title: Otto the Great

text: In the following years, both empires sought to strengthen their influence in southern Italy with several campaigns. In 969, John I Tzimiskes assassinated and succeeded Byzantine Emperor Nikephoros in a military revolt. Finally recognizing Otto's imperial title, the new eastern emperor sent his niece Theophanu to Rome in 972, and she married Otto II on 14 April 972. As part of this rapprochement, the conflict over southern Italy was finally resolved: the Byzantine Empire accepted Otto's dominion over the principalities of Capua, Benevento and Salerno; in return the German Emperor retreated from the Byzantine possessions in Apulia and Calabria.


title: Otto the Great

text: With his son's wedding completed and peace with the Byzantine Empire concluded, Otto led the imperial family back to Germany in August 972. In the spring of 973, the Emperor visited Saxony and celebrated Palm Sunday in Magdeburg. At the same ceremony the previous year, Margrave Hermann Billung, Otto's trusted lieutenant and personal administrator over Saxony during his years in Italy, had been received like a king by Archbishop Adalbert of Magdeburg – a gesture of protest against the Emperor's prolonged absence from Germany.


title: Otto the Great

text: Celebrating Easter with a great assembly in Quedlinburg, Emperor Otto was the most powerful man in Europe. According to Thietmar of Merseburg, Otto received "the dukes Miesco [of Poland] and Boleslav [of Bohemia], and legates from the Greeks [Byzantium], the Beneventans [Rome], Magyars, Bulgars, Danes and Slavs". Ambassadors from England and Muslim Spain arrived later the same year. To mark the Rogation Days, Otto travelled to his palace at Memleben, the place where his father had died 37 years earlier. While there, Otto became seriously ill with fever and, after receiving his last sacraments, died on 7 May 973 at the age of 60.


title: Otto the Great

text: The transition of power to his seventeen-year-old son Otto II was seamless. On 8 May 973, the lords of the Empire confirmed Otto II as their new ruler. Otto II arranged for a magnificent thirty-day funeral, in which his father was buried beside his first wife Eadgyth in Magdeburg Cathedral.


title: Otto the Great

text: Although never Emperor, Otto's father Henry I the Fowler is considered the founder of the Ottonian dynasty. In relation to the other members of his dynasty, Otto I was the son of Henry I, father of Otto II, grandfather of Otto III, and great-uncle to Henry II. The Ottonians would rule Germany (later the Holy Roman Empire) for over a century from 919 until 1024.


title: Otto the Great

text: A limited renaissance of the arts and architecture in the second half of the 10th century depended on the court patronage of Otto and his immediate successors. The Ottonian Renaissance was manifest in some revived cathedral schools, such as that of Bruno I, Archbishop of Cologne, and in the production of illuminated manuscripts, the major art form of the age, from a handful of elite scriptoria, such as that at Quedlinburg Abbey, founded by Otto in 936. Extant manuscripts of this era are the "Diploma Ottonianum", the "Marriage Charter of Empress Theophanu", and the "Gero Codex", an evangeliary drawn up around 969 for Archbishop Gero. The Imperial abbeys and the Imperial courts became centers of religious and spiritual life; prestigious convents like Gandersheim and Quedlinburg were led by women of the royal family.


title: Otto the Great

text: Otto I was selected as the main motif for a high value commemorative coin, the €100 Imperial Crown of the Holy Roman Empire commemorative coin, issued in 2008 by the Austrian Mint. The obverse shows the Imperial Crown of the Holy Roman Empire. The reverse shows Emperor Otto I with Old St. Peter's Basilica in Rome in the background, where his coronation took place. Among others, three exhibitions in Magdeburg, opening in 2001, 2006 and 2012, have documented Otto's life and his influence on medieval European history.


title: Anthropologist

text: An anthropologist is a person engaged in the practice of anthropology. Anthropology is the study of aspects of humans within past and present societies. Social anthropology, cultural anthropology and philosophical anthropology study the norms and values of societies. Linguistic anthropology studies how language affects social life, while economic anthropology studies human economic behavior. Biological (physical), forensic and medical anthropology study the biological development of humans, the application of biological anthropology in a legal setting and the study of diseases and their impacts on humans over time, respectively.


title: Anthropologist

text: Anthropologists usually cover a breadth of topics within anthropology in their undergraduate education and then proceed to specialize in topics of their own choice at the graduate level. In some universities, a qualifying exam serves to test both the breadth and depth of a student's understanding of anthropology; the students who pass are permitted to work on a doctoral dissertation.


title: Anthropologist

text: Anthropologists typically hold graduate degrees, either doctorates or master's degrees. Not holding an advanced degree is rare in the field. Some anthropologists hold undergraduate degrees in other fields than anthropology and graduate degrees in anthropology.


title: Anthropologist

text: Research topics of anthropologists include the discovery of human remains and artifacts as well as the exploration of social and cultural issues such as population growth, structural inequality and globalization by making use of a variety of technologies including statistical software and Geographic Information Systems (GIS). Anthropological field work requires a faithful representation of observations and a strict adherence to social and ethical responsibilities, such as the acquisition of consent, transparency in research and methodologies and the right to anonymity.


title: Anthropologist

text: Historically, anthropologists primarily worked in academic settings; however, by 2014, U.S. anthropologists and archaeologists were largely employed in research positions (28%), management and consulting (23%) and government positions (27%). U.S. employment of anthropologists and archaeologists is projected to increase from 7,600 to 7,900 between 2016 and 2026, a growth rate just under half the national median.


title: Anthropologist

text: Anthropologists without doctorates tend to work more in other fields than academia, while the majority of those with doctorates are primarily employed in academia. Many of those without doctorates in academia tend to work exclusively as researchers and do not teach. Those in research-only positions are often not considered faculty. The median salary for anthropologists in 2015 was $62,220. Many anthropologists report an above average level of job satisfaction.


title: Anthropologist

text: Although closely related and often grouped with archaeology, anthropologists and archaeologists perform differing roles, though archeology is considered a sub-discipline of anthropology. While both professions focus on the study of human culture from past to present, archaeologists focus specifically on analyzing material remains such as artifacts and architectural remains. Anthropology encompasses a wider range of professions including the rising fields of forensic anthropology, digital anthropology and cyber anthropology. The role of an anthropologist differs as well from that of a historian. While anthropologists focus their studies on humans and human behavior, historians look at events from a broader perspective. Historians also tend to focus less on culture than anthropologists in their studies. A far greater percentage of historians are employed in academic settings than anthropologists, who have more diverse places of employment.


title: Anthropologist

text: Anthropologists are experiencing a shift in the twenty-first century United States with the rise of forensic anthropology. In the United States, as opposed to many other countries forensic anthropology falls under the domain of the anthropologist and not the Forensic pathologist. In this role, forensic anthropologists help in the identification of skeletal remains by deducing biological characteristics such as sex, age, stature and ancestry from the skeleton. However, forensic anthropologists tend to gravitate more toward working in academic and laboratory settings, while forensic pathologists perform more applied field work. Forensic anthropologists typically hold academic doctorates, while forensic pathologists are medical doctors. The field of forensic anthropology is rapidly evolving with increasingly capable technology and more extensive databases. Forensic anthrology is one of the most specialized and competitive job areas within the field of anthropology and currently has more qualified graduates than positions.


title: Anthropologist

text: The profession of Anthropology has also received an additional sub-field with the rise of Digital anthropology. This new branch of the profession has an increased usage of computers as well as interdisciplinary work with medicine, computer visualization, industrial design, biology and journalism. Anthropologists in this field primarily study the evolution of human reciprocal relations with the computer-generated world. Cyber anthropologists also study digital and cyber ethics along with the global implications of increasing connectivity. With cyber ethical issues such as net neutrality increasingly coming to light, this sub-field is rapidly gaining more recognition. One rapidly emerging branch of interest for cyber anthropologists is artificial intelligence. Cyber anthropologists study the co-evolutionary relationship between humans and artificial intelligence. This includes the examination of computer-generated (CG) environments and how people interact with them through media such as movies, television, and video.


title: Anthropologist

text: Culture anthropology is a sub-field of anthropology. A cultural anthropologist studies different cultures. They study primitive societies, villages, as well as modern communities and cities. They look at different behaviors and patterns within a culture. In order to study these cultures, many anthropologists will live among the culture they are studying.


title: Anthropologist

text: Cultural anthropologists can work as professors, work for corporations, nonprofit organizations, as well government agencies. The field is very large and people can do a lot as a cultural anthropologist.


title: Anthropologist

text: Some notable anthropologists include: Ruth Benedict, Franz Boas, Ella Deloria, James George Frazer, Clifford Geertz, Edward C. Green, Zora Neale Hurston, Claude Lévi-Strauss, Bronisław Malinowski, Margaret Mead, Elsie Clews Parsons, Paul Rabinow, Alfred Radcliffe-Brown, Marshall Sahlins, Nancy Scheper-Hughes (b. 1944), and Edward Burnett Tylor (1832-1917).


title: Xylometazoline

text: Xylometazoline, also spelled xylomethazoline, is a medication used to reduce symptoms of nasal congestion, allergic rhinitis, and sinusitis. Use is not recommended for more than seven days. Use is also not recommended in those less than three months of age and some say not less than 6 years of age. It is used directly in the nose as a spray or drops.


title: Xylometazoline

text: Side effects include trouble sleeping, irritation of the nose, nausea, nosebleed (3%), period pain (10%) and headache (3%). Long term use (> 10 days) is not recommended due to a rhinitis medicamentosa when stopped. Use is not recommended during pregnancy. Xylometazoline is in the decongestant and alpha-adrenergic agonist families of medication.


title: Xylometazoline

text: Xylometazoline was patented in 1956 and came into medical use in 1959. It is on the World Health Organization's List of Essential Medicines. Xylometazoline is available as a generic medication.


title: Xylometazoline

text: The drug works by stimulating adrenergic receptors on the lamina propria of blood vessels in the nose. The decongestant effect is due to constriction of large veins in the nose which swell up during the inflammation of any infection or allergy of the nose. The smaller arteries are also constricted and this causes the colour of the nasal epithelium to be visibly paler after dosage.


