title: Political corruption

text: Corruption is a difficult concept to define. A proper definition of corruption requires a multi-dimensional approach. Machiavelli popularized the oldest dimension of corruption as the decline of virtue among political officials and the citizenry. The psychologist Horst-Eberhard Richter's modernized version defines corruption as the undermining of political values. Corruption as the decline of virtue has been criticized as too broad and far too subjective to be universalized. The second dimension of corruption is corruption as deviant behavior. Sociologist Christian Höffling and Economist J.J. Sentuira both characterized corruption as social illness; the latter defined corruption as the misuse of public power for one’s profit.


title: Political corruption

text: The third dimension is the quid pro quo. Corruption always is an exchange between two or more persons/parties where the persons/parties possess economic goods, and the other person/parties possess a transferred power to be used, according to fixed rules and norms, toward a common good. Fourth, there are also different levels of societal perception of corruption. Heidenheimer divides corruption into three categories. The first category is called white corruption; this level of corruption is mostly viewed with tolerance and may even be lawful and legitimate; typically based on family ties and patron-client systems. The type of corruption often occurring in constitutional states or state transitioning to a more democratic society is called grey corruption is considered reprehensible according to a society’s moral norms, but the persons involved are still mostly lacking any sense of doing something wrong. The third category, black corruption is so severe that it violates a society’s norms and laws. The final dimension is called “shadow politics;” this is part of the informal political process that goes beyond legitimate informal political agreements to behavior that is purposefully concealed.


title: Political corruption

text: Political corruption undermines democracy and good governance by flouting or even subverting formal processes. Corruption in elections and in the legislature reduces accountability and distorts representation in policymaking; corruption in the judiciary compromises the rule of law; and corruption in public administration results in the inefficient provision of services. For republics, it violates a basic principle of republicanism regarding the centrality of civic virtue.


title: Political corruption

text: More generally, corruption erodes the institutional capacity of government if procedures are disregarded, resources are siphoned off, and public offices are bought and sold. Corruption undermines the legitimacy of government and such democratic values as trust and tolerance. Recent evidence suggests that variation in the levels of corruption amongst high-income democracies can vary significantly depending on the level of accountability of decision-makers. Evidence from fragile states also shows that corruption and bribery can adversely impact trust in institutions.


title: Political corruption

text: Corruption can also impact government's provision of goods and services. It increases the costs of goods and services which arise from efficiency loss. In the absence of corruption, governmental projects might be cost-effective at their true costs, however, once corruption costs are included projects may not be cost-effective so they are not executed distorting the provision of goods and services.


title: Political corruption

text: In the private sector, corruption increases the cost of business through the price of illicit payments themselves, the management cost of negotiating with officials and the risk of breached agreements or detection. Although some claim corruption reduces costs by cutting bureaucracy, the availability of bribes can also induce officials to contrive new rules and delays. Openly removing costly and lengthy regulations are better than covertly allowing them to be bypassed by using bribes. Where corruption inflates the cost of business, it also distorts the field of inquiry and action, shielding firms with connections from competition and thereby sustaining inefficient firms.


title: Political corruption

text: Corruption may have a direct impact on the firm's effective marginal tax rate. Bribing tax officials can reduce tax payments of the firm if the marginal bribe rate is below the official marginal tax rate. However, in Uganda, bribes have a higher negative impact on firms’ activity than taxation. Indeed, a one percentage point increase in bribes reduces firm's annual growth by three percentage points, while an increase in 1 percentage point on taxes reduces firm's growth by one percentage point.


title: Political corruption

text: Corruption also generates economic distortion in the public sector by diverting public investment into capital projects where bribes and kickbacks are more plentiful. Officials may increase the technical complexity of public sector projects to conceal or pave the way for such dealings, thus further distorting investment. Corruption also lowers compliance with construction, environmental, or other regulations, reduces the quality of government services and infrastructure, and increases budgetary pressures on government.


title: Political corruption

text: Economists argue that one of the factors behind the differing economic development in Africa and Asia is that in Africa, corruption has primarily taken the form of rent extraction with the resulting financial capital moved overseas rather than invested at home (hence the stereotypical, but often accurate, image of African dictators having Swiss bank accounts). In Nigeria, for example, more than $400 billion was stolen from the treasury by Nigeria's leaders between 1960 and 1999.


title: Political corruption

text: University of Massachusetts Amherst researchers estimated that from 1970 to 1996, capital flight from 30 Sub-Saharan countries totaled $187bn, exceeding those nations' external debts. (The results, expressed in retarded or suppressed development, have been modeled in theory by economist Mancur Olson.) In the case of Africa, one of the factors for this behavior was political instability and the fact that new governments often confiscated previous government's corruptly obtained assets. This encouraged officials to stash their wealth abroad, out of reach of any future expropriation. In contrast, Asian administrations such as Suharto's New Order often took a cut on business transactions or provided conditions for development, through infrastructure investment, law and order, etc.


title: Political corruption

text: Corruption is often most evident in countries with the smallest per capita incomes, relying on foreign aid for health services. Local political interception of donated money from overseas is especially prevalent in Sub-Saharan African nations, where it was reported in the 2006 World Bank Report that about half of the funds that were donated for health usages were never invested into the health sectors or given to those needing medical attention.


title: Political corruption

text: Instead, the donated money was expended through "counterfeit drugs, siphoning off of drugs to the black market, and payments to ghost employees". Ultimately, there is a sufficient amount of money for health in developing countries, but local corruption denies the wider citizenry the resource they require.


title: Political corruption

text: Corruption facilitates environmental destruction. While corrupt societies may have formal legislation to protect the environment, it cannot be enforced if officials can easily be bribed. The same applies to social rights worker protection, unionization prevention, and child labor. Violation of these laws rights enables corrupt countries to gain illegitimate economic advantage in the international market.


title: Political corruption

text: The Nobel Prize-winning economist Amartya Sen has observed that "there is no such thing as an apolitical food problem." While drought and other naturally occurring events may trigger famine conditions, it is government action or inaction that determines its severity, and often even whether or not a famine will occur.


title: Political corruption

text: Governments with strong tendencies towards kleptocracy can undermine food security even when harvests are good. Officials often steal state property. In Bihar, India, more than 80% of the subsidized food aid to poor is stolen by corrupt officials. Similarly, food aid is often robbed at gunpoint by governments, criminals, and warlords alike, and sold for a profit. The 20th century is full of many examples of governments undermining the food security of their own nations – sometimes intentionally.


title: Political corruption

text: The scale of humanitarian aid to the poor and unstable regions of the world grows, but it is highly vulnerable to corruption, with food aid, construction and other highly valued assistance as the most at risk. Food aid can be directly and physically diverted from its intended destination, or indirectly through the manipulation of assessments, targeting, registration and distributions to favor certain groups or individuals.


title: Political corruption

text: In construction and shelter there are numerous opportunities for diversion and profit through substandard workmanship, kickbacks for contracts and favouritism in the provision of valuable shelter material. Thus while humanitarian aid agencies are usually most concerned about aid being diverted by including too many, recipients themselves are most concerned about exclusion. Access to aid may be limited to those with connections, to those who pay bribes or are forced to give sexual favors. Equally, those able to do so may manipulate statistics to inflate the number of beneficiaries and siphon off additional assistance.


title: Political corruption

text: Malnutrition, illness, wounds, torture, harassment of specific groups within the population, disappearances, extrajudicial executions and the forcible displacement of people are all found in many armed conflicts. Aside from their direct effects on the individuals concerned, the consequences of these tragedies for local systems must also be considered: the destruction of crops and places of cultural importance, the breakdown of economic infrastructure and of health-care facilities such as hospitals, etc., etc.


title: Political corruption

text: Corruption plays a huge role in health care system starting from the hospital, to the government and lifted to the other institutions that promote quality and affordable health care to the people. The efficiency of health care delivery in any country is heavily dependent on accountable and transparent systems, proper management of both financial and human resources and timely supply of services to the vulnerable populace of the nation.


title: Political corruption

text: At the basic level, greed skyrockets corruption. When the structure of the health care system is not adequately addressed beginning from oversight in healthcare delivery and supply of drugs and tendering process, mismanagement and misappropriation of funds will always be observed. Corruption also can undermine health care service delivery which in turn disorients the lives of the poor. Corruption leads to violation of human rights and fundamental freedoms as people supposed to benefit from the basic health care from the governments are denied due to unscrupulous processes driven by greed. Therefore, for a country to keep citizens healthy there must be efficient systems and proper resources that can tame the evils like corruption that underpin it.


title: Political corruption

text: Education forms the basis and the fabric in which a society is transformed and different facets of well-being are shaped. Corruption in higher education has been prevalent and calls for immediate intervention. Increased corruption in higher education has led to growing global concern among governments, students and educators and other stakeholders. Those offering services in the higher education institutions are facing pressure that highly threatens the integral value of higher education enterprise. Corruption in higher education has a larger negative influence, it destroys the relation between personal effort and reward anticipation. Moreover, employees and students develop a belief that personal success does not come from hard work and merit but through canvassing with teachers and taking other shortcuts.


title: Political corruption

text: Academic promotions in the higher education institutions have been disabled by unlimited corruption. Presently, promotion is based on personal connections than professional achievements. This has led to dramatic increase in the number of professors and exhibits their rapid status loss. Utmost the flawed processes in the academic institutions has led to unbaked graduates who are not well fit to the job market. Corruption hinders the international standards of an education system. Additionally, Plagiarism is a form of corruption in academic research, where it affects originality and disables learning. Individual violations are in close relation to the operation ways of a system.


