title: Fancy Bear

text: Fancy Bear is thought to have been responsible for a six-month-long cyber-attack on the German parliament that began in December 2014. On 5 May 2020, German federal prosecutors issued an arrest warrant for Dimitri Badin in relation with the attacks. The attack completely paralyzed the Bundestag's IT infrastructure in May 2015. To resolve the situation, the entire parliament had to be taken offline for days. IT experts estimate that a total of 16 gigabytes of data were downloaded from Parliament as part of the attack.


title: Fancy Bear

text: The group is also suspected to be behind a spear phishing attack in August 2016 on members of the Bundestag and multiple political parties such as Linken-faction leader Sahra Wagenknecht, Junge Union and the CDU of Saarland. Authorities feared that sensitive information could be gathered by hackers to later manipulate the public ahead of elections such as Germany's next federal election which was due in September 2017.


title: Fancy Bear

text: Five wives of U.S. military personnel received death threats from a hacker group calling itself "CyberCaliphate", claiming to be an Islamic State affiliate, on February 10, 2015. This was later discovered to have been a false flag attack by Fancy Bear, when the victims' email addresses were found to have been in the Fancy Bear phishing target list. Russian social media trolls have also been known to hype and rumor monger the threat of potential Islamic State terror attacks on U.S. soil in order to sow fear and political tension.


title: Fancy Bear

text: On April 8, 2015, French television network TV5Monde was the victim of a cyber-attack by a hacker group calling itself "CyberCaliphate" and claiming to have ties to the terrorist organization Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL). French investigators later discounted the theory that militant Islamists were behind the cyber-attack, instead suspecting the involvement of Fancy Bear.


title: Fancy Bear

text: Hackers breached the network's internal systems, possibly aided by passwords openly broadcast by TV5, overriding the broadcast programming of the company's 12 channels for over three hours. Service was only partially restored in the early hours of the following morning and normal broadcasting services were disrupted late into April 9. Various computerised internal administrative and support systems including e-mail were also still shut down or otherwise inaccessible due to the attack. The hackers also hijacked TV5Monde's Facebook and Twitter pages to post the personal information of relatives of French soldiers participating in actions against ISIS, along with messages critical of President François Hollande, arguing that the January 2015 terrorist attacks were "gifts" for his "unforgivable mistake" of partaking in conflicts that "[serve] no purpose".


title: Fancy Bear

text: The director-general of TV5Monde, Yves Bigot, later said that the attack nearly destroyed the company; if it had taken longer to restore broadcasting, satellite distribution channels would have been likely to cancel their contracts. The attack was designed to be destructive, both of equipment and of the company itself, rather than for propaganda or espionage, as had been the case for most other cyber-attacks. The attack was carefully planned; the first known penetration of the network was on January 23, 2015. The attackers then carried out reconnaissance of TV5Monde to understand the way in which it broadcast its signals, and constructed bespoke malicious software to corrupt and destroy the Internet-connected hardware that controlled the TV station's operations, such as the encoder systems. They used seven different points of entry, not all part of TV5Monde or even in France—one was a company based in the Netherlands that supplied the remote controlled cameras used in TV5's studios. Between February 16 and March 25 the attackers collected data on TV5 internal platforms, including its IT Internal Wiki, and verified that login credentials were still valid. During the attack, the hackers ran a series of commands extracted from TACACS logs to erase the firmware from switches and routers.


title: Fancy Bear

text: Although the attack purported to be from IS, France's cyber-agency told Bigot to say only that the messages "claimed to be" from IS. He was later told that evidence had been found that the attackers were the APT 28 group of Russian hackers. No reason was found for the targeting of TV5Monde, and the source of the order to attack, and funding for it, is not known. It has been speculated that it was probably an attempt to test forms of cyber-weaponry. The cost was estimated at €5m ($5.6m; £4.5m) in the first year, followed by recurring annual cost of over €3m ($3.4m; £2.7m) for new protection. The company's way of working had to change, with authentication of email, checking of flash drives before insertion, and so on, at significant detriment to efficiency for a news media company that must move information.