title: Xylometazoline

text: Xylometazoline is an imidazole derivative which is designed to mimic the molecular shape of adrenaline. It binds to α and α adrenergic receptors in the nasal mucosa. Due to its sympathomimetic effects, it should not be used by people with high blood pressure, or other heart problems.


title: Xylometazoline

text: Extended usage of xylometazoline can result in decreased effectiveness or a buildup of tolerance against the drug. The number of receptors decreases, and when the administration of the drug is ceased, chronic congestion can occur; this is called rhinitis medicamentosa, commonly referred to as rebound congestion. Moreover, long-term overdosing can cause degenerative changes in nasal mucous membranes that pose another health problem.


title: Xylometazoline

text: The most common name for over-the-counter products containing xylometazoline internationally is "Otrivin" (used in Australia, Canada, Estonia, Greece, Hungary, India, Israel, Jordan, Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Poland, South Africa, Sweden, Vietnam, Hong Kong), "Otrivine" (United Kingdom, Ireland, Turkey), or "Otriven" (Germany). A product marketed as "Otrivin Oxy" contains oxymetazoline instead of xylometazoline.


title: Xylometazoline

text: Other product names used include Antazol (Square, in Bangladesh), Xylomet (Opsonin, Bangladesh), Cirovin, Klarigen (in Denmark), Nasolin, Neo-Rinoleina, Novorin, Olynth, Otrinoz, Galazolin (Russia, Ukraine, Belarus), Nasomist-X, Otrix, Rhinoset, Zenfresh, Naphthyzinium, Xymelyn (in Latvia), Sinutab Nasal Spray, Snup akut, Sudafed, Xylo-COMOD, Xylolin (in UAE), Xylovit, Olynth (in Serbia and Slovakia), Meralys (in Croatia) Xynosine (in Pakistan, Afghanistan, Kyrgyzstan and Kazakhstan), Xymelin, Zymelin, Xylostar, Xylorin (in Poland), Nasobol, Xylo Mepha and others (Switzerland), Decozal (in Jordan), Nasic, Orinox (Romania), Narhimed (Italy), and nasa Rhinathiol (Belgium).


title: Xylometazoline

text: As of 2021, no consumer products containing xylometazoline are marketed in the United States, however imported products containing xylometazoline are available online.


title: Xylometazoline

text: The standard adult solution strength is 0.1% w/v xylometazoline (or 1 mg per 1 mL solution), and the dose for children under 12 is usually 0.05% (0.5 mg/mL).


title: Schlager music

text: Schlager music (, "hit(s)") is a style of European popular music that is generally a catchy instrumental accompaniment to vocal pieces of pop music with simple, happy-go-lucky, and often sentimental lyrics.


title: Schlager music

text: Typical Schlager tracks are either sweet, sentimental ballads with a simple, catchy melody or light pop tunes. Lyrics typically center on love, relationships, and feelings. The northern variant of Schlager (notably in Finland) has taken elements from Finnic, Nordic, Slavic, and other East European folk songs, with lyrics tending towards melancholic and elegiac themes. Musically, Schlager bears similarities to styles such as easy listening.


title: Schlager music

text: "Schlager" is a loanword from German. It also came into some other languages (such as Danish, Dutch, Czech, Hungarian, Lithuanian, Estonian, Serbian, Russian, Hebrew, and Romanian, for example), where it retained its meaning of a "(musical) hit". The style has been frequently represented at the Eurovision Song Contest and has been popular since the contest began in 1956, although it is gradually being replaced by other pop music styles.


title: Schlager music

text: The roots of German Schlager are old. Originally it meant hit or strike. The first use of the word applied to music, in its original meaning, was in an opening night critique in the newspaper "Wiener Fremden-Blatt" on 17 February 1867 about The Blue Danube by Johann Strauss II. One ancestor of Schlager music in its current meaning may be the operetta, which was highly popular in the early twentieth century. In the 1920s and 1930s, the Comedian Harmonists and Rudi Schuricke laid the foundations for this new music. Well-known Schlager singers of the 1950s and early 1960s include Lale Andersen, Freddy Quinn, Ivo Robić, Gerhard Wendland, Caterina Valente, Margot Eskens and Conny Froboess. Schlager reached a peak of popularity in Germany and Austria in the 1960s (featuring Peter Alexander and Roy Black) and the early 1970s. From the mid-1990s through the early 2000s, Schlager also saw an extensive revival in Germany by, for example, Guildo Horn, , Michelle, and . Dance clubs would play a stretch of Schlager titles during the course of an evening, and numerous new bands were formed specialising in 1970s Schlager cover versions and newer material.


title: Schlager music

text: In Hamburg in the 2010s, Schlager fans still gathered annually by the hundreds of thousands, dressing in 1970s clothing for street parades called "Schlager Move". The Schlager Move designation is also used for a number of smaller Schlager music parties in several major German cities throughout the year. (This revival is sometimes associated with kitsch and camp.)


title: Schlager music

text: Germans view Schlager as their country music, and American country and Tex-Mex music are both major elements in Schlager culture. ("Is This the Way to Amarillo" is regularly played in Schlager contexts, usually in the English-language original.)


title: Schlager music

text: Popular Schlager singers include Michael Holm, Roland Kaiser, Hansi Hinterseer, Jürgen Drews, Andrea Berg, Heintje Simons, Helene Fischer, Nicole, Claudia Jung, Andrea Jürgens, Michelle, Kristina Bach, Marianne Rosenberg, Simone Stelzer, Daniela Alfinito, Semino Rossi, Vicky Leandros, , DJ Ötzi, Andreas Gabalier and more recently, Beatrice Egli. Stylistically, Schlager continues to influence German "party pop" or "Party-Schlager" (e.g. "Layla", 2022): that is, music most often heard in après-ski bars and Majorcan mass discos. Contemporary Schlager is often mingled with Volkstümliche Musik. If it is not part of an ironic kitsch revival, a taste for both styles of music is commonly associated with folksy pubs, fun fairs, and bowling league venues. In the English-speaking world, the most popular group to have included elements of Schlager in their style is probably ABBA, a band that mixed traditional Swedish music, Schlager, and pop-rock to create their own sound.


title: Schlager music

text: Between 1975 and 1981 German-style Schlager became disco-oriented, in many ways merging with the mainstream disco music of the time. Singers such as Marianne Rosenberg recorded both Schlager and disco hits. The song "Moskau" by German band Dschinghis Khan was one of the earliest modern, dance-based Schlager, again showing how Schlager of the 1970s and early 1980s merged with mainstream disco and Euro-disco. Dschinghis Khan, while primarily a Euro-disco band, also played disco-influenced Schlager.


title: Binge-watching

text: Binge-watching (also called binge-viewing) is the practice of watching entertainment or informational content for a prolonged time span, usually a single television show.


title: Binge-watching

text: Binge-watching overlaps with marathon viewing which places more emphasis on stamina and less on self-indulgence. In a survey conducted by Netflix in February 2014, 73% of people define binge-watching as "watching between 2–6 episodes of the same TV show in one sitting". Some researchers have argued that binge-watching should be defined based on the context and the actual content of TV show. Others suggested that what is normally called binge-watching in fact refers to more than one type of TV viewing behavior (and experience). They proposed that the notion of binge-watching should be expanded to include both the prolonged sit (watching 3 or more episodes in a row, in one sitting) and the accelerated consumption of an entire season (or seasons) of a show, one episode at a time, over several days.


title: Binge-watching

text: Binge-watching as an observed cultural phenomenon has become popular with the rise of video streaming services in the 2006–2007 time frame, such as Netflix, Amazon Prime Video, and Hulu through which the viewer can watch television shows and movies on-demand. For example, 61% of the Netflix survey participants said they binge-watch regularly. Recent research based on video-on-demand data from major US video streaming providers shows that over 64% of the customers binged-watched once during a year.


title: Binge-watching

text: Japanese manga magazine "Weekly Shōnen Jump" developed a successful formula of publishing individual manga chapters and then compiling them into separate standalone tankōbon volumes that could be "binged" all at once. This "Jump" formula produced major Japanese pop culture hits such as "Dragon Ball" (1984 debut), "One Piece" (1997 debut) and "Naruto" (1999 debut). According to Matt Alt of "The New Yorker", ""Jump" presaged the way the world consumes streaming entertainment today."


title: Binge-watching

text: The practice of binge-watching was previously called marathon-watching. Early examples of this practice include marathon viewing sessions of imported Japanese anime shows on VHS tapes in anime fandom


title: Binge-watching

text: communities during the late 1970s to 1980s, and Nickelodeon's Nick at Nite which broadcast multiple episodes from "Donna Reed" and "Route 66" in July 1985.


title: Binge-watching

text: The usage of the word "binge-watching" was popularized with the advent of on-demand viewing and online streaming. In 2013, the word burst into mainstream use to describe the Netflix practice of releasing seasons of its original programs simultaneously, as opposed to the industry standard model of releasing episodes on a weekly basis.


title: Binge-watching

text: In November 2015, the "Collins English Dictionary" chose the word "binge-watch" as the word of the year.


title: Binge-watching

text: At the beginning of the 2020 pandemic, there was a noticeable surge of Netflix binge watching. Lockdown made it so that those stuck at home turned towards spending their time catching up and re-watching television series.


title: Binge-watching

text: In a comparison study, Bridget Rubenking observed that traditional appointment viewing had decreased from 2015 to 2020. Rubenking noted that all three types of viewing, binge watching, serial viewing, and appointment viewing, were at an all-time high during the start of the pandemic. These circumstances contributed to a rise in the number of individuals who adopted these habits.


title: Binge-watching

text: Actor Kevin Spacey used the 2013 MacTaggart Lecture to implore television executives to give audiences "what they want when they want it. If they want to binge, then we should let them binge". He claimed that high-quality stories will retain audience's attention for hours on end, and may reduce piracy, although millions still download content illegally. Binge-watching "complex, quality TV" such as "The Wire" and "Breaking Bad" has been likened to reading more than one chapter of a novel in one sitting, and is viewed by some as a "smart, contemplative way" of watching TV. A recent study found that while binge-watching, people feel "transported" into the world of the show, which increases their viewing enjoyment, makes them binge-watch more frequently and for longer.


