title: Siege of Baghdad (1258)

text: Although hesitant at first to go to war with Hulagu out of Mongol brotherhood, the economic situation of the Golden Horde led him to declare war against the Ilkhanate. This became known as the Berke–Hulagu war.


title: Geraldine Viswanathan

text: Geraldine Viswanathan ( ; born 20 June 1995) is an Australian actress. She gained attention in the role of Kayla in the 2018 film "Blockers", for which Refinery29 referred to her as "the film's breakout star". Viswanathan starred in the 2019 coming-of-age film "Hala", as well as "Bad Education" opposite Hugh Jackman and Allison Janney. She also played a recurring role in the Australian series "Janet King", and currently appears in the TBS comedy anthology, "Miracle Workers".


title: Geraldine Viswanathan

text: Geraldine's father, Suresh Viswanathan, is a doctor who works in nuclear medicine and is of Indian Tamil descent. Her mother, Anja Raith, is from Switzerland and was raised by a father who was a filmmaker and ballet dancer. Raith was once an aspiring actress who attended musical theatre school in London before getting married and settling down in Newcastle; she has now started an acting school called "Anja's Place".


title: Geraldine Viswanathan

text: Viswanathan grew up with a younger sister and a deep love of horses and animals. She attended the Hunter School of the Performing Arts, Newcastle, where she was in drama class.


title: Geraldine Viswanathan

text: At the age of 15, Viswanathan and her family moved to Los Angeles, California for a few months, where she went through the process of securing a manager with the hopes of obtaining Disney and Nickelodeon roles. In later years, Viswanathan performed standup and sketch comedy with her group named "Freudian Nip".


title: Geraldine Viswanathan

text: In 2015, Viswanathan was shortlisted for the Heath Ledger Scholarship. She contemplated going to university to study international studies and media, but instead dove into acting and made working in America her goal, as roles in Australia are limited.


title: Geraldine Viswanathan

text: At the age of four, Viswanathan appeared in a Kodak television commercial. In 2016, she appeared in "Emo the Musical" and went to Los Angeles for her first pilot season. In 2017, Viswanathan joined the cast of ABC's drama series "Janet King" in the role of Bonnie.


title: Geraldine Viswanathan

text: Her big break came in 2018, when she was cast in the movie "Blockers" alongside Leslie Mann and John Cena, who played her father. In the same year, she was cast in the Netflix movie "The Package" and the drama film "Hala" which went to Sundance Film Festival. "The Hollywood Reporter" included her in its "Next Gen Talent" list as one of "20 rising stars among the blockbuster breakouts and small-screen discoveries who are shaking up the industry".


title: Geraldine Viswanathan

text: In 2019, Viswanathan was cast in the anthology series "Miracle Workers" alongside Steve Buscemi and Daniel Radcliffe. "Bad Education" (2019) sees Viswanathan play alongside Hugh Jackman and Allison Janney as the character of Rachel. The film is based on a true story of an embezzlement scandal and received critical acclaim at Sundance Film Festival, as well as some Emmy nominations.


title: Geraldine Viswanathan

text: Viswanathan starred in the Selena Gomez produced feature film, "The Broken Hearts Gallery" (2020), in Toronto, Canada. The film was due to be released in Summer of 2020, but was postponed to September due to the COVID-19 pandemic. In the film, she stars alongside fellow Australian Dacre Montgomery, playing the heroine Lucy, a gallery assistant who struggles to give up items from past relationships. About the film, she noted that she feels fortunate to represent brown girls on screen, and appreciated that her mother in the film is blonde and looks a lot like her real mother.


title: Geraldine Viswanathan

text: In October 2021, she was added to the psychological thriller film "Cat Person", based on a short story by Kristen Roupenian published in 2017 in "The New Yorker".


title: Geraldine Viswanathan

text: In January 2022, Viswanathan was cast in a multi-starrer film "The Beanie Bubble" co-directed by Kristin Gore and Damian Kulash.


title: Geraldine Viswanathan

text: Viswanathan was once a reader in casting rooms, and was the reader for the Australian casting process for "Crazy Rich Asians".


title: Damon Lindelof

text: Damon Laurence Lindelof (born April 24, 1973) is an American screenwriter, comic book writer, and producer. Among his accolades, he received three Primetime Emmy Awards, from twelve nominations. In 2010, "Time" magazine named him one of the 100 most influential people in the world.


title: Damon Lindelof

text: Lindelof is best known as the creator and showrunner of numerous critically acclaimed television series, such as the ABC science fiction drama series "Lost" (2004–2010), the HBO supernatural drama series "The Leftovers" (2014–2017), and the HBO superhero limited series "Watchmen" (2019).


title: Damon Lindelof

text: Lindelof was also a writer on the CBS crime drama series "Nash Bridges" (2000–2001) and the NBC crime drama series "Crossing Jordan" (2001–2004). He co-wrote the films "Cowboys & Aliens" (2011), "Prometheus" (2012), "Star Trek Into Darkness" (2013), "World War Z" (2013), and "Tomorrowland" (2015).


title: Damon Lindelof

text: Lindelof was born in Englewood, New Jersey, the son of Susan (Klausner), a teacher, and David Herbert Lindelof, a bank manager. Lindelof's mother is Ashkenazi Jewish, with family from Białystok, Poland. His father's ancestry included Swedish (where his Lindelof great-grandfather was born, in Välinge, Malmöhus), Norwegian, Spanish, and German. Lindelof celebrated his Bar Mitzvah in Teaneck, where he attended synagogue.


title: Damon Lindelof

text: Lindelof went to Teaneck High School, a school whose diverse student body he credits with expanding his horizons as a writer. He has stated, "I was a Jewish white kid growing up in Teaneck, but at the same time, I had African and Filipino and Asian friends and to have that experience all through high school while getting an awesome education was wonderful." He attended film school at New York University, performing briefly in the band Petting Zoo, and moved to Los Angeles after graduating.


title: Damon Lindelof

text: An early boost to Lindelof's writing career came in 1999, when he was selected as a semifinalist for a Nicholl Fellowship for his screenplay "Perfectionists". Before this, he had worked on reviewing scripts at Paramount, Fox, and Alan Ladd studios.


title: Damon Lindelof

text: In 1999, Lindelof began his professional career as a writer on the drama series "Wasteland" and the anthology series "Undressed". He received further attention as a writer on the CBS crime drama series "Nash Bridges", which he worked on from 2000 to 2001. He then wrote and produced the NBC crime drama series "Crossing Jordan", which he worked on until the end of its third season.


title: Damon Lindelof

text: In 2004, Lindelof received further recognition and success as an executive producer and showrunner (alongside Carlton Cuse) on the drama series "Lost". The series was praised for its unique brand of storytelling and strong characters. The first two seasons of the show were ratings juggernauts and the show never fell out of the Top 30 throughout its six seasons on the air. Lindelof's work on "Lost" garnered numerous awards and nominations throughout its run, including winning the Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Drama Series in 2005.


title: Damon Lindelof

text: Lindelof and the "Lost" writing staff won the Writers Guild of America Award for Best Dramatic Series at the February 2006 ceremony for their work on the first and second seasons. He was nominated for the WGA Award for Best Dramatic Series a further three times. At the February 2007 ceremony for his work on the second and third seasons, at the February 2009 ceremony for his work on the fourth season and at the February 2010 ceremony for his work on the fifth season. Lindelof and his co-writer Drew Goddard were also nominated for the WGA Award for Best Episodic Drama at the February 2008 ceremony for writing the episode "Flashes Before Your Eyes".


title: Damon Lindelof

text: Lindelof and co-showrunner Carlton Cuse have been heralded as two of the first to truly embrace the changing times with things such as their daily podcast and being active in the fan community. A majority of the six seasons were met with critical praise, however, both Lindelof and Cuse were not afraid to address critiques on the show, be it through the podcast or other forms of media. However, Lindelof said in late 2013 that he would no longer be addressing those displeased with the way the show ended, stating:


title: Damon Lindelof

text: And what do I do? I jump at the opportunity to acknowledge how many people were dissatisfied with how it ended. I try to be self-deprecating and witty when I do this, but that's an elaborate (or obvious?) defense mechanism to let people know I'm fully aware of the elephant in the room and I'm perfectly fine with it sitting down on my face and shitting all over me ... And here's my part: I will finally stop talking about it. I'm not doing this because I feel entitled or above it — I'm doing it because I accept that I will not change hearts nor minds. I will not convince you they weren't dead the whole time, nor resent you for believing they were despite my infinite declarations otherwise.


title: Damon Lindelof

text: Lindelof was featured on a December 2008 episode of "The Write Environment", a public television series featuring in-depth, candid one-on-one interviews with some of TV's most prolific and well-known series creator and writers. The interview is also available on DVD.


title: Damon Lindelof

text: While approaching the end of "Lost", it was rumored that Lindelof and J. J. Abrams would write and direct a film adaptation of Stephen King's The Dark Tower series. Lindelof dismissed this in a Q&A with "USA Today" in late 2009. He commented, "After working six years on "Lost", the last thing I want to do is spend the next seven years adapting one of my favorite books of all time. I'm such a massive Stephen King fan that I'm terrified of screwing it up. I'd do anything to see those movies written by someone else. My guess is they will get made because they're so incredible. But not by me." Lindelof later served as co-producer on the 2009 science fiction action film, "Star Trek", which was directed by frequent collaborator J. J. Abrams.


title: Damon Lindelof

text: In 2011, Lindelof aided in development of the fantasy series "Once Upon a Time", which was created by former "Lost" writers Edward Kitsis and Adam Horowitz. He was not officially credited in the pilot. Also in 2011, Lindelof, Alex Kurtzman, and Roberto Orci, and several other writers, contributed to the screenplay of the film version of the comic book series "Cowboys & Aliens".


title: Damon Lindelof

text: Lindelof co-wrote the screenplay for Ridley Scott's science fiction film "Prometheus", which was released in June 2012 to commercial success. Lindelof also produced the 2013 science fiction action sequel, "Star Trek Into Darkness", and cowrote its screenplay with Kurtzman and Orci. Also that year, he co-wrote the screenplay for the action adventure film "World War Z".