title: Fancy Bear

text: Security firm root9B released a report on Fancy Bear in May 2015 announcing its discovery of a targeted spear phishing attack aimed at financial institutions. The report listed international banking institutions that were targeted, including the United Bank for Africa, Bank of America, TD Bank, and UAE Bank. According to the root9B, preparations for the attacks started in June 2014 and the malware used "bore specific signatures that have historically been unique to only one organization, Sofacy." Security journalist Brian Krebs questioned the accuracy of root9B's claims, postulating that the attacks had actually originated from Nigerian phishers. In June 2015 well respected security researcher Claudio Guarnieri published a report based on his own investigation of a concurrent SOFACY attributed exploit against the German Bundestag and credited root9B with having reported, "the same IP address used as Command & Control server in the attack against Bundestag (176.31.112.10)", and went on to say that based on his examination of the Bundestag attack, "at least some" indicators contained within root9B's report appeared accurate, including a comparison of the hash of the malware sample from both incidents. root9B later published a technical report comparing Claudio's analysis of SOFACY attributed malware to their own sample, adding to the veracity of their original report.


title: Fancy Bear

text: In August 2015, Fancy Bear used a zero-day exploit of Java, spoofing the Electronic Frontier Foundation and launching attacks on the White House and NATO. The hackers used a spear phishing attack, directing emails to the false URL electronicfrontierfoundation.org.


title: Fancy Bear

text: In August 2016, the World Anti-Doping Agency reported the receipt of phishing emails sent to users of its database claiming to be official WADA communications requesting their login details. After reviewing the two domains provided by WADA, it was found that the websites' registration and hosting information were consistent with the Russian hacking group Fancy Bear. According to WADA, some of the data the hackers released had been forged.


title: Fancy Bear

text: Due to evidence of widespread doping by Russian athletes, WADA recommended that Russian athletes be barred from participating in the 2016 Rio Olympics and Paralympics. Analysts said they believed the hack was in part an act of retaliation against whistleblowing Russian athlete Yuliya Stepanova, whose personal information was released in the breach. In August 2016, WADA revealed that their systems had been breached, explaining that hackers from Fancy Bear had used an International Olympic Committee (IOC)-created account to gain access to their Anti-doping Administration and Management System (ADAMS) database. The hackers then used the website fancybear.net to leak what they said were the Olympic drug testing files of several athletes who had received therapeutic use exemptions, including gymnast Simone Biles, tennis players Venus and Serena Williams and basketball player Elena Delle Donne. The hackers honed in on athletes who had been granted exemptions by WADA for various reasons. Subsequent leaks included athletes from many other countries.


title: Fancy Bear

text: Eliot Higgins and other journalists associated with Bellingcat, a group researching the shooting down of Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 over Ukraine, were targeted by numerous spearphishing emails. The messages were fake Gmail security notices with Bit.ly and TinyCC shortened URLs. According to ThreatConnect, some of the phishing emails had originated from servers that Fancy Bear had used in previous attacks elsewhere. Bellingcat is known for having demonstrated that Russia is culpable for the shooting down of MH17, and is frequently derided by the Russian media.


title: Fancy Bear

text: The group targeted the Dutch Safety Board, the body conducting the official investigation into the crash, before and after the release of the board's final report. They set up fake SFTP and VPN servers to mimic the board's own servers, likely for the purpose of spearphishing usernames and passwords. A spokesman for the DSB said the attacks were not successful.


title: Fancy Bear

text: Fancy Bear carried out spear phishing attacks on email addresses associated with the Democratic National Committee in the first quarter of 2016. On March 10, phishing emails that were mainly directed at old email addresses of 2008 Democratic campaign staffers began to arrive. One of these accounts may have yielded up to date contact lists. The next day, phishing attacks expanded to the non-public email addresses of high level Democratic Party officials. Hillaryclinton.com addresses were attacked, but required two factor authentication for access. The attack redirected towards Gmail accounts on March 19. Podesta's Gmail account was breached the same day, with 50,000 emails stolen. The phishing attacks intensified in April, although the hackers seemed to become suddenly inactive for the day on April 15, which in Russia was a holiday in honor of the military's electronic warfare services. The malware used in the attack sent stolen data to the same servers that were used for the group's 2015 attack on the German parliament.


title: Fancy Bear

text: On June 14, CrowdStrike released a report publicizing the DNC hack and identifying Fancy Bear as the culprits. An online persona, Guccifer 2.0, then appeared, claiming sole credit for the breach.


title: Fancy Bear

text: Another sophisticated hacking group attributed to the Russian Federation, nicknamed Cozy Bear, was also present in the DNC's servers at the same time. However the two groups each appeared to be unaware of the other, as each independently stole the same passwords and otherwise duplicated their efforts. Cozy Bear appears to be a different agency, one more interested in traditional long-term espionage. A CrowdStrike forensic team determined that while Cozy Bear had been on the DNC's network for over a year, Fancy Bear had only been there a few weeks.


