Giada De Laurentiis

text: In July 2014, De Laurentiis opened her first restaurant, called GIADA, inside The Cromwell in Las Vegas, Nevada. The restaurant offers seating in the dining room, lounge, or outdoor patio with views of the Bellagio fountains and Caesars Palace. The GIADA menu includes Italian cuisine with Californian influences, including "lemon spaghetti, chicken cacciatore, marsala herb chicken meatballs, rosemary focaccia and lemon flatbread and vegetable Bolognese rigatoni". Family-style, vegan, and gluten-free options are also available, as well as an antipasto station. Restaurant guests can watch chefs prepare food from the open kitchen.


title: Giada De Laurentiis

text: In 2014, De Laurentiis voiced the character of Gelata in the US version of the Tinker Bell special "Pixie Hollow Bake Off".


title: Giada De Laurentiis

text: On June 26, 2020, De Laurentiis' Food Network series "Giada Entertains" won a Daytime Emmy Award as Outstanding Culinary Series. On July 26, 2020, De Laurentiis won the Daytime Emmy for Outstanding Culinary Host.


title: Giada De Laurentiis

text: De Laurentiis had a range of products made exclusively for Target. In 2013, ceramic lasagna pans under the Giada De Laurentiis brand were recalled after they cracked and at least six people were injured. In 2022, Target only seems to carry her books, including a Target edition of "Eat Better, Feel Better".


title: Giada De Laurentiis

text: De Laurentiis has two restaurants on the Las Vegas Strip. She opened her first restaurant in May 2014. The restaurant, simply called "Giada", is located in the Cromwell. She opened a second restaurant in early 2018. "Pronto by Giada", taking up residency in Caesars Palace, is a fast casual dining restaurant.


title: Giada De Laurentiis

text: In July 2017, she announced she would also be opening a restaurant in the Horseshoe Casino in Baltimore, Maryland, just north of Washington, D.C. It is called GDL Italian by Giada, and opened in May 2018.


title: Giada De Laurentiis

text: On May 25, 2003, De Laurentiis married Todd Thompson, a fashion designer. The couple's only child, Jade Marie De Laurentiis-Thompson, was born on March 29, 2008. Jade was named after her mother - "Giada" is Italian for "Jade." While acknowledging how special the experience of having a child has been, she has stated that she does not plan to have more children. De Laurentiis remains focused on her career, saying, "I have so many babies: the show, Todd, and Jade." On December 29, 2014, De Laurentiis announced on her website that she and Todd had separated the previous July, and had decided to end their marriage. The divorce was finalized on September 3, 2015. Since November 2015, she has been romantically involved with TV producer Shane Farley.


title: Giada De Laurentiis

text: Both "Giada at Home" and "Weeknights with Giada" landed in the number one position on "The New York Times" Best Seller list.


title: Cristina Fernández de Kirchner

text: Cristina Elisabet Fernández de Kirchner (; born 19 February 1953), often referred to by her initials CFK, is an Argentine lawyer and politician who has served as the Vice President of Argentina since 2019. She also served as the President of Argentina from 2007 to 2015 and the first lady during the tenure of her husband, Néstor Kirchner. She was the second female president of Argentina (after Isabel Perón) and the first elected female president of Argentina. Ideologically, she identifies herself as a Peronist and a progressive, with her political approach called Kirchnerism.


title: Cristina Fernández de Kirchner

text: Born in La Plata, Buenos Aires Province, she studied law at the University of La Plata, and moved to Patagonia with her husband Néstor Kirchner upon graduation. She was elected to the provincial legislature; her husband was elected mayor of Río Gallegos. She was elected national senator in 1995, and had a controversial tenure, while her husband was elected governor of Santa Cruz Province. In 1994, she was also elected to the constituent assembly that amended the Constitution of Argentina. She was the First Lady from 2003 to 2007 after her husband was elected president.


title: Cristina Fernández de Kirchner

text: Néstor Kirchner did not run for reelection. Instead, his wife was the candidate for the Front for Victory alliance, becoming president in the 2007 presidential election. Her first term of office started with a conflict with the agricultural sector, and her proposed taxation system was rejected. After this she nationalised private pension funds, and fired the president of the Central Bank. The price of public services remained subsidised and she renationalised energy firm YPF as a result. The country had good relations with other South American nations, and strained relations with the western bloc as part of the regional political movement known as "pink tide". She also continued her husband's human rights policies, and had a rocky relationship with the press. Néstor Kirchner died in 2010, and she was re-elected for a second term in 2011. She won the 2011 general election with 54.11% of the votes, the highest percentage obtained by any presidential candidate since 1983. The 37.3% difference between votes for hers and the runner-up ticket Binner-Morandini was the second largest in the history of Argentine general elections. She established currency controls during her second term, and the country fell into sovereign default in 2014. She left office in 2015 with approval ratings above 50%.


title: Cristina Fernández de Kirchner

text: During her two terms as president, several corruption scandals took place and subsequently her government faced several demonstrations against her rule. She was charged for fraudulent low price sales of dollar futures, and later acquitted. In 2015, she was indicted for obstructing the investigation into the 1994 AMIA Bombing, after Alberto Nisman's controversial accusation of a purported "pact" (a memorandum) signed between her government and Iran which was supposedly seeking impunity for Iranians involved in the terrorist attack. In 2017, an arrest warrant issued by Claudio Bonadio for Fernández de Kirchner charged her with "treason", but due to her parliamentary immunity, she did not go to prison, and the "treason" accusation was later dropped, while other charges related to Nisman's accusation remained. In 2018, she was also indicted for corruption on charges alleging that her administration had accepted bribes in exchange for public works contracts. On 30 September 2020, the federal criminal cassation court confirmed the corruption trials of Fernández de Kirchner, ruling the former president's objections to be inadmissible. After analyzing the claims of the defendants in the case for the never-ratified Memorandum with Iran, on 7 October 2021, the Federal Oral Court 8 declared the case null and void. The judges concluded that there was no crime in the signing of the agreement with Iran, and declared a judicial dismissal of Cristina Kirchner and the other defendants. On 6 December 2022, she was sentenced to six years in prison and a lifetime ban from holding public office for corruption, and has stated her intention to appeal the verdict.


title: Cristina Fernández de Kirchner

text: Cristina Fernández was born on 19 February 1953 at Tolosa, a suburb of La Plata, capital of the Buenos Aires Province. She is the daughter of Eduardo Fernández and Ofelia Esther Wilhelm. Eduardo was a bus driver and an anti-Peronist, and Ofelia was a Peronist union leader and a single mother. Fernández married her and moved into her house when Cristina was two years old. Most details about her childhood such as her elementary school are unknown. She attended high school at Popular Mercantil and Misericordia schools. Three of her grandparents were Spanish immigrants, specifically from Galicia.


title: Cristina Fernández de Kirchner

text: She began her college studies at the National University of La Plata. She studied psychology for a year, then dropped it and studied law instead. She met fellow student Néstor Kirchner in 1973. He introduced her to political debates. There were heated political controversies at the time caused by the decline of the Argentine Revolution military government, the return of the former president Juan Perón from exile, the election of Héctor Cámpora as president of Argentina, and the early stages of the Dirty War. She became influenced by Peronism, left-wing politics, and anti-imperialism. Despite the presence of sympathizers of the "Montoneros" guerrillas in La Plata, the Kirchners had never been involved themselves. Cristina and Néstor married in a civil ceremony on 9 May 1975. Her mother got them administrative jobs at her union. The 1976 Argentine coup d'état took place the following year. Cristina proposed to move to Río Gallegos, Néstor's home city, but he delayed their departure until his graduation on 3 July 1976.