title: Damon Lindelof

text: He co-wrote the screenplay for the science fiction adventure film "Tomorrowland" with director Brad Bird, based on a story by Lindelof, Bird, and Jeff Jensen. The film was in development for many years before being released in 2015.


title: Damon Lindelof

text: In 2014, Lindelof co-created the HBO supernatural drama series "The Leftovers" with Tom Perrotta, based on Perrotta's novel of the same name. He also served as showrunner and executive producer throughout the show's three seasons. The series received widespread critical acclaim. Many critics referred to "The Leftovers" as one of the greatest television series of all time, with particular praise for its writing, directing, acting and thematic depth. Despite receiving average Nielsen ratings throughout its run, the series has developed a cult following.


title: Damon Lindelof

text: In August 2018, it was announced that Lindelof would be adapting Alan Moore's "Watchmen" as a series for HBO. He had previously been quoted as saying it was his favorite graphic novel and a huge inspiration on "Lost". The series, which features an original story set after the events of the graphic novel, premiered in 2019 to critical acclaim. On review aggregator website Rotten Tomatoes, the series has a 95% "certified fresh" rating based on 112 reviews, with an average rating of 8.58/10. The website's critical consensus reads, "Bold and bristling, "Watchmen" isn't always easy viewing, but by adding new layers of cultural context and a host of complex characters it expertly builds on its source material to create an impressive identity of its own." While HBO had not confirmed a second season following the show's broadcast, Lindelof stated that if there were, he would not likely be back for it, but instead have another producer step forward to tell another story set in this universe. Lindelof said he felt that the show was "not my story" and that "These nine episodes are sort of everything that I have to say at this point about "Watchmen"".


title: Damon Lindelof

text: In 2019, Lindelof joined a host of other writers in firing their agents as part of the WGA's stand against the ATA and the practice of packaging.


title: Damon Lindelof

text: In 2020, Lindelof wrote and produced the horror thriller film "The Hunt". The film attracted some media controversy for its political subject matter, and received mixed reviews upon release. After a wide release run for almost a week, COVID-19 regulations forced theaters to close, and the film subsequently played almost exclusively at drive-ins.


title: Damon Lindelof

text: In 2022, Lindelof was announced as a writer of an upcoming "Star Wars" movie along with Sharmeen Obaid-Chinoy.


title: Damon Lindelof

text: Lindelof is the writer of the six-issue comic-book miniseries "Ultimate Wolverine vs. Hulk" for Marvel Comics, which takes place in the Ultimate Marvel universe. It began publication in January 2006. Production was suspended after the second issue in February 2006 due to Lindelof's heavy workload elsewhere. The last of the scripts was submitted to Marvel in 2008 and the series resumed publication in March 2009.


title: Damon Lindelof

text: He also wrote the first issue of the comic book series "" (Vol. 2), published by DC comics, in June 2012.


title: Damon Lindelof

text: Lindelof wrote a Rip Hunter story for "Time Warp" No. 1 (May 2013) which was drawn by Jeff Lemire and published by Vertigo.


title: Damon Lindelof

text: Lindelof frequently collaborates with a tightly knit group of film professionals which include J. J. Abrams, Adam Horowitz, Alex Kurtzman, Roberto Orci, Edward Kitsis, Andre Nemec, Josh Appelbaum, Jeff Pinkner, and Bryan Burk.


title: Damon Lindelof

text: Lindelof is a self-professed Stephen King fan and has placed many references to King's work into "Lost", as well as mentioning within the Official Lost Podcast that "The Stand" serves as a huge influence. Lindelof has been quoted as saying that the graphic novel "Watchmen", written by Alan Moore, is the greatest piece of popular fiction ever produced, and its effect on "Lost" is evident many times in the show. He has also mentioned David Lynch's "Twin Peaks" as a big influence for "Lost".


title: Damon Lindelof

text: J. J. Abrams had often cited Patrick McGoohan's similarly allegorical sci-fi/spy series "The Prisoner" as another major influence on "Lost". Lindelof lists his favorite six films, in no particular order, as "Touch of Evil", "Raiders of the Lost Ark", "Pulp Fiction", "The Shining", "Bambi", and "The Godfather Part II". Lindelof is a fan of the television series "The Wire", "Breaking Bad", and "Battlestar Galactica".


title: Damon Lindelof

text: Lindelof was at the center of controversy after tweeting, of the 2012 Aurora shooting, that he would be seeing "The Dark Knight Rises" and suggested that other filmgoers should stay in their seats after the credits for a moment of silence. Lindelof deleted his Twitter account on October 14, 2013, the date of "the departure" on his then-upcoming HBO show, "The Leftovers". Lindelof stopped his final tweet in mid-sentence leaving his followers to wonder in regard to the significance. Lindelof's final tweet read, "After much thought and deliberation, I've decided t". Lindelof later said that he felt as though his time on Twitter was consuming him in a negative fashion and that he has no intentions of returning to the site.


title: 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake

text: The 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake occurred on California's Central Coast on October 17 at local time. The shock was centered in The Forest of Nisene Marks State Park in Santa Cruz County, approximately northeast of Santa Cruz on a section of the San Andreas Fault System and was named for the nearby Loma Prieta Peak in the Santa Cruz Mountains. With an magnitude of 6.9 and a maximum Modified Mercalli intensity of IX ("Violent"), the shock was responsible for 63 deaths and 3,757 injuries. The Loma Prieta segment of the San Andreas Fault System had been relatively inactive since the 1906 San Francisco earthquake (to the degree that it was designated a seismic gap) until two moderate foreshocks occurred in June 1988 and again in August 1989.


title: 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake

text: Damage was heavy in Santa Cruz County and less so to the south in Monterey County, but effects extended well to the north into the San Francisco Bay Area, both on the San Francisco Peninsula and across the bay in Oakland. No surface faulting occurred, though many other ground failures and landslides were present, especially in the Summit area of the Santa Cruz Mountains. Liquefaction was also a significant issue, especially in the heavily damaged Marina District of San Francisco, but its effects were also seen in the East Bay, and near the shore of Monterey Bay, where a non-destructive tsunami was also observed.


title: 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake

text: Because it happened during a national live broadcast of the 1989 World Series, the annual championship series of Major League Baseball, taking place between Bay Area teams San Francisco Giants and the Oakland Athletics, it is sometimes referred to as the "World Series earthquake", with the championship games of the year being referred to as the "Earthquake Series". Rush-hour traffic on the Bay Area freeways was lighter than normal because the game, being played at Candlestick Park in San Francisco, was about to begin, and this may have prevented a larger loss of life, as several of the Bay Area's major transportation structures suffered catastrophic failures. The collapse of a section of the double-deck Nimitz Freeway in Oakland was the site of the largest number of casualties for the event, but the collapse of man-made structures and other related accidents contributed to casualties occurring in San Francisco, Los Altos, and Santa Cruz.


title: 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake

text: The history of earthquake investigations in California has been largely focused on the San Andreas Fault system because of its strong influence in the state as the boundary between the Pacific Plate and the North American Plate; it is the most studied fault on Earth. Andrew Lawson, a geologist from the University of California, Berkeley, had named the fault after the San Andreas Lake (prior to the occurrence of the 1906 San Francisco earthquake) and later led an investigation into that event. The San Andreas Fault ruptured for a length of during the 1906 shock, both to the north of San Francisco and to the south in the Santa Cruz Mountains region. Several long term forecasts for a large shock along the San Andreas Fault in that area had been made public prior to 1989 (the event and its aftershocks occurred within a recognized seismic gap) but the earthquake that transpired was not what had been anticipated. The 1989 Loma Prieta event originated on an undiscovered oblique-slip reverse fault that is located adjacent to the San Andreas Fault.


title: 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake

text: Since many forecasts had been presented for the region near Loma Prieta, seismologists were not taken by surprise by the October 1989 event. Between 1910 and 1989 there were 20 widely varying forecasts that were announced, with some that were highly specific, covering multiple aspects of an event, while others were less complete and vague. With a M6.5 event on the San Juan Bautista segment, or an M7 event on the San Francisco Peninsula segment, United States Geological Survey (USGS) seismologist Allan Lindh's 1983 forecasted rupture length of (starting near Pajaro Gap, and continuing to the northwest) for the San Juan Bautista segment nearly matched the actual rupture length of the 1989 event. An updated forecast was presented in 1988, at which time Lindh took the opportunity to assign a new name to the San Juan Bautista segment – the Loma Prieta segment.


title: 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake

text: In early 1988, the Working Group for California Earthquake Probabilities (WGCEP) made several statements regarding their forecasts for the northern San Andreas Fault segment, the San Francisco Peninsula segment, and a portion of that segment which was referred to as the southern Santa Cruz Mountains segment. The thirty year probability for one or more M7 earthquakes in the study area was given as 50%, but because of a lack of information and low confidence, a 30% probability was assigned to the Southern Santa Cruz Mountains segment. Two moderate shocks, referred to as the Lake Elsman earthquakes by the USGS, occurred in the Santa Cruz Mountains region in June 1988 and again in August 1989. Following each event, the State office of Emergency Services issued (for the first time in Bay Area history) short term advisories for a possible large earthquake, which meant there was "a slightly increased likelihood of an M6.5 event on the Santa Cruz Mountains segment of the San Andreas fault". The advisories following the two Lake Elsman events were issued in part because of the statements made by WGCEP and because they were two of the three largest shocks to occur along the 1906 earthquake's rupture zone since 1914.