title: Binge-watching

text: ITV Director of Television Peter Fincham warned that binge-watching erodes the "social value" of television as there are fewer opportunities to anticipate future episodes and discuss them with friends. Nevertheless, research has shown that heavy binge-watching does not necessarily mean less social engagement. One study found quite the opposite, reporting that heavy binge-watchers spent more time in interactions with friends and family on a daily basis than non-binge-watchers. Heavy binge-watchers are used by others as sources of opinion about what shows to watch and they often engage in conversations about TV shows both offline and online.


title: Binge-watching

text: Research conducted at the University of Texas at Austin found binge watching television is correlated with depression, loneliness, self-regulation deficiency, and obesity. "Even though some people argue that binge-watching is a harmless addiction, findings from our study suggest that binge-watching should no longer be viewed this way," the authors conclude. Cases of people being treated for “binge watching addiction” have already been reported.


title: Binge-watching

text: Research published by media scholar, Dr. Anne Sweet, Ph.D., underlines that binge-watching is a form of compulsive consumption, similar to binge-eating, or binge-drinking, and that due to its addictive aspects, it could even represent a form of TV addiction. These findings were problematized by Pittman and Steiner (2019), who found that "the degree to which an individual pays attention to a show may either increase or decrease subsequent regret, depending on the motivation for binge-watching."


title: Binge-watching

text: Research conducted by media scholar Dr. Emil Steiner, Ph.D., at Rowan University isolated five motivations for binge-watching (catching up, relaxation, sense of completion, cultural inclusion, and improved viewing experience). The author concludes that while compulsiveness is possible, most binge-viewers have an ambivalent relationship with the nascent techno-cultural behavior. Furthermore, he argues that the negotiation of control in binge-watching is changing our understanding of television culture.


title: Binge-watching

text: Research conducted by Technicolor lab in 2016 found that a binge-watching session does increase the probability of another binge-watching session in the near future. In the meantime, the majority of people will not immediately have another binge-watching session. This indicates that binge-watching is not a consistent behavior for real-world video-on-demand consumers.


title: Binge-watching

text: Viewing an entire season of a show within 24 hours of its release has become common. According to a 2018 survey of adult TV watchers, 29% reported having done so. Among those aged 18–29, the number increases to 51%.


title: Binge-watching

text: In July 2013, Entertainment Weekly’s website listed the top five television series suited for the new entertainment-consumption phenomenon of binge-watching, which has emerged as viewers have chosen to watch whole seasons of TV series, or even whole series, at a sitting


title: Binge-watching

text: It has also been subjected to parody as the website CollegeHumor released a 2014 comedic PSA titled "The Dangers of Binge-Watching".


title: Binge-watching

text: In March 2020, memes surrounding binge watching while stuck in lockdown circulated the internet. The collective experience of living in a pandemic led to a number of people online to indulge in sharing memes.


title: Binge-watching

text: A 2019 study by Dr. Matthew Pittman of the University of Tennessee and Dr. Emil Steiner of Rowan University examined how attentiveness affected viewer experience and post-binge regret. "The survey (N = 800) determined that the degree to which an individual pays attention to a show may either increase or decrease subsequent regret, depending on the motivation for binge-watching." But simply watching shows that demand more attention is not enough to moderate post-binge regret. Their subsequent research (Pittman and Steiner, 2021) found that viewers who planned their binge-watching ahead of time were more likely to choose shows that aligned with their motives for watching — relaxing comedies, riveting dramas, nostalgic favorites. Such planning improved "viewer engagement, resulting in improved emotional outcomes."


title: Binge-watching

text: Within the television industry, speculation emerged in the early 2020s that binge watching a new series could make a series less memorable in the long term compared to shows released on a more traditional schedule; various streaming providers, lead by Disney+, have had success releasing some of their original series on a weekly schedule, in contrast to the Netflix model which is most aggressive among the streaming providers in releasing episodes all at once. Showrunners have increasingly requested that their programs not be released in bulk as a creative decision.


title: Binge-watching

text: Mareike Jenner makes note of streaming services like Netflix using algorithms to recommend relevant content to viewers. Algorithms allow streaming services to personalize the user's experience by suggesting similar series to the one they just watched.


title: Binge-watching

text: Binge watching can be attributed to "the bored body problem," which Tina Kendall explains as the phenomenon of individuals feeling the need to feel engaged. Individuals who feel as if they have limited freedom or choice see binge watching as an activity to participate in. Kendall emphasizes that lockdown has heightened the need to get back into a rhythm as quarantine has left people feeling uncertain about how they should organize their day.


title: Binge-watching

text: Binge watching can be related to Zillmann’s Mood Management Theory, which may account binge-watching as an emotional regulation process. In line with the mood management theory, media content selection could be driven by the purpose of mood regulation. Most people attempt to regulate their moods and shift it to a more positive one through television shows. However, such an effect proves to be dependent on individual self-control. Ego-depleted individuals (i.e., individuals presenting lower available cognitive resources to exert self-control) demonstrate tendencies to negatively evaluate entertainment use as a procrastination form, which may elicit feelings of guilt and negatively impact stress recovery and well-being. Therein, the results of mood-regulation through content binging is dictated through individual self-control.


title: Binge-watching

text: A 2017 study linked binge-watching to a poorer sleep quality, increased insomnia and fatigue. In fact, binge-watching could lead to an increased cognitive alertness, therefore impacting sleep. The results showed that 98 percent of binge-watchers were more likely to have poor sleep quality, were more alert before sleep and reported more fatigue. Authors also emphasize that findings have been inconsistent in sleep research regarding the negative associations between sleep and television viewing, and that it should be distinguished from binge-watching.


title: Binge-watching

text: Consuming television content at 'binge' levels has been found to create a negative effect on sleep cycles as a whole. Binge-watching may create feelings of regret, which may extending into the early hours of the morning, impacting on sleep and the day ahead. Additionally, individuals displaying binge-watching tendencies are more likely to suffer from insomnia, poorer sleep quality and sleep deprivation.


title: Binge-watching

text: A study from 2020 outlines the type of people who are most likely to partake in binge-watching. "[They] are more neurotic, less agreeable, less conscientious, and less open to new experience." They also found that people who binge-watch often are more likely feel sad, anxious, stress and have low self-esteem. The study also finds that people who binge-watch often use "avoidance and emotional coping, instead of task-oriented coping."


title: Binge-watching

text: The same study also found that there were four profiles that binge-watchers fit into. The first is avid binge-watchers, who have high motivation for watching TV, but also have a strong sense of urgency and emotional reactions. The second is recreational binge-watchers, who have the least motivation and do not spend as much time watching TV. The third profile is, unregulated binge-watchers, who have the highest motivation to watch TV, which is driven by their coping mechanisms. Studies show they also "display the highest impulsivity among the binge-watchers of all types." The last profile is, regulated binge-watchers, who also are motivated by emotional enrichment, they don't react as emotionally, and aren't impulsive people.


title: Binge-watching

text: Studies have shown that prolonged binge-watching can lead to addictive characteristics. The type of instant gratification that it produces can be similar to that of gambling or computer/social media addiction. People who binge-watch regularly usually use it as an escape from reality and to take away from loneliness or boredom. Another study found correlations between binge-watching and procrastinating. Both of these come with warning signs such as, "loss of self-control, urgency, regret, neglect of duties, negative social and health consequences, lying, or even symptoms of withdrawal such as anxiety, nervousness, rage, and concentration difficulties."


title: Binge-watching

text: A 2016 study found that, overall, viewers who tend to binge-watch are less responsive to advertising than viewers who do not. The effectiveness of advertising declines the longer a viewing session goes on. Researchers attribute this phenomenon to the disruption caused by ads. Binge-watchers want to remain immersed in what they are watching. They do not want to be forced back into the real world.


title: Binge-watching

text: In 2019, Hulu introduced a new ad format for binge-watchers. A brand runs ads during the first and second episodes of a binge-watching session that include jokes and references to binge-watching. Before the third episode, the brand rewards binge-watchers by running an ad that features a special promotion or announcing they will be able to watch the next episode without commercial interruptions.


title: Binge-watching

text: "Although watching television shows or movies on cable is becoming less and less common in our generation, several studies have come out discussing the effects that fast food advertising has especially on the younger audience. When binge watching we come across several different advertisements, and we underestimate the impact and significant effect they have on us." A study on the "Receptivity to television fast-food restaurant marketing and obesity among U.S youth" studied the extent to which fast food advertisements have played a role in the rates of obesity in the United States, where the results found that there was a significant correlation between increased viewing time and receptivity to fast food marketing. The study states that $1.8 billion have been put towards food and beverage marketing directed specifically towards children and adolescents; demonstrating that big corporations know there are certain marketing tactics that have been known to work on younger audiences. There is, of course, a significant ethical concern when it comes to the tailoring of fast food marketing towards children and adolescents as it comprises their health, as many studies have shown. It is extremely important to recognize the receptivity that we have towards what we watch, as this allows us to be more aware of how what we are watching affects us. In learning to do this, young audiences can be more conscious of where their wants or cravings are stemming from, and how to possibly limit them if they are compromising their health and lifestyle.


title: Diem (digital currency)

text: Diem (formerly known as Libra) was a permissioned blockchain-based stablecoin payment system proposed by the American social media company Meta Platforms. The plan also includes a private currency implemented as a cryptocurrency.


title: Diem (digital currency)

text: The launch was originally planned to be in 2020, but only rudimentary experimental code has been released until the project was acquired in January 2022.


title: Diem (digital currency)

text: The project, currency and transactions would have been managed and cryptographically entrusted to the Diem Association, a membership organization of companies from payment, technology, telecommunication, online marketplace and venture capital, and nonprofits.


title: Diem (digital currency)

text: Before December 2020, the project was called "Libra", although this was changed to Diem following legal challenges regarding its name and logo.


title: Diem (digital currency)

text: In general, the project generated backlash from government regulators in the European Union, the USA, other countries, and among the general public over monetary sovereignty, financial stability, privacy, and antitrust concerns which ultimately helped kill the project.


title: Diem (digital currency)

text: Morgan Beller started working on cryptocurrency and blockchain at Meta in 2017, and was initially the only person working on Meta's blockchain initiative.