title: Cristina Fernández de Kirchner

text: Cristina had not yet graduated when they moved to Río Gallegos and completed the remaining subjects with distance education. There have been claims made that she never graduated, and that she may have worked as a lawyer without having a degree. This idea was proposed by the constitutionalist Daniel Sabsay, and fueled by the reluctance of the National University of La Plata (UNLP) to release her degree. She registered at the Tribunal Superior de Justicia of Santa Cruz in 1980, the Comodoro Rivadavia's chamber of appeals in 1985 and worked as an attorney for the Justicialist Party in 1983. There are also logs of minor cases where she acted as a lawyer. The claim has been sent to trial four times, and the judges Norberto Oyarbide, Ariel Lijo, Sergio Torres, and Claudio Bonadio all ruled that she has a degree.


title: Cristina Fernández de Kirchner

text: Néstor established a law firm that Cristina joined in 1979. The firm worked for banks and financial groups that filed eviction lawsuits, which had a growing rate at the time because the 1050 ruling of the Central Bank had increased the interest rates for mortgage loans. The Kirchners acquired twenty-one land lots at cheap prices as they were about to be auctioned. Their law firm defended military personnel accused of committing crimes during the Dirty War. Forced disappearances were common at the time, but unlike other lawyers the Kirchners never signed a "habeas corpus". Julio César Strassera, prosecutor in the 1985 Trial of the Juntas against the military, criticized the Kirchners' lack of legal actions against the military, and considered their later interest in the issue a form of hypocrisy.


title: Cristina Fernández de Kirchner

text: Cristina Kirchner was elected deputy for the provincial legislature of Santa Cruz in 1989. The Justicialist Party (PJ), led by Carlos Menem, returned to the presidency in the 1989 general elections. She served as interim governor of Santa Cruz for a couple of days, after the impeachment of Ricardo del Val in 1990. She organized Néstor's political campaign when he was elected governor of Santa Cruz in 1991. In 1994, she was elected to the constituent assembly that amended the Constitution of Argentina.


title: Cristina Fernández de Kirchner

text: She was elected national senator in the 1995 general elections. She opposed some bills proposed by Menem, such as a treaty with Chilean president Patricio Aylwin that benefited Chile in a dispute over the Argentina–Chile border. The Minister of Defense Oscar Camilión was questioned in Congress about the Argentine arms trafficking scandal; Kirchner told him that he had to resign, which he refused to do. As a result, she made a name for herself as a troublemaker. She was removed from the PJ bloc in the Congress in 1997 for misconduct. She resigned her senatorial seat that year and ran for national deputy in the 1997 midterm elections instead. Menem ended his term of office in 1999 and was replaced by Fernando de la Rúa. Fernández de Kirchner took part in a commission to investigate money laundering with fellow legislator Elisa Carrió, and got into conflicts with her. She ran again for senator in the 2001 midterm elections.


title: Cristina Fernández de Kirchner

text: Néstor Kirchner was elected president in 2003, and she became the First Lady. Under these circumstances, she sought a lower profile in Congress. Her husband had a political dispute with the previous president, Eduardo Duhalde. Their dispute continued during the 2005 midterm elections. Without consensus in the PJ for a single candidate for senator of the Buenos Aires province, both leaders had their respective wives run for the office: Hilda González de Duhalde for the PJ, and Cristina Fernández de Kirchner for the Front for Victory. She won the election.


title: Cristina Fernández de Kirchner

text: The presidential election was held on 28 October 2007. With Fernández de Kirchner leading all the pre-election polls by a wide margin, her challengers focused on forcing her into a ballotage. To win in a single round, a presidential candidate in Argentina needs either more than 45% of the vote, or 40% of the vote and a lead of more than 10 percentage points over the runner-up. However, with 13 challengers splitting the vote, she won the election decisively in the first round with just over 45% of the vote, compared to 23% for Elisa Carrió (candidate for the Civic Coalition) and 17% for former Economy Minister Roberto Lavagna. Fernández de Kirchner was popular among the suburban working class and the rural poor, while Carrió and Lavagna both received more support from the urban middle class. She lost the election in the large cities of Buenos Aires and Rosario.


title: Cristina Fernández de Kirchner

text: On 14 November, the president-elect announced the names of her new cabinet, which was sworn in on 10 December. Of the twelve ministers appointed, seven had been ministers in Néstor Kirchner's government, while the other five took office for the first time. The selections anticipated the continuation of the policies implemented by Néstor Kirchner.


title: Cristina Fernández de Kirchner

text: She began a four-year term on 10 December 2007, facing challenges including: inflation, poor public security, international credibility, a faulty energy infrastructure, and protests from the agricultural sectors over an increase of nearly 30% on export taxes. Fernández de Kirchner was the second female president of Argentina, after Isabel Perón but, unlike Perón, she was elected to the office, whereas Isabel Perón was elected Juan Perón's vice president, and automatically assumed the presidency on his death. The transition from Néstor Kirchner to Cristina Fernández de Kirchner was also the first time a democratic head of state was replaced by their spouse without the death of either. He remained highly influential during his wife's term, supervising the economy and leading the PJ. Their marriage has been compared with those of Juan and Eva Perón and Bill and Hillary Clinton. Media observers suspected that Mr. Kirchner stepped down as president to circumvent the term limit, swapping roles with his wife.


title: Cristina Fernández de Kirchner

text: When Néstor Kirchner refused to run for re-election in 2007 and proposed his wife instead, it was rumored that they could alternate in the presidency for the next 12 years to circumvent the constitutional limit of two consecutive terms. This scenario would have had Cristina standing down in favor of Néstor in 2011, and Néstor would in turn hand the FPV candidacy back to Cristina in 2015. The death of Néstor Kirchner in 2010 derailed such a plan. She had a low positive image, below 30%. On 21 June 2011, she announced that she would run for a second term as president. A few days later, she announced that her economic minister Amado Boudou would run for vice president on her ticket. She personally chose most of the candidates for deputy in the Congress, favoring members of the Cámpora.


title: Cristina Fernández de Kirchner

text: The elections took place on 23 October. She was re-elected with 54% of the vote, followed by socialist Hermes Binner, 37 points behind her. The opposition was divided between several candidates and the perceived economic prosperity prevailed over voter's concerns about corruption and cronyism. It was the largest victory percentage in national elections since 1983. The Peronist party also won eight of the nine elections for governor held that day, increased their number of senators, and obtained the majority in the chamber of deputies, including the number of legislators needed for quorum. They had lost that majority in the 2009 elections. She invited children on stage during the celebrations, and Vice President Amado Boudou played an electric guitar. As she had in 2007, she gave a conciliatory speech.


title: Cristina Fernández de Kirchner

text: When she first took office, Cristina Kirchner replaced the previous minister of economy, Miguel Gustavo Peirano, who had been appointed by her husband as former president. Peirano was succeeded by Martín Lousteau in December 2007. He served as the first of several ministers of economy under her presidency. The attempt to increase taxes on agricultural exports caused a conflict with the agricultural sector and protests broke out. As a result, taxes were not increased, and Lousteau resigned by April 2008, only a few months after he had been appointed. He was replaced by Argentina's tax agency chief Carlos Rafael Fernández.


title: Cristina Fernández de Kirchner

text: As an alternative to increasing taxes, and facing debt payments the following year, the government nationalized private pension funds, known as ""Administradoras de Fondos de Jubilaciones y Pensiones"" (AFJP). The amount of money involved in this operation was nearly 30 billion dollars, and debt obligations were nearly 24 billion dollars. The nationalization was justified by the president as government protectionism during the crisis, and compared with the bank bailouts in Europe and the United States. It was criticized as a threat to property rights and the rule of law.


title: Cristina Fernández de Kirchner

text: Fernández resigned after the Kirchnerist defeat in the 2009 elections, and was replaced by Amado Boudou, president of the ANSES which had worked for that nationalization. Although inflation was nearing 25% and on the rise, Boudou did not consider it a significant problem.