title: 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake

text: The 5.3 June 1988 and the 5.4 August 1989 events also occurred on previously unknown oblique reverse faults and were within of the M6.9 Loma Prieta mainshock epicenter, near the intersection of the San Andreas and Sargent faults. Total displacement for these shocks was relatively small (approximately of strike-slip and substantially less reverse-slip) and although they occurred on separate faults and well before the mainshock, a group of seismologists considered these to be foreshocks because of when and where they occurred relative to the main event. Each event's aftershock sequence and effect on stress drop was closely examined, and their study indicated that the shocks affected the mainshock's rupture process. Following the August 8, 1989 shock, in anticipation of an upcoming large earthquake, staff at the University of California, Santa Cruz deployed four accelerometers in the area, which were positioned at the UCSC campus, two residences in Santa Cruz, and a home in Los Gatos. Unlike other nearby (high gain) seismographs that were overwhelmed (driven off scale) by the large magnitude mainshock, the four accelerometers captured a useful record of the main event and more than half an hour of the early aftershock activity.


title: 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake

text: The June 27, 1988, shock occurred with a maximum intensity of VI ("Strong"). Its effects included broken windows in Los Gatos, and other light damage in Holy City, where increased flow was observed at a water well. Farther away from the Santa Cruz Mountains, pieces of concrete fell from a parking structure at the Sunnyvale Town Center, a two-level shopping mall in Santa Clara County. More moderate damage resulted from the August 8, 1989, shock (intensity VII, "Very strong") when chimneys were toppled in Cupertino, Los Gatos, and Redwood Estates. Other damage included cracked walls and foundations and broken underground pipes. At the office of the Los Gatos City Manager, a window that was cracked had also been broken in the earlier shock. Also in Los Gatos, one man died when he fell or jumped through a window and impacted the ground five stories below.


title: 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake

text: The Loma Prieta earthquake was named for Loma Prieta Peak in the Santa Cruz Mountains, which lies just to the east of the mainshock epicenter. The duration of the heaviest shaking in the Santa Cruz Mountains was about 15 seconds, but strong ground motion recordings revealed that the duration of shaking was not uniform throughout the affected area (because of different types and thicknesses of soil). At sites with rocky terrain, the duration was shorter and the shaking was much less intense, and at locations with unconsolidated soil (like the Marina District in San Francisco or the Cypress Street Viaduct in Oakland) the intensity of the shaking was more severe and lasted longer. The strong motion records also allowed for the causative fault to be determined – the rupture was related to the San Andreas Fault System.


title: 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake

text: While a Mercalli Intensity of VIII ("Severe") covered a large swath of territory relatively close to the epicenter (including the cities of Los Gatos, Santa Cruz, and Watsonville) farther to the north, portions of San Francisco were assessed at intensity IX ("Violent"). At more than distant, the San Francisco Bay Area recorded peak horizontal accelerations that were as high as 0.26 "g", and close to the epicenter they peaked at more than 0.6 "g". In a general way, the location of aftershocks of the event delineated the extent of the faulting, which (according to seismologist Bruce Bolt) extended about in length. Because the rupture took place bilaterally, the duration of strong shaking was about half of what it would have been had it ruptured in one direction only. The duration of a typical M6.9 shock with a comparable rupture length would have been about twice as long.


title: 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake

text: Gregory Beroza, a seismologist with Stanford University, made several distinctions regarding the 1906 and 1989 events. Near Loma Prieta, the 1906 rupture was more shallow, had more strike-slip, and occurred on a fault that was near vertical. The 1989 event's oblique-slip rupture was at 10 km and below on a fault plane that dipped 70° to the southwest. Because much of the slip in 1989 occurred at depth and the rupture propagated up dip, Beroza proposed that the overlying San Andreas Fault actually inhibited further rupture and also maintains that the occurrence of an event at the location that was forecast by the WGCEP in 1988 was coincidental.


title: 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake

text: The contrasting characteristics of the 1906 and 1989 events were examined by seismologists Hiroo Kanamori and Kenji Satake. The significant amount of vertical displacement in 1989 was a key aspect to consider because a long-term sequence of 1989-type events (with an 80–100-year recurrence interval) normally result in regions with high topographic relief, which is not seen in the Santa Cruz Mountains. Three scenarios were presented that might explain this disparity. The first is that the geometry of the San Andreas Fault goes through a transition every several thousand years. Secondly, slip type could vary from event to event. And lastly, the 1989 event did not occur on the San Andreas Fault.


title: 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake

text: While the effects of a four-year drought limited the potential of landslides, the steep terrain near the epicenter was prone to movement, and up to 4,000 landslides may have occurred during the event. The majority of landslides occurred to the southwest of the epicenter, especially along road cuts in the Santa Cruz Mountains and in the Summit Road area, but also along the bluffs of the Pacific Coast, and as far north as the Marin Peninsula. Highway 17 was blocked for several weeks by a large slide and one person was killed by a rockfall along the coast. Other areas with certain soil conditions were susceptible to site amplification due to the effects of liquefaction, especially near the shore of San Francisco Bay (where its effects were severe in the Marina District) and to the west of the epicenter near rivers and other bodies of water. Minor lateral spreading was also seen along the shores of San Francisco Bay and to the south near Monterey Bay. Other ground effects included downslope movement, slumps, and ground cracks.


title: 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake

text: Fifty-seven of the deaths were directly caused by the earthquake; six further fatalities were ruled to have been caused indirectly. In addition, there were 3,757 injuries as a result of the earthquake, 400 of which were serious. The highest number of deaths, 42, occurred in Oakland because of the collapse of the Cypress Street Viaduct on the Nimitz Freeway (Interstate 880), where the upper level of a double-deck portion of the freeway collapsed, crushing the cars on the lower level, and causing crashes on the upper level. One section of the San Francisco–Oakland Bay Bridge also collapsed, leading to a single fatality, Anamafi Moala, a 23-year-old woman. Three people were killed in the collapse of buildings along the Pacific Garden Mall in Santa Cruz, and five people were killed in the collapse of a brick wall on Bluxome Street in San Francisco.


title: 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake

text: When the earthquake hit, the third game of the 1989 World Series baseball championship was about to begin. Because of the unusual circumstance that both of the World Series teams (the San Francisco Giants and Oakland Athletics) were based in the affected area, many people had left work early or were staying late to participate in after work group viewings and parties. As a consequence the normally crowded freeways contained unusually light traffic. If traffic had been normal for a Tuesday rush hour, injuries and deaths would certainly have been higher. The initial media reports failed to take into account the game's effect on traffic and initially estimated the death toll at 300, a number that was corrected to 63 in the days after the earthquake.


title: 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake

text: After the earthquake occurred, a group led by Antony C. Fraser-Smith of Stanford University reported that the event was preceded by disturbances in background magnetic field noise as measured by a sensor placed in Corralitos, about from the epicenter. From October 5, they reported that a substantial increase in noise was measured in the frequency range 0.01–10 Hz. The measurement instrument was a single-axis search-coil magnetometer that was being used for low frequency research. Precursor increases of noise apparently started a few days before the earthquake, with noise in the range 0.01–0.5 Hz rising to exceptionally high levels about three hours before the earthquake. The Fraser-Smith et al. report remains one of the most frequently cited claims of a specific earthquake precursor; more recent studies have cast doubt on the connection, attributing the Corralitos signals to either unrelated magnetic disturbance or, even more simply, to sensor-system malfunction.


title: 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake

text: The earthquake caused severe damage in some very specific locations in the Bay Area, most notably on unstable soil in San Francisco and Oakland. Oakland City Hall was evacuated after the earthquake until a US$80 million (equivalent to US$ million today) seismic retrofit and hazard abatement work was completed in 1995. Many other communities sustained severe damage throughout the region located in Alameda, San Mateo, Santa Clara, San Benito, Santa Cruz and Monterey counties. Major property damage in San Francisco's Marina District from the epicenter resulted from liquefaction of soil used to create waterfront land. Other effects included sand volcanoes, landslides and ground ruptures. Some 12,000 homes and 2,600 businesses were damaged. The Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) turned people who were homeless prior to the earthquake away from homeless shelters and provided shelter for those with homes prior to the earthquake.


title: 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake

text: In Santa Cruz, close to the epicenter, 40 buildings collapsed, killing six people. At the Santa Cruz Beach Boardwalk, the Plunge Building was significantly damaged. Liquefaction also caused damage in the Watsonville area. For example, sand volcanoes formed in a field near Pajaro as well as in a strawberry field. The Ford's department store in Watsonville experienced significant damage, including a crack down the front of the building. Many homes were dislodged if they were not bolted to their foundations. There were structural failures of twin bridges across Struve Slough near Watsonville. In Moss Landing, the liquefaction destroyed the causeway that carried the Moss Beach access road across a tidewater basin, damaged the approach and abutment of the bridge linking Moss Landing spit to the mainland and cracked the paved road on Paul's Island. In the Old Town historical district of the city of Salinas, unreinforced masonry buildings were partially destroyed.


title: 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake

text: Following the quake, an estimated 1.4 million people experienced power losses that were mainly due to damaged electrical substations. Many San Francisco radio and television stations were temporarily knocked off the air. KGO-TV, the local ABC station in San Francisco, was off the air for about 15 minutes, while KRON-TV (at the time the region's NBC affiliate) was off the air for about half an hour, and KGO-AM (ABC News Radio) was off the air for about 40 minutes. About an hour and 40 minutes after the quake, Fox affiliate KTVU resumed broadcasting, with their news anchors, Dennis Richmond and Elaine Corral reporting from the station's parking lot. KCBS-AM (CBS News Radio) switched immediately to backup power and managed to stay on air despite a subsequent generator failure. KCBS later won a Peabody Award for their news coverage, as did KGO-TV.