title: Diem (digital currency)

text: Meta vice president David A. Marcus moved from Facebook Messenger to a new blockchain division in May 2018. First reports of Facebook planning a cryptocurrency, with Marcus in charge, emerged a few days later. By February 2019, there were more than 50 engineers working on the project. Confirmation that Facebook intended a cryptocurrency first emerged in May 2019. At this time it was known as "GlobalCoin" or "Facebook Coin".


title: Diem (digital currency)

text: The project was formally announced on June 18, 2019, under the name Libra. The creators of the coin are listed as Morgan Beller, David Marcus and Kevin Weil (Novi's VP of Product). The first release was planned for 2020.


title: Diem (digital currency)

text: On July 15, 2019, Facebook announced the currency will not launch until all regulatory concerns have been met and Libra has the "appropriate approvals". On September 18, 2019, during a meeting with top Senate Democratic leaders, Mark Zuckerberg said that Libra would not be launched anywhere in the world without first obtaining approval from United States regulators. In October 2019 multiple companies left Libra Association: PayPal left on 4 October, eBay, Mastercard, Stripe, Visa and Mercado Pago followed on 11 October, and Booking Holdings on 14 October.


title: Diem (digital currency)

text: According to a November 2020 report in the "Financial Times", Libra will be launching a slimmed down plan that includes the cryptocurrency being a stablecoin backed by the US dollar rather than a multiple currency collection. The newspaper also reported that the cryptocurrency will now be called Diem, which is Latin for "day". In December 2020, Libra was rebranded as Diem, and Libra Association renamed Diem Association. As of December 2020, Diem Association has 27 members.


title: Diem (digital currency)

text: In January 2022, it was reported that the Diem Association was winding down, with Diem’s assets being sold to the California based Silvergate Capital for a reported $200 million. Facebook was also reported to have planned to launch the token in the U.S. with it being issued by Slivergate although the Federal Reserve and the United States Department of the Treasury were not supportive of the project.


title: Diem (digital currency)

text: The plan for the Libra token was to be backed by financial assets such as a basket of currencies, and US Treasury securities in an attempt to avoid volatility. Facebook has announced that each of the partners will inject an initial 10 million, so Libra has full asset backing on the day it opens. As of January 2020, Libra is said to have dropped the idea of a mixed currency basket in favor of individual stablecoins pegged to individual currencies.


title: Diem (digital currency)

text: Libra service partners, within the Libra Association, will create new Libra currency units based on demand. Libra currency units will be retired as they are redeemed for conventional currency.


title: Diem (digital currency)

text: Initial reconciliation of transactions will be performed at each service partner, and the blockchain's distributed ledger will be used for reconciliation between service partners. The intent is to help prevent everyone but members of the Libra Association from trying to extract and analyze data from the distributed ledger.


title: Diem (digital currency)

text: In contrast to cryptocurrencies such as bitcoin which use permissionless blockchains, Libra is not decentralized, relying on trust in the Libra Association as "a de facto central bank".


title: Diem (digital currency)

text: In September 2019, Facebook announced that the reserve basket would be made up of: 50% United States dollar, 18% Euro, 14% Japanese yen, 11% Pound sterling and 7% Singapore dollar.


title: Diem (digital currency)

text: Libra has considered using coins based on individual national currencies on the network, alongside the basket-based Libra token. This was first mooted publicly by David Marcus in October 2019, and by Mark Zuckerberg in his October 2019 Senate testimony. The idea was promoted again in March 2020.


title: Diem (digital currency)

text: On April 16, 2020, Libra announced plans to create an infrastructure for multiple cryptocurrencies, the preponderance of which will be backed by individual fiat currencies, and said the association was in talks with regulators from Switzerland for a payments license.


title: Diem (digital currency)

text: In May 2021, Diem announced that it had withdrawn its application to the Swiss Financial Market Supervisory Authority and said that it would instead seek approval with the US treasury to register as a money services business.


title: Diem (digital currency)

text: Facebook established the Libra Association (later renamed to Diem Association) to oversee the currency, founded in Geneva, Switzerland. As of December 2020, Diem Association includes:


title: Diem (digital currency)

text: Seven other companies had been named as Libra Association members in the initial June 2019 announcement, but left before the first Libra meeting on 14 October 2019: Booking Holdings, eBay, Mastercard, Mercado Pago, PayPal, Stripe and Visa Inc. Visa chairman and CEO Alfred F. Kelly clarified in July that Visa had not joined, but had signed a nonbinding letter of intent; and that "no one has yet officially joined." He said that factors determining whether Visa would, in fact, join included "the ability of the association to satisfy all the requisite regulatory requirements." Vodafone joined the association in October 2019, but left in January 2020, saying they preferred to work on their mobile banking subsidiary M-Pesa.


title: Diem (digital currency)

text: Press coverage around the initial Libra announcement noted the absence of Apple Pay, Google Pay, Amazon and of any banks. Banking executives had been reluctant to join due to uncertainties surrounding regulation and feasibility of the scheme.


title: Diem (digital currency)

text: In late April 2020, the payment processing company, Checkout.com, announced they would be joining the association. In May 2020, Singapore state investor Temasek Holdings, cryptocurrency investor Paradigm and private equity firm Slow Ventures announced they would join the association.


title: Diem (digital currency)

text: Libra Association was renamed to Diem Association on December 1, 2020, as part of the rebranding from Libra to Diem.


title: Diem (digital currency)

text: The project has faced criticism and opposition from central banks. The use of a cryptocurrency and blockchain for the implementation has been questioned.


title: Diem (digital currency)

text: The first regulator response to Libra came within minutes of the launch announcement, from French Finance Minister, Bruno Le Maire, who was being interviewed on French radio station Europe 1. He said that Libra could not be allowed to become a sovereign currency, and would require strong consumer protections.


title: Diem (digital currency)

text: Le Maire then warned the French Parliament of his concerns about Libra and privacy, money laundering and terrorism finance. He called on the central bank governors of the Group of Seven to prepare a report on Facebook's plans.


title: Diem (digital currency)

text: Bank of England governor Mark Carney said there was a need to keep an "open mind" about new technology for money transfers, but "anything that works in this world will become instantly systemic and will have to be subject to the highest standards of regulation."


title: Diem (digital currency)

text: German MEP Markus Ferber warned that Facebook could become a shadow bank. His colleague MEP Stefan Berger sees Libra's power potential as a threat to the economic stability of the euro zone and its democracies: Libra could make Facebook its central bank. Berger argues in favor of the development of a European stablecoin in order to be able to offer a secure alternative to the Facebook currency. Berger will be in charge of the European report of Markets in Crypto-Assets (MiCA) which will serve as base for a regulatory framework for crypto-assets.


title: Diem (digital currency)

text: On September 13, 2019, Le Maire stated that France would not allow development of Libra in the European Union, as would be a threat to the monetary sovereignty of states. He also spoke about the potential for abuse of marketing dominance and systemic financial risks as reasons for not allowing stablecoins to operate yet within the EU.


title: Diem (digital currency)

text: According to a "Reuters" report, German Finance Minister Olaf Scholz said following a video conference of G7 finance ministers that Germany and Europe cannot accept Diem currency entry into the market while the regulatory risks are not adequately addressed. Scholz stated that he does not support private-sector digital currencies, and his remarks could be detrimental to Diem and JPMorgan Coin.


title: Diem (digital currency)

text: Valdis Dombrovskis, Executive Vice-President of the European Commission for An Economy that Works for People, stated at the Digital Finance Outreach 2020 Closing Conference that the European Union is preparing a new cryptocurrency regime that may include stricter requirements for "global stablecoin" projects like Libra. In addition, Dombrovskis stated in his address that stablecoins that function on a global scale can "present new concerns" — they can disturb financial and monetary stability.


title: Diem (digital currency)

text: US regulators and politicians expressed concerns within hours of the mid-2019 announcement. Maxine Waters, Chairperson of the United States House Committee on Financial Services Committee asked Facebook to halt the development and launch of Libra, citing a list of recent scandals and that "the cryptocurrency market currently lacks a clear regulatory framework". The U.S. House Committee on Financial Services Democrats sent a letter to Facebook asking the company to stop development of Libra, citing concerns of privacy, national security, trading, and monetary policy.


title: Diem (digital currency)

text: Jerome Powell, chairman of the Federal Reserve, testified before Congress on 10 July 2019 that the Fed had "serious concerns" as to how Libra would deal with "money laundering, consumer protection and financial stability."


title: Diem (digital currency)

text: President Donald Trump tweeted on 12 July 2019 that "If Facebook and other companies want to become a bank, they must seek a new Banking Charter and become subject to all Banking Regulations."


title: Diem (digital currency)

text: US regulators contacted Visa, PayPal, Mastercard and Stripe, asking for a complete overview of how Libra would fit into their anti-money-laundering compliance programs.


title: Diem (digital currency)

text: Since several participants left the project in late 2019, the Libra Association has been working to address concerns from United States regulators with the development of a "Libra 2.0" blueprint.


title: Diem (digital currency)

text: According to "CNBC", in 2021, Diem reportedly withdrawn its application for a Swiss payment license, intending to instead move its activities to the United States. Diem announced that it would relocate its operating headquarters from Geneva to Washington with an intend to establish its payment system from the United States.


title: Diem (digital currency)

text: The Swiss Federal Data Protection and Information Commissioner, that David Marcus told the US Senate would oversee privacy for Libra, said that it had not heard from Facebook at all.


title: Diem (digital currency)

text: The government of Japan has begun the process of investigating Libra and doing an analysis on the effect on Japan's monetary policy and financial regulation. In July 2019, Japanese officials formed a working committee, consisting of the Bank of Japan, the Ministry of Finance and the Financial Services Agency, to coordinate policies to address Libra's impact on regulation, monetary policy, tax, and payments settlement. The working group will coordinate measures to handle Libra's influence on regulation, monetary policy, tax, and payments settlement. This will be done before the Group of Seven meeting in France between 24 and 26 August 2019.


title: Diem (digital currency)

text: Data protection regulators internationally issued a statement asking Facebook to protect personal data of users, and to detail Libra's planned practices for handling personal data, in the light of "previous episodes where Facebook’s handling of people’s information has not met the expectations of regulators, or their own users."