title: Fancy Bear

text: According to CrowdStrike from 2014 to 2016, the group used Android malware to target the Ukrainian Army's Rocket Forces and Artillery. They distributed an infected version of an Android app whose original purpose was to control targeting data for the D-30 Howitzer artillery. The app, used by Ukrainian officers, was loaded with the X-Agent spyware and posted online on military forums. CrowdStrike initially claimed that more than 80% of Ukrainian D-30 Howitzers were destroyed in the war, the highest percentage loss of any artillery pieces in the army (a percentage that had never been previously reported and would mean the loss of nearly the entire arsenal of the biggest artillery piece of the Ukrainian Armed Forces). According to the Ukrainian army CrowdStrike's numbers were incorrect and that losses in artillery weapons "were way below those reported" and that these losses "have nothing to do with the stated cause". CrowdStrike has since revised this report after the International Institute for Strategic Studies (IISS) disavowed its original report, claiming that the malware hacks resulted in losses of 15–20% rather than their original figure of 80%.


title: Fancy Bear

text: On October 31, 2016, Google's Threat Analysis Group revealed a zero-day vulnerability in most Microsoft Windows versions that is the subject of active malware attacks. On November 1, 2016, Microsoft Executive Vice President of the Windows and Devices Group Terry Myerson posted to Microsoft's Threat Research & Response Blog, acknowledging the vulnerability and explaining that a "low-volume spear-phishing campaign" targeting specific users had utilized "two zero-day vulnerabilities in Adobe Flash and the down-level Windows kernel." Microsoft pointed to Fancy Bear as the threat actor, referring to the group by their in-house code name "STRONTIUM".


title: Fancy Bear

text: In February 2017, the General Intelligence and Security Service (AIVD) of the Netherlands revealed that Fancy Bear and Cozy Bear had made several attempts to hack into Dutch ministries, including the Ministry of General Affairs, over the previous six months. Rob Bertholee, head of the AIVD, said on "EenVandaag" that the hackers were Russian and had tried to gain access to secret government documents.


title: Fancy Bear

text: In a briefing to parliament, Dutch Minister of the Interior and Kingdom Relations Ronald Plasterk announced that votes for the Dutch general election in March 2017 would be counted by hand.


title: Fancy Bear

text: The officials of International Association of Athletics Federations (IAAF) stated in April 2017 that its servers had been hacked by the "Fancy Bear" group. The attack was detected by cybersecurity firm Context Information Security which identified that an unauthorised remote access to IAAF's servers had taken place on February 21. IAAF stated that the hackers had accessed the "Therapeutic Use Exemption" applications, needed to use medications prohibited by WADA.


title: Fancy Bear

text: Researchers from Trend Micro in 2017 released a report outlining attempts by Fancy Bear to target groups related to the election campaigns of Emmanuel Macron and Angela Merkel. According to the report, they targeted the Macron campaign with phishing and attempting to install malware on their site. French government cybersecurity agency ANSSI confirmed these attacks took place, but could not confirm APT28's responsibility. Marine Le Pen's campaign does not appear to have been targeted by APT28, possibly indicating Russian preference for her campaign. Putin had previously touted the benefits to Russia if Marine Le Pen were elected.


title: Fancy Bear

text: The report says they then targeted the German Konrad Adenauer Foundation and Friedrich Ebert Foundation, groups that are associated with Angela Merkel's Christian Democratic Union and opposition Social Democratic Party, respectively. Fancy Bear set up fake email servers in late 2016 to send phishing emails with links to malware.


title: Fancy Bear

text: On January 10, 2018, the "Fancy Bears Hack Team" online persona leaked what appeared to be stolen International Olympic Committee (IOC) and U.S. Olympic Committee emails, dated from late 2016 to early 2017, were leaked in apparent retaliation for the IOC's banning of Russian athletes from the 2018 Winter Olympics as a sanction for Russia's systematic doping program. The attack resembles the earlier World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA) leaks. It is not known whether the emails are fully authentic, because of Fancy Bear's history of salting stolen emails with disinformation. The mode of attack was also not known, but was probably phishing.


title: Fancy Bear

text: Cyber Security experts have also claimed that attacks also appear to have been targeting the professional sports drug test bottling company known as the Berlinger Group.


title: Fancy Bear

text: The Swedish Sports Confederation reported Fancy Bear was responsible for an attack on its computers, targeting records of athletes' doping tests.


title: Fancy Bear

text: The software company Microsoft reported in August 2018 that the group had attempted to steal data from political organizations such as the International Republican Institute and the Hudson Institute think tanks. The attacks were thwarted when Microsoft security staff won control of six net domains. In its announcement Microsoft advised that "we currently have no evidence these domains were used in any successful attacks before the DCU transferred control of them, nor do we have evidence to indicate the identity of the ultimate targets of any planned attack involving these domains".