title: 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake

text: KNBR-AM (the designated station for the Bay Area's Emergency Broadcast System at the time) failed to communicate a catastrophe with the activation and instructions of the Emergency Broadcast System to the public after the quake because the engineering department at KNBR experienced major technical malfunctions and difficulties. The malfunctions during the aftermath of the earthquake caused confusion as to whether an earthquake would cause the Emergency Broadcast System to activate. KNBR began using an emergency generator, hooking up the signal from a command center right after their nearby studio was severely shaken during the quake, when most of the KNBR staff were at Candlestick for the World Series. The Mayor of San Francisco, Art Agnos, later came on the air and provided an update on the earthquake. According to an aftermath article by Tsuneo Katayama from March 1992, a staff member at KNBR answered some questions at a nearby station about the failed activation of the EBS. One answer was replied saying that KNBR was "not primary" but KNBR "is an EBS station". Sarcastic comments were then responded as well, saying that the EBS hasn't been activated until 2 days after the earthquake. Later on, one KNBR listener responded that the very first thing that came on after the earthquake is the Mayor saying that "all off-duty police officers and firemen for the Cities and Counties of San Francisco and Oakland were reported to work". Another correspondent later said that the problem with both OES and the Emergency Broadcast System is that "there are so many cities" such as Oakland, Berkeley, and San Jose. One of the criticisms is that the only official announcement was simply "too slow" to air. Another correspondent replied that "the Loma Prieta experience seems to have left more than slight concern over the EBS". An answer was lastly then responded to KNBR, "One important thing we learned from the EBS and the quake was that we are still very unprepared to get out information quickly, clearly, and uninterruptedly. We're fortunate that we were able to hook up and establish the EBS, but there were so many links in the chain that were not communicating". According to the Department of the Interior and the National Science Foundation's article on the "U.S. Geological Survey Professional Paper #1552-A" (1999), KNBR was one of the first radio stations to return to the air after the earthquake but failed to activate the EBS because the staff was isolated in Candlestick Park. On the November 3, 1989, issue of the Gavin Report, KNBR after the earthquake under their circumstance had decided to activate the Emergency Broadcast System itself, and other stations legally chose to rebroadcast KNBR without having them written an authority to do so, or making the use of telecasts of the station. The Federal Communications Commission later investigated the issue of KNBR's EBS malfunction, calling the fail "revoked". After the major EBS failure at KNBR's activation and the engineering department after the quake, KCBS-AM became the new primary station for the Bay Area Emergency Broadcast System in 1990 after being secondary for years alongside KGO-AM, which was still secondary as of 2021.


title: 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake

text: (All four network-affiliated TV stations (KRON, KGO, KTVU and CBS affiliate KPIX) would recover enough to broadcast continuous breaking news coverage of the aftermath of the quake for the next several hours, some of it picked up and broadcast nationally over their respective networks, as well as on CNN, in a manner anticipating later major catastrophes such as the 1994 Los Angeles earthquake and the 9/11 terror attacks).


title: 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake

text: Power was restored to most of San Francisco by midnight, and all but 12,000 customers had their power restored within two days.


title: 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake

text: The quake caused an estimated $6 billion (equivalent to $ billion today) in property damage, becoming one of the most expensive natural disasters in U.S. history at the time. Private donations poured into aid relief efforts and on October 26, President George H. W. Bush signed a $1.1 billion ($ billion today) earthquake relief package for California.


title: 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake

text: Four people died in San Francisco's Marina District, four buildings were destroyed by fire, and seven buildings collapsed. Another 63 damaged structures were judged too dangerous to live in. Among the four deaths, one family lost their infant son who choked on dust while trapped for an hour inside their collapsed apartment.


title: 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake

text: The Marina district was built on a landfill made of a mixture of sand, dirt, rubble, waste, and other materials containing a high percentage of groundwater. Some of the fill was rubble dumped into San Francisco Bay after the 1906 San Francisco earthquake, but most was sand and debris laid down in preparation for the 1915 Panama-Pacific International Exposition, a celebration of San Francisco's ability to rebound after its catastrophe in 1906. After the Exposition, apartment buildings were erected on the landfill. In the 1989 earthquake, the water-saturated unconsolidated mud, sand, and rubble suffered liquefaction, and the earthquake's vertical shock waves rippled the ground more severely.


title: 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake

text: At the intersection of Beach and Divisadero Streets in San Francisco, a natural gas main rupture caused a major structure fire. The San Francisco Fire Department selected civilians to help run fire hoses from a distance because the nearby hydrant system failed. Since the bay was only two blocks from the burning buildings, water from the bay was pumped by the fireboat "Phoenix", to engines on the shore, and from there sprayed on the fire. The apartment structures that collapsed were older buildings that included ground-floor garages, which engineers refer to as a soft story building.


title: 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake

text: In Santa Cruz, the Pacific Garden Mall was severely damaged, with falling debris killing three people, half of the six earthquake deaths in Santa Cruz and Monterey Counties. Some 31 buildings were damaged enough to warrant demolition, seven of which had been listed in the Santa Cruz Historic Building Survey. The four oldest were built in 1894, the five oldest withstood the 1906 San Francisco earthquake.


title: 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake

text: Immediately, a number of civilians began to free victims from the rubble of Ford's Department Store and the Santa Cruz Coffee Roasting Company – both buildings had collapsed inward on customers and employees alike. Two police officers crawled through voids in the debris, found one victim alive and another dead inside the coffee house. Santa Cruz beach lifeguards assisted in moving the victims. Police dogs were brought in to help locate other victims. A woman was found dead inside Ford's. The civilians who were helpful initially, were soon viewed by police and fire officials as a hindrance to operations, with frantic coworkers and friends of a coffee house employee thought to be trapped under the rubble continuing their efforts in the dark. Police arrested those who refused to stop searching. This became a political issue in the following days. The body of a young woman coffee worker was found under a collapsed wall late the next day.


title: 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake

text: During the first few days following the quake, electric power to most Santa Cruz County subscribers was out, and some areas had no water. Limited phone service remained online, providing a crucial link to rescue workers. Widespread search operations were organized to find possible victims inside the remains of fallen structures. As many as six teams of dogs and their handlers were at work identifying the large number of damaged buildings that held no victims.


title: 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake

text: The quake claimed one life in Watsonville: a driver who collided with panicked horses after they escaped their collapsed corral. In other Santa Cruz and Monterey county locations such as Boulder Creek and Moss Landing, a number of structures were damaged, with some knocked off of their foundations. Many residents slept outside their homes out of concern for further damage from aftershocks, of which there were 51 with magnitudes greater than 3.0 in the following 24 hours, and 16 more the second day. The earthquake damaged several historic buildings in the Old Town district of Salinas, and some were later demolished.


title: 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake

text: Damage to the Salinas River rail bridge and subsequent repairs led to reduced traffic on the Monterey Branch Line, which contributed to the discontinuance of freight rail services in western Monterey County.


title: 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake

text: The San Francisco–Oakland Bay Bridge suffered severe damage, as a section of the upper deck on the eastern cantilever side fell onto the deck below. The quake caused the Oakland side of the bridge to shift to the east, and caused the bolts of one section to shear off, sending the section of roadbed crashing down like a trapdoor. Traffic on both decks came to a halt, blocked by the section of the roadbed. Police began unsnarling the traffic jam, telling drivers to turn their cars around and drive back the way they had come. Eastbound drivers stuck on the lower deck between the collapse and Yerba Buena Island were routed up to the upper deck and westward back to San Francisco. A miscommunication made by emergency workers at Yerba Buena Island routed some drivers the wrong way; they were directed to the upper deck where they drove eastward toward the collapse site. One of these drivers did not see the open gap in time; the car plunged over the edge and smashed onto the collapsed roadbed. The driver, Anamafi Moala, died, and the passenger, her brother, was seriously injured. Caltrans removed and replaced the collapsed section, and re-opened the bridge on November 18.


title: 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake

text: The worst disaster of the earthquake was the collapse of the double-deck Cypress Street Viaduct of Interstate 880 in West Oakland. The failure of a section of the viaduct, also known as the "Cypress Structure" and the "Cypress Freeway", killed 42 and injured many more.


title: 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake

text: Built-in the late 1950s and opened to traffic in 1957 (as SR 17), the Cypress Street Viaduct, a stretch of Interstate 880, was a double-deck freeway section made of nonductile reinforced concrete that was constructed above and astride Cypress Street in Oakland. Roughly half of the land the Cypress Viaduct was built on filled marshland and half on somewhat more stable alluvium. Because of new highway structure design guidelines – the requirement of ductile construction elements – instituted following the 1971 San Fernando earthquake, a limited degree of earthquake reinforcement was retrofitted to the Cypress Viaduct in 1977. The added elements were longitudinal restraints at transverse expansion joints in the box girder spans, but no studies were made of possible failure modes specific to the Cypress Viaduct. Caltrans has since received widespread backlash for not thoroughly studying the structure. When the earthquake hit, the shaking was amplified on the former marshland, and soil liquefaction occurred.


title: 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake

text: When the earthquake struck, the freeway buckled and twisted before the support columns failed and the upper deck fell on the lower deck. Forty-two people were crushed to death in their cars. Cars on the upper deck were tossed around violently, some of them flipped sideways and some of them were left dangling at the edge of the freeway. Nearby residents and factory workers came to the rescue, climbing onto the wreckage with ladders and forklifts and pulling trapped people out of their cars from under a four-foot gap in some sections. 60 members of Oakland's Public Works Agency left the nearby city yard and joined rescue efforts. Employees from Pacific Pipe drove heavy lift equipment to the scene and started using it to raise sections of fallen freeway enough to allow further rescue. Local workers continued their volunteer operation nonstop until October 21, 1989, when they were forced to pause as U.S. President George H. W. Bush and California Governor George Deukmejian viewed the damage. That same day, survivor Buck Helm was freed from the wreckage, having spent 90 hours trapped in his car. Dubbed "Lucky Buck" by the local radio, Helm lived for another 29 days on life support, but then died of respiratory failure at the age of 58.


title: 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake

text: Although the freeway reopened in stages between 1997 and 1999, it was not fully rebuilt until 2001 so that it would comply with safety and reinforcement standards. In the meantime, traffic was detoured through nearby Interstate 980, causing increased congestion. Instead of rebuilding Interstate 880 over the same ground, Caltrans rerouted the freeway farther west around the outskirts of West Oakland to provide better access to the Port of Oakland and the San Francisco–Oakland Bay Bridge, and to meet community desires to keep the freeway from cutting through residential areas (at the time the original viaduct was constructed, West Oakland was predominantly occupied by African- and Hispanic-Americans). Street-level Mandela Parkway now occupies the previous roadbed of the Cypress structure.