title: Political corruption

text: Furthermore, the universities may be in relationships and dealings with business and people in government, which majority of them enrol in doctoral studies without the undergraduate program. Consequently, money, power and related influence compromise education standards since they are fueling factors. A Student may finish thesis report within a shorter time upon which compromises the quality of work delivered and questions the threshold of the higher education.


title: Political corruption

text: Corruption is not specific to poor, developing, or transition countries. In western countries, cases of bribery and other forms of corruption in all possible fields exist: under-the-table payments made to reputed surgeons by patients attempting to be on top of the list of forthcoming surgeries, bribes paid by suppliers to the automotive industry in order to sell low-quality connectors used for instance in safety equipment such as airbags, bribes paid by suppliers to manufacturers of defibrillators (to sell low-quality capacitors), contributions paid by wealthy parents to the "social and culture fund" of a prestigious university in exchange for it to accept their children, bribes paid to obtain diplomas, financial and other advantages granted to unionists by members of the executive board of a car manufacturer in exchange for employer-friendly positions and votes, etc. Examples are endless.


title: Political corruption

text: These various manifestations of corruption can ultimately present a danger for public health; they can discredit specific, essential institutions or social relationships. Osipian summarized a 2008 "study of corruption perceptions among Russians ... .30 percent of the respondents marked the level of corruption as very high, while another 44 percent as high. 19 percent considered it as average and only 1 percent as low. The most corrupt in people's minds are traffic police (33 percent), local authorities (28 percent), police (26 percent), healthcare (16 percent), and education (15 percent). 52 percent of the respondents had experiences of giving money or gifts to


title: Political corruption

text: medical professionals while 36 percent made informal payments to educators." He claimed that this corruption lowered the rate of economic growth in Russia, because the students disadvantaged by this corruption could not adopt better work methods as quickly, lowering thereby total factor productivity for Russia.


title: Political corruption

text: Corruption can also affect the various components of sports activities (referees, players, medical and laboratory staff involved in anti-doping controls, members of national sport federation and international committees deciding about the allocation of contracts and competition places).


title: Political corruption

text: Cases exist against (members of) various types of non-profit and non-government organizations, as well as religious organizations.


title: Political corruption

text: Ultimately, the distinction between public and private sector corruption sometimes appears rather artificial, and national anti-corruption initiatives may need to avoid legal and other loopholes in the coverage of the instruments.


title: Political corruption

text: In the context of political corruption, a bribe may involve a payment given to a government official in exchange of his use of official powers. Bribery requires two participants: one to give the bribe, and one to take it. Either may initiate the corrupt offering; for example, a customs official may demand bribes to let through allowed (or disallowed) goods, or a smuggler might offer bribes to gain passage. In some countries the culture of corruption extends to every aspect of public life, making it extremely difficult for individuals to operate without resorting to bribes. Bribes may be demanded in order for an official to do something he is already paid to do. They may also be demanded in order to bypass laws and regulations. In addition to their role in private financial gain, bribes are also used to intentionally and maliciously cause harm to another (i.e. no financial incentive). In some developing nations, up to half of the population has paid bribes during the past 12 months.


title: Political corruption

text: The Council of Europe dissociates active and passive bribery and to incriminates them as separate offences:


title: Political corruption

text: This dissociation aims to make the early steps (offering, promising, requesting an advantage) of a corrupt deal already an offence and, thus, to give a clear signal (from a criminal-policy point-of-view) that bribery is not acceptable. Furthermore, such a dissociation makes the prosecution of bribery offences easier since it can be very difficult to prove that two parties (the bribe-giver and the bribe-taker) have formally agreed upon a corrupt deal. In addition, there is often no such formal deal but only a mutual understanding, for instance when it is common knowledge in a municipality that to obtain a building permit one has to pay a "fee" to the decision maker to obtain a favorable decision. A working definition of corruption is also provided as follows in article 3 of the Civil Law Convention on Corruption (ETS 174): For the purpose of this Convention, "corruption" means requesting, offering, giving or accepting, directly or indirectly, a bribe or any other undue advantage or prospect thereof, which distorts the proper performance of any duty or behavior required of the recipient of the bribe, the undue advantage or the prospect thereof.


title: Political corruption

text: Trading in influence, or influence peddling, refers to a person selling his/her influence over the decision making process to benefit a third party (person or institution). The difference with bribery is that this is a tri-lateral relation. From a legal point of view, the role of the third party (who is the target of the influence) does not really matter although he/she can be an accessory in some instances. It can be difficult to make a distinction between this form of corruption and some forms of extreme and loosely regulated lobbying where for instance law- or decision-makers can freely "sell" their vote, decision power or influence to those lobbyists who offer the highest compensation, including where for instance the latter act on behalf of powerful clients such as industrial groups who want to avoid the passing of specific environmental, social, or other regulations perceived as too stringent, etc. Where lobbying is (sufficiently) regulated, it becomes possible to provide for a distinctive criteria and to consider that trading in influence involves the use of "improper influence", as in article 12 of the Criminal Law Convention on Corruption (ETS 173) of the Council of Europe.


title: Political corruption

text: Patronage refers to favoring supporters, for example with government employment. This may be legitimate, as when a newly elected government changes the top officials in the administration in order to effectively implement its policy. It can be seen as corruption if this means that incompetent persons, as a payment for supporting the regime, are selected before more able ones. In nondemocracies many government officials are often selected for loyalty rather than ability. They may be almost exclusively selected from a particular group (for example, Sunni Arabs in Saddam Hussein's Iraq, the nomenklatura in the Soviet Union, or the Junkers in Imperial Germany) that support the regime in return for such favors. A similar problem can also be seen in Eastern Europe, for example in Romania, where the government is often accused of patronage (when a new government comes to power it rapidly changes most of the officials in the public sector).


title: Political corruption

text: Favoring relatives (nepotism) or personal friends (cronyism) of an official is a form of illegitimate private gain. This may be combined with bribery, for example demanding that a business should employ a relative of an official controlling regulations affecting the business. The most extreme example is when the entire state is inherited, as in North Korea or Syria. A lesser form might be in the Southern United States with Good ol' boys, where women and minorities are excluded. A milder form of cronyism is an "old boy network", in which appointees to official positions are selected only from a closed and exclusive social network – such as the alumni of particular universities – instead of appointing the most competent candidate.


title: Political corruption

text: Seeking to harm enemies becomes corruption when official powers are illegitimately used as means to this end. For example, trumped-up charges are often brought up against journalists or writers who bring up politically sensitive issues, such as a politician's acceptance of bribes.


title: Political corruption

text: Gombeenism refers to an individual who is dishonest and corrupt for the purpose of personal gain, often monetary, while parochialism, which is also known as parish pump politics, relates to placing local or vanity projects ahead of the national interest. For instance in Irish politics, populist left wing political parties will often apply these terms to mainstream establishment political parties and will cite the many cases of Corruption in Ireland, such as the Irish Banking crisis, which found evidence of bribery, cronyism and collusion, where in some cases politicians who were coming to the end of their political careers would receive a senior management or committee position in a company they had dealings with.


title: Political corruption

text: Electoral fraud is illegal interference with the process of an election. Acts of fraud affect vote counts to bring about an election result, whether by increasing the vote share of the favored candidate, depressing the vote share of the rival candidates, or both. Also called voter fraud, the mechanisms involved include illegal voter registration, intimidation at polls, voting computer hacking, and improper vote counting.


title: Political corruption

text: Embezzlement is the theft of entrusted funds. It is political when it involves public money taken by a public official for use by anyone not specified by the public. Ponzi schemes are an example of embezzlement. Some embezzlers “skim off the top” so that they continually acquire a small amount over a particular time interval. This method reduces the likelihood of being caught. On the other hand, some embezzlers steal a very large amount of goods or funds in a single instance and then disappear. Sometimes company managers underreport income to their supervisors and keep the difference.A common type of embezzlement is that of personal use of entrusted government resources; for example, when an official assigns public employees to renovate his own house.


title: Political corruption

text: A kickback is an official's share of misappropriated funds allocated from his or her organization to an organization involved in corrupt bidding. For example, suppose that a politician is in charge of choosing how to spend some public funds. He can give a contract to a company that is not the best bidder, or allocate more than they deserve. In this case, the company benefits, and in exchange for betraying the public, the official receives a kickback payment, which is a portion of the sum the company received. This sum itself may be all or a portion of the difference between the actual (inflated) payment to the company and the (lower) market-based price that would have been paid had the bidding been competitive.


title: Political corruption

text: Another example of a kickback would be if a judge receives a portion of the profits that a business makes in exchange for his judicial decisions.


title: Political corruption

text: Kickbacks are not limited to government officials; any situation in which people are entrusted to spend funds that do not belong to them are susceptible to this kind of corruption.


title: Political corruption

text: An unholy alliance is a coalition among seemingly antagonistic groups for ad hoc or hidden gain, generally some influential non-governmental group forming ties with political parties, supplying funding in exchange for favorable treatment. Like patronage, unholy alliances are not necessarily illegal, but unlike patronage, by its deceptive nature and often great financial resources, an unholy alliance can be more dangerous to the public interest. An early use of the term was by former US President Theodore "Teddy" Roosevelt:


title: Political corruption

text: An illustrative example of official involvement in organized crime can be found from the 1920s and 1930s Shanghai, where Huang Jinrong was a police chief in the French concession, while simultaneously being a gang boss and co-operating with Du Yuesheng, the local gang ringleader. The relationship kept the flow of profits from the gang's gambling dens, prostitution, and protection rackets undisturbed and safe.


title: Political corruption

text: The United States accused Manuel Noriega's government in Panama of being a "narcokleptocracy", a corrupt government profiting on illegal drug trade. Later the U.S. invaded Panama and captured Noriega.