title: Cristina Fernández de Kirchner

text: In January 2010, Fernández de Kirchner created the bicentennial fund employing a necessity and urgency decree in order to pay debt obligations with foreign-exchange reserves. Martín Redrado, president of the Central Bank, refused to implement it, and was fired by another decree. Judge María José Sarmiento annulled both decrees on the grounds that the Central Bank was independent. Redrado resigned one month later, and was replaced by Mercedes Marcó del Pont.


title: Cristina Fernández de Kirchner

text: In an attempt to combat poverty, the government introduced in 2009 the Universal Child Allowance, a cash transfer program to parents who are unemployed or in the informal economy. It was later expanded to cover other disadvantaged groups.


title: Cristina Fernández de Kirchner

text: The extent to which Kirchner's policies have lowered poverty is controversial, with the government's reported poverty rate being questioned by some experts. According to a 2017 UNICEF report, the cash transfers reduced extreme poverty by 30.8% and general poverty by 5.6%.


title: Cristina Fernández de Kirchner

text: Fernández de Kirchner was reelected in 2011, along with Amado Boudou as vice president and the Front for Victory regained control over both chambers of Congress. Hernán Lorenzino became the new minister of economy. The government established currency controls that limited the power to buy or sell foreign currencies, especially American dollars. Many Argentines kept their savings in dollars as a hedge against inflation. The government believed the controls were required to prevent the capital flight and tax evasion.


title: Cristina Fernández de Kirchner

text: They initiated a period of fiscal reform, which included several tax increases, limits to wage increases, but increases in protectionism and reorganization of state-owned enterprises. Hugo Moyano, main union leader, who was a strong supporter of kirchnerism, began to oppose the President. Moyano would later organize a big protest at Plaza de Mayo, with 30,000 people, requesting the abolition of capital gains tax.


title: Cristina Fernández de Kirchner

text: Axel Kicillof was appointed minister in 2013, and served for the remainder of Kirchner's term. He arranged payment of the debt to the Paris Club, and the compensation requested by Repsol for the nationalization of YPF. One month later, negotiations with hedge funds failed, and American judge Thomas Griesa issued an order that Argentina had to pay to all creditors and not just those who had accepted a reduced payment as outlined in the Argentine debt restructuring plan. Kicillof refused to agree that the country had fallen into a sovereign default.


title: Cristina Fernández de Kirchner

text: When Argentina devalued the peso in January 2014, Kicillof placed blame on the exchange-market speculation by Juan José Aranguren, chief of Royal Dutch Shell in Argentina; later in the year, when the peso was at its lowest ever position in relation to the dollar, he blamed "vulture funds" from the United States.


title: Cristina Fernández de Kirchner

text: At the 2014 United Nations conference, she accused the "vulture funds" of destabilizing the economy of the countries and called them "economic terrorists".


title: Cristina Fernández de Kirchner

text: According to The Economist, the Kirchners returned Argentina to "economic nationalism and near-autarky".


title: Cristina Fernández de Kirchner

text: In 2002, Eduardo Duhalde fixed the prices for public services such as electricity, gas and water supply. These remained fixed during the terms of Duhalde and Néstor and Cristina Kirchner, despite the crisis that motivated them having ended. As the inflation rate grew during the period, the state financed part of these prices with subsidies. Investment in these areas decreased, and the generation and distribution networks suffered. Argentina lost its self-supply of energy, and had to import it, rather than being able to export surpluses.


title: Cristina Fernández de Kirchner

text: She proposed a fiscal austerity program in early 2012, including the gradual removal of subsidies. The proposal turned out to be unpopular, and was not implemented. She opted instead to send a bill to Congress for the renationalization of YPF, privatized in 1993, blaming the Spanish company Repsol for the energy trade deficit. The bill was approved by the Chamber of Deputies by a 207-32 margin. It was criticized as an authoritarian move, as there was no negotiation with Repsol. As well, the Vaca Muerta oil field had been discovered by this time. However, YPF was unable to afford the costs to exploit the oil at the site, and the rights to drill at Vaca Muerta were sold to the Chevron Corporation. The costs of energy imports increased the trade deficit and the inflation rate, and power outages became frequent. Outages usually took place on the hottest days of the summer season, as the use of air conditioning increased electricity consumption to peak levels.


title: Cristina Fernández de Kirchner

text: In March 2008, Fernández de Kirchner introduced a new sliding-scale taxation system for agricultural exports, so that rates fluctuated with international prices. This would effectively raise levies on soybean exports from 35% to 44% at the time of the announcement. This new taxation scheme, proposed by Minister Martín Lousteau, led to a nationwide lockout by farming associations, with the aim of forcing the government to back down on new tax system. They were joined on 25 March by thousands of pot-banging demonstrators massed around the Buenos Aires Obelisk and the presidential palace. These demonstrations were followed by others at locations across the country that included road blockades and food shortages.


title: Cristina Fernández de Kirchner

text: The protests were highly polarizing. The government argued that the new taxes would allow for a better redistribution of wealth, and keep down the food prices. It also claimed the farmers were staging a coup d'état against Fernández de Kirchner. Farmers argued that the high taxes made cultivation unviable. The activist Luis D'Elía interrupted one of the demonstrations leading stick-wielding pro-government supporters, who attacked the participants. Minister Lousteau resigned during the crisis, and the Peronist governors opted to negotiate on their own with the farmers, ignoring her approach. Her public image plummeted to its lowest level since the election in October 2007.


title: Cristina Fernández de Kirchner

text: After four months of conflict and having the majority in both houses of the Argentine Congress, the president introduced the new taxation bill. However, many legislators gave priority to the local agendas of their provinces as their economies depended heavily on agriculture. Many FPV legislators, such as Rubén Marín, opposed the bill. Marín argued: "For us, agriculture is the economy". There were two demonstrations the day of the vote: one against the bill, attended by 235,000 people, and the other in support of the bill, attended by 100,000 people. Farmers had announced that they would continue their demonstrations if the bill was approved without amendments. Senator Emilio Rached from Santiago del Estero cast the vote that resulted in a 36–36 tie. In the case of a tie, the vice president, who also serves as president of the Senate but without the right to vote, is required to cast the tie-breaking vote. Julio Cobos voted against the bill, which was then rejected, saying that: "My vote is not in favor, my vote is against". Despite the chilly relations between Cobos and Cristina Kirchner since that event, he completed his term as vice president.


title: Cristina Fernández de Kirchner

text: Fernández de Kirchner was reelected in 2011. The Constitution of Argentina allows only one reelection. Many of her supporters proposed an amendment to the Constitution to allow indefinite reelections. She did not publicly support the proposal, but did not discourage or reject it either. The proposal was not taken to the Congress, as the FPV still lacked the required two-thirds majority to approve an amendment bill. It was rejected by many sectors of society. The first big demonstration (a "cacerolazo") took place in September 2012. It was not called by specific politicians or social leaders, but by the public using social networks. The massive turnout was completely unexpected by both the government and the opposition. People also protested the 2012 Buenos Aires rail disaster, the conflict between Kirchnerism and the media, rising crime rates, and the tight currency controls. She dismissed the demonstration, and said that she would continue working as before. Most of the Fernández de Kirchner loyalists, however, preferred simply to ignore the protest.


title: Cristina Fernández de Kirchner

text: A larger demonstration, the 8N, took place two months later. It was attended by nearly half a million people. They protested a variety of issues such as those of the previous demonstration, as well as the growing rate of inflation and the corruption scandals. She promised to keep her policies unchanged, and Senator Aníbal Fernández dismissed the significance of the demonstrations. Journalist Jorge Lanata explained the polarization was because the government and its supporters thought they were engaged in a revolution, and this justified being against freedom of the press and other public rights. Cabinet Chief Juan Manuel Abal Medina said the demonstrators belonged to a class that was against social justice, and compared the demonstrations to a coup d'état. A similar view was held by Fernández de Kirchner's loyalists.