title: 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake

text: Immediately after the earthquake, Bay Area airports were closed so officials could conduct a visual inspection and damage assessment procedures. San Jose International Airport, Oakland International Airport and San Francisco International Airport all opened the next morning. Large cracks in Oakland's runway and taxiway reduced the usable length to two-thirds normal, and damage to the dike required quick remediation to avoid flooding the runway with water from the bay. Oakland Airport repair costs were assessed at $30 million (equivalent to $ million today).


title: 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake

text: San Francisco Municipal Railway (Muni) lost all power to electric transit systems when the quake hit, but otherwise suffered little damage and no injuries to operators or riders. Cable cars and electric trains and buses were stalled in place – half of Muni's transport capability was lost for 12 hours. Muni relied on diesel buses to continue abbreviated service until electric power was restored later that night, and electric units could be inspected and readied for service on the morning of October 18. After 78 hours, 96 percent of Muni services were back in operation, including the cable cars. Amtrak intercity rail service into Oakland from the "California Zephyr" continued, but the "Coast Starlight" was temporarily suspended north of Salinas because of damage to the Southern Pacific's Coast Line.


title: 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake

text: The earthquake changed the Bay Area's automobile transportation landscape. Not only did the quake force seismic retrofitting of all Bay Area bridges, it caused enough damage that some parts of the region's freeway system had to be demolished. Damage to the region's transportation system was estimated at $1.8 billion (equivalent to $ billion today).


title: 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake

text: The 1989 World Series featured the Oakland Athletics and the San Francisco Giants in the first cross-town World Series since 1956. Game 3 of the series was scheduled to begin at San Francisco's Candlestick Park on October 17 at 5:35 PDT, and American TV network ABC began its pre-game show at 5:00 PDT. When the quake struck at approximately 5:04 PDT, sportscaster Tim McCarver was narrating taped highlights of Game 2, which had been played two days prior across the Bay Bridge in Oakland. Television viewers saw the video signal begin to break up, heard McCarver repeat a sentence as the shaking distracted him, and heard McCarver's colleague Al Michaels exclaim, "I'll tell you what, we're having an earth – ." At that moment, the signal from Candlestick Park was lost.


title: 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake

text: The network put up a green ABC Sports “World Series” technical difficulties telop graphic while it scrambled to repair the video feed (the broadcast cameras and mics were powered by the local power supply), but audio from the stadium was restored after a few seconds via a telephone link:


title: 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake

text: Michaels: Well, heh, I don't know if we're on the air or not, and I'm not sure I care at this particular moment but we are. Well, folks, that's the greatest open in the history of television! Bar none!


title: 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake

text: Michaels: Yes, it certainly did! Heh! We're still here! Heh! We are still, as we can tell, on the air, and I guess you are hearing us, even though we have no picture and no return audio, and we will be back, we hope, from San Francisco, in just a moment.


title: 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake

text: The combined screams of excitement and panic from fans who had no idea of the devastation elsewhere could be heard in the background. ABC then switched to episodes of "Roseanne" and "The Wonder Years", which were on standby for a rain delay situation, while attempting to restore electricity to its remote equipment. KGO-TV, the local owned-and-operated ABC station in San Francisco, lost power for almost 15 minutes upon the start of the earthquake, before beginning its coverage with anchor Cheryl Jennings.


title: 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake

text: With anchorman Ted Koppel in position in Washington, D.C., ABC News began continuous coverage of the quake at 5:32 pm PDT, with Al Michaels, in the process, becoming a de facto on-site reporter for ABC. CBS News also began coverage around that same time with coverage from its San Francisco affiliate KPIX-TV. About an hour later, NBC News also began continuous coverage with Tom Brokaw anchoring and featuring local coverage from its then-San Francisco affiliate, KRON-TV. A Goodyear Blimp had already been overhead to cover the baseball game, and ABC used it to capture images of damage to the Bay Bridge and other locations. Local Fox affiliate KTVU was knocked off the air for over 90 minutes before returning to the air with a raw feed fed from one of the station's remote trucks. KTVU anchors Dennis Richmond and Elaine Corral began their coverage from the station's parking lot, as power had not yet been restored to that section of Oakland.


title: 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake

text: Inside Candlestick Park, fewer than half of the more than 62,000 fans had reached their seats by the time of the quake, and the load on the structure of the stadium was lower than maximum. There had also been a seismic-strengthening project previously completed on the upper deck concrete windscreen that may have prevented large numbers of injuries in the event of serious damage or even a catastrophic collapse. Fans reported that the stadium moved in an articulated manner as the earthquake wave passed through it, that the light standards swayed by many feet, and that the concrete upper deck windscreen moved in a wave-like manner over a distance of several feet. When electrical power to the stadium was lost, someone drove a police car onto the field, where an officer used the car's public address system to advise that the game had been postponed. After the shaking subsided, many of the players on both teams immediately searched for, and gathered, family and friends from the stands before evacuating the facility.


title: 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake

text: The October 18, 1989, edition of NBC's "Today" that covered the earthquake ran until noon Eastern Time. Bryant Gumbel, Jane Pauley and Deborah Norville anchored from Chicago (where they had planned to originally do a special celebratory edition), with reports done by Bob Jamieson and Don Oliver in San Francisco, and George Lewis in Oakland. Jim Miklaszewski and Bob Hager covered disaster response from Washington. NBC Sports commentators Bob Costas and Jimmy Cefalo discussed the effect the temblor would have on the 1989 World Series.


title: 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake

text: The World Series was delayed while the Bay Area started the recovery process. While the teams' stadiums had suffered only minor damage, it took several days for power and transmission links at Candlestick Park to be repaired. After ten days (the longest delay in World Series history), Game 3 was held in San Francisco on October 27 and Game 4 the following afternoon as the A's swept the Giants, four games to none.


title: 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake

text: It is likely that the World Series game saved many lives, as Bay Area residents who would have normally been on the freeways were at home ready to watch the game when the earthquake hit. It is a rough estimate that thousands of people may have otherwise been on the Cypress Structure during the 5:00 pm rush-hour, as the structure was said to have carried 195,000 vehicles a day.


title: The Aristocrats

text: "The Aristocrats" is a taboo-defying off-color joke that has been told by numerous stand-up comedians since the vaudeville era . It relates the story of a family trying to get an agent to book their stage act, which is revealed to be remarkably vulgar and offensive in nature, with the punch line revealing that they incongruously bill themselves as "The Aristocrats". When told to audiences who know the punch line, the joke's humor depends on the described outrageousness of the family act.


title: The Aristocrats

text: Because the objective of the joke is its transgressive content, it is most often told privately, such as by comedians to other comedians. It came to wider public attention when it was told by Gilbert Gottfried during the Friars' Club roast of Hugh Hefner. Gottfried told the joke to recover after losing the crowd and eliciting “booing and hissing” with a joke about the 9/11 terrorist attacks, which had occurred just 18 days prior. It was the subject of a 2005 documentary film of the same name by Paul Provenza and Penn Jillette.


title: Huffman coding

text: In computer science and information theory, a Huffman code is a particular type of optimal prefix code that is commonly used for lossless data compression. The process of finding or using such a code proceeds by means of Huffman coding, an algorithm developed by David A. Huffman while he was a Sc.D. student at MIT, and published in the 1952 paper "A Method for the Construction of Minimum-Redundancy Codes".


title: Huffman coding

text: The output from Huffman's algorithm can be viewed as a variable-length code table for encoding a source symbol (such as a character in a file). The algorithm derives this table from the estimated probability or frequency of occurrence ("weight") for each possible value of the source symbol. As in other entropy encoding methods, more common symbols are generally represented using fewer bits than less common symbols. Huffman's method can be efficiently implemented, finding a code in time linear to the number of input weights if these weights are sorted. However, although optimal among methods encoding symbols separately, Huffman coding is not always optimal among all compression methods - it is replaced with arithmetic coding or asymmetric numeral systems if a better compression ratio is required.


title: Huffman coding

text: In 1951, David A. Huffman and his MIT information theory classmates were given the choice of a term paper or a final exam. The professor, Robert M. Fano, assigned a term paper on the problem of finding the most efficient binary code. Huffman, unable to prove any codes were the most efficient, was about to give up and start studying for the final when he hit upon the idea of using a frequency-sorted binary tree and quickly proved this method the most efficient.


title: Huffman coding

text: In doing so, Huffman outdid Fano, who had worked with Claude Shannon to develop a similar code. Building the tree from the bottom up guaranteed optimality, unlike the top-down approach of Shannon–Fano coding.


title: Huffman coding

text: Huffman coding uses a specific method for choosing the representation for each symbol, resulting in a prefix code (sometimes called "prefix-free codes", that is, the bit string representing some particular symbol is never a prefix of the bit string representing any other symbol). Huffman coding is such a widespread method for creating prefix codes that the term "Huffman code" is widely used as a synonym for "prefix code" even when such a code is not produced by Huffman's algorithm.


title: Huffman coding

text: Tuple formula_3, which is the tuple of the (positive) symbol weights (usually proportional to probabilities), i.e. formula_4.


title: Huffman coding

text: Code formula_5, which is the tuple of (binary) codewords, where formula_6 is the codeword for formula_7.


title: Huffman coding

text: Let formula_8 be the weighted path length of code formula_9. Condition: formula_10 for any code formula_11.


title: Huffman coding

text: We give an example of the result of Huffman coding for a code with five characters and given weights. We will not verify that it minimizes "L" over all codes, but we will compute "L" and compare it to the Shannon entropy "H" of the given set of weights; the result is nearly optimal.


title: Huffman coding

text: For any code that is "biunique", meaning that the code is "uniquely decodeable", the sum of the probability budgets across all symbols is always less than or equal to one. In this example, the sum is strictly equal to one; as a result, the code is termed a "complete" code. If this is not the case, one can always derive an equivalent code by adding extra symbols (with associated null probabilities), to make the code complete while keeping it "biunique".