title: Political corruption

text: Some research indicates that political corruption is contagious: the revelation of corruption in a sector leads others in the sector to engage in corruption.


title: Political corruption

text: observed a tendency for "The functionaries of every government ... to command at will the liberty and property of their constituents. There is no safe deposit [for liberty and property] ... without information. Where the press is free, and every man able to read, all is safe."


title: Political corruption

text: Recent research supports Jefferson's claim. Brunetti and Weder found "evidence of a significant relationship between more press freedom and less corruption in a large cross-section of countries." They also presented "evidence which suggests that the direction of causation runs from higher press freedom to lower corruption." Adserà, Boix, and Payne found that increases in newspaper readership led to increased political accountability and lower corruption in data from roughly 100 countries and from different states in the US.


title: Political corruption

text: Snyder and Strömberg found "that a poor fit between newspaper markets and political districts reduces press coverage of politics. ... Congressmen who are less covered by the local press work less for their constituencies: they are less likely to stand witness before congressional hearings ... . Federal spending is lower in areas where there is less press coverage of the local members of congress." Schulhofer-Wohl and Garrido found that the year after the "Cincinnati Post" closed in 2007, "fewer candidates ran for municipal office in the Kentucky suburbs most reliant on the Post, incumbents became more likely to win re-election, and voter turnout and campaign spending fell.


title: Political corruption

text: An analysis of the evolution of mass media in the United States and European Union since World War II noted mixed results from the growth of the Internet: "The digital revolution has been good for freedom of expression [and] information [but] has had mixed effects on freedom of the press": It has disrupted traditional sources of funding, and new forms of Internet journalism have replaced only a tiny fraction of what's been lost.


title: Political corruption

text: Media responses to whistleblower incidents or reports, and to matters which generate skepticism in established law and government but may not technically be whistleblower incidents, are limited by the prevalence of political correctness and speech codes in many Western nations. In China and many other East Asian countries the state-enforced speech codes limit or, in their view, channel the efforts of the media and civil society to reduce public corruption.


title: Political corruption

text: Extensive and diverse public spending is, in itself, inherently at risk of cronyism, kickbacks, and embezzlement. Complicated regulations and arbitrary, unsupervised official conduct exacerbate the problem. This is one argument for privatization and deregulation. Opponents of privatization see the argument as ideological. The argument that corruption necessarily follows from the opportunity is weakened by the existence of countries with low to non-existent corruption but large public sectors, like the Nordic countries. These countries score high on the Ease of Doing Business Index, due to good and often simple regulations and have rule of law firmly established. Therefore, due to their lack of corruption in the first place, they can run large public sectors without inducing political corruption. Recent evidence that takes both the size of expenditures and regulatory complexity into account has found that high-income democracies with more expansive state sectors do indeed have higher levels of corruption.


title: Political corruption

text: Like other governmental economic activities, also privatization, such as in the sale of government-owned property, is particularly at the risk of cronyism. Privatizations in Russia, Latin America, and East Germany were accompanied by large-scale corruption during the sale of the state-owned companies. Those with political connections unfairly gained large wealth, which has discredited privatization in these regions. While media have reported widely the grand corruption that accompanied the sales, studies have argued that in addition to increased operating efficiency, daily petty corruption is, or would be, larger without privatization and that corruption is more prevalent in non-privatized sectors. Furthermore, there is evidence to suggest that extralegal and unofficial activities are more prevalent in countries that privatized less.


title: Political corruption

text: In the European Union, the principle of subsidiarity is applied: a government service should be provided by the lowest, most local authority that can competently provide it. An effect is that distribution of funds in multiple instances discourages embezzlement because even small sums missing will be noticed. In contrast, in a centralized authority, even minute proportions of public funds can be large sums of money.


title: Political corruption

text: Wealth and power can have a compounding effect on political corruption, however, the immunity from the law that money and influence bring will not come into effect when a powerful individual injures or harms another powerful individual. An example of this immunity being broken is Bernie Madoff, who while being rich and powerful himself, stole from other rich and powerful individuals. This resulted in his eventual arrest despite his status.


title: Political corruption

text: If the highest echelons of the governments also take advantage of corruption or embezzlement from the state's treasury, it is sometimes referred to the neologism "kleptocracy". Members of the government can take advantage of the natural resources (e.g., diamonds and oil in a few prominent cases) or state-owned productive industries. A number of corrupt governments have enriched themselves via foreign aid. Indeed, there is a positive correlation between aid flows and high levels of corruption within recipient countries.


title: Political corruption

text: Corruption in Sub-Saharan Africa consists primarily of extracting economic rent and moving the resulting financial capital overseas instead of investing at home. Authors Leonce Ndikumana and James K. Boyce estimate that from 1970 to 2008, capital flight from 33 sub-Saharan countries totalled $700 billion.


title: Political corruption

text: A corrupt dictatorship typically results in many years of general hardship and suffering for the vast majority of citizens as civil society and the rule of law disintegrate. In addition, corrupt dictators routinely ignore economic and social problems in their quest to amass ever more wealth and power.


title: Political corruption

text: The classic case of a corrupt, exploitive dictator often given is the regime of Marshal Mobutu Sese Seko, who ruled the Democratic Republic of the Congo (which he renamed Zaire) from 1965 to 1997. It is said that usage of the term kleptocracy gained popularity largely in response to a need to accurately describe Mobutu's regime. Another classic case is Nigeria, especially under the rule of General Sani Abacha who was "de facto" president of Nigeria from 1993 until his death in 1998. He is reputed to have stolen some US$3–4 billion. He and his relatives are often mentioned in Nigerian 419 letter scams claiming to offer vast fortunes for "help" in laundering his stolen "fortunes", which in reality turn out not to exist. More than $400 billion was stolen from the treasury by Nigeria's leaders between 1960 and 1999.


title: Political corruption

text: There are two methods of corruption of the judiciary: the state (through budget planning and various privileges), and the private. Budget of the judiciary in many transitional and developing countries is almost completely controlled by the executive. The latter undermines the separation of powers, as it creates a critical financial dependence of the judiciary. The proper national wealth distribution including the government spending on the judiciary is subject of the constitutional economics. Judicial corruption can be difficult to completely eradicate, even in developed countries.


title: Political corruption

text: Mobile telecommunications and radio broadcasting help to fight corruption, especially in developing regions like Africa, where other forms of communications are limited.


title: Political corruption

text: In India, the anti-corruption bureau fights against corruption, and a new ombudsman bill called Jan Lokpal Bill is being prepared.


title: Political corruption

text: In the 1990s, initiatives were taken at an international level (in particular by the European Community, the Council of Europe, the OECD) to put a ban on corruption: in 1996, the Committee of Ministers of the Council of Europe, for instance, adopted a comprehensive Programme of Action against Corruption and, subsequently, issued a series of anti-corruption standard-setting instruments:


title: Political corruption

text: The purpose of these instruments was to address the various forms of corruption (involving the public sector, the private sector, the financing of political activities, etc.) whether they had a strictly domestic or also a transnational dimension. To monitor the implementation at national level of the requirements and principles provided in those texts, a monitoring mechanism – the Group of States Against Corruption (also known as GRECO) (French: Groupe d'Etats contre la corruption) was created.


title: Political corruption

text: Further conventions were adopted at the regional level under the aegis of the Organization of American States (OAS or OEA), the African Union, and in 2003, at the universal level under that of the United Nations Convention against Corruption where it is enabled with mutual legal assistance between the states parties regarding investigations, processes and judicial actions related to corruption crimes, as established in article 46.


title: Political corruption

text: A whistleblower (also written as whistle-blower or whistle blower) is a person who exposes any kind of information or activity that is deemed illegal, unethical, or not correct within an organization that is either private or public. The information of alleged wrongdoing can be classified in many ways: violation of company policy/rules, law, regulation, or threat to public interest/national security, as well as fraud, and corruption. Those who become whistleblowers can choose to bring information or allegations to the surface either internally or externally. Internally, a whistleblower can bring his/her accusations to the attention of other people within the accused organization such as an immediate supervisor. Externally, a whistleblower can bring allegations to light by contacting a third party outside of an accused organization such as the media, government, law enforcement, or those who are concerned.


title: Political corruption

text: Because of this, a number of laws exist to protect whistleblowers. Some third-party groups even offer protection to whistleblowers, but that protection can only go so far. Whistleblowers face legal action, criminal charges, social stigma, and termination from any position, office, or job. Two other classifications of whistleblowing are private and public. The classifications relate to the type of organizations someone chooses to whistle-blow on private sector, or public sector. Depending on many factors, both can have varying results. However, whistleblowing in the public sector organization is more likely to result in criminal charges and possible custodial sentences. A whistleblower who chooses to accuse a private sector organization or agency is more likely to face termination and legal and civil charges.


title: Political corruption

text: Deeper questions and theories of whistleblowing and why people choose to do so can be studied through an ethical approach. Whistleblowing is a topic of ongoing ethical debate. Leading arguments in the ideological camp that whistleblowing is ethical to maintain that whistleblowing is a form of civil disobedience, and aims to protect the public from government wrongdoing. In the opposite camp, some see whistleblowing as unethical for breaching confidentiality, especially in industries that handle sensitive client or patient information. Legal protection can also be granted to protect whistleblowers, but that protection is subject to many stipulations. Hundreds of laws grant protection to whistleblowers, but stipulations can easily cloud that protection and leave whistleblowers vulnerable to retaliation and legal trouble. However, the decision and action have become far more complicated with recent advancements in technology and communication. Whistleblowers frequently face reprisal, sometimes at the hands of the organization or group they have accused, sometimes from related organizations, and sometimes under law. Questions about the legitimacy of whistleblowing, the moral responsibility of whistleblowing, and the appraisal of the institutions of whistleblowing are part of the field of political ethics.