title: Cristina Fernández de Kirchner

text: Buenos Aires and La Plata suffered floods in April, resulting in more than 70 deaths. Mayor Mauricio Macri pointed out that the national government had prevented the city from taking out international loans, which would have been used for infrastructure improvements. A week later, Fernández de Kirchner announced a proposed amendment of the Argentine judiciary. Three bills were controversial: the first proposed to limit injunctions against the state; the second would include people selected in national elections on the body that appoints or removes judges; the third would create a new court that would limit the number of cases heard by the Supreme Court. The opposition considered the bills an attempt to control the judiciary. The 2013 season of the investigative journalism program "Periodismo para todos" revealed an ongoing case of political corruption involving Néstor Kirchner, called "The Route of the K-Money", which generated a huge political controversy. This led to a new "cacerolazo" on 18 April, known as the 18A.


title: Cristina Fernández de Kirchner

text: Prosecutor Alberto Nisman, who worked on the investigation of the 1994 Asociación Mutual Israelita Argentina (Argentine-Israeli Mutual Association) AMIA bombing, accused Fernández de Kirchner of engaging in a criminal, cover-up conspiracy to cover up the attack. He was found dead in his home the day before he was to explain his denunciation in Congress. Argentine law enforcement concluded that Nisman's death was a homicide. The unsolved case was highly controversial. The 18F demonstration took place a month after his death. It was organized as a silent demonstration, as an homage to Alberto Nisman, and was devoid of political flags or banners. The rule was followed, with occasional exceptions, by waves of spontaneous clapping or people singing the Argentine national anthem. The city police estimated that the demonstration was attended by 400,000 people.


title: Cristina Fernández de Kirchner

text: Several scandals took place during the Fernández de Kirchner administration. The first involved the detention of Venezuelan-American businessman Antonini Wilson in an airport after being found with a suitcase filled with $800,000. This money was illegally provided by Petróleos de Venezuela, the state oil company, to be used for her 2007 general election campaign. Details of the case were explained by businessman Carlos Kauffmann and lawyer Moisés Maiónica, who pleaded guilty. The FPV financing of the 2007 elections caused another scandal years later. Three pharmaceutical businessmen, Sebastián Forza, Damián Ferrón, and Leopoldo Bina, were found dead in 2008, a case known as the "Triple Crime". Further investigation of Forza, who contributed $200,000 to the campaign, identified him as a provider of ephedrine to the Sinaloa Cartel. In 2015, Martín Lanatta and José Luis Salerno, convicted for the killings, claimed that Aníbal Fernández was the boss of a mafia ring that ordered those killings to secure the illegal traffic of ephedrine. Fernández denied the charges, maintaining that it was a set up to undermine his chances in the 2015 general election. General illegal drug trade grew in Argentina during Kirchnerism, and saw Mexican and Colombian syndicates working with Peruvian and Bolivian smugglers. Conviction rates for money laundering were almost nonexistent. Mariano Federici, head of the Financial Information Unit, said that the "magnitude of the threat is very serious, and this would never have been possible without collaboration from government officials in this country".


title: Cristina Fernández de Kirchner

text: Amado Boudou, who served as minister of economy during Fernández de Kirchner's first term and vice president during the second, was suspected of corruption in 2012 case. The Ciccone Calcografica printing company filed for bankruptcy in 2010, but this request was cancelled when businessman Alejandro Vandenbroele bought it. The company received tax breaks to pay its debts, and was selected to print banknotes of the Argentine peso. It is suspected that Vandenbroele is actually a frontman for Boudou, and that he employed his clout as minister of economy to benefit a company that actually belonged to him.


title: Cristina Fernández de Kirchner

text: The TV program "Periodismo para todos" broadcast information about "The Route of the K-Money" scandal. Businessman Leonardo Fariña said in an interview that he helped businessman Lázaro Báez to divert money from public works, and take it to a financial firm located in the Madero Center luxury hotel. This firm, informally known as "La Rosadita", would have sent the money abroad to tax havens, using shell companies. Given the amounts of money involved, the money was weighed instead of counted to determine the value. Federico Elaskar, owner of the firm, confirmed Fariña's claims in another interview. Both of them retracted their statements after the program was aired, but prosecutor José María Campagnoli confirmed their links with Báez. Báez denied any wrongdoing. Campagnoli was suspended as a prosecutor, accused of leaking information, and abusing his authority. Báez is also linked with the Kirchners to the Hotesur scandal, a suspected case of money laundering. According to a criminal complaint by opposition deputy Margarita Stolbizer, his company Valle Mitre S.A. has rented 1,100 rooms per month, for years, at the Hotesur and Alto Calafate hotels, but without occupying them. These hotels, located in the city of El Calafate, belong to the Kirchners.


title: Cristina Fernández de Kirchner

text: The Fernández de Kirchner presidency continued the trials of military personnel involved in the Dirty War started by her husband. There have been more than 500 people sentenced, and 1,000 convicted, in a process that was unprecedented in Latin America. De facto president Jorge Rafael Videla, who was convicted and given a life sentence in 1985 and pardoned years later, received a new life sentence in 2010. General Luciano Benjamín Menéndez, who waged war against the leftist guerrillas in the northern Argentine provinces, received a life sentence as well.


title: Cristina Fernández de Kirchner

text: Another related investigation involved the fate of the children of captured pregnant guerrillas, who were given up for adoption by the military junta. An estimated 500 children were involved. The investigation became controversial during the Fernández de Kirchner administration, as those involved had become adults and some of them refused to participate in DNA testing. One of those cases was the Noble siblings case, involving the adopted sons of Ernestina Herrera de Noble, owner of the "Clarín" newspaper. The Kirchners advanced a bill in Congress to make the genetic testing of suspected victims mandatory. Although the measure had popular support, critics considered it a breach of the right to privacy, and politically motivated because of a dispute between her and the "Clarín" newspaper. The Noble siblings tests in 2011 were negative, and the case was closed in January 2016, after Fernández de Kirchner left the presidency. Hilario Bacca, a confirmed son of disappeared guerrillas, appealed a judicial ruling that sought to change his name, asking to keep the name he had been using.


title: Cristina Fernández de Kirchner

text: Football broadcasting was nationalized on the program "Fútbol para todos" and then filled with pro-government advertisements. On the other hand, the country's largest selling newspaper "Clarín", published by the Clarín Group, is not aligned with the government.


title: Cristina Fernández de Kirchner

text: The Fernández de Kirchner government launched an illegal campaign against Clarín Group, which included over 450 legal and administrative acts of harassment, as reported by the Global Editors Network. One of those actions was a selective use of state advertising, to benefit the media aligned with the government. The government tried to enforce a controversial media law that would see Clarín Group lose licenses and be forced to sell most of its assets. The law was initially sanctioned as a competition law for the media, but critics pointed out that it was only being used to further the campaign against Clarín Group. The government had little interest in enforcing measures of the law that were not related to Clarín Group. Clarín Group launched a constitutional challenge against some articles of the law with the judiciary. The government released an anti-Clarín advertisement claiming it refused to obey the law and may be subverting democracy. The conflict led to disputes with the judiciary. Minister Julio Alak said that extending an injunction that allowed Clarín Group to keep its assets during the trial would be an insurrection, and it was rumored that judges who did not rule as the government wished might face impeachment. The court extended the injunction.


title: Cristina Fernández de Kirchner

text: She claims that journalistic objectivity does not exist, and that all journalists act on behalf of certain interests. She also justified the lack of press conferences, arguing that it is not important for her administration.


title: Cristina Fernández de Kirchner

text: Anthony Mills, deputy director of the International Press Institute, compared the harassment against the press in Argentina with cases in Venezuela and Ecuador. He considered it unfortunate that the president disparaged journalism, and pointed that the freedom of the press may be declining in Argentina.


title: Cristina Fernández de Kirchner

text: The 2009 midterm elections took place a year after the crisis with the farmers. The Kirchners were highly unpopular at the time, and people rejected their policies and governing style. The growing rates of inflation and crime also eroded their public support. Seeking to reverse their declining popularity, Néstor Kirchner led the list for deputy candidates at the Buenos Aires province. He was narrowly defeated by Francisco de Narváez, who led a Peronist faction opposed to the Kirchners. The Kirchners lost the majority of Congress as a result of the election.