title: Huffman coding

text: As defined by Shannon (1948), the information content "h" (in bits) of each symbol "a" with non-null probability is


title: Huffman coding

text: The entropy "H" (in bits) is the weighted sum, across all symbols with non-zero probability , of the information content of each symbol:


title: Huffman coding

text: As a consequence of Shannon's source coding theorem, the entropy is a measure of the smallest codeword length that is theoretically possible for the given alphabet with associated weights. In this example, the weighted average codeword length is 2.25 bits per symbol, only slightly larger than the calculated entropy of 2.205 bits per symbol. So not only is this code optimal in the sense that no other feasible code performs better, but it is very close to the theoretical limit established by Shannon.


title: Huffman coding

text: In general, a Huffman code need not be unique. Thus the set of Huffman codes for a given probability distribution is a non-empty subset of the codes minimizing formula_15 for that probability distribution. (However, for each minimizing codeword length assignment, there exists at least one Huffman code with those lengths.)


title: Huffman coding

text: The technique works by creating a binary tree of nodes. These can be stored in a regular array, the size of which depends on the number of symbols, formula_2. A node can be either a leaf node or an internal node. Initially, all nodes are leaf nodes, which contain the symbol itself, the weight (frequency of appearance) of the symbol and optionally, a link to a parent node which makes it easy to read the code (in reverse) starting from a leaf node. Internal nodes contain a weight, links to two child nodes and an optional link to a parent node. As a common convention, bit '0' represents following the left child and bit '1' represents following the right child. A finished tree has up to formula_2 leaf nodes and formula_18 internal nodes. A Huffman tree that omits unused symbols produces the most optimal code lengths.


title: Huffman coding

text: The process begins with the leaf nodes containing the probabilities of the symbol they represent. Then, the process takes the two nodes with smallest probability, and creates a new internal node having these two nodes as children. The weight of the new node is set to the sum of the weight of the children. We then apply the process again, on the new internal node and on the remaining nodes (i.e., we exclude the two leaf nodes), we repeat this process until only one node remains, which is the root of the Huffman tree.


title: Huffman coding

text: The simplest construction algorithm uses a priority queue where the node with lowest probability is given highest priority:


title: Huffman coding

text: Since efficient priority queue data structures require O(log "n") time per insertion, and a tree with "n" leaves has 2"n"−1 nodes, this algorithm operates in O("n" log "n") time, where "n" is the number of symbols.


title: Huffman coding

text: If the symbols are sorted by probability, there is a linear-time (O("n")) method to create a Huffman tree using two queues, the first one containing the initial weights (along with pointers to the associated leaves), and combined weights (along with pointers to the trees) being put in the back of the second queue. This assures that the lowest weight is always kept at the front of one of the two queues:


title: Huffman coding

text: Once the Huffman tree has been generated, it is traversed to generate a dictionary which maps the symbols to binary codes as follows:


title: Huffman coding

text: The final encoding of any symbol is then read by a concatenation of the labels on the edges along the path from the root node to the symbol.


title: Huffman coding

text: In many cases, time complexity is not very important in the choice of algorithm here, since "n" here is the number of symbols in the alphabet, which is typically a very small number (compared to the length of the message to be encoded); whereas complexity analysis concerns the behavior when "n" grows to be very large.


title: Huffman coding

text: It is generally beneficial to minimize the variance of codeword length. For example, a communication buffer receiving Huffman-encoded data may need to be larger to deal with especially long symbols if the tree is especially unbalanced. To minimize variance, simply break ties between queues by choosing the item in the first queue. This modification will retain the mathematical optimality of the Huffman coding while both minimizing variance and minimizing the length of the longest character code.


title: Huffman coding

text: Generally speaking, the process of decompression is simply a matter of translating the stream of prefix codes to individual byte values, usually by traversing the Huffman tree node by node as each bit is read from the input stream (reaching a leaf node necessarily terminates the search for that particular byte value). Before this can take place, however, the Huffman tree must be somehow reconstructed. In the simplest case, where character frequencies are fairly predictable, the tree can be preconstructed (and even statistically adjusted on each compression cycle) and thus reused every time, at the expense of at least some measure of compression efficiency. Otherwise, the information to reconstruct the tree must be sent a priori. A naive approach might be to prepend the frequency count of each character to the compression stream. Unfortunately, the overhead in such a case could amount to several kilobytes, so this method has little practical use. If the data is compressed using canonical encoding, the compression model can be precisely reconstructed with just formula_19 bits of information (where is the number of bits per symbol). Another method is to simply prepend the Huffman tree, bit by bit, to the output stream. For example, assuming that the value of 0 represents a parent node and 1 a leaf node, whenever the latter is encountered the tree building routine simply reads the next 8 bits to determine the character value of that particular leaf. The process continues recursively until the last leaf node is reached; at that point, the Huffman tree will thus be faithfully reconstructed. The overhead using such a method ranges from roughly 2 to 320 bytes (assuming an 8-bit alphabet). Many other techniques are possible as well. In any case, since the compressed data can include unused "trailing bits" the decompressor must be able to determine when to stop producing output. This can be accomplished by either transmitting the length of the decompressed data along with the compression model or by defining a special code symbol to signify the end of input (the latter method can adversely affect code length optimality, however).


title: Huffman coding

text: The probabilities used can be generic ones for the application domain that are based on average experience, or they can be the actual frequencies found in the text being compressed.


title: Huffman coding

text: This requires that a frequency table must be stored with the compressed text. See the Decompression section above for more information about the various techniques employed for this purpose.


title: Huffman coding

text: Huffman's original algorithm is optimal for a symbol-by-symbol coding with a known input probability distribution, i.e., separately encoding unrelated symbols in such a data stream. However, it is not optimal when the symbol-by-symbol restriction is dropped, or when the probability mass functions are unknown. Also, if symbols are not independent and identically distributed, a single code may be insufficient for optimality. Other methods such as arithmetic coding often have better compression capability.


title: Huffman coding

text: Although both aforementioned methods can combine an arbitrary number of symbols for more efficient coding and generally adapt to the actual input statistics, arithmetic coding does so without significantly increasing its computational or algorithmic complexities (though the simplest version is slower and more complex than Huffman coding). Such flexibility is especially useful when input probabilities are not precisely known or vary significantly within the stream. However, Huffman coding is usually faster and arithmetic coding was historically a subject of some concern over patent issues. Thus many technologies have historically avoided arithmetic coding in favor of Huffman and other prefix coding techniques. As of mid-2010, the most commonly used techniques for this alternative to Huffman coding have passed into the public domain as the early patents have expired.


title: Huffman coding

text: For a set of symbols with a uniform probability distribution and a number of members which is a power of two, Huffman coding is equivalent to simple binary block encoding, e.g., ASCII coding. This reflects the fact that compression is not possible with such an input, no matter what the compression method, i.e., doing nothing to the data is the optimal thing to do.


title: Huffman coding

text: Huffman coding is optimal among all methods in any case where each input symbol is a known independent and identically distributed random variable having a probability that is dyadic. Prefix codes, and thus Huffman coding in particular, tend to have inefficiency on small alphabets, where probabilities often fall between these optimal (dyadic) points. The worst case for Huffman coding can happen when the probability of the most likely symbol far exceeds 2 = 0.5, making the upper limit of inefficiency unbounded.


title: Huffman coding

text: There are two related approaches for getting around this particular inefficiency while still using Huffman coding. Combining a fixed number of symbols together ("blocking") often increases (and never decreases) compression. As the size of the block approaches infinity, Huffman coding theoretically approaches the entropy limit, i.e., optimal compression. However, blocking arbitrarily large groups of symbols is impractical, as the complexity of a Huffman code is linear in the number of possibilities to be encoded, a number that is exponential in the size of a block. This limits the amount of blocking that is done in practice.


title: Huffman coding

text: A practical alternative, in widespread use, is run-length encoding. This technique adds one step in advance of entropy coding, specifically counting (runs) of repeated symbols, which are then encoded. For the simple case of Bernoulli processes, Golomb coding is optimal among prefix codes for coding run length, a fact proved via the techniques of Huffman coding. A similar approach is taken by fax machines using modified Huffman coding. However, run-length coding is not as adaptable to as many input types as other compression technologies.


title: Huffman coding

text: Many variations of Huffman coding exist, some of which use a Huffman-like algorithm, and others of which find optimal prefix codes (while, for example, putting different restrictions on the output). Note that, in the latter case, the method need not be Huffman-like, and, indeed, need not even be polynomial time.


title: Huffman coding

text: The "n"-ary Huffman algorithm uses the {0, 1..., "n" − 1} alphabet to encode message and build an "n"-ary tree. This approach was considered by Huffman in his original paper. The same algorithm applies as for binary (formula_20) codes, except that the "n" least probable symbols are taken together, instead of just the 2 least probable. Note that for "n" greater than 2, not all sets of source words can properly form an "n"-ary tree for Huffman coding. In these cases, additional 0-probability place holders must be added. This is because the tree must form an "n" to 1 contractor; for binary coding, this is a 2 to 1 contractor, and any sized set can form such a contractor. If the number of source words is congruent to 1 modulo "n"−1, then the set of source words will form a proper Huffman tree.


title: Huffman coding

text: A variation called adaptive Huffman coding involves calculating the probabilities dynamically based on recent actual frequencies in the sequence of source symbols, and changing the coding tree structure to match the updated probability estimates. It is used rarely in practice, since the cost of updating the tree makes it slower than optimized adaptive arithmetic coding, which is more flexible and has better compression.


title: Huffman coding

text: Most often, the weights used in implementations of Huffman coding represent numeric probabilities, but the algorithm given above does not require this; it requires only that the weights form a totally ordered commutative monoid, meaning a way to order weights and to add them. The Huffman template algorithm enables one to use any kind of weights (costs, frequencies, pairs of weights, non-numerical weights) and one of many combining methods (not just addition). Such algorithms can solve other minimization problems, such as minimizing formula_21, a problem first applied to circuit design.