title: Political corruption

text: Measuring corruption accurately is difficult if not impossible due to the illicit nature of the transaction and imprecise definitions of corruption. Few reliable measures of the magnitude of corruption exists and among those, there is a high level of heterogeneity. One of the most common ways to estimate corruption is through perception surveys. They have the advantage of good coverage, however, they do not measure corruption precisely. While "corruption" indices first appeared in 1995 with the Corruption Perceptions Index CPI, all of these metrics address different proxies for corruption, such as public perceptions of the extent of the problem. However, over time the refinement of methods and validation checks against objective indicators has meant that, while not perfect, many of these indicators are getting better at consistently and validly measuring the scale of corruption.


title: Political corruption

text: Transparency International, an anti-corruption NGO, pioneered this field with the CPI, first released in 1995. This work is often credited with breaking a taboo and forcing the issue of corruption into high-level development policy discourse. Transparency International currently publishes three measures, updated annually: a CPI (based on aggregating third-party polling of public perceptions of how corrupt different countries are); a Global Corruption Barometer (based on a survey of general public attitudes toward and experience of corruption); and a Bribe Payers Index, looking at the willingness of foreign firms to pay bribes. The Corruption Perceptions Index is the best known of these metrics, though it has drawn much criticism and may be declining in influence. In 2013 Transparency International published a report on the "Government Defence Anti-corruption Index". This index evaluates the risk of corruption in countries' military sector.


title: Political corruption

text: The World Bank collects a range of data on corruption, including survey responses from over 100,000 firms worldwide and a set of indicators of governance and institutional quality. Moreover, one of the six dimensions of governance measured by the Worldwide Governance Indicators is Control of Corruption, which is defined as "the extent to which power is exercised for private gain, including both petty and grand forms of corruption, as well as 'capture' of the state by elites and private interests." While the definition itself is fairly precise, the data aggregated into the Worldwide Governance Indicators is based on any available polling: questions range from "is corruption a serious problem?" to measures of public access to information, and not consistent across countries. Despite these weaknesses, the global coverage of these datasets has led to their widespread adoption, most notably by the Millennium Challenge Corporation.


title: Political corruption

text: A number of parties have collected survey data, from the public and from experts, to try to gauge the level of corruption and bribery, as well as its impact on political and economic outcomes.


title: Political corruption

text: A second wave of corruption metrics has been created by Global Integrity, the International Budget Partnership, and many lesser known local groups. These metrics include the Global Integrity Index, first published in 2004. These second wave projects aim to create policy change by identifying resources more effectively and creating checklists toward incremental reform. Global Integrity and the International Budget Partnership each dispense with public surveys and instead uses in-country experts to evaluate "the opposite of corruption" – which Global Integrity defines as the public policies that prevent, discourage, or expose corruption. These approaches complement the first wave, awareness-raising tools by giving governments facing public outcry a checklist which measures concrete steps toward improved governance.


title: Political corruption

text: Typical second wave corruption metrics do not offer the worldwide coverage found in first wave projects and instead focus on localizing information gathered to specific problems and creating deep, "unpackable" content that matches quantitative and qualitative data.


title: Political corruption

text: Alternative approaches, such as the British aid agency's Drivers of Change research, skips numbers and promotes understanding corruption via political economy analysis of who controls power in a given society. Another approach, suggested for when conventional measures of corruption are unavailable, is to look at the bodyfat of officials, after finding that obesity of cabinet ministers in post-Soviet states was highly correlated with more accurate measures.


title: Geostationary orbit

text: A geostationary orbit, also referred to as a geosynchronous equatorial orbit (GEO), is a circular geosynchronous orbit in altitude above Earth's equator ( in radius from Earth's center) and following the direction of Earth's rotation.


title: Geostationary orbit

text: An object in such an orbit has an orbital period equal to Earth's rotational period, one sidereal day, and so to ground observers it appears motionless, in a fixed position in the sky. The concept of a geostationary orbit was popularised by the science fiction writer Arthur C. Clarke in the 1940s as a way to revolutionise telecommunications, and the first satellite to be placed in this kind of orbit was launched in 1963.


title: Geostationary orbit

text: Communications satellites are often placed in a geostationary orbit so that Earth-based satellite antennas do not have to rotate to track them but can be pointed permanently at the position in the sky where the satellites are located. Weather satellites are also placed in this orbit for real-time monitoring and data collection, and navigation satellites to provide a known calibration point and enhance GPS accuracy.


title: Geostationary orbit

text: Geostationary satellites are launched via a temporary orbit, and placed in a slot above a particular point on the Earth's surface. The orbit requires some stationkeeping to keep its position, and modern retired satellites are placed in a higher graveyard orbit to avoid collisions.


title: Geostationary orbit

text: In 1929, Herman Potočnik described both geosynchronous orbits in general and the special case of the geostationary Earth orbit in particular as useful orbits for space stations. The first appearance of a geostationary orbit in popular literature was in October 1942, in the first Venus Equilateral story by George O. Smith, but Smith did not go into details. British science fiction author Arthur C. Clarke popularised and expanded the concept in a 1945 paper entitled "Extra-Terrestrial Relays – Can Rocket Stations Give Worldwide Radio Coverage?", published in "Wireless World" magazine. Clarke acknowledged the connection in his introduction to "The Complete Venus Equilateral". The orbit, which Clarke first described as useful for broadcast and relay communications satellites, is sometimes called the Clarke Orbit. Similarly, the collection of artificial satellites in this orbit is known as the Clarke Belt.


title: Geostationary orbit

text: In technical terminology the orbit is referred to as either a geostationary or geosynchronous equatorial orbit, with the terms used somewhat interchangeably.


title: Geostationary orbit

text: The first geostationary satellite was designed by Harold Rosen while he was working at Hughes Aircraft in 1959. Inspired by Sputnik 1, he wanted to use a geostationary satellite to globalise communications. Telecommunications between the US and Europe was then possible between just 136 people at a time, and reliant on high frequency radios and an undersea cable.


title: Geostationary orbit

text: Conventional wisdom at the time was that it would require too much rocket power to place a satellite in a geostationary orbit and it would not survive long enough to justify the expense, so early efforts were put towards constellations of satellites in low or medium Earth orbit. The first of these were the passive Echo balloon satellites in 1960, followed by Telstar 1 in 1962. Although these projects had difficulties with signal strength and tracking, that could be solved through geostationary satellites, the concept was seen as impractical, so Hughes often withheld funds and support.


title: Geostationary orbit

text: By 1961, Rosen and his team had produced a cylindrical prototype with a diameter of , height of , weighing , light and small enough to be placed into orbit. It was spin stabilised with a dipole antenna producing a pancake shaped waveform. In August 1961, they were contracted to begin building the real satellite. They lost Syncom 1 to electronics failure, but Syncom 2 was successfully placed into a geosynchronous orbit in 1963. Although its inclined orbit still required moving antennas, it was able to relay TV transmissions, and allowed for US President John F. Kennedy to phone Nigerian prime minister Abubakar Tafawa Balewa from a ship on August 23, 1963.


title: Geostationary orbit

text: The first satellite placed in a geostationary orbit was Syncom 3, which was launched by a Delta D rocket in 1964. With its increased bandwidth, this satellite was able to transmit live coverage of the Summer Olympics from Japan to America. Geostationary orbits have been in common use ever since, in particular for satellite television.


title: Geostationary orbit

text: Although most populated land locations on the planet now have terrestrial communications facilities (microwave, fiber-optic), with telephone access covering 96% of the population and internet access 90%, some rural and remote areas in developed countries are still reliant on satellite communications.


title: Geostationary orbit

text: Most commercial communications satellites, broadcast satellites and SBAS satellites operate in geostationary orbits.


title: Geostationary orbit

text: Geostationary communication satellites are useful because they are visible from a large area of the earth's surface, extending 81° away in both latitude and longitude. They appear stationary in the sky, which eliminates the need for ground stations to have movable antennas. This means that Earth-based observers can erect small, cheap and stationary antennas that are always directed at the desired satellite. However, latency becomes significant as it takes about 240 ms for a signal to pass from a ground based transmitter on the equator to the satellite and back again. This delay presents problems for latency-sensitive applications such as voice communication, so geostationary communication satellites are primarily used for unidirectional entertainment and applications where low latency alternatives are not available.


title: Geostationary orbit

text: Geostationary satellites are directly overhead at the equator and appear lower in the sky to an observer nearer the poles. As the observer's latitude increases, communication becomes more difficult due to factors such as atmospheric refraction, Earth's thermal emission, line-of-sight obstructions, and signal reflections from the ground or nearby structures. At latitudes above about 81°, geostationary satellites are below the horizon and cannot be seen at all. Because of this, some Russian communication satellites have used elliptical Molniya and Tundra orbits, which have excellent visibility at high latitudes.


title: Geostationary orbit

text: A worldwide network of operational geostationary meteorological satellites is used to provide visible and infrared images of Earth's surface and atmosphere for weather observation, oceanography, and atmospheric tracking. As of 2019 there are 19 satellites in either operation or stand-by. These satellite systems include:


title: Geostationary orbit

text: These satellites typically captures images in the visual and infrared spectrum with a spatial resolution between 0.5 and 4 square kilometres. The coverage is typically 70°, and in some cases less.