title: Diem (digital currency)

text: Finance Watch describes Libra as a "huge risk to public monetary sovereignty" and "concludes that Libra is a bad idea – for its users, for the stability of our financial system, and last but not least for our democracy."


title: Diem (digital currency)

text: On September 16, 2019, officials from the Libra consortium, including J.P. Morgan and Facebook, met with officials from 26 central banks, including the Federal Reserve and Bank of England, in Basel, Switzerland and the meeting was chaired by European Central Bank board member Benoît Cœuré, a vocal Libra critic.


title: Diem (digital currency)

text: Industry observers have speculated whether Libra will provide meaningful privacy to its users. Facebook's plan is to let its subsidiary Novi Financial manage Libra for Facebook users, and Facebook executives have stated that Novi will not share account holder's purchase information with Facebook without authorization. However, the system is also planned to include a friend-finder search function, and the use of this function will constitute permission for Novi to combine the account holder's transaction history with their Facebook account.


title: Diem (digital currency)

text: In August 2019, according to "CNBC", top data protection officials including Democratic FTC commissioner Rohit Chopra, U.K. Information Commissioner Elizabeth Denham, EU Data Protection Supervisor Giovanni Buttarelli, and other top regulators from Australia, Canada, Albania, and Burkina Faso in a joint statement expressed doubts over Facebook's proposed digital currency project Libra (Diem). According to "CNBC", Facebook has confirmed that governments and regulators throughout the world are scrutinizing Libra.


title: Diem (digital currency)

text: In general, consumer advocates and public interest groups have opposed Diem on privacy grounds and rejected the tethering of financial services to mass surveillance.


title: Diem (digital currency)

text: Scholars have highlighted several antitrust risks associated with Diem, namely, a risk of collusion between association members, a risk of tying between Diem and Novi, and a risk of exclusivity agreements if Novi is required to use Diem within Facebook environment.


title: Diem (digital currency)

text: Facebook tries to police inaccurate information and fake Libra websites on its platform. According to "The Washington Post", nearly a dozen fake accounts, pages, and groups on Facebook and Instagram advertised themselves as legitimate centres for the Libra digital currency, in some cases trying to sell discounted Libra which was not yet accessible. Numerous of the counterfeits used the Facebook logo, images of Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, and Libra's official marketing material. The growth of fake pages and groups devoted to Libra added to Facebook's difficulties with global authorities.


title: Diem (digital currency)

text: Diem Association (formerly Libra Association) faces legal challenges as both the name and the logo of the digital currency are already in use within different territories.


title: Diem (digital currency)

text: Finco Services Inc has filed a lawsuit with New York Southern District Court against Facebook, Inc., Novi Financial, Inc., Jlv, LLC and Character SF, LLC for an alleged trademark infringement arising out of the use by the latter of a logo similar to the start-up bank operated by Finco Services, Inc. The plaintiff has requested a preliminary and permanent injunctive relief as well as monetary relief from the defendants. A settlement conference in this matter is scheduled for March 26, 2020 in the United States Courthouse, while the parties did not consent to conducting the proceedings before a magistrate judge and requested to be tried to a jury.


title: Diem (digital currency)

text: In Europe, Libra Association has filed an application with the European Union Intellectual Property Office for the registration of the word “LIBRA” as a verbal trademark. The proceeding has already received five oppositions to registration from four European companies based mainly on the alleged likelihood of confusion with their prior trademarks. The opposing companies are Lyra Network, Libra Internet Bank, Libri GmbH and Advanced New Technologies Co., Ltd. In April 2020, the parties will reach the adversarial part of the opposition proceedings, unless a settlement is reached during the cooling-off period.


title: Diem (digital currency)

text: Diem will not rely on cryptocurrency mining. Only members of Diem Association will be able to process transactions via the permissioned blockchain.


title: Diem (digital currency)

text: Diem hopes to begin transitioning to a permissionless proof-of-stake system within five years; although their own materials admit that no solution exists "that can deliver the scale, stability, and security needed to support billions of people and transactions across the globe through a permissionless network."


title: Diem (digital currency)

text: In June 2019, Elaine Ou, an opinion writer at "Bloomberg News", tried compiling and running the publicly released code for Libra. At the time, the software did little more than allow fake coins to be put in a wallet; almost none of the functionality outlined in the white paper was implemented, including "major architectural features that have yet to be invented." Ou was surprised that Facebook "would release software in such a state".


title: Diem (digital currency)

text: In June 2019, Facebook announced plans to release a digital wallet called Calibra in 2020, as a standalone app and also to integrate it within Messenger and WhatsApp. In May 2020, Calibra was renamed Novi. As of February 2021, Novi and Diem were not released yet and do not have a set release date.


title: Diem (digital currency)

text: Move is the Diem blockchain's proposed smart contract and custom transactions language. It is planned to be a statically-typed programming language, compiled to bytecode.


title: Diem (digital currency)

text: The Move language syntax has not been released yet. An example Intermediate representation of the language is shown in the Move white paper:


title: Foreign relations of Pakistan

text: The Islamic Republic of Pakistan maintains a large network of diplomatic relations across the world. Pakistan is the second largest Muslim-majority country in terms of population (after Indonesia) and is the only Muslim majority nation to have possession of nuclear weapons.


title: Foreign relations of Pakistan

text: Pakistan's economy is integrated into the world with strong trade ties to the EU and economic alliances and agreements with many Asian nations.


title: Foreign relations of Pakistan

text: Pakistan is in a strategic geopolitical location, being situated at the corridor of major maritime and land-based transit routes reaching from the energy-rich regions of Central Asia and the Middle East, to the population centers of South and East Asia. Pakistan also has geostrategic hotspots such as Afghanistan, China, India and Iran as immediate neighbors. Pakistan maintains a tense relationship with the Republic of India due to the Kashmir conflict, close ties with the People's Republic of China, Turkey, Saudi Arabia and Gulf Arab states, and fluctuating relationship with the United States of America due to overlapping interests during the Cold War and War on Terror. Pakistan is a member of the United Nations , Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO) , Organisation of Islamic Cooperation (OIC) and more .


title: Foreign relations of Pakistan

text: After Pakistan gained its independence in August 1947, the Commonwealth were the first countries to recognize its sovereign status. The United States was the first non-Muslim country to recognize Pakistan and France was the first country where Pakistan's flag was raised.


title: Foreign relations of Pakistan

text: Pakistan's Foreign Policy seeks to protect, promote and advance Pakistan's national interests in the comity of nations”


title: Foreign relations of Pakistan

text: "Our objective should be peace within and peace without. We want to live peacefully and maintain cordial and friendly relations with our immediate neighbours and with world at large. We have no aggressive designs against any one. We stand by the United Nations Charter and will gladly make our contribution to the peace and prosperity of the world."


title: Foreign relations of Pakistan

text: The foreign policy of Pakistan sets out in the way it interacts with foreign nations and to determine its standard of interactions for its organizations, corporations and individual citizens. Backed by the semi-agricultural and semi-industrialized economy, Pakistan is the 47th largest (nominal GDP, 2021) and 23rd largest (purchasing) economic power and 6th largest military in the world, with a defence budget of (2018) 4.0% of its GDP (2018). The Foreign Minister of Pakistan is the official charged with state-to-state diplomacy, although the Prime minister maintains an ultimate authority over foreign policy. The state foreign policy includes defining the national interest, as well as the economic interest and strategies chosen both to safeguard that and to achieve its policy goals. Following the general election held on May 2013, Tariq Fatimi and NSA Sartaj Aziz were designated as advisers to the Prime Minister on foreign and strategic policies. After the dismissal of Nawaz Sharif's government in July 2017, Khawaja Muhammad Asif held the portfolio of foreign minister under the premiership of Shahid Khaqan Abbasi. After the victory of Imran Khan Niazi in the Pakistan General Elections 2018, Shah Mehmood Qureshi was named the Minister of Foreign Affairs. After the fall of the Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf-led coalition government in 2022, there was much speculation as to who would be the next foreign minister. It ultimately became clear that Bilawal Bhutto Zardari, chairman of the Pakistan People’s Party (the second largest member of the newly formed coalition government), would serve as foreign minister—a position previously held by his grandfather, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, and an alleged affair partner of his, Hina Rabbani Khar.


title: Foreign relations of Pakistan

text: In 1947, Muhammad Ali Jinnah, founder of the state of Pakistan, clearly described the principles and objectives of Pakistan's foreign policy in a broadcast message, which is featured prominently in a quotation on the homepage of Pakistan's Ministry of Foreign Affairs website: "The foundation of our foreign policy is friendship with all nations across the globe."


title: Foreign relations of Pakistan

text: Since its independence in 1947, Pakistan's foreign policy has encompassed difficult relations with the neighbouring Soviet Union (USSR) who maintained a close military and ideological interaction with the neighbouring countries such as Afghanistan (in the West) and India (in East). During most of 1947–1991, the USSR support was given to Republic of India, over which it has fought three wars on Kashmir conflict. During the 1960s, Pakistan's relations with and neighbouring Afghanistan have also been extremely difficult due to the latter's contest over the Durand Line. The foreign relations with Iran, Turkey, Saudi Arabia and China remain extremely important and based on the extensive cooperation in national security and economical interests in the Persian Gulf and wide-ranging bilateral relations with the United States and other Western countries. With the growing influence of USSR in the region, Pakistan cemented close security relations with China in Asia and Poland, United Kingdom and Germany in Europe during most of the Cold War. While Pakistan had "on-off relations" with the United States, Pakistan assisted President Nixon reapproach with China and other East Asian countries. Imran Khan visited Moscow to meet President Vladimir Putin as Russia was launching the invasion of Ukraine. He has previously criticised America's “War on Terror“.


title: Foreign relations of Pakistan

text: Pakistan's ties with Russia have moved past the bitter Cold War hostilities in recent years and the chill in the relations between Pakistan and the U.S. has further pushed the country towards Russia and China.