title: Huffman coding

text: Length-limited Huffman coding is a variant where the goal is still to achieve a minimum weighted path length, but there is an additional restriction that the length of each codeword must be less than a given constant. The package-merge algorithm solves this problem with a simple greedy approach very similar to that used by Huffman's algorithm. Its time complexity is formula_22, where formula_23 is the maximum length of a codeword. No algorithm is known to solve this problem in formula_24 or formula_25 time, unlike the presorted and unsorted conventional Huffman problems, respectively.


title: Huffman coding

text: In the standard Huffman coding problem, it is assumed that each symbol in the set that the code words are constructed from has an equal cost to transmit: a code word whose length is "N" digits will always have a cost of "N", no matter how many of those digits are 0s, how many are 1s, etc. When working under this assumption, minimizing the total cost of the message and minimizing the total number of digits are the same thing.


title: Huffman coding

text: "Huffman coding with unequal letter costs" is the generalization without this assumption: the letters of the encoding alphabet may have non-uniform lengths, due to characteristics of the transmission medium. An example is the encoding alphabet of Morse code, where a 'dash' takes longer to send than a 'dot', and therefore the cost of a dash in transmission time is higher. The goal is still to minimize the weighted average codeword length, but it is no longer sufficient just to minimize the number of symbols used by the message. No algorithm is known to solve this in the same manner or with the same efficiency as conventional Huffman coding, though it has been solved by Karp whose solution has been refined for the case of integer costs by Golin.


title: Huffman coding

text: In the standard Huffman coding problem, it is assumed that any codeword can correspond to any input symbol. In the alphabetic version, the alphabetic order of inputs and outputs must be identical. Thus, for example, formula_26 could not be assigned code formula_27, but instead should be assigned either formula_28 or formula_29. This is also known as the Hu–Tucker problem, after T. C. Hu and Alan Tucker, the authors of the paper presenting the first formula_25-time solution to this optimal binary alphabetic problem, which has some similarities to Huffman algorithm, but is not a variation of this algorithm. A later method, the Garsia–Wachs algorithm of Adriano Garsia and Michelle L. Wachs (1977), uses simpler logic to perform the same comparisons in the same total time bound. These optimal alphabetic binary trees are often used as binary search trees.


title: Huffman coding

text: If weights corresponding to the alphabetically ordered inputs are in numerical order, the Huffman code has the same lengths as the optimal alphabetic code, which can be found from calculating these lengths, rendering Hu–Tucker coding unnecessary. The code resulting from numerically (re-)ordered input is sometimes called the "canonical Huffman code" and is often the code used in practice, due to ease of encoding/decoding. The technique for finding this code is sometimes called Huffman–Shannon–Fano coding, since it is optimal like Huffman coding, but alphabetic in weight probability, like Shannon–Fano coding. The Huffman–Shannon–Fano code corresponding to the example is formula_31, which, having the same codeword lengths as the original solution, is also optimal. But in "canonical Huffman code", the result is formula_32.


title: Huffman coding

text: Arithmetic coding and Huffman coding produce equivalent results — achieving entropy — when every symbol has a probability of the form 1/2. In other circumstances, arithmetic coding can offer better compression than Huffman coding because — intuitively — its "code words" can have effectively non-integer bit lengths, whereas code words in prefix codes such as Huffman codes can only have an integer number of bits. Therefore, a code word of length "k" only optimally matches a symbol of probability 1/2 and other probabilities are not represented optimally; whereas the code word length in arithmetic coding can be made to exactly match the true probability of the symbol. This difference is especially striking for small alphabet sizes.


title: Huffman coding

text: Prefix codes nevertheless remain in wide use because of their simplicity, high speed, and lack of patent coverage. They are often used as a "back-end" to other compression methods. Deflate (PKZIP's algorithm) and multimedia codecs such as JPEG and MP3 have a front-end model and quantization followed by the use of prefix codes; these are often called "Huffman codes" even though most applications use pre-defined variable-length codes rather than codes designed using Huffman's algorithm.


title: Illegal drug trade

text: The illegal drug trade or drug trafficking is a global black market dedicated to the cultivation, manufacture, distribution and sale of prohibited drugs. Most jurisdictions prohibit trade, except under license, of many types of drugs through the use of drug prohibition laws. The think tank Global Financial Integrity's "Transnational Crime and the Developing World" report estimates the size of the global illicit drug market between US$426 and US$652billion in 2014 alone. With a world GDP of US$78 trillion in the same year, the illegal drug trade may be estimated as nearly 1% of total global trade. Consumption of illegal drugs is widespread globally and it remains very difficult for local authorities to thwart its popularity.


title: Illegal drug trade

text: The government of the Qing Dynasty issued edicts against opium smoking in 1730, 1796 and 1800. The West prohibited addictive drugs throughout the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Beginning in the 18th century, British merchants from the East India Company began to illegally sell opium to Chinese merchants, and by the early 19th century, an illegal drug trade in China emerged. As a result, by 1838 the number of Chinese opium-addicts had grown to between four and twelve million. The Chinese government responded by enforcing a ban on the import of opium; this led to the First Opium War (1839-1842) between the United Kingdom and Qing-dynasty China. The British easily defeated the Chinese, and in the resulting treaty that ended the war, the Treaty of Nanking, the Qing government was forced to allow British merchants to sell Indian-grown opium. Trading in opium was lucrative, and smoking it had become common for the Chinese in the 19th century, so British merchants increased trade with the Chinese. The Second Opium War broke out in 1856, with the British joined this time by the French. The Treaty of Tianjin, which concluded that conflict, stipulated that the Chinese authorities would open further ports to foreign trade, including opium.


title: Illegal drug trade

text: In 1868, as a result of the increased use of opium in Britain, the British government restricted the sale of opium by implementing the 1868 Pharmacy Act. In the United States, control of opium remained under the control of individual U.S. states until the introduction of the Harrison Act in 1914, after 12 international powers signed the International Opium Convention in 1912.


title: Illegal drug trade

text: Between 1920 and around 1933 the Eighteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution banned alcohol in the United States. Prohibition proved almost impossible to enforce and resulted in the rise of organized crime, including the modern American Mafia, which identified enormous business opportunities in the manufacturing, smuggling and sale of illicit liquor.


title: Illegal drug trade

text: The beginning of the 21st century saw drug use increase in North America and Europe, with a particularly increased demand for marijuana and cocaine. As a result, international organized crime syndicates such as the Sinaloa Cartel and 'Ndrangheta have increased cooperation among each other in order to facilitate trans-Atlantic drug-trafficking. Use of another illicit drug, hashish, has also increased in Europe.


title: Illegal drug trade

text: Drug trafficking is widely regarded by lawmakers as a serious offense around the world. Penalties often depend on the type of drug (and its classification in the country into which it is being trafficked), the quantity trafficked, where the drugs are sold and how they are distributed. If the drugs are sold to underage people, then the penalties for trafficking may be harsher than in other circumstances.


title: Illegal drug trade

text: Drug smuggling carries severe penalties in many countries. Sentencing may include lengthy periods of incarceration, flogging and even the death penalty (in Singapore, Malaysia, Indonesia and elsewhere). In December 2005, Van Tuong Nguyen, a 25-year-old Australian drug smuggler, was hanged in Singapore after being convicted in March 2004. In 2010, two people were sentenced to death in Malaysia for trafficking of cannabis into the country. Execution is mostly used as a deterrent, and many have called upon much more effective measures to be taken by countries to tackle drug trafficking; for example, targeting specific criminal organisations that are often also active in the smuggling of other goods (i.e. wildlife) and even people. In many cases, links between politicians and the criminal organisations have been proven to exist. Border region is a hotbed for illicit drug abuse and trade


title: Illegal drug trade

text: In June 2021, Interpol revealed an operation in 92 countries that shut down 113,000 websites and online marketplaces selling counterfeit or illicit medicines and medical products a month earlier, led to the arrests of 227 people worldwide, recovered pharmaceutical products worth $23 million, and led to the seizure of approximately nine million devices and drugs, including large quantities of fake COVID-19 tests and face masks.


title: Illegal drug trade

text: The countries of drug production and transit are some of the most affected by the trade, though countries receiving the illegallyimported substances are also adversely affected. For example, Ecuador has absorbed up to 300,000 refugees from Colombia who are running from guerrillas, paramilitaries and drug lords. While some applied for asylum, others are still illegal immigrants. The drugs that pass from Colombia through Ecuador to other parts of South America create economic and social problems.


title: Illegal drug trade

text: Honduras, through which an estimated 79% of cocaine passes on its way to the United States, had, as of 2011, the highest murder rate in the world. According to the International Crisis Group, the most violent regions in Central America, particularly along the Guatemala–Honduras border, are highly correlated with an abundance of drug trafficking activity.


title: Illegal drug trade

text: In several countries, the illegal drug trade is thought to be directly linked to violent crimes such as murder and gun violence. This is especially true in all developing


title: Illegal drug trade

text: countries, such as Honduras, but is also an issue for many developed countries worldwide. In the late 1990s in the United States the Federal Bureau of Investigation estimated that 5% of murders were drug-related. In Colombia, drug violence can be caused by factors such as the economy, poor governments, and no authority within law enforcement.


title: Illegal drug trade

text: After a crackdown by US and Mexican authorities in the first decade of the 21st century as part of tightened border security in the wake of the September 11 attacks, border violence inside Mexico surged. The Mexican government estimates that 90% of the killings are drug-related.


title: Illegal drug trade

text: A report by the UK government's Drug Strategy Unit that was leaked to the press, stated that due to the expensive price of highly addictive drugs heroin and cocaine, drug use was responsible for the great majority of crime, including 85% of shoplifting, 70–80% of burglaries and 54% of robberies. It concluded that "[t]he cost of crime committed to support illegal cocaine and heroin habits amounts to £16 billion a year in the UK"


title: Illegal drug trade

text: Venezuela has been a path to the United States and Europe for illegal drugs originating in Colombia, through Central America, Mexico and Caribbean countries such as Haiti, the Dominican Republic, and Puerto Rico.