title: Geostationary orbit

text: Geostationary satellite imagery has been used for tracking volcanic ash, measuring cloud top temperatures and water vapour, oceanography, measuring land temperature and vegetation coverage, facilitating cyclone path prediction, and providing real time cloud coverage and other tracking data. Some information has been incorporated into meteorological prediction models, but due to their wide field of view, full-time monitoring and lower resolution, geostationary weather satellite images are primarily used for short-term and real-time forecasting.


title: Geostationary orbit

text: Geostationary satellites can be used to augment GNSS systems by relaying clock, ephemeris and ionospheric error corrections (calculated from ground stations of a known position) and providing an additional reference signal. This improves position accuracy from approximately 5m to 1m or less.


title: Geostationary orbit

text: Geostationary satellites are launched to the east into a prograde orbit that matches the rotation rate of the equator. The smallest inclination that a satellite can be launched into is that of the launch site's latitude, so launching the satellite from close to the equator limits the amount of inclination change needed later. Additionally, launching from close to the equator allows the speed of the Earth's rotation to give the satellite a boost. A launch site should have water or deserts to the east, so any failed rockets do not fall on a populated area.


title: Geostationary orbit

text: Most launch vehicles place geostationary satellites directly into a geostationary transfer orbit (GTO), an elliptical orbit with an apogee at GEO height and a low perigee. On-board satellite propulsion is then used to raise the perigee, circularise and reach GEO.


title: Geostationary orbit

text: Satellites in geostationary orbit must all occupy a single ring above the equator. The requirement to space these satellites apart, to avoid harmful radio-frequency interference during operations, means that there are a limited number of orbital slots available, and thus only a limited number of satellites can be operated in geostationary orbit. This has led to conflict between different countries wishing access to the same orbital slots (countries near the same longitude but differing latitudes) and radio frequencies. These disputes are addressed through the International Telecommunication Union's allocation mechanism under the Radio Regulations. In the 1976 Bogota Declaration, eight countries located on the Earth's equator claimed sovereignty over the geostationary orbits above their territory, but the claims gained no international recognition.


title: Geostationary orbit

text: A statite is a hypothetical satellite that uses radiation pressure from the sun against a solar sail to modify its orbit.


title: Geostationary orbit

text: It would hold its location over the dark side of the Earth at a latitude of approximately 30 degrees. A statite is stationary relative to the Earth and Sun system rather than compared to surface of the Earth, and could ease congestion in the geostationary ring.


title: Geostationary orbit

text: Geostationary satellites require some station keeping to keep their position, and once they run out of thruster fuel they are generally retired. The transponders and other onboard systems often outlive the thruster fuel and by allowing the satellite to move naturally into an inclined geosynchronous orbit some satellites can remain in use, or else be elevated to a graveyard orbit. This process is becoming increasingly regulated and satellites must have a 90% chance of moving over 200 km above the geostationary belt at end of life.


title: Geostationary orbit

text: Space debris at geostationary orbits typically has a lower collision speed than at low Earth orbit (LEO) since all GEO satellites orbit in the same plane, altitude and speed; however, the presence of satellites in eccentric orbits allows for collisions at up to 4 km/s. Although a collision is comparatively unlikely, GEO satellites have a limited ability to avoid any debris.


title: Geostationary orbit

text: Debris less than 10 cm in diameter cannot be seen from the Earth, making it difficult to assess their prevalence.


title: Geostationary orbit

text: Despite efforts to reduce risk, spacecraft collisions have occurred. The European Space Agency telecom satellite Olympus-1 was struck by a meteoroid on August 11, 1993 and eventually moved to a graveyard orbit, and in 2006 the Russian Express-AM11 communications satellite was struck by an unknown object and rendered inoperable, although its engineers had enough contact time with the satellite to send it into a graveyard orbit. In 2017, both AMC-9 and Telkom-1 broke apart from an unknown cause.


title: Geostationary orbit

text: An inclination of zero ensures that the orbit remains over the equator at all times, making it stationary with respect to latitude from the point of view of a ground observer (and in the Earth-centered Earth-fixed reference frame).


title: Geostationary orbit

text: The orbital period is equal to exactly one sidereal day. This means that the satellite will return to the same point above the Earth's surface every (sidereal) day, regardless of other orbital properties. For a geostationary orbit in particular, it ensures that it holds the same longitude over time. This orbital period, "T", is directly related to the semi-major axis of the orbit through the formula:


title: Geostationary orbit

text: The eccentricity is zero, which produces a circular orbit. This ensures that the satellite does not move closer or further away from the Earth, which would cause it to track backwards and forwards across the sky.


title: Geostationary orbit

text: A geostationary orbit can be achieved only at an altitude very close to and directly above the equator. This equates to an orbital speed of and an orbital period of 1,436 minutes, one sidereal day. This ensures that the satellite will match the Earth's rotational period and has a stationary footprint on the ground. All geostationary satellites have to be located on this ring.


title: Geostationary orbit

text: A combination of lunar gravity, solar gravity, and the flattening of the Earth at its poles causes a precession motion of the orbital plane of any geostationary object, with an orbital period of about 53 years and an initial inclination gradient of about 0.85° per year, achieving a maximal inclination of 15° after 26.5 years. To correct for this perturbation, regular orbital stationkeeping maneuvers are necessary, amounting to a delta-v of approximately 50 m/s per year.


title: Geostationary orbit

text: A second effect to be taken into account is the longitudinal drift, caused by the asymmetry of the Earth – the equator is slightly elliptical. There are two stable equilibrium points (at 75.3°E and 108°W) and two corresponding unstable points (at 165.3°E and 14.7°W). Any geostationary object placed between the equilibrium points would (without any action) be slowly accelerated towards the stable equilibrium position, causing a periodic longitude variation. The correction of this effect requires station-keeping maneuvers with a maximal delta-v of about 2 m/s per year, depending on the desired longitude.


title: Geostationary orbit

text: Solar wind and radiation pressure also exert small forces on satellites: over time, these cause them to slowly drift away from their prescribed orbits.


title: Geostationary orbit

text: In the absence of servicing missions from the Earth or a renewable propulsion method, the consumption of thruster propellant for station-keeping places a limitation on the lifetime of the satellite. Hall-effect thrusters, which are currently in use, have the potential to prolong the service life of a satellite by providing high-efficiency electric propulsion.


title: Geostationary orbit

text: For circular orbits around a body, the centripetal force required to maintain the orbit ("F") is equal to the gravitational force acting on the satellite ("F"):


title: Geostationary orbit

text: where "F" is the gravitational force acting between two objects, "M" is the mass of the Earth, , "m" is the mass of the satellite, "r" is the distance between the centers of their masses, and "G" is the gravitational constant, .


title: Geostationary orbit

text: where "v" is the magnitude of the velocity (i.e. the speed) of the satellite. From Newton's Second law of Motion, the centripetal force "F" is given by:


title: Geostationary orbit

text: where "T" is the orbital period (i.e. one sidereal day), and is equal to . This gives an equation for "r":


title: Geostationary orbit

text: The product "GM" is known with much greater precision than either factor alone; it is known as the geocentric gravitational constant "μ" = . Hence


title: Geostationary orbit

text: The resulting orbital radius is . Subtracting the Earth's equatorial radius, , gives the altitude of .


title: Geostationary orbit

text: By the same method, we can determine the orbital altitude for any similar pair of bodies, including the areostationary orbit of an object in relation to Mars, if it is assumed that it is spherical (which it is not entirely). The gravitational constant "GM" ("μ") for Mars has the value of , its equatorial radius is and the known rotational period ("T") of the planet is (). Using these values, Mars' orbital altitude is equal to .


title: Grammatical case

text: A grammatical case is a category of nouns and noun modifiers (determiners, adjectives, participles, and numerals), which corresponds to one or more potential grammatical functions for a nominal group in a wording. In various languages, nominal groups consisting of a noun and its modifiers belong to one of a few such categories. For instance, in English, one says "I see them" and "they see me": the nominative pronouns "I/they" represent the perceiver and the accusative pronouns "me/them" represent the phenomenon perceived. Here, nominative and accusative are cases, that is, categories of pronouns corresponding to the functions they have in representation.


title: Grammatical case

text: English has largely lost its inflected case system but personal pronouns still have three cases, which are simplified forms of the nominative, accusative and genitive cases. They are used with personal pronouns: subjective case (I, you, he, she, it, we, they, who, whoever), objective case (me, you, him, her, it, us, them, whom, whomever) and possessive case (my, mine; your, yours; his; her, hers; its; our, ours; their, theirs; whose; whosever). Forms such as "I", "he" and "we" are used for the subject ("I kicked the ball"), and forms such as "me", "him" and "us" are used for the object ("John kicked me").


title: Grammatical case

text: As a language evolves, cases can merge (for instance, in Ancient Greek, the locative case merged with the dative case), a phenomenon officially called syncretism.


title: Grammatical case

text: Languages such as Latin, Tamil, Russian and German have extensive case systems, with nouns, pronouns, adjectives, and determiners all inflecting (usually by means of different suffixes) to indicate their case. The number of cases differs between languages: Persian has two; modern English has three but for pronouns only; Torlakian dialects, Classical and Modern Standard Arabic have three; German, Icelandic, Modern Greek, and Irish have four; Romanian and Ancient Greek have five; Bengali, Latin, Russian, Slovak, Slovenian, and Turkish each have at least six; Armenian, Czech, Georgian, Kajkavian, Latvian, Lithuanian, Polish, Serbian, Croatian and Ukrainian have seven; Mongolian, Sanskrit, Tamil, and Greenlandic have eight; Assamese has 10; Basque has 13; Estonian has 14; Finnish has 15; Hungarian has 18 and Tsez has 64 cases.