title: Cristina Fernández de Kirchner

text: The Front for Victory recovered the majority in both chambers of the Congress during the 2011 presidential elections, when she was re-elected for a second term. The party had projects to amend the constitution and allow indefinite reelections, but lacked the supermajority required for it. A victory at the 2013 midterm elections would have given such majority, but the party was defeated in most provinces. Sergio Massa, a former cabinet minister of the Kirchners, won in the Buenos Aires Province by nearly 10 points with his new party, the Renewal Front. Argentina lacked a big opposition party since the collapse of the Radical Civic Union in 2001. Instead, Massa created an alternative party that also stood for Peronism. However, the party still retained a simple majority in Congress. This election was the first one where teenagers from 16 to 18 could vote. President Fernández de Kirchner, who had undergone brain surgery some weeks before, was hospitalized during the election and unable to join the campaign.


title: Cristina Fernández de Kirchner

text: Fernández de Kirchner was part of the "pink tide", a group of populist, left-wing presidents who ruled several Latin American countries in the 2000s. This group included, among others, Néstor and Cristina Kirchner in Argentina, Hugo Chávez and Nicolás Maduro in Venezuela, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva and Dilma Rousseff in Brazil, Evo Morales in Bolivia and Rafael Correa in Ecuador. She has been an unconditional supporter of Chávez and Maduro. As Paraguay rejected the incorporation of Venezuela into the Mercosur trade bloc, she took advantage of the impeachment of Fernando Lugo to claim that Paraguay had suffered a coup d'état and proposed to temporarily remove the country from the bloc. With the support of the other presidents, Paraguay was removed for a time, and Venezuela was incorporated into the Mercosur. She maintained her support of Venezuela even during the large 2014 Venezuela protests and the imprisonment of its leader, Leopoldo López.


title: Cristina Fernández de Kirchner

text: She had a rocky relationship with the United States. Several items from a US Air Force plane, such as drugs and GPS devices, were seized by Argentine officials, which caused a diplomatic crisis. US State Department spokesman Philip J. Crowley said that they were standard tools used in counter-terrorism tactics which were being taught to the Argentine police during the joint operation, and asked for the return of the seized materials. She blamed the whole country for the 2014 default, ruled by US judge Thomas P. Griesa. She said in a "cadena nacional" ("national network") address that the US may be trying to oust her from power, or even assassinate her. She said this a few days after accusing the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant of similar assassination plans against her. The idea was rejected by opposition leader Elisa Carrió as a mere conspiracy theory.


title: Cristina Fernández de Kirchner

text: The 30th anniversary of the Falklands War was in 2012, and Fernández de Kirchner was increasingly critical of the UK, reiterating the Argentine claims in the Falkland Islands sovereignty dispute. British Prime minister David Cameron rejected her comments. Relations were also strained by recent oil explorations in the area, and she threatened to sue Rockhopper Exploration for it.


title: Cristina Fernández de Kirchner

text: When Archbishop Jorge Bergoglio was elected as Pope Francis, the initial reactions were mixed. Most of Argentine society cheered it, but the pro-government newspaper "Página/12" published renewed allegations about the Dirty War, and the president of the National Library described a global conspiracy theory. The president took more than an hour to congratulate him, and only did so in a passing reference within a routine speech. However, due to the Pope's popularity in Argentina, Fernández de Kirchner made what the political analyst Claudio Fantini called a "Copernican shift" in her relations with him and fully embraced the Francis phenomenon. On the day before his inauguration as pope, Bergoglio, now Francis, had a private meeting with Fernández de Kirchner. They exchanged gifts and lunched together. This was the new pope's first meeting with a head of state, and there was speculation that the two were mending their relations. "Página/12" removed their controversial articles about Bergoglio, written by Horacio Verbitsky, from their web page, as a result of this change.


title: Cristina Fernández de Kirchner

text: Argentina suffered a terrorist attack in 1994, the AMIA bombing targeting a Buenos Aires Jewish center, that killed 85 people and wounded 300. The investigation remained open for years, and prosecutor Alberto Nisman was appointed to the case. He accused Iran of organizing the attack, and the Hezbollah group of carrying it out. He intended to prosecute five Iranian officials, including former Iranian president Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, but Argentina signed a memorandum of understanding with Iran for a joint investigation. Nisman accused the president of signing that memorandum for oil and trade benefits, according to hundreds of hours of wiretaps. On 19 January 2015, he was found dead at his home, a day before a congressional hearing to explain his accusation, which caused a great controversy. As of 2016, both the cases of the AMIA bombing and the death of Nisman remain unresolved, and the courts declined at the time to investigate his denunciation of Fernández de Kirchner.


title: Cristina Fernández de Kirchner

text: Fernández de Kirchner maintained her positions during several speeches at the United Nations General Assembly (UNGA) during its yearly meetings of September and had a rocky relationship with Iranian President Ahmadinejad. In 2009, Fernández de Kirchner personally asked Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad to cooperate with the Argentine justice to help bring closure to the AMIA bombing. She pointed the belief of both mandataries in God and condemned Ahmadinejad's denial of the Holocaust as well as other "Western tragedies" In the September 2009 UNGA, she clashed with Ahmadinejad and ordered the Argentine delegation to walk out on Ahmadinejad's speech, denouncing his rhetoric. In return, Iran responded that Argentina's accusations were "unfounded and irresponsible" and denounced the "inept Argentine judicial system and its vulnerabiities to internal and foreign pressures."


title: Cristina Fernández de Kirchner

text: Mauricio Macri, mayor of Buenos Aires, was elected president in the 2015 presidential elections, defeating the Kirchnerist candidate Daniel Scioli in a ballotage. During the transition period, Macri reported that Fernández de Kirchner was creating obstacles and problems in an attempt to undermine his government. She changed the 2016 budget, increasing spending in several areas (even the broadcasting of soccer matches), despite the huge fiscal deficit. A number of Kirchnerist officials refused to resign their offices to allow Macri to appoint his own people. Even the handover ceremony became controversial, as she refused to attend it. It was the first time since the end of military rule in 1983 that the outgoing president did not hand over power to the incoming one.


title: Cristina Fernández de Kirchner

text: In 2016, she founded a think tank under the name of Patria Institute, intended to centralize her post-presidency activities. She also wrote a book called "Sinceramente", which was published in 2019.


title: Cristina Fernández de Kirchner

text: Both Fernández de Kirchner and her former interior minister Florencio Randazzo wanted to run for senator for the Buenos Aires Province at the 2017 midterm elections. Refusing to run in primary elections, she asked for a shared ticket as a condition to run for senator. Randazzo did not accept the proposal. As both candidates enlisted to run in the general election, the FPV broke apart with the Justicialist Party of Buenos Aires Province backing Randazzo and the rest of the FPV parties backing Fernández de Kirchner; the remaining parties formed the Citizen's Unity ("Unidad Ciudadana") coalition. Esteban Bullrich was the candidate of "Cambiemos".


title: Cristina Fernández de Kirchner

text: Fernández de Kirchner won the mandatory primary elections by a slim margin of 0,08%, but lost in the general election 36% to 42%. However, she still took office according to Argentine Senate election procedure where the balloting results in two of the three senate seats being claimed by the party winning the largest vote share, with the second-place finisher claiming the third senate seat.


title: Cristina Fernández de Kirchner

text: On 27 October 2019, Cristina Fernández de Kirchner was elected vice president, making her the first former head of state to assume the Argentine vice presidency. She was the running mate of Alberto Fernández (no relation), who was elected president. She resigned from the Senate on 27 November 2019 after assuming the vice presidency, and was replaced by her former foreign minister Jorge Taiana.