title: Foreign relations of Pakistan

text: China has played a significant role in the development, economy and security of Pakistan, with relationship beginning in 1950 when Pakistan was among the first countries to enter into official diplomatic relations with the Republic of China (on Taiwan Island) and recognizes the People's Republic of China (PRC) on Mainland China as the sole representative. Since then, both countries have placed considerable importance on the maintenance of an extremely close and supportive special relationship and the two countries have regularly exchanged high-level visits resulting in a variety of agreements. The PRC has provided economic, military, and technical assistance to Pakistan, and each country considers the other a close strategic ally. Since the advent of the 21st century, Pakistan and China have strengthened their relations through bilateral trade, military agreements and supporting each other on key issues. The intensifying US-China Strategic Rivalry has put Pakistan in an extremely difficult situation to maintain ties with both of these states. Bilawal Bhutto Zardari accused UN Human Rights Office report on Xinjiang were “taken out of context”, and Pakistan supports China’s activities for socio-economic development, harmony and peace, and stability.


title: Foreign relations of Pakistan

text: The United States has played an important role in the young history of Pakistan, being one of the first countries to recognize their independence on 14 August 1947. The relationship between the two countries went through varying levels of friendliness, but Pakistan consistently found themselves on the United States side of issues faced during the Cold War. Pakistan served as a geostrategic position for United States military bases during the Cold War since it bordered the Soviet Union and China. These positive relations would fall apart following successful cooperation in fighting the Soviet Union's influence in Central Asia and the subsequent fall of the Soviet Union.


title: Foreign relations of Pakistan

text: In reaction to Pakistan's new nuclear capacity, the United States in 1992 passed the Pressler Amendment approving sanctions against Pakistan, Relations would restrengthen following 9/11 with Pakistan's warm response following the tragedy. Aid was given to Pakistan for the first time again in 2002, and the 2000s saw an extension of this friendly relationship.


title: Foreign relations of Pakistan

text: As the War on Terror continued to linger, the United States and Pakistan would disagree on strategies while also accusing each other of various things. This dynamic would reach a head following a few incidents highlighted by the operation to kill Osama bin Laden in Abbottabad. While these incidents wore down the trust between the two nations, the two would continue to share a healthy relationship. Although the two countries do not view each other favorably in polls, the two governments share an important relationship featuring multiple types of aid to Pakistan, important military cooperation and collaboration, and a strategic ally in Central Asia for the United States The United States and Pakistan's relationship persists of promoting trade and regional economic cooperation, this type of relationship is beneficial for both countries and gives incentive for continuing friendly relations. U.S. also has concerns regarding Pakistan include regional and global terrorism; Afghan stability; democratization and human rights protection; the ongoing Kashmir problem and Pakistan-India tensions; and economic development. Recently US stopped military aid to Pakistan, which was about US$2 billion per year. America’s deference to India reflects its importance to counter China’s influence in Asia. This imposes a ceiling on cooperation with Pakistan, limiting it to the non-strategic domain.


title: Foreign relations of Pakistan

text: After Independence, Pakistan vigorously pursued bilateral relations with other Muslim countries and made a wholehearted bid for leadership of the Muslim world, or at least for leadership in achieving its unity. The Ali brothers had sought to project Pakistan as the natural leader of the Islamic world, in large part due to its large manpower and military strength. A top-ranking Muslim League leader, Khaliquzzaman, declared that Pakistan would bring together all Muslim countries into Islamistan – a pan-Islamic entity. Such developments (alongside Pakistan's creation) did not get American approval and British Prime Minister Clement Attlee voiced international opinion at the time by stating that he wished that India and Pakistan would re-unite. Since most of the Arab world was undergoing a nationalist awakening at the time, there was little attraction to Pakistan's Pan-Islamic aspirations. Some of the Arab countries saw the 'Islamistan' project as a Pakistani attempt to dominate other Muslim states.


title: Foreign relations of Pakistan

text: Pakistan vigorously championed the right of self-determination for Muslims around the world. Pakistan's efforts for the independence movements of Indonesia, Libya, Algeria, Tunisia, Egypt, Morocco, Somalia, Azerbaijan, and Eritrea were significant and initially led to close ties between these countries and Pakistan. However, Pakistan also masterminded an attack on the Afghan city of Jalalabad during the Afghan Civil War to establish an Islamic government there. Pakistan had wished to foment an 'Islamic Revolution' which would transcend national borders covering Pakistan, Afghanistan and Central Asia.


title: Foreign relations of Pakistan

text: On the other hand, Pakistan's relations with Iran have been strained at times due to sectarian tensions. Iran and Saudi Arabia used Pakistan as a battleground for their proxy sectarian war and by the 1990s, Pakistan's support for the Sunni Taliban organization in Afghanistan became a problem for Shia Iran which opposed a Taliban-controlled Afghanistan. Tensions between Iran and Pakistan intensified in 1998, when Iran accused Pakistan of war crimes as Pakistani warplanes bombarded Afghanistan's last Shia stronghold in support of the Taliban.


title: Foreign relations of Pakistan

text: In 1949 after gaining independence from the United Kingdom, Pakistan still had close ties with the country. The Prime Minister Liaquat Ali Khan also paid a historical and friendly state visit to the United States, and held meetings with President Harry Truman and the American military officials for the purpose of the military aid in 1951. Ideologically, Prime Minister Ali Khan was opposed to communism; and his government was struggling with issues concerning the matters of uplifting the national economy and protecting interests of national security. In 1954–56, the United States and Pakistan signed the Mutual Defense Assistance Agreement which saw the dispatching of the Military Assistance Advisory Group to provide military training to the Pakistan Armed Forces in 1955–56.


title: Foreign relations of Pakistan

text: In 1955, Pakistan joined the CENTO and the SEATO alliances. Also, in 1956, when Pakistan declared itself a republic, it continued as a member of the Commonwealth of Nations. In 1971, Pakistan withdrew itself from the two alliances in a vision of exercising an independent foreign policy. In 1964, Pakistan signed the Regional Cooperation for Development (RCD) Pact with Turkey and Iran, when all three countries were closely allied with the U.S., and as neighbours of the Soviet Union, wary of perceived Soviet expansionism. To this day, Pakistan has a close relationship with Turkey. RCD became defunct after the Iranian Revolution, and a Pakistani-Turkish initiative led to the founding of the Economic Cooperation Organization (ECO) in 1985. In 1974, Pakistan became a critical entity in the militarization of the OIC and has historically maintained friendly relations with all the Arab and Muslim countries under the banner of OIC. Pakistan rejoined the Commonwealth in 1989. In 2004, Pakistan became a Major non-NATO ally of the United States.


title: Foreign relations of Pakistan

text: Pakistan was a member of the Commonwealth from 1947 to 1956 under the name 'Dominion of Pakistan'. From 1956 to 1972, the Islamic Republic of Pakistan was a republic in the Commonwealth of Nations, when it withdrew in protest at the Commonwealth's support of East Pakistan's secession and Bangladesh's independence. In 1989, Pakistan rejoined, despite Pakistan's suspension from the Commonwealth of Nations between 1999 and 2008.


title: Foreign relations of Pakistan

text: At the Astana Summit on 9 June 2017, India and Pakistan became full members of the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO).


title: Foreign relations of Pakistan

text: Since 1947, Pakistan's relations have been difficult with neighbour India over regional issues. India and Pakistan have fought three conventional wars throughout the 20th century over the issue of Kashmir. There have been attempts to unite the countries but since 1940, Muhammad Ali Jinnah and his Muslim League had demanded an independent Pakistan, whose Muslims would have their own government rather than remaining subordinate to India's Hindu majority. There are many sources of tension between the two countries but the issues over terrorism, size disparities and three geostrategic issues: Kashmir, water, and the Siachen Glacier, are the major ones resulting in the attenuated volume of trade and trust deficit. The continuing dispute over the status of Kashmir inflames opinions in both nations and makes friendly relations difficult. In the 1960s, the problems over the Durand Line escalated with Afghanistan which led to open hostilities in the 1970s. Pakistan is also a member of the Coffee Club to oppose Indian membership in the United Nations Security Council. Former Prime Minister Imran Khan had named senior U.S. diplomat Donald Lu as the person who was allegedly involved in the “foreign conspiracy“ to topple his government through a no-confidence vote tabled by the Opposition. The U.S. has repeatedly dismissed Khan's allegations.


title: Gerhard Richter

text: Gerhard Richter (; born 9 February 1932) is a German visual artist. Richter has produced abstract as well as photorealistic paintings, and also photographs and glass pieces. He is widely regarded as one of the most important contemporary German artists and several of his works have set record prices at auction.


title: Gerhard Richter

text: Richter was born in Hospital Dresden-Neustadt in Dresden, Saxony, and grew up in Reichenau (now Bogatynia, Poland), and in Waltersdorf (Zittauer Gebirge), in the Upper Lusatian countryside, where his father worked as a village teacher. Gerhard's mother, Hildegard Schönfelder, gave birth to him at the age of 25. Hildegard's father, Ernst Alfred Schönfelder, at one time was considered a gifted pianist. Ernst moved the family to Dresden after taking up the family enterprise of brewing and eventually went bankrupt. Once in Dresden, Hildegard trained as a bookseller, and in doing so realized a passion for literature and music. Gerhard's father, Horst Richter, was a mathematics and physics student at the Technische Hochschule in Dresden. The two were married in 1931.


title: Gerhard Richter

text: After struggling to maintain a position in the new National Socialist education system, Horst found a position in Reichenau. Gerhard's younger sister, Gisela, was born there in 1936. Horst and Hildegard were able to remain primarily apolitical due to Reichenau's location in the countryside. Horst, being a teacher, was eventually forced to join the National Socialist Party. He never became an avid supporter of Nazism, and was not required to attend party rallies. In 1942, Gerhard was conscripted into the "Deutsches Jungvolk", but by the end of the war he was still too young to be an official member of the Hitler Youth. In 1943, Hildegard moved the family to Waltersdorf, and was later forced to sell her piano. Two brothers of Hildegard died as soldiers in the war and a sister, who was schizophrenic, was starved to death in the Nazi euthanasia program.


title: Gerhard Richter

text: Richter left school after 10th grade and apprenticed as an advertising and stage-set painter, before studying at the Dresden Academy of Fine Arts. In 1948, he finished vocational high school in Zittau, and, between 1949 and 1951, successively worked as an apprentice with a sign painter and as a painter. In 1950, his application for study at the Dresden Academy of Fine Arts was rejected as "too bourgeois". He finally began his studies at the Academy in 1951. His teachers there were Karl von Appen, and Will Grohmann.