title: Grammatical case

text: Commonly encountered cases include nominative, accusative, dative and genitive. A role that one of those languages marks by case is often marked in English with a preposition. For example, the English prepositional phrase "with (his) foot" (as in "John kicked the ball with his foot") might be rendered in Russian using a single noun in the instrumental case, or in Ancient Greek as (, meaning "the foot") with both words (the definite article, and the noun () "foot") changing to dative form.


title: Grammatical case

text: More formally, case has been defined as "a system of marking dependent nouns for the type of relationship they bear to their heads". Cases should be distinguished from thematic roles such as "agent" and "patient". They are often closely related, and in languages such as Latin, several thematic roles are realised by a somewhat fixed case for deponent verbs, but cases are a syntagmatic/phrasal category, and thematic roles are the function of a syntagma/phrase in a larger structure. Languages having cases often exhibit free word order, as thematic roles are not required to be marked by position in the sentence.


title: Grammatical case

text: It is widely accepted that the Ancient Greeks had a certain idea of the forms of a name in their own language. A fragment of Anacreon seems to prove this. Nevertheless, it cannot be inferred that the Ancient Greeks really knew what grammatical cases were. Grammatical cases were first recognized by the Stoics and from some philosophers of the Peripatetic school. The advancements of those philosophers were later employed by the philologists of the Alexandrian school.


title: Grammatical case

text: The English word "case" used in this sense comes from the Latin , which is derived from the verb , "to fall", from the Proto-Indo-European root "". The Latin word is a calque of the Greek , , lit. "falling, fall". The sense is that all other cases are considered to have "fallen" away from the nominative. This imagery is also reflected in the word "declension", from Latin , "to lean", from the PIE root "".


title: Grammatical case

text: The equivalent to "case" in several other European languages also derives from "casus", including in French, in Italian, in Spanish, in Portuguese and in German. The Russian word ("padyézh") is a calque from Greek and similarly contains a root meaning "fall", and the German and Czech simply mean "fall", and are used for both the concept of grammatical case and to refer to physical falls. The Finnish equivalent is , whose main meaning is "position" or "place".


title: Grammatical case

text: Although not very prominent in modern English, cases featured much more saliently in Old English and other ancient Indo-European languages, such as Latin, Old Persian, Ancient Greek, and Sanskrit. Historically, the Indo-European languages had eight morphological cases, though modern languages typically have fewer, using prepositions and word order to convey information that had previously been conveyed using distinct noun forms. Among modern languages, cases still feature prominently in most of the Balto-Slavic languages (except Macedonian and Bulgarian), with most having six to eight cases, as well as Icelandic, German and Modern Greek, which have four. In German, cases are mostly marked on articles and adjectives, and less so on nouns. In Icelandic, articles, adjectives, personal names and nouns are all marked for case, making it, among other things, the living Germanic language that could be said to most closely resemble Proto-Germanic.


title: Grammatical case

text: The eight historical Indo-European cases are as follows, with examples either of the English case or of the English syntactic alternative to case:


title: Grammatical case

text: All of the above are just rough descriptions; the precise distinctions vary significantly from language to language, and as such they are often more complex. Case is based fundamentally on changes to the noun to indicate the noun's role in the sentence – one of the defining features of so-called fusional languages. Old English was a fusional language, but Modern English does not work this way.


title: Grammatical case

text: Modern English has largely abandoned the inflectional case system of Proto-Indo-European in favor of analytic constructions. The personal pronouns of Modern English retain morphological case more strongly than any other word class (a remnant of the more extensive case system of Old English). For other pronouns, and all nouns, adjectives, and articles, grammatical function is indicated only by word order, by prepositions, and by the "Saxon genitive" ("-'s").


title: Grammatical case

text: Most English personal pronouns have five forms: the nominative case form, the oblique case form, a distinct "reflexive" or "intensive" form (such as "myself", "ourselves") which is based upon the possessive determiner form but is coreferential to a preceding instance of nominative or oblique, and the possessive case forms, which include both a "determiner" form (such as "my", "our") and a predicatively-used "independent" form (such as "mine", "ours") which is distinct (with two exceptions: the third person singular masculine "he" and the third person singular neuter "it", which use the same form for both determiner and independent ["his car", "it is his"]). The interrogative personal pronoun "who" exhibits the greatest diversity of forms within the modern English pronoun system, having definite nominative, oblique, and genitive forms ("who", "whom", "whose") and equivalently-coordinating indefinite forms ("whoever", "whomever", and "whosever").


title: Grammatical case

text: Though English "pronouns" can have subject and object forms (he/him, she/her), "nouns" show only a singular/plural and a possessive/non-possessive distinction (e.g. "chair", "chairs", "chair's", "chairs"'); there is no manifest difference in the form of "chair" between "The chair is here." (subject) and "I own the chair." (direct object), a distinction made instead by word order and context.


title: Grammatical case

text: Cases can be ranked in the following hierarchy, where a language that does not have a given case will tend not to have any cases to the right of the missing case:


title: Grammatical case

text: This is, however, only a general tendency. Many forms of Central German, such as Colognian and Luxembourgish, have a dative case but lack a genitive. In Irish nouns, the nominative and accusative have fallen together, whereas the dative–locative has remained separate in some paradigms; Irish also has genitive and vocative cases. In many modern Indo-Aryan languages, the accusative, genitive, and dative have merged to an oblique case, but many of these languages still retain vocative, locative, and ablative cases. Old English had an instrumental case, but neither a locative nor a prepositional case.


title: Grammatical case

text: The traditional case order (nom-gen-dat-acc) was expressed for the first time in "The Art of Grammar" in the 2nd century BC:


title: Grammatical case

text: Latin grammars, such as "Ars grammatica", followed the Greek tradition, but added the ablative case of Latin. Later other European languages also followed that Graeco-Roman tradition.


title: Grammatical case

text: However, for some languages, such as Latin, due to case syncretism the order may be changed for convenience, where the accusative or the vocative cases are placed after the nominative and before the genitive. For example:


title: Grammatical case

text: For similar reasons, the customary order of the four cases in Icelandic is nominative–accusative–dative–genitive, as illustrated below:


title: Grammatical case

text: In the most common case concord system, only the head-word (the noun) in a phrase is marked for case. This system appears in many Papuan languages as well as in Turkic, Mongolian, Quechua, Dravidian, Indo-Aryan, and other languages. In Basque and various Amazonian and Australian languages, only the phrase-final word (not necessarily the noun) is marked for case. In many Indo-European, Finnic, and Semitic languages, case is marked on the noun, the determiner, and usually the adjective. Other systems are less common. In some languages, there is double-marking of a word as both genitive (to indicate semantic role) and another case such as accusative (to establish concord with the head noun).


title: Grammatical case

text: Declension is the process or result of altering nouns to the correct grammatical cases. Languages with rich nominal inflection (use grammatical cases for many purposes) typically have a number of identifiable declension classes, or groups of nouns with a similar pattern of case inflection or declension. Sanskrit has six declension classes, whereas Latin is traditionally considered to have five, and Ancient Greek three. For example, Slovak has fifteen noun declension classes, five for each gender (the number may vary depending on which paradigms are counted or omitted, this mainly concerns those that modify declension of foreign words; refer to article).


title: Grammatical case

text: In Indo-European languages, declension patterns may depend on a variety of factors, such as gender, number, phonological environment, and irregular historical factors. Pronouns sometimes have separate paradigms. In some languages, particularly Slavic languages, a case may contain different groups of endings depending on whether the word is a noun or an adjective. A single case may contain many different endings, some of which may even be derived from different roots. For example, in Polish, the genitive case has "-a, -u, -ów, -i/-y, -e-" for nouns, and "-ego, -ej, -ich/-ych" for adjectives. To a lesser extent, a noun's animacy or humanness may add another layer of complexity. For example, in Russian:


title: Grammatical case

text: Australian languages represent a diversity of case paradigms in terms of their alignment (i.e. nominative-accusative vs. ergative-absolutive) and the morpho-syntactic properties of case inflection including where/how many times across a noun phrase the case morphology will appear. For typical r-expression noun phrases, most Australian languages follow a basic ERG-ABS template with additional cases for peripheral arguments; however, many Australian languages, the function of case marking extends beyond the prototypical function of specifying the syntactic and semantic relation of an NP to a predicate. Dench and Evans (1988) use a five-part system for categorizing the functional roles of case marking in Australian languages. They are enumerated below as they appear in Senge (2015):


title: Grammatical case

text: To illustrate this paradigm in action, take the case-system of Wanyjirra for whose description Senge invokes this system. Each of the case markers functions in the prototypical relational sense, but many extend into these additional functions:


title: Grammatical case

text: Wanyjirra is an example of a language in which case marking occurs on all sub-constituents of the NP; see the following example in which the demonstrative, head, and quantifier of the noun phrase all receive ergative marking:


title: Grammatical case

text: However, this is by no means always the case or even the norm for Australian languages. For many, case-affixes are considered special-clitics (i.e. phrasal-affixes, see Anderson 2005) because they have a singular fixed position within the phrase. For Bardi, the case marker usually appears on the first phrasal constituent while the opposite is the case for Wangkatja (i.e. the case marker is attracted to the rightmost edge of the phrase). See the following examples respectively:


title: Grammatical case

text: Basque has the following cases, with examples given in the indefinite, definite singular, definite plural, and definite close plural of the word "etxe", "house", "home":


title: Grammatical case

text: Some of them can be re-declined, even more than once, as if they were nouns (usually, from the genitive locative case), although they mainly work as noun modifiers before a noun clause:


title: Grammatical case

text: In German, grammatical case is largely preserved in the articles and adjectives, but nouns have lost many of their original endings. Below is an example of case inflection in German using the masculine definite article and one of the German words for "sailor".