title: Fancy Bear

text: According to the August 2018 report by the Associated Press, Fancy Bear had been for years targeting the email correspondence of the officials of the Ecumenical Patriarchate of Constantinople headed by the Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew I. The publication appeared at a time of heightened tensions between the Ecumenical Patriarchate, the seniormost of all the Eastern Orthodox Churches, and the Russian Orthodox Church (the Moscow Patriarchate) over the issue of the full ecclesiastical independence (autocephaly) for the Orthodox Church in Ukraine, sought after by the Ukrainian government. The publication cited experts as saying that the grant of autocephaly to the Church in Ukraine would erode the power and prestige of the Moscow Patriarchate and would undermine its claims of transnational jurisdiction. Cyber attacks also targeted Orthodox Christians in other countries as well as Muslims, Jews and Catholics in the United States, Ummah, an umbrella group for Ukrainian Muslims, the papal nuncio in Kiev and Yosyp Zisels, who directs Ukraine's Association of Jewish Organizations and Communities.


title: Fancy Bear

text: In October 2018, an indictment by a U.S. federal grand jury of seven Russian men, all GRU officers, in relation to the attacks was unsealed. The indictment states that from December 2014 until a least May 2018, the GRU officers conspired to conduct "persistent and sophisticated computer intrusions affecting U.S. persons, corporate entities, international organizations, and their respective employees located around the world, based on their strategic interest to the Russian government." The U.S. Department of Justice stated that the conspiracy, among other goals, aimed "to publicize stolen information as part of an influence and disinformation campaign designed to undermine, retaliate against, and otherwise delegitimize" the efforts of the World Anti-Doping Agency, an international anti-doping organization that had published the McLaren Report, a report that exposed extensive doping of Russian athletes sponsored by the Russian government. The defendants were charged with computer hacking, wire fraud, aggravated identity theft, and money laundering.


title: Fancy Bear

text: In February 2019, Microsoft announced that it had detected spear-phishing attacks from APT28, aimed at employees of the German Marshall Fund, Aspen Institute Germany, and the German Council on Foreign Relations. Hackers from the group purportedly sent phishing e-mails to 104 email addresses across Europe in an attempt to gain access to employer credentials and infect sites with malware.


title: Fancy Bear

text: In 2020, the Czech reported a cyber-espionage incident in an unnamed strategic institution, possibly the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, most likely carried out by Fancy Bear.


title: Fancy Bear

text: In August 2020 the Norwegian Storting reported a "significant cyber attack" on their e-mail system. In September 2020, Norway's foreign minister, Ine Marie Eriksen Søreide, accused Russia of the attack. Norwegian Police Security Service concluded in December 2020 that "The analyses show that it is likely that the operation was carried out by the cyber actor referred to in open sources as APT28 and Fancy Bear," and that "sensitive content has been extracted from some of the affected email accounts.".


title: Fancy Bear

text: Fancy Bear employs advanced methods consistent with the capabilities of state actors. They use spear phishing emails, malware drop websites disguised as news sources, and zero-day vulnerabilities. One cybersecurity research group noted their use of six different zero-day exploits in 2015, a technical feat that would require large numbers of programmers seeking out previously unknown vulnerabilities in top-of-the-line commercial software. This is regarded as a sign that Fancy Bear is a state-run program and not a gang or a lone hacker.


title: Fancy Bear

text: One of Fancy Bear's preferred targets is web-based email services. A typical compromise will consist of web-based email users receiving an email urgently requesting that they change their passwords to avoid being hacked. The email will contain a link to a spoof website that is designed to mimic a real webmail interface, users will attempt to login and their credentials will be stolen. The URL is often obscured as a shortened bit.ly link in order to get past spam filters. Fancy Bear sends these phishing emails primarily on Mondays and Fridays. They also send emails purportedly containing links to news items, but instead linking to malware drop sites that install toolkits onto the target's computer. Fancy Bear also registers domains that resemble legitimate websites, then create a spoof of the site to steal credentials from their victims. Fancy Bear has been known to relay its command traffic through proxy networks of victims that it has previously compromised.


title: Fancy Bear

text: Software that Fancy Bear has used includes ADVSTORESHELL, CHOPSTICK, JHUHUGIT, and XTunnel. Fancy Bear utilises a number of implants, including Foozer, WinIDS, X-Agent, X-Tunnel, Sofacy, and DownRange droppers. Based on compile times, FireEye concluded that Fancy Bear has consistently updated their malware since 2007. To avert detection, Fancy Bear returns to the environment to switch their implants, changes its command and control channels, and modifies its persistent methods. The threat group implements counter-analysis techniques to obfuscate their code. They add junk data to encoded strings, making decoding difficult without the junk removal algorithm. Fancy Bear takes measures to prevent forensic analysis of its hacks, resetting the timestamps on files and periodically clearing the event logs.