title: Cristina Fernández de Kirchner

text: Cristina Fernández de Kirchner faced several charges in court after leaving office. One of those concerned the sale of dollar futures at very low prices near the end of her term of office. This became a problem during Macri's presidency. The operation was carried out by the Central Bank, but judge Claudio Bonadio believes Fernández de Kirchner is the instigator. She is also being investigated for her role in "The Route of the K-Money" scandal. About US$1 million of her assets was frozen while Bonadio investigated the case. She took advantage of the hearing to organize her first political rally since leaving power. Lázaro Báez who has close ties with the Kirchners was detained in April 2016 as it was suspected that he might flee escape. José López, an official from the ministry of public works, was detained while trying to hide bags filled with millions in cash at a monastery. On 27 December 2016, Federal Judge Julián Ercolini ordered the freezing of US$633 million of Fernández de Kirchner's assets and approved charges of illicit association and fraudulent administration against her. The case presented by Nisman was finally opened for investigation in December 2016.


title: Cristina Fernández de Kirchner

text: In December 2017, Judge Bonadio indicted her and charged her with high treason. However, as a sitting senator, she enjoyed immunity from prosecution. On 5 March 2018, Fernández de Kirchner was indicted for obstructing investigation into the 1994 AMIA Bombing which killed 85 people, with her allegedly making a deal with the Iranian government to stop investigating Iranian officials who may have been involved in the attack in exchange for better prices on Iranian oil and other products. She can still face trial despite her immunity, while legislators also have the choice to strip her of immunity. Human Rights Watch claims, based mainly on reports and testimonies made by the ex-secretary-general of Interpol Ronald Noble, that these charges have no grounds. Noble refuted the claim of cover-up made by judge Bonadio, calling the judge's report "false, misleading and incomplete".


title: Cristina Fernández de Kirchner

text: In April 2021, Fernández de Kirchner's lawyers anticipated that they will ask for the cause against her regarding the memorandum of understanding between Argentina and Iran to be nullified, alleging that it was tampered by the visits of two different judges to former President Mauricio Macri, which coincided with the time of indictments on the cause against her.


title: Cristina Fernández de Kirchner

text: On 6 December 2022, the Court of First Instance found de Kirchner guilty of "fraudulent administration" over the awarding of a public works contract to a friend, businessman Lázaro Báez. The court sentenced Fernández de Kirchner to six years in prison and a lifetime ban from holding public office for corruption. She has temporary immunity and will be able to remain free due to her current role as a vice president, and can appeal the verdict. She denied the allegations against her and confirmed that she will not run for reelection in 2023.


title: Cristina Fernández de Kirchner

text: Axel Kaiser, a follower of the Austrian School, claims that this propaganda glorifies the state to the detriment of individual rights, uses conspiracy theories to explain the government's mistakes, blames neoliberalism for poverty, and glorifies democracy while only maintaining the appearance of it, justifies economic interventionism by describing economic activity as a zero-sum game (where any wealth is the result of exploitation), and blames class conflict and imperialism for problems such as inflation.


title: Cristina Fernández de Kirchner

text: To Kaiser, this system divides the political world into two halves: the people and those against the people, with the Kirchners described as the saviors of the people, interpreting their collective will beyond the boundaries of parliaments and parties. This division is used to justify the rejection of those described as being against the people, and to polarize the population. He claims that Fernández de Kirchner's election in 2011 was used to justify authoritarian policies in the name of the general will, criticism being described as antidemocratic or as the plotting of a coup.


title: Cristina Fernández de Kirchner

text: According to Richard Bourke, political theorist and Kirchner supporter Ernesto Laclau considered this the perfect form of democracy, a vision of that has been criticized by other writers as leaving little room for opposition, reducing the citizen to a spectator unable to contest government policies.


title: Cristina Fernández de Kirchner

text: In 1973, during her studies at the National University of La Plata, she met her future spouse, Néstor Kirchner. They were married on 9 May 1975 and had two children: Máximo (born 1977, currently serving as National Deputy for Buenos Aires Province and the leader for Frente de Todos in the chamber) and Florencia (born 1990).


title: Cristina Fernández de Kirchner

text: Néstor Kirchner died on 27 October 2010 after suffering a heart attack. Following the death of her husband, she dressed in black for over three years.


title: Cristina Fernández de Kirchner

text: Fernández de Kirchner's health first became a topic of public concern in 2005 when "Noticias" magazine reported that she might suffer from bipolar disorder. Journalist Franco Lindner interviewed the psychiatrist who treated her without revealing his name. Journalist Nelson Castro investigated further and discovered that the psychiatrist was Alejandro Lagomarsino, who died in 2011. Lagomarsino was the leading specialist in the treatment of bipolar disorder in Argentina.


title: Cristina Fernández de Kirchner

text: Castro's investigation revealed that Fernández de Kirchner was treated by Lagomarsino for a short period. He could not determine the length of her treatment or the medicine she received, or whether another psychiatrist continued treating her or not. Castro considers that some of her outlandish phrases or projects, and her frequent periods of hiding from public view, may be explained by the disorder's periods of mania and depression, as well as being a regular political strategy. Eduardo Duhalde said that Néstor Kirchner once confided in him that she had a bipolar disorder, while she was having a violent outburst.


title: Cristina Fernández de Kirchner

text: During the United States diplomatic cables leak it was revealed that Hillary Clinton questioned Fernández de Kirchner's mental health and asked the US embassy whether she was receiving treatment or not; she later apologized to Fernández de Kirchner for those leaks. She said in her book "La Presidenta" that it was all a misunderstanding; it is her sister who suffers from bipolar disorder.


title: Cristina Fernández de Kirchner

text: On 27 December 2011, presidential spokesman Alfredo Scoccimaro announced that Fernández de Kirchner had been diagnosed with thyroid cancer on 22 December and that she would undergo surgery on 4 January 2012. The standard procedure in these operations is to expose the thyroid gland so that a pathologist can take a sample, analyze it looking for carcinogenic cells, and then decide whether it needs to be removed. In her case, this step was omitted and the gland was removed directly. After the operation, it was revealed that she had been misdiagnosed and did not have cancer. On 5 October 2013, doctors ordered Fernández de Kirchner to rest for a month after they found blood on her brain caused by a head injury she received on 8 August 2012. She was re-admitted to hospital and had successful surgery on 8 October 2013 to remove blood from under a membrane covering her brain.


title: Cristina Fernández de Kirchner

text: On 4 November 2021, Fernández de Kirchner was admitted at the Santorio Otamendi after doctors found out that she had a uterine polyp and had to undergo hysterectomy. On 6 November 2021, she was later discharged after a successful hysterectomy.


title: Cloudflare

text: Cloudflare, Inc. is an American content delivery network and DDoS mitigation company, founded in 2009. It primarily acts as a reverse proxy between a website's visitor and the Cloudflare customer's hosting provider. Its headquarters are in San Francisco, California. According to "The Hill", it is used by more than 20 percent of the entire Internet for its web security services.


title: Cloudflare

text: Cloudflare was founded in July 2009 by Matthew Prince, Lee Holloway, and Michelle Zatlyn. Prince and Holloway had previously collaborated on Project Honey Pot, a product of Unspam Technologies that served as some inspiration for the basis of Cloudflare. From 2009, the company was venture-capital funded. On August 15, 2019, Cloudflare submitted its S-1 filing for IPO on the New York Stock Exchange under the stock ticker NET. It opened for public trading on September 13, 2019 at $15 per share.


title: Cloudflare

text: In 2020, Cloudflare co-founder and COO Michelle Zatlyn was named president, making her one of the few woman presidents of a publicly traded technology company in the U.S.


title: Cloudflare

text: Cloudflare has acquired web-services and security companies, including StopTheHacker (Feb 2014), CryptoSeal (June 2014), Eager Platform Co. (December 2016), Neumob (November 2017), S2 Systems (January 2020), Linc (December 2020), Zaraz (December 2021), Vectrix (February 2022), and Area 1 Security (February 2022).