title: Gerhard Richter

text: Richter married Marianne Eufinger in 1957; she gave birth to his first daughter. He married his second wife, the sculptor Isa Genzken, in 1982. Richter had two sons and a daughter with his third wife, Sabine Moritz after they were married in 1995.


title: Gerhard Richter

text: In the early days of his career, he prepared a wall painting ("Communion with Picasso", 1955) for the refectory of his Academy of Arts as part of his BA Another mural entitled "Lebensfreude" (Joy of life) followed at the German Hygiene Museum for his diploma. It was intended to produce an effect "similar to that of wallpaper or tapestry".


title: Gerhard Richter

text: From 1957 to 1961 Richter worked as a master trainee in the academy and took commissions for the then state of East Germany. During this time, he worked intensively on murals like ' (Workers' struggle), on oil paintings (e.g. portraits of the East German actress Angelica Domröse and of Richter's first wife Ema), on various self-portraits and on a panorama of Dresden with the neutral name ' (Townscape, 1956).


title: Gerhard Richter

text: Together with his wife Marianne, Richter escaped from East to West Germany two months before the building of the Berlin Wall in 1961. Both his wall paintings in the Academy of Arts and the Hygiene Museum were then painted over for ideological reasons. Much later, after German reunification, two "windows" of the wall painting "Joy of life" (1956) would be uncovered in the stairway of the German Hygiene Museum, but these were later covered over when it was decided to restore the Museum to its original 1930 state.


title: Gerhard Richter

text: In West Germany Richter began to study at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf under Karl Otto Götz together with Sigmar Polke, Werner Hilsing, HA Schult, Kuno Gonschior, Hans Erhard Walther, Konrad Lueg and Gotthard Graubner. With Polke and (pseudonym Lueg) he introduced the term "" (Capitalistic Realism) as an anti-style of art, appropriating the pictorial shorthand of advertising. This title also referred to the realist style of art known as Socialist Realism, then the official art doctrine of the Soviet Union, but it also commented upon the consumer-driven art doctrine of western capitalism.


title: Gerhard Richter

text: Richter taught at the Hochschule für bildende Künste Hamburg and the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design as a visiting professor; he returned to the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf in 1971, where he worked as a professor for over 15 years.


title: Gerhard Richter

text: In 1983, Richter resettled from Düsseldorf to Cologne, where he still lives and works today. In 1996, he moved into a studio designed by architect Thiess Marwede. With an estimated fortune of €700 million, Richter was ranked number 220 of the richest 1,001 individuals and families in Germany by the monthly business publication "Manager Magazin" in 2017.


title: Gerhard Richter

text: Richter created various painting pictures from black-and-white photographs during the 1960s and early 1970s, basing them on a variety of sources: newspapers and books, sometimes incorporating their captions, (as in "Helga Matura" (1966)); private snapshots; aerial views of towns and mountains, ("Cityscape Madrid" (1968) and Alps (1968)); seascapes (1969–70); and a large multipart work made for the German Pavilion in the 1972 Venice Biennale. For "Forty-eight Portraits" (1971–72), he chose mainly the faces of composers such as Gustav Mahler and Jean Sibelius, and of writers such as H. G. Wells and Franz Kafka.


title: Gerhard Richter

text: From around 1964, Richter made a number of portraits of dealers, collectors, artists and others connected with his immediate professional circle. Richter's two portraits of "Betty", his daughter, were made in 1977 and 1988 respectively; the three portraits titled "IG" were made in 1993 and depict the artist's second wife, Isa Genzken. "Lesende" (1994) portrays Sabine Moritz, whom Richter married in 1995, shown absorbed in the pages of a magazine. Many of his realist paintings reflect on the history of Nazism, creating paintings of family members who had been members, as well as victims, of the Nazi party. From 1966, as well as those given to him by others, Richter began using photographs he had taken as the basis for portraits. In 1975, on the occasion of a show in Düsseldorf, Gilbert & George commissioned Richter to make a portrait of them.


title: Gerhard Richter

text: Richter began making prints in 1965. He was most active before 1974, only completing sporadic projects since that time. In the period 1965–1974, Richter made most of his prints (more than 100), of the same or similar subjects in his paintings. He has explored a variety of photographic printmaking processes – screenprint, photolithography, and collotype – in search of inexpensive mediums that would lend a "non-art" appearance to his work. He stopped working in print media in 1974, and began painting from photographs he took himself.


title: Gerhard Richter

text: While elements of landscape painting appeared initially in Richter's work early on in his career in 1963, the artist began his independent series of landscapes in 1968 after his first vacation, an excursion that landed him besotted with the terrain of Corsica. Landscapes have since emerged as an independent work group in his oeuvre. According to Dietmar Elger, Richter's landscapes are understood within the context of traditional of German Romantic Painting. They are compared to the work of Caspar David Friedrich (1774–1840). Friedrich is foundational to German landscape painting. Each artist spent formative years of their lives in Dresden. "Große Teyde-Landschaft" (1971) takes its imagery from similar holiday snapshots of the volcanic regions of Tenerife.


title: Gerhard Richter

text: "Atlas" was first exhibited in 1972 at the Museum voor Hedendaagse Kunst in Utrecht under the title "Atlas der Fotos und Skizzen", it included 315 parts. The work has continued to expand, and was exhibited later in full form at the Lenbachhaus in Munich in 1989, the Museum Ludwig in Cologne in 1990, and at Dia Art Foundation in New York in 1995. "Atlas" continues as an ongoing, encyclopedic work composed of approximately 4,000 photographs, reproductions or cut-out details of photographs and illustrations, grouped together on approximately 600 separate panels.


title: Gerhard Richter

text: In 1972, Richter embarked on a ten-day trip to Greenland, his friend Hanne Darboven was meant to accompany him, but instead he traveled alone. His intention was to experience and record the desolate arctic landscape. In 1976, four large paintings, each titled "Seascape" emerged from the Greenland photographs.


title: Gerhard Richter

text: In 1982 and 1983, Richter made a series of paintings of "Candles" and "Skulls" that relate to a longstanding tradition of still life "memento mori" painting. Each composition is most commonly based on a photograph taken by Richter in his own studio. Influenced by old master vanitas painters such as Georges de La Tour and Francisco de Zurbarán, the artist began to experiment with arrangements of candles and skulls placed in varying degrees of natural light, sitting atop otherwise barren tables. The Candle paintings coincided with his first large-scale abstract paintings, and represent the complete antithesis to those vast, colorful and playfully meaningless works. Richter has made only 27 of these still lifes. In 1995, the artist marked the 50th anniversary of the allied bombings of his hometown Dresden during the Second World War. His solitary candle was reproduced on a monumental scale and placed overlooking the River Elbe as a symbol of rejuvenation.


title: Gerhard Richter

text: In a 1988 series of 15 ambiguous photo paintings entitled "18 October 1977", he depicted four members of the Red Army Faction (RAF), a German left-wing militant organization. These paintings were created from black-and-white newspaper and police photos. Three RAF members were found dead in their prison cells on 18 October 1977 and the cause of their deaths was the focus of widespread controversy. In the late 1980s, Richter had begun to collect images of the group which he used as the basis for the 15 paintings exhibited for the first time in Krefeld in 1989. The paintings were based on an official portrait of Ulrike Meinhof during her years as a radical journalist; on photographs of the arrest of Holger Meins; on police shots of Gudrun Ensslin in prison; on Andreas Baader's bookshelves and the record player to conceal his gun; on the dead figures of Meinhof, Ensslin, and Baader; and on the funeral of Ensslin, Baader, and Jan-Carl Raspe.


title: Gerhard Richter

text: Since 1989, Richter has worked on creating new images by dragging wet paint over photographs. The photographs, not all taken by Richter himself, are mostly snapshots of daily life: family vacations, pictures of friends, mountains, buildings and streetscapes.


title: Gerhard Richter

text: Richter was flying to New York on 11 September 2001, but due to the 9/11 attacks, including on the World Trade Center, his plane was diverted to Halifax, Nova Scotia. A few years later, he made one small painting specifically about the planes crashing into the World Trade Center. In "September: A History Painting by Gerhard Richter", Robert Storr situates Richter's 2005 painting "September" within a brand of anti-ideological thought that he finds throughout Richter's work. He considers how the ubiquitous photographic documentation of 11 September attacks affects the uniqueness of one's distinct remembrance of the events, and he offers a valuable comparison to Richter's "18 October 1977" cycle.


title: Gerhard Richter

text: In the 2000s, Richter made a number of works that dealt with scientific phenomena. In 2003, he produced several paintings with the same title: "Silicate". Large oil-on-canvas pieces, these show latticed rows of light- and dark-grey blobs whose shapes quasi-repeat as they race across the frame, their angle modulating from painting to painting. They depict a photo, published in the "Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung", of a computer-generated simulacrum of reflections from the silicon dioxide found in insects' shells.


title: Gerhard Richter

text: Coming full-circle from his early "Table (1962)" in which he cancelled his photorealist image with haptic swirls of grey paint, in 1969, Richter produced the first of a group of grey monochromes that consist exclusively of the textures resulting from different methods of paint application.


title: Gerhard Richter

text: In 1976, Richter first gave the title "Abstract Painting" to one of his works. By presenting a painting without even a few words to name and explain it, he felt he was "letting a thing come, rather than creating it." In his abstract pictures, Richter builds up cumulative layers of non-representational painting, beginning with brushing big swaths of primary color onto canvas. The paintings evolve in stages, based on his responses to the picture's progress: the incidental details and patterns that emerge. Throughout his process, Richter uses the same techniques he uses in his representational paintings, blurring and scraping to veil and expose prior layers.


title: Gerhard Richter

text: From the mid-1980s, Richter began to use a homemade squeegee to rub and scrape the paint that he had applied in large bands across his canvases. In an interview with Benjamin H.D. Buchloch in 1986, Richter was asked about his "Monochrome Grey Pictures and Abstract Pictures" and their connection with the artists Yves Klein and Ellsworth Kelly. The following are Richter's answers:


title: Gerhard Richter

text: The Grey Pictures were done at a time when there were monochrome paintings everywhere. I painted them nonetheless. ... Not Kelly, but Bob Ryman, Brice Marden, Alan Charlton, Yves Klein and many others.