title: Grammatical case

text: Hindi-Urdu (Hindustani) has three noun cases, the "nominative," "oblique", and "vocative" cases. The vocative case is now obsolete (however, still used in certain regions) and the oblique case doubles as the vocative case. The pronoun cases in Hindi-Urdu are the "nominative", "ergative", "accusative, dative", and two "oblique" cases. The case forms which do not exist for certain pronouns are constructed using primary postpositions (or other grammatical particles) and the oblique case (shown in parentheses in the table below).


title: Grammatical case

text: The other cases are constructed adpositionally using the case-marking postpositions using the nouns and pronouns in their oblique cases. The oblique case is used exclusively with these 8 case-marking postpositions of Hindi-Urdu forming 10 grammatical cases, which are: "ergative" ने (ne), "dative" and "accusative" को (ko), "instrumental" and "ablative" से (se), "genitive" का (kā), "inessive" में (mẽ), "adessive" पे (pe), "terminative" तक (tak), "semblative" सा (sā).


title: Grammatical case

text: An example of a Latin case inflection is given below, using the singular forms of the Latin term for "cook", which belongs to Latin's second declension class.


title: Grammatical case

text: The Romance languages have largely abandoned or simplified the grammatical cases of Latin. Much like English, most Romance case markers survive only in pronouns.


title: Grammatical case

text: Hungarian declension is relatively simple with regular suffixes attached to the vast majority of nouns. The following table lists all of the cases used in Hungarian.


title: Grammatical case

text: An example of a Russian case inflection is given below (with explicit stress marks), using the singular forms of the Russian term for "sailor", which belongs to Russian's first declension class.


title: Grammatical case

text: Up to ten additional cases are identified by linguists, although today all of them are either incomplete (do not apply to all nouns or do not form full word paradigm with all combinations of gender and number) or degenerate (appear identical to one of the main six cases). The most recognized additional cases are locative (), partitive (), and two forms of vocative — old () and neo-vocative (). Sometimes, so called count-form (for some countable nouns after numerals) is considered to be a sub-case. See details.


title: Grammatical case

text: Grammatical case was analyzed extensively in Sanskrit. The grammarian Pāṇini identified six semantic roles or "kāraka", which are related to the following eight Sanskrit cases in order:


title: Grammatical case

text: For example, in the following sentence "leaf" is the agent ("kartā", nominative case), "tree" is the source ("apādāna", ablative case), and "ground" is the locus ("adhikaraṇa", locative case). The declensions are reflected in the morphemes "-āt", "-am", and "-au" respectively.


title: Grammatical case

text: However, the cases may be deployed for other than the default thematic roles. A notable example is the passive construction. In the following sentence, "Devadatta" is the "kartā", but appears in the instrumental case, and "rice", the "karman", object, is in the nominative case (as subject of the verb). The declensions are reflected in the morphemes "-ena" and "-am".


title: Grammatical case

text: The Tamil case system is analyzed in native and missionary grammars as consisting of a finite number of cases. The usual treatment of Tamil case (Arden 1942) is one in which there are seven cases: nominative (first case), accusative (second case), instrumental (third), dative (fourth), ablative (fifth), genitive (sixth), and locative (seventh). In traditional analyses, there is always a clear distinction made between post-positional morphemes and case endings. The vocative is sometimes given a place in the case system as an eighth case, but vocative forms do not participate in usual morphophonemic alternations and do not govern the use of any postpositions. Modern grammarians, however, argue that this eight-case classification is coarse and artificial and that Tamil usage is best understood if each suffix or combination of suffixes is seen as marking a separate case.


title: Grammatical case

text: The accusative can exist only in the noun(whether it is derived from a verb or not). For example, "Arkadaşlar bize gelmeyi düşünüyorlar." (Friends are thinking of coming to us).


title: Grammatical case

text: The dative can exist only in the noun (whether it is derived from a verb or not). For example, "Bol bol kitap okumaya çalışıyorum." (I try to read a lot of books).


title: Grammatical case

text: As languages evolve, case systems change. In early Ancient Greek, for example, the genitive and ablative cases of given names became combined, giving five cases, rather than the six retained in Latin. In modern Hindi, the Sanskrit cases have been reduced to three: a direct case (for subjects and direct objects) and oblique case, and a vocative case. In English, apart from the pronouns discussed above, case has vanished altogether except for the possessive/non-possessive dichotomy in nouns.


title: Grammatical case

text: The evolution of the treatment of case relationships can be circular. Postpositions can become unstressed and sound like they are an unstressed syllable of a neighboring word. A postposition can thus merge into the stem of a head noun, developing various forms depending on the phonological shape of the stem. Affixes can then be subject to various phonological processes such as assimilation, vowel centering to the schwa, phoneme loss, and fusion, and these processes can reduce or even eliminate the distinctions between cases. Languages can then compensate for the resulting loss of function by creating postpositions, thus coming full circle.


title: Grammatical case

text: Recent experiments in agent-based modeling have shown how case systems can emerge and evolve in a population of language users. The experiments demonstrate that language users may introduce new case markers to reduce the cognitive effort required for semantic interpretation, hence facilitating communication through language. Case markers then become generalized through analogical reasoning and reuse.


title: Grammatical case

text: Languages are categorized into several case systems, based on their "morphosyntactic alignment"—how they group verb agents and patients into cases:


title: Grammatical case

text: The following are systems that some languages use to mark case instead of, or in addition to, declension:


title: Grammatical case

text: The lemma form of words, which is the form chosen by convention as the canonical form of a word, is usually the most unmarked or basic case, which is typically the nominative, trigger, or absolutive case, whichever a language may have.


title: Mr. Freeze

text: Mr. Freeze is a supervillain appearing in American comic books published by DC Comics. The character was created by Dave Wood, Sheldon Moldoff and Bob Kane, and first appeared in "Batman" #121 in February 1959 as the ice-based criminal Mr. Zero. He was soon renamed "Mr. Freeze" and, years later, received a revamped origin story based on the one conceived by writer Paul Dini for "". Dini's depiction of the character as a tragic villain popularized Mr. Freeze into becoming one of Batman's most enduring enemies belonging to the collective of adversaries that make up his rogues gallery.


title: Mr. Freeze

text: Mr. Freeze is the alter ego of Dr. Victor Fries, a German-born cryogenics expert in Gotham City who was caught in a laboratory mishap whilst attempting to cure his terminally ill wife, Nora. The accident drastically lowered his body temperature to sub-zero levels, forcing him to wear a cryogenic suit in order to survive. Fries turns to crime to find a cure for his wife's illness through any means necessary, which often puts him into conflict with Batman.


title: Mr. Freeze

text: The character has been adapted in various media incarnations, having been portrayed in live-action by George Sanders, Otto Preminger and Eli Wallach in the 1960s "Batman" television series, Arnold Schwarzenegger in the 1997 film "Batman & Robin", and Nathan Darrow in the Fox crime drama "Gotham". Michael Ansara, Clancy Brown, Maurice LaMarche, and others have provided his voice in media ranging from animation to video games.


title: Mr. Freeze

text: Mr. Freeze made his first appearance in "Batman" #121 (February 1959), and was created by Dave Wood, Sheldon Moldoff and Bob Kane. From the time of his first appearance in 1959, the character was portrayed as one of many "joke" villains cast as stock enemies of Batman. He was originally called Mr. Zero in the comics, but the producers of the 1960s "Batman" television series renamed him Mr. Freeze and portrayed Batman addressing him as "Dr. Otto Schivel", and the name quickly carried over to the comic books. In the Pre-"Crisis" continuity, it is explained that Mr. Freeze is a rogue scientist whose design for an "ice gun" backfires when he inadvertently spills cryogenic chemicals on himself, resulting in him needing sub-zero temperatures to survive.


title: Mr. Freeze

text: Originally called Mr. Zero, he was renamed and popularized by the 1960s "Batman" television series, in which he was played by three different actors (George Sanders, Otto Preminger, and Eli Wallach).


title: Mr. Freeze

text: Nearly 30 years later, a television adaptation of Batman revitalized him once again. "" retold Mr. Freeze's origin in "", an episode by writer Paul Dini. The episode introduced his terminally ill, cryogenically frozen wife Nora, which explained his obsession with ice and need to build a criminal empire to raise research funds. This more complex, tragic character was enthusiastically accepted by fans, and has become the standard portrayal for the character in most forms of media, including the comic book series itself, which previously had the character casually killed off by the Joker.


title: Mr. Freeze

text: Freeze was resurrected in the comic after the episode aired. The episode was seen as groundbreaking for a Saturday morning cartoon and helped set the tone for the rest of the series. This backstory was also made canon in the comics and has been the character's official origin in almost every incarnation of Batman until September 2011, when The New 52 rebooted DC's continuity. Elements of this origin story were incorporated into the 1997 film "Batman & Robin", in which he was portrayed by Arnold Schwarzenegger.


title: Mr. Freeze

text: In order to create an ice gun, a scientist whose name remains unknown starts experimenting with a concentrated freezing solution. He suffers an unfortunate accident that changes his physiology, forcing him to live in environments below zero temperature. He adopts the criminal identity of Mr. Zero. To be able to go out to the normal environment, Zero creates an air conditioned costume, which helps him remain in cold temperatures, even in hot climates. Using this equipment, Zero gathers a small gang and starts a crime spree in Gotham City, stealing mainly diamonds and other precious jewels. Mr. Zero is eventually confronted by the local vigilantes, Batman and Robin. Unable to stand against his cold weapons, the Dynamic Duo fails to stop Zero. They are captured by him and brought to his secret cold hideout, near the mountains. Trapped in blocks of ice, Batman and Robin learn Zero's plan to steal a large collection of gems. Batman eventually breaks a nearby steam pipe, causing steam to fill the hideout, melting the ice away and apparently curing Zero from his ailment. After this, Batman and Robin are able to capture the whole gang and bring Zero to the authorities.