title: Cloudflare

text: Since at least 2017, Cloudflare has been using a wall of lava lamps in their San Francisco headquarters as a source of randomness for encryption keys, alongside double pendulums in its London offices and a geiger counter in its Singapore offices. The lava lamp installation implements the Lavarand method, where a camera transforms the unpredictable shapes of the "lava" blobs into a digital image.


title: Cloudflare

text: Cloudflare received media attention in June 2011 for providing DDoS mitigation for the website of LulzSec, a black hat hacking group.


title: Cloudflare

text: In March 2013, The Spamhaus Project was targeted by a DDoS attack that Cloudflare reported exceeded 300gigabits per second (Gbit/s). Patrick Gilmore, of Akamai, stated that at the time it was "the largest publicly announced DDoS attack in the history of the Internet." While trying to defend Spamhaus against the DDoS attacks, Cloudflare ended up being attacked as well; Google and other companies eventually came to Spamhaus' defense and helped it to absorb the unprecedented amount of attack traffic.


title: Cloudflare

text: In February 2014, Cloudflare claimed to have mitigated an NTP reflection attack against an unnamed European customer, which they stated peaked at 400 Gbit/s. In November 2014, it reported a 500 Gbit/s DDoS attack in Hong Kong. In June 2020, it mitigated a DDoS attack that peaked at 250 Gbit/s. In July 2021 the company claimed to have absorbed a DDoS attack three times larger than any they'd previously recorded, which their corporate blog implied was over 1.2 Tbit/s in total.


title: Cloudflare

text: Cloudflare acts as a reverse proxy for web traffic. It supports web protocols including SPDY and HTTP/2, QUIC, and support for HTTP/2 Server Push.


title: Cloudflare

text: Cloudflare provides DDoS mitigation services that protect customers from distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks.


title: Cloudflare

text: In 2010, Cloudflare launched a Content Distribution Network (CDN) service. TechCrunch wrote that its goal was to be "a CDN for the masses".


title: Cloudflare

text: In 2017 Cloudflare launched Cloudflare Workers, a serverless computing platform for creating new applications, augmenting existing ones, without configuring or maintaining infrastructure. It has expanded to include Workers KV, a low-latency key-value data store; Cron Triggers, for scheduling Cron jobs; and additional tooling for developers to deploy and scale their code across the globe.


title: Cloudflare

text: On September 25, 2019, Cloudflare released a freemium VPN service for mobile devices called WARP. A year later, beta support for macOS and Windows was released.


title: Cloudflare

text: In November, 2020, Cloudflare announced Cloudflare for Teams, consisting of a DNS resolver and web gateway called "Gateway," and a zero-trust authentication service called "Access."


title: Cloudflare

text: On September 26, 2022, Cloudflare announced Zero Trust SIM, an eSIM designed to secure mobile devices and prevent SIM-swapping attacks. The technology is based on the zero trust security model. According to Cloudflare, the secure eSIM can also be used as a second identification factor with 2FA verification protocols. The product will be first available in the United States, with a planned global rollout in the future.


title: Cloudflare

text: In September 2022, Cloudflare began to test Turnstile – an alternative to CAPTCHA. The product, instead of presenting a visual CAPTCHA for the user to solve, automatizes the verification process by conducting JavaScript-based checks inside the browser to determine whether the user is a real person or an automated entity. The algorithm reportedly uses machine learning to optimize the process.


title: Cloudflare

text: In 2014, Cloudflare began providing free DDoS mitigation for artists, activists, journalists, and human rights groups under the name "Project Galileo." More than 1,000 users and organizations were participating in Project Galileo as of 2020. In 2017, they extended the service to electoral infrastructure and political campaigns under the name "Athenian Project." In December 2020, Cloudflare released a beta Jamstack platform for front-end developers to deploy websites on Cloudflare's infrastructure, under the name "Pages."


title: Cloudflare

text: In January 2021, the company began providing their "Waiting Room" digital queue product for free for COVID-19 vaccination scheduling under the title "Project Fair Shot." Project Fair Shot later won a Webby People's Choice Award in 2022 for Event Management under the Apps & Software category.


title: Cloudflare

text: On June 1, 2012, the hacker group UGNazi redirected visitors to the website 4chan to a Twitter account belonging to UGNazi by “hijacking” 4chan’s domain via Cloudflare. After initiating a password recovery for the Google Workspace hosted email account of Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince, UGNazi then allegedly used social engineering to trick AT&T support staff into giving them access to his voicemail. Exploiting a bug in Google App’s two-factor authentication security procedures, the hackers allegedly used the voicemail-recovered password to access Prince’s email account without a second layer of authentication. Once in control of Prince’s email account, they were able to redirect the 4chan domain through Cloudflare’s database.


title: Cloudflare

text: In March 2021, Tillie Kottmann from the hacking collective "Advanced Persistent Threat 69420" demonstrated that the group had gained root shell access to security cameras in Cloudflare offices managed by cloud-based physical security company Verkada after obtaining the credentials of a Verkada superuser account that had been leaked on the Internet. Cloudflare stated that the compromised cameras were in offices that had been officially closed for several months, though the hacking collective also obtained access to Verkada-operated cameras in Cloudflare's offices in New York City, London, Austin and San Francisco. The hacking group told "Bloomberg News" that it had video archives from all Verkada customers; it accessed footage from Cloudflare's cameras and posted a screenshot of security footage which they said was taken by a Verkada camera in a Cloudflare office.


title: Cloudflare

text: From September 2016 until February 2017, a major Cloudflare bug (nicknamed Cloudbleed) leaked sensitive data, including passwords and authentication tokens, from customer websites by sending extra data in response to web requests. The leaks resulted from a buffer overflow which occurred, according to numbers provided by Cloudflare at the time, more than 18,000,000 times before the problem was corrected.


title: Cloudflare

text: In May 2017, "ProPublica" reported that Cloudflare routinely discloses the names and email addresses of persons complaining about hate sites to the operators of those sites, which has led to the complainants being harassed. Cloudflare's general counsel defended the company's policies by saying it is "base constitutional law that people can face their accusers", and noted that there had been a disclaimer on Cloudflare's complaint form since 2015 stating that they "would notify the site owner." Cloudflare's CEO later suggested that, had people not wanted their names shared, they should have provided a false name on the reporting form.


title: Cloudflare

text: There was major outage lasting about 30 minutes, on July 2, 2019 attributed to bad software deployment. In 2020, a misconfiguration of a router caused a data pileup and outage in major European cities. Cloudflare experienced another outage in June 2022.


title: Cloudflare

text: Cloudflare has been criticized for not banning websites with hate speech content. The company has said it has a content neutrality policy and that it opposes the policing of its customers on free speech grounds, except in cases where the customers break the law. The company has also faced criticism for not banning websites allegedly connected to terrorism groups, but Cloudflare has maintained that no law enforcement agency has asked the company to discontinue these services and it closely monitors its obligations under U.S. laws.


title: Cloudflare

text: In 2022, a report by Stanford University found that Cloudflare was a prominent CDN provider among several other providers that are disproportionately responsible for serving misinformation websites.


title: Cloudflare

text: Cloudflare has come under pressure on multiple occasions due to its services being utilized to serve hate speech and far-right content. As Cloudflare is considered an infrastructure provider, rather than a hosting provider, they are able to maintain broad legal immunity for the content served from their customers.


title: Cloudflare

text: Cloudflare provided DNS routing and DDoS protection for the white supremacist and neo-Nazi website, "The Daily Stormer." In 2017 Cloudflare stopped providing its services to "The Daily Stormer" after an announcement on the website asserted that the "upper echelons" of Cloudflare were "secretly supporters of their ideology". Previously Cloudflare had refused to take any action regarding "The Daily Stormer". As a self-described "free speech absolutist", Cloudflare's CEO Matthew Prince, in a blog post, vowed never to succumb to external pressure again and sought to create a "political umbrella" for the future. Prince further addressed the dangers of large companies deciding what is allowed to stay online, a concern that is shared by a number of civil liberties groups and privacy experts. The Electronic Frontier Foundation, a US digital rights group, said that services such as Cloudflare "should not be adjudicating what speech is acceptable", adding that "when illegal activity, like inciting violence or defamation, occurs, the proper channel to deal with it is the legal system."