title: Gerhard Richter

text: In the 1990s the artist began to run his squeegee up and down the canvas in an ordered fashion to produce vertical columns that take on the look of a wall of planks.


title: Gerhard Richter

text: Richter's abstract work and its illusion of space developed out of his incidental process: an accumulation of spontaneous, reactive gestures of adding, moving, and subtracting paint. Despite unnatural palettes, spaceless sheets of color, and obvious trails of the artist's tools, the abstract pictures often act like windows through which we see the landscape outside. As in his representational paintings, there is an equalization of illusion and paint. In those paintings, he reduces worldly images to mere incidents of Art. Similarly, in his abstract pictures, Richter exalts spontaneous, intuitive mark-making to a level of spatial logic and believability.


title: Gerhard Richter

text: "Firenze" continues a cycle of 99 works conceived in the autumn of 1999 and executed in the same year and thereafter. The series of overpainted photographs, or übermalte Fotographien, consists of small paintings bearing images of the city of Florence, created by the artist as a tribute to the music of Steve Reich and the work of Contempoartensemble, a Florence-based group of musicians.


title: Gerhard Richter

text: After 2000, Richter made a number of works that dealt with scientific phenomena, in particular, with aspects of reality that cannot be seen by the naked eye. In 2006, Richter conceived six paintings as a coherent group under the title "Cage", named after the American avant-garde composer John Cage. The "Cage" paintings are large works constructed from intersecting fields, lines, and swaths of uneven smears that reflect the broad squeegee tool which Richter drags across the canvases, before removing areas of paint to generate a subtractive method of concealing and revealing variegated layers and patches. In May 2002, Richter photographed 216 details of his abstract painting no. 648-2, from 1987. Working on a long table over a period of several weeks, Richter combined these 10 x 15 cm details with 165 texts on the Iraq war, published in the German "Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung" newspaper on 20 and 21 March. This work was published in 2004 as a book entitled "War Cut".


title: Gerhard Richter

text: In November 2008, Richter began a series in which he applied ink droplets to wet paper, using alcohol and lacquer to extend and retard the ink's natural tendency to bloom and creep. The resulting "November" sheets are regarded as a significant departure from his previous watercolours in that the pervasive soaking of ink into wet paper produced double-sided works. Sometimes the uppermost sheets bled into others, generating a sequentially developing series of images. In a few cases Richter applied lacquer to one side of the sheet, or drew pencil lines across the patches of colour.


title: Gerhard Richter

text: As early as 1966, Richter had made paintings based on colour charts, using the rectangles of colour as found objects in an apparently limitless variety of hue; these culminated in 1973–4 in a series of large-format pictures such as "256 Colours". Richter painted three series of Color Chart paintings between 1966 and 1974, each series growing more ambitious in their attempt to create through their purely arbitrary arrangement of colors. The artist began his investigations into the complex permutations of color charts in 1966, with a small painting entitled "10 Colors". The charts provided anonymous and impersonal source material, a way for Richter to disassociate color from any traditional, descriptive, symbolic or expressive end. When he began to make these paintings, Richter had his friend Blinky Palermo randomly call out colors, which Richter then adopted for his work. Chance thus plays its role in the creation of his first series.


title: Gerhard Richter

text: Returning to color charts in the 1970s, Richter changed his focus from the readymade to the conceptual system, developing mathematical procedures for mixing colours and chance operations for their placement. The range of the colors he employed was determined by a mathematical system for mixing the primary colors in graduated amounts. Each color was then randomly ordered to create the resultant composition and form of the painting. Richter's second series of Color Charts was begun in 1971 and consisted of only five paintings. In the final series of Color Charts which preoccupied Richter throughout 1973 and 1974, additional elements to this permutational system of color production were added in the form of mixes of a light grey, a dark gray and later, a green.


title: Gerhard Richter

text: Richter's "4900 Colours" from 2007 consisted of bright monochrome squares that have been randomly arranged in a grid pattern to create stunning fields of kaleidoscopic color. It was produced at the same time he developed his design for the south transept window of Cologne Cathedral. "4900 Colours" consists of 196 panels in 25 colors that can be reassembled in 11 variations – from a single expansive surface to multiple small-format fields. Richter developed "Version II" – 49 paintings, each of which measures 97 by 97 centimeters – especially for the Serpentine Gallery.


title: Gerhard Richter

text: Richter began to use glass in his work in 1967, when he made "Four Panes of Glass". These plain sheets of glass could tilt away from the poles on which they were mounted at an angle that changed from one installation to the next. In 1970, he and Blinky Palermo jointly submitted designs for the sports facilities for the 1972 Olympic Games in Munich. For the front of the arena, they proposed an array of glass windows in twenty-seven different colors; each color would appear fifty times, with the distribution determined randomly. In 1981, for a two-person show with Georg Baselitz in Düsseldorf, Richter produced the first of the monumental transparent mirrors that appear intermittently thereafter in his oeuvre; the mirrors are significantly larger than Richter's paintings and feature adjustable steel mounts. For pieces such as "Mirror Painting (Grey, 735-2)" (1991), the mirrors were coloured grey by the pigment attached to the back of the glass. Arranged in two rooms, Richter presented an ensemble of paintings and colored mirrors in a special pavilion designed in collaboration with architect Paul Robbrecht at Documenta 9 in Kassel in 1992.


title: Gerhard Richter

text: In 2002, for the Dia Art Foundation, Richter created a glass sculpture in which seven parallel panes of glass refract light and the world beyond, offering altered visions of the exhibition space; "Spiegel I" (Mirror I) and "Spiegel II" (Mirror II), a two-part mirror piece from 1989 that measures 7' tall and 18' feet long, which alters the boundaries of the environment and again changes one's visual experience of the gallery; and "Kugel" (Sphere), 1992, a stainless steel sphere that acts as a mirror, reflecting the space. Since 2002, the artist has created a series of three dimensional glass constructions, such as "6 Standing Glass Panels" (2002/2011).


title: Gerhard Richter

text: In 2010, the Drawing Center showed "Lines which do not exist", a survey of Richter's drawings from 1966 to 2005, including works made using mechanical intervention such as attaching a pencil to an electric hand drill. It was the first career overview of Richter in the United States since "40 Years of Painting" at the Museum of Modern Art in 2002. In a review of "Lines which do not exist", R. H. Lossin wrote in "The Brooklyn Rail": "Viewed as a personal (and possibly professional) deficiency, Richter's drawing practice consisted of diligently documenting something that didn't work—namely a hand that couldn't draw properly. ...Richter displaces the concept of the artist's hand with hard evidence of his own, wobbly, failed, and very material appendage."


title: Gerhard Richter

text: Throughout his career, Richter has mostly declined lucrative licensing deals and private commissions. Measuring 9 by 9 ½ feet and depicting both the Milan Duomo and the square's 19th-century Galleria Vittorio Emanuele II, "Domplatz, Mailand" (1968) was a commission from Siemens, and it hung in that company's offices in Milan from 1968 to 1998. (In 1998, Sotheby's sold it in London, where it fetched what was then a record price for Richter, $3.6 million). In 1980, Richter and Isa Genzken were commissioned to design the König-Heinrich-Platz underground station in Duisburg; it was only completed in 1992. In 1986, Richter received a commission for two large-scale paintings – "Victoria I" and "Victoria II" – from the Victoria insurance company in Düsseldorf. In 1990, along with Sol LeWitt and Oswald Mathias Ungers, he created works for the Bayerische Hypotheken- und Wechselbank in Düsseldorf. In 1998, he installed a wall piece based on the colours of Germany's flag in the rebuilt Reichstag in Berlin. In 2012 he was asked to design the first page of the German newspaper "Die Welt". In 2017 Richter designed the label of the 2015 Chateau Mouton Rothschild's first wine of that year.


title: Gerhard Richter

text: In 2002, the same year as his MoMA retrospective, Richter was asked to design a stained glass window in the Cologne Cathedral.


title: Gerhard Richter

text: In August 2007, his window was unveiled. It is an abstract collage of 11,500 pixel-like squares in 72 colors, randomly arranged by computer (with some symmetry), reminiscent of his 1974 painting "4096 colours". The artist waived any fee, and the costs of materials and mounting the window came to around €370,000 ($506,000), covered by donations from more than 1,000 people. Cardinal Joachim Meisner did not attend the window's unveiling as he would have preferred it to have been a figurative representation of 20th century Christian martyrs and said that Richter's window would fit better in a mosque or other prayer house. A professed atheist with "a strong leaning towards Catholicism", Richter had his three children with his third wife baptized in the Cologne Cathedral.


title: Gerhard Richter

text: In September 2020, Richter unveiled his three 30-foot-tall stained-glass windows for the Tholey Abbey, one of the oldest monasteries in Germany. He called them his last major work, adding that he would focus on drawings and sketches from then on. The large choir windows were made by Gustva van Treeck, an esteemed glass workshop in nearby Munich. They are abstract painted works inspired by his "Pattern" series from the 1990s. An additional 34 figurative stained glass windows designed for the abbey by Afghan-German Muslim artist Mahbuba Maqsoodi are expected to be completed by Easter 2021. The monks of the abbey hoped the windows would promote tourism to the abbey and its town and bring people into the faith.


title: Gerhard Richter

text: Richter first began exhibiting in Düsseldorf in 1963. Richter had his first gallery solo show in 1964 at Galerie Schmela in Düsseldorf. Soon after, he had exhibitions in Munich and Berlin and by the early 1970s exhibited frequently throughout Europe and the United States. In 1966, Bruno Bischofberger was the first to show Richter's works outside Germany. Richter's first retrospective took place at the Kunsthalle Bremen in 1976 and covered works from 1962 to 1974. A traveling retrospective at Düsseldorf's Kunsthalle in 1986 was followed in 1991 by a retrospective at the Tate Gallery, London. In 1993, he received a major touring retrospective "Gerhard Richter: Malerei 1962–1993" curated by Kasper König, with a three volume catalogue edited by Benjamin Buchloh. This exhibition containing 130 works carried out over the course of thirty years, was to entirely reinvent Richter's career.