title: Fancy Bear

text: According to an indictment by the United States Special Counsel, X-Agent was "developed, customized, and monitored" by GRU Lieutenant Captain Nikolay Yuryevich Kozachek.


title: Fancy Bear

text: Fancy Bear has been known to tailor implants for target environments, for instance reconfiguring them to use local email servers. In August 2015, Kaspersky Lab detected and blocked a version of the ADVSTORESHELL implant that had been used to target defense contractors. An hour and a half following the block, Fancy Bear actors had compiled and delivered a new backdoor for the implant.


title: Fancy Bear

text: Unit 26165 was involved in the design of the curriculum at several Moscow public schools, including School 1101.


title: Fancy Bear

text: Fancy Bear sometimes creates online personas to sow disinformation, deflect blame, and create plausible deniability for their activities.


title: Fancy Bear

text: An online persona that first appeared and claimed responsibility for the DNC hacks the same day the story broke that Fancy Bear was responsible. Guccifer 2.0 claims to be a Romanian hacker, but when interviewed by "Motherboard" magazine, they were asked questions in Romanian and appeared to be unable to speak the language. Some documents they have released appear to be forgeries cobbled together from material from previous hacks and publicly available information, then salted with disinformation.


title: Fancy Bear

text: A website created to leak documents taken in the WADA and IAAF attacks was fronted with a brief manifesto dated September 13, 2016, proclaiming that the site is owned by "Fancy Bears' hack team", which it said is an "international hack team" who "stand for fair play and clean sport". The site took responsibility for hacking WADA and promised that it would provide "sensational proof of famous athletes taking doping substances", beginning with the US Olympic team, which it said "disgraced its name by tainted victories". WADA said some of the documents leaked under this name were forgeries, and that data had been changed.


title: Fancy Bear

text: A Twitter account named "Anonymous Poland" (@) claimed responsibility for the attack on the World Anti-Doping Agency and released data stolen from the Court of Arbitration for Sport, a secondary target. ThreatConnect supports the view that Anonymous Poland is a sockpuppet of Fancy Bear, noting the change from a historical focus on internal politics. A screen capture video uploaded by Anonymous Poland shows an account with Polish language settings, but their browser history showed that they had made searches in Google.ru (Russia) and Google.com (US), but not in Google.pl (Poland).


title: Felix Pappalardi

text: Felix A. Pappalardi Jr. (December 30, 1939 – April 17, 1983) was an American music producer, songwriter, vocalist, and bassist. He is best known as the bassist and co-lead vocalist of the band Mountain, whose song "Mississippi Queen" peaked at number 21 on the "Billboard" Hot 100 and has become a classic rock radio staple. Originating in the eclectic music scene in New York's Greenwich Village, he became closely attached to the British power trio Cream, writing, arranging, and producing for their second album "Disraeli Gears". As a producer for Atlantic Records, he worked on several projects with guitarist Leslie West; in 1969 their partnership evolved into the band Mountain. The band lasted less than five years, but their work influenced the first generation of heavy metal and hard rock music. Pappalardi continued to work as a producer, session musician, and songwriter until he was shot and killed by his wife Gail Collins in 1983.


title: Felix Pappalardi

text: Pappalardi was born in the Bronx, New York City. A classically trained musician, he graduated from New York City's The High School of Music & Art and attended the University of Michigan.


title: Felix Pappalardi

text: In 1964, Pappalardi was a member of Max Morath's Original Rag Quartet (ORQ) in their premier engagement at New York's Village Vanguard with several other musicians. Along with Pappalardi on guitarrón (Mexican acoustic bass) were pianist-singer Morath, who revived classic ragtime played in the Scott Joplin manner, Barry Kornfeld, a New York studio folk and jazz guitarist, and Jim Tyler, a Baroque and Renaissance lutenist, playing four-string banjo and mandolin. The ORQ then toured the college and concert circuit during the following year, and opened four engagements with the Dinah Shore show in Las Vegas and elsewhere. Pappalardi studied classical music at the University of Michigan. Upon completing his studies and returning to New York, he was unable to find work and so became part of the Greenwich Village folk-music scene where he made a name for himself as a skilled arranger; he also appeared on albums by Tom Paxton as well as Vince Martin and Fred Neil for Elektra Records. From there he moved into record production