title: Cloudflare

text: In 2019, Cloudflare was criticized for providing services to the far-right discussion and imageboard 8chan, which allows users to post and discuss content with minimal interference from site administrators. The message board has been linked to mass shootings in the United States and the Christchurch mosque shootings in New Zealand. In addition, a number of news organizations including "The Washington Post" and "The Daily Dot" have reported on the existence of child pornography and child sexual abuse discussion boards.


title: Cloudflare

text: A Cloudflare representative stated that the platform "does not host the referenced websites, cannot block websites, and is not in the business of hiding companies that host illegal content". Cloudflare did not terminate service to 8chan until public and legal pressure mounted in the wake of the 2019 El Paso shooting, a copycat event similar in nature to the Christchurch mosque shootings, in which the associated manifesto was published to 8chan.


title: Cloudflare

text: In an interview with "The Guardian", immediately following the 2019 El Paso shooting, CEO Matthew Prince defended Cloudflare's support of 8chan, stating that he had a "moral obligation" to keep the site online.


title: Cloudflare

text: A few days later Cloudflare terminated their service to 8chan, and as a result the website was taken off the clearnet.


title: Cloudflare

text: Cloudflare provided DDoS mitigation and acted as a reverse proxy for Kiwi Farms, a far-right Internet forum dedicated to discussion and trolling of online figures or communities, that often engages in harassment and doxxing of targets, and has been implicated in the suicides of at least three people. Kiwi Farms also has a reputation for transphobic content, and its users have been accused of swatting vulnerable individuals. Although Cloudflare was not the primary website host, they did perform critical services to keep Kiwi Farms on-line, both protecting the site from denial-of-service attacks and optimizing content delivery. Kiwi Farms began as a 4chan forum in 2007, but gained notoriety in 2019, when website owner Joshua Moon reposted a video of the Christchurch mosque shootings along with the perpetrator's manifesto to the Kiwi Farms site. He refused requests for cooperation from New Zealand law enforcement, when asked to provide information regarding users who may have posted relevant information related to the mosque attacks.


title: Cloudflare

text: In 2022, a campaign was launched by transgender activist Clara Sorrenti, who has previously been targeted by the forum, to pressure Cloudflare into terminating service for Kiwi Farms. On August 31, 2022, Cloudflare responded to the campaign with a blog post, and likened their services to that of a public utility, stating that "Just as the telephone company doesn't terminate your line if you say awful, racist, bigoted things, we have concluded ... that turning off security services because we think what you publish is despicable is the wrong policy", but that it would certainly be the "popular choice" to drop sites that the Cloudflare team "personally feels [are] disgusting and immoral". The company also defended their decision by saying that "where they had provided DDoS protection services to an anti-LGBTIQ+ website, they donated 100% of the fees earned to an organisation fighting for LGBTIQ+ rights". The blog post mentioned Cloudflare's terms of use agreement, which allows them to terminate service due to "content that discloses sensitive personal information, [and] incites or exploits violence against people" but, according to "The Guardian", the statement "did not specifically address how Kiwi Farms users doxxing people did not fall foul of these terms".


title: Cloudflare

text: Cloudflare has been accused of pinkwashing their message, by highlighting donations for LGBTQ services like The Trevor Project's suicide hotline, with LGBTQ rights organization GLAAD criticizing the statement, calling Cloudflare "the definition of hypocrisy" stating that the company is "hiding behind donations to LGBTQ causes and simultaneously refusing to sever ties with [the Kiwi Farms] website."


title: Cloudflare

text: On September 3, 2022, Cloudflare blocked Kiwi Farms, citing urgent escalating rhetoric against targets of Kiwi Farms, stating that there is an "unprecedented emergency and immediate threat to human life". According to "The Washington Post", there was a "surge in credible violent threats stemming from the site" and CEO Matthew Prince said that Cloudflare believes "there is an imminent danger, and the pace at which law enforcement is able to respond to those threats we don't think is fast enough to keep up." Former whistleblower and transgender rights activist Chelsea Manning responded to the situation and said that better long-term solutions are needed for dealing with such "dangerous speech", suggesting an approach that doesn't rely on "hosting providers to have to take these things down".


title: Cloudflare

text: "The Huffington Post" has documented Cloudflare's services to "at least 7 terrorist groups", as designated by the United States Department of State including the Taliban, Al-Shabaab, the al-Aqsa Martyrs' Brigades, Hamas, Myanmar's military junta led by the Tatmadaw, and the al-Quds Brigades. Cloudflare has been aware since at least 2012, and has taken no action. However, according to Cloudflare's CEO, no law enforcement agency has asked the company to discontinue these services. Two of the top three online chat forums and nearly forty other web sites belonging to the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) are guarded by Cloudflare. According to Prince, U.S. law enforcement has not asked Cloudflare to discontinue the service, and it has not chosen to do so itself. In November 2015, hacktivist group Anonymous discouraged the use of Cloudflare's services following the ISIL attacks in Paris and additional revelations that Cloudflare aids terrorists. Cloudflare responded by calling the group "15-year-old kids in Guy Fawkes masks", and saying that whenever such concerns are raised it consults anti-terrorism experts and abides by the law.


title: Cloudflare

text: Cloudflare services have been used by Rescator, a carding website that sells stolen payment card data.


title: Cloudflare

text: Cloudflare has been cited in reports by The Spamhaus Project, an international spam tracking organization, for the high numbers of cybercriminal botnet operations hosted by Cloudflare. An October 2015 report found that Cloudflare provisioned 40% of the SSL certificates used by typosquatting phishing sites, which use deceptive domain names resembling those of banks and payment processors to compromise Internet users' banking and other transactions.


title: Cloudflare

text: In 2018, Cloudflare was identified by the European Union's Counterfeit and Piracy Watch List as a "notorious market" which engages in, facilitates, or benefits from counterfeiting and piracy. The report noted that Cloudflare hides and anonymizes the operators of 40% of the world's pirate sites, and 62% of the 500 largest such sites, and "does not follow due diligence when opening accounts for websites to prevent illegal sites from using its services." Italian courts have enjoined Cloudflare to cease hosting pirate television service "IPTV THE BEST" after it was found to be infringing the intellectual property of Sky Italy and the Italian football league, and German courts have similarly found that "Cloudflare and its anonymization services attract structurally copyright infringing websites."


title: Cloudflare

text: In April 2018, Cloudflare dropped Switter as a client and ceased services. Switter was a social media network for the sex worker community, built on Mastodon's open-source software and was launched in March of 2018, with 49,000 members joining in the first few weeks, before the site was shutdown by Cloudflare. This occurred shortly after the passage of H.R. 1865, FOSTA/SESTA, a set of bills that criminalized websites that "facilitate or support sex trafficking", and was signed into law by President Donald Trump in 2018. According to "The Verge", "The conflation of consensual sex work with sex trafficking, as well as the threat of litigation" led to a crackdown by Internet providers. SESTA weakened protections for Internet infrastructure companies and was criticized on free speech grounds due to concerns about disproportionate impact and disruptions to the lives of sex workers.


title: Cloudflare

text: Switter's parent company, Assembly Four, is based in Australia, where sex work has been decriminalized. They had hoped the social media platform would be safe from US legislation, but Cloudflare terminated service, saying the move was "related to our attempts to understand FOSTA, which is a very bad law and [sets] a very dangerous precedent". In response, Assembly Four said that "Given Cloudflare's previous stances of privacy and freedom, as well as fighting alongside the EFF, we had hoped they would take a stand against FOSTA/SESTA".