title: Illegal drug trade

text: According to the United Nations, there was an increase of cocaine trafficking through Venezuela since 2002. In 2005, the government of Hugo Chávez severed ties with the United States Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA), accusing its representatives of spying. Following the departure of the DEA from Venezuela and the expansion of DEA's partnership with Colombia in 2005, Venezuela became more attractive to drug traffickers. Between 2008 and 2012, Venezuela's cocaine seizure ranking among other countries declined, going from being ranked fourth in the world for cocaine seizures in 2008 to sixth in the world in 2012.


title: Illegal drug trade

text: On 18 November 2016, following what was known as the Narcosobrinos incident, Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro's two nephews were found guilty of trying to ship drugs into the United States so they could "obtain a large amount of cash to help their family stay in power".


title: Illegal drug trade

text: According to a research conducted by the Israel-based Abba Eban Institute as part of an initiative called Janus Initiative, the main routes that Hezbollah uses for smuggling drugs are from Colombia, Venezuela and Brazil into West Africa and then transported through northern Africa into Europe. This route serves Hezbollah in making a profit in the cocaine smuggling market to leverage it for terrorist activities.


title: Illegal drug trade

text: Cocaine produced in Colombia and Bolivia increasingly has been shipped via West Africa (especially in Nigeria, Cape Verde, Guinea-Bissau, Cameroon, Mali, Benin, Togo, and Ghana). The money is often laundered in countries such as Nigeria, Ghana, and Senegal.


title: Illegal drug trade

text: According to the Africa Economic Institute, the value of illicit drug smuggling in Guinea-Bissau is almost twice the value of the country's GDP. Police officers are often bribed. A police officer's normal monthly wage of $floor() is less than 2% of the value of of cocaine (€7000 or $floor()). The money can also be laundered using real estate. A house is built using illegal funds, and when the house is sold, legal money is earned. When drugs are sent over land, through the Sahara, the drug traders have been forced to cooperate with terrorist organizations, such as Al Qaida in Islamic Maghreb.


title: Illegal drug trade

text: Heroin is increasingly trafficked from Afghanistan to Europe and America through eastern and southern African countries. This path is known as the "southern route" or "smack track." Repercussions of this trade include burgeoning heroin use and political corruption among intermediary African nations.


title: Illegal drug trade

text: Drugs in Asia traditionally traveled the southern routesthe main caravan axes of Southeast Asia and Southern Chinaand include the former opium-producing countries of Thailand, Iran, and Pakistan. After the 1990s, particularly after the end of the Cold War (1991), borders were opened and trading and customs agreements were signed so that the routes expanded to include China, Central Asia, and Russia. There are, therefore, diversified drug trafficking routes available today, particularly in the heroin trade and these thrive due to the continuous development of new markets. A large amount of drugs are smuggled into Europe from Asia. The main sources of these drugs are Afghanistan, along with countries that constituted the so-called Golden Crescent. From these producers, drugs are smuggled into the West and Central Asia to its destinations in Europe and the United States. Iran is now the route for smugglers, having been previously a primary trading route, due to its large-scale and costly war against drug trafficking. The Border Police Chief of Iran said that his country "is a strong barrier against the trafficking of illegal drugs to Caucasus, especially the Republic of Azerbaijan." The drugs produced by the Golden Triangle of Myanmar, Laos, and Thailand, on the other hand, pass through the southern routes to feed the Australian, U.S., and Asian markets.


title: Illegal drug trade

text: Drugs are increasingly traded online on the dark web on darknet markets. Internet-based drug trafficking is the global distribution of narcotics, making extensive use of technology. This is a very wide range. Similarly, the use of the Internet for the illegal trafficking of two controlled categories of drugs can also be identified as Internet-related drug trafficking. The platform Silk Road provided goods and services to 100,000 buyers before being shut down in October 2013. This prompted the creation of new platforms such as Silk Road 2.0, which were also shut down.


title: Illegal drug trade

text: Statistics about profits from the drug trade are largely unknown due to its illicit nature. An online report published by the UK Home Office in 2007 estimated the illicit drug market in the UK at £4–6.6 billion a year


title: Illegal drug trade

text: In December 2009 United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime Executive Director Antonio Maria Costa claimed illegal drug money saved the banking industry from collapse. He claimed he had seen evidence that the proceeds of organized crime were "the only liquid investment capital" available to some banks on the brink of collapse during 2008. He said that a majority of the $352 billion (£216bn) of drug profits was absorbed into the economic system as a result: "In many instances, the money from drugs was the only liquid investment capital. In the second half of 2008, liquidity was the banking system's main problem and hence liquid capital became an important factor...Inter-bank loans were funded by money that originated from the trade and other illegal activities...there were signs that some banks were rescued that way".


title: Illegal drug trade

text: Costa declined to identify countries or banks that may have received any drug money, saying that would be inappropriate because his office is supposed to address the problem, not apportion blame.


title: Illegal drug trade

text: Though street-level drug sales are widely viewed as lucrative, a study by Sudhir Venkatesh suggested that many low-level employees receive low wages. In a study he made in the 1990s working closely with members of the Black Gangster Disciple Nation in Chicago, he found that one gang (essentially a franchise) consisted of a leader (a college graduate named J.T.), three senior officers, and 25 to 75 street level salesmen ('foot soldiers') depending on season. Selling crack cocaine, they took in approximately $32,000 per month over a six-year period. This was spent as follows: $5,000 to the board of twenty directors of the Black Gangster Disciple Nation, who oversaw 100 such gangs for approximately $500,000 in monthly income. Another $5,000 monthly was paid for cocaine, and $4,000 for other non-wage expenses. J.T. took $8,500 monthly for his own salary. The remaining $9,500 monthly went to pay the employees a $7 per hour wage for officers and a $3.30 per hour wage for foot soldiers. Contrary to a popular image of drug sales as a lucrative profession, many of the employees were living with their mothers by necessity. Despite this, the gang had four times as many unpaid members who dreamed of becoming foot soldiers.


title: Illegal drug trade

text: There are several arguments on whether or not free trade has a correlation to an increased activity in the illicit drug trade. Currently, the structure and operation of the illicit drug industry is described mainly in terms of an international division of labor. Free trade can open new markets to domestic producers who would otherwise resort to exporting illicit drugs. Additionally, extensive free trade among states increases cross-border drug enforcement and coordination between law enforcement agencies in different countries. However, free trade also increases the sheer volume of legal cross-border trade and provides cover for drug smuggling—by providing ample opportunity to conceal illicit cargo in legal trade. While international free trade continues to expand the volume of legal trade, the ability to detect and interdict drug trafficking is severely diminished. Towards the late 1990s, the top ten seaports in the world processed 33.6 million containers. Free trade has fostered integration of financial markets and has provided drug traffickers with more opportunities to launder money and invest in other activities. This strengthens the drug industry while weakening the efforts of law enforcement to monitor the flow of drug money into the legitimate economy. Cooperation among cartels expands their scope to distant markets and strengthens their abilities to evade detection by local law enforcement. Additionally, criminal organizations work together to coordinate money-laundering activities by having separate organizations handle specific stages of laundering process. One organization structures the process of how financial transactions will be laundered, while another criminal group provides the “dirty” money to be cleaned. By fostering expansion of trade and global transportation networks, free trade encourages cooperation and formation of alliances among criminal organizations across different countries.


title: Illegal drug trade

text: The drug trade in Latin America emerged in the early 1930s. It saw significant growth in the Andean countries, including Peru, Bolivia, Chile, Ecuador, Colombia and Venezuela. The underground market in the early half of the 20th century mainly had ties to Europe. After World War II, the Andean countries saw an expansion of trade, specifically with cocaine.


title: Illegal drug trade

text: The effects of the illegal drug trade in the United States can be seen in a range of political, economic and social aspects. Increasing drug related violence can be tied to the racial tension that arose during the late 20th century along with the political upheaval prevalent throughout the 1960s and 70s. The second half of the 20th century was a period when increased wealth, and increased discretionary spending, increased the demand for illicit drugs in certain areas of the United States. Large-scale drug trafficking is one of the few capital crimes, and may result in a death sentence prescribed at the federal level when it involves killing.


title: Illegal drug trade

text: A large generation, the baby boomers, came of age in the 1960s. Their social tendency to confront the law on specific issues, including illegal drugs, overwhelmed the understaffed judicial system. The federal government attempted to enforce the law, but with meager effect.


title: Illegal drug trade

text: Marijuana was a popular drug seen through the Latin American trade route in the 1960s. Cocaine became a major drug product in the later decades. Much of the cocaine is smuggled from Colombia and Mexico via Jamaica. This led to several administrations combating the popularity of these drugs. Due to the influence of this development on the U.S. economy, the Reagan administration began "certifying" countries for their attempts at controlling drug trafficking. This allowed the United States to intervene in activities related to illegal drug transport in Latin America. Continuing into the 1980s, the United States instated stricter policy pertaining to drug transit through sea. As a result, there was an influx in drug-trafficking across the Mexico–U.S. border. This increased the drug cartel activity in Mexico. By the early 1990s, so much as 50% of the cocaine available in the United States market originated from Mexico, and by the 2000s, over 90% of the cocaine in the United States was imported from Mexico. In Colombia, however, there was a fall of the major drug cartels in the mid-1990s. Visible shifts occurred in the drug market in the United States. Between the 1996 and 2000, U.S. cocaine consumption dropped by 11%.


title: Illegal drug trade

text: In 2008, the U.S. government initiated another program, known as the Merida Initiative, to help combat drug trafficking in Mexico. This program increased U.S. security assistance to $1.4 billion over several years, which helped supply Mexican forces with "high-end equipment from helicopters to surveillance technology". Despite U.S. aid, Mexican "narcogangs" continue to outnumber and outgun the Mexican Army, allowing for continued activities of drug cartels across the U.S.–Mexico border.


title: Illegal drug trade

text: Although narcotics are illegal in the US, they have become integrated into the nation's culture and are seen as a recreational activity by sections of the population. Illicit drugs are considered to be a commodity with strong demand, as they are typically sold at a high value. This high price is caused by a combination of factors that include the potential legal ramifications that exist for suppliers of illicit drugs and their high demand. Despite the constant effort by politicians to win the war on drugs, the US is still the world's largest importer of illegal drugs.