title: Mr. Freeze

text: After years of inactivity, Zero's condition apparently returns. Going back to a his life of crime, he changes his alias to Mr. Freeze and is forced to remain in cold temperatures once again. In this second exploit, Freeze redesigns his cryo-suit and improves his cryothermal gun. With a new gang, he starts a new series of crimes and steals valuable pieces of art. Similar to his first criminal activities, Freeze is eventually stopped by Batman and Robin.


title: Mr. Freeze

text: Long after this, Freeze becomes part of a mock criminal trial, after which he changes his cryo-suit for one that allows him more mobility. Freeze eventually falls in love with a woman called Hildy. In order to slow her aging process, Freeze sets out to recreate the accident that transformed him. For his experiments, Freeze uses wealthy people in Gotham as test subjects, but all the efforts result in failure. The victims turn into frozen zombies, who follow Freeze's command. His new crimes alert the police and Batman. In the ensuing fight, Batman is only able to win when Hildy shows her true intentions and betrays Freeze, only to be encased in solid ice when her plan backfires. Freeze's next plan consists of freezing Gotham City by removing all the heat and transporting the energy to the neighboring city of Metropolis. Freeze is unable to accomplish his goal and is stopped by Batman and Superman. During one last attempt to freeze Gotham entirely, Mr. Freeze creates a large ice cannon. After robbing a bank, Freeze is confronted by Batman and the new Robin, who manages to defeat him with help from Vicki Vale and Julia Pennyworth, whom Freeze previously captured.


title: Mr. Freeze

text: Following the Crisis rebooting the history of the DC Universe, Mr. Freeze is revamped using a history similar to the one created by Paul Dini for "Batman: The Animated Series". Dr. Victor Fries, Ph.D. (surname pronounced "freeze") is a brilliant cryogenicist. As a child, he was fascinated with cryonic preservation and liked to freeze animals. His parents are horrified by his "hobby" and send him to a strict boarding school, where he is miserable and feels detached from humanity. In college, he meets Nora, the woman he ultimately marries.


title: Mr. Freeze

text: Eighteen months after Bruce Wayne becomes Batman, Nora contracts a fatal disease, so Fries begins developing a freeze ray for GothCorp in order to preserve her in suspended animation until a cure can be found. Fries' boss Ferris Boyle decides to tell the mob about the gun, leading Batman to create a team of specialists to help him do his job better. As Fries puts Nora in suspended animation, Boyle interrupts and tampers with the experiment, resulting in an explosion that kills Nora. Fries survives, but the chemicals in the freeze ray lower his body temperature to the point that he must wear a cryogenic suit in order to survive. He swears revenge on those responsible for the death of his wife (whom he talks to often) and becomes Mr. Freeze, the first superpowered villain whom Batman faces in this continuity. Eventually, Batman's operatives find Freeze, who shoots one of them with his freeze gun, but Batman eventually apprehends him. Initially locked in Arkham Asylum, Freeze was eventually transferred to the Gotham State Penitentiary, from where he escaped and attempted to steal technology from S.T.A.R. Labs until he was stopped and returned to prison by Batman.


title: Mr. Freeze

text: Freeze's crimes tend to involve freezing everyone and everything that he encounters so he never forges alliances with the other criminals in Gotham, preferring to work alone. On rare occasions, he has worked with another member of Batman's rogues' gallery, usually, as an enforcer for Gotham's mob bosses, such as the Penguin during his or Black Mask during the of Jason Todd. In one of his notable team-ups, Freeze constructs a cryogenic machine for Hush so that Hush might take revenge on Batman, Freeze's equipment allowing Hush to preserve Catwoman's surgically removed heart to use as a means of threatening her life. After Batman's death, most of the Arkham inmates were by a new Black Mask. Freeze was among them and he started working on a project called Ice-X Protocol when the GCPD tried to capture him. He stunned them with his gun and captured Gordon, taking him to his secret lair. Gordon managed to break free and defeat Freeze by causing an explosion that weakened Freeze. After his capture, Freeze was taken to Iron Heights prison. During his time with the Secret Society of Super Villains, he fashions a sub-zero machine for Nyssa al Ghul in exchange for the use of her Lazarus Pit. He attempts to restore Nora to life without waiting for the adjusting needed in the pool chemicals; she returns to life as the twisted Lazara and escapes. She blames her husband for her plight, and she estranges herself from him.


title: Mr. Freeze

text: In September 2011, The New 52 rebooted DC's continuity. In this new timeline, during the "Night of the Owls" crossover, the Court of Owls sends assassins known as Talons to kill 40 of the most important citizens of Gotham, including Mr. Freeze. The Red Hood, Starfire and Arsenal choose to save him, and subsequently remand him into Batgirl's custody. "Batman Annual" (vol. 2) #1 introduces a new origin for Mr. Freeze. Here, Victor Fries' fascination with cryonics began when he was a boy and his mother fell through the ice of a frozen lake. The ice was able to keep her preserved long enough for help to arrive, thus sparking his lifelong obsession with the cold. It is later revealed that the accident left Fries' mother in constant pain, and Fries ended her suffering by pushing her into the same frozen lake. In this new origin, Nora was never Fries' wife. Her name was Nora Fields, a woman born in 1934. When Nora was 23, she was diagnosed with incurable heart disease, so her family placed her in cryogenic stasis hoping that a cure would be found in the future. Fries, having written his doctoral thesis on Nora, took on a position as a cryogenic researcher and technician at Wayne Enterprises, the facility that housed Nora's body. Eventually, he fell in love with Nora and became dedicated to finding a reliable method for slowly thawing cryogenic subjects. However, Bruce Wayne ordered the project to be shut down, as he began to feel uncomfortable with Fries' obsession with Nora. Furious, Fries hurled a chair at Wayne, who dodged the attack; the chair smashed into an array of cryonic chemical tanks, the contents of which sprayed onto Fries and transformed him into Mr. Freeze.


title: Mr. Freeze

text: The Court of Owls uses Freeze's cryogenic-thaw formula to revive their Talons, and then they try to kill him. Freeze survives but is captured by the Red Hood and sent to Arkham Asylum. He escapes shortly afterward and rearms himself with the Penguin's help. Freeze decides to kill Bruce Wayne and takes Nora, whom he believes to be his wife so that they can leave Gotham City behind forever. Infiltrating Wayne Enterprises, Freeze has a brief fight with Nightwing and Robin, but he subdues them. Then, Freeze goes to the penthouse, where he finds Batman and the frozen Nora. Batman defeats Mr. Freeze by injecting his suit with the thawing formula, which he had intended to use to revive Nora from suspended animation.


title: Mr. Freeze

text: During the "Forever Evil" storyline, Mr. Freeze appears as a member of the Secret Society of Super Villains at the time when the Crime Syndicate arrived from their world. The Scarecrow later visits Mr. Freeze to let him know of the war going on at Blackgate Penitentiary. The Man-Bats are able to bring the remaining Talons to Mr. Freeze after Man-Bat and Scarecrow steal them from Blackgate. Mr. Freeze and Clayface later encounter the Rogues when they land in their territory. Mr. Freeze tells Mirror Master II he is not interested in capitalizing on the bounty on their heads, only to use Weather Wizard to create optimal conditions for him to freeze Gotham. As the Rogues are fighting the two, Black Mask (alongside his False Face society) arrives to capture the Rogues to receive the bounty.


title: Mr. Freeze

text: In the "Watchmen" sequel "Doomsday Clock", Mr. Freeze is among the villains that attend the underground meeting held by Riddler that talks about the Superman Theory. When Comedian crashes the meeting, Mr. Freeze's helmet is punctured by a bullet shot by an unseen combatant. In the "Ends of the Earth" story arc of "All-Star Batman", Freeze has awoken many people that have been held in cryogenic stasis—using them as an army to steal resources for his research to cure his wife Nora, himself, and all of these people—and plans to release deadly bacteria held in one of the world's oldest ice cores to make a new world, but Batman has injected himself with a cold-resistant virus that becomes airborne when his skin is exposed and is able to kill the spores.


title: Mr. Freeze

text: Several years later due to the events in "Year of the Villain," Lex Luthor gives Mr. Freeze a vial that would cure and furthermore revive his frozen wife. Freeze had to kidnap several women who matched his late wife's characteristics, in both mental and physical states, going as far as modifying their DNA to hers in order to experiment with the vial before reviving his wife. In the end, it worked and his wife came back to life cured. She soon took up the name Mrs. Freeze.


title: Mr. Freeze

text: Like most Batman villains, Mr. Freeze plans his crimes about a specific theme; in his case, ice, snow, and cold. An accident caused Mr. Freeze to become genetically altered with a bizarre condition that has irreversibly frozen him to the bone, transforming him into a cold-blooded mutant whose body temperature must always be kept below zero. His altered biology caused his skin cells to become storage units for the cold to help his body chemistry to be comfortably chilled, allowing him to become both entirely immune and adapted to sub-freezing temperatures. Extraordinarily, his age progression has slowed drastically in a suspended animated state; some interpretations also suggest that the chemical he was soaked in was glycerol, a cryo-protectant he intended to use for cryopreservation. His unique physiology makes him immune to most toxins, bacteria, and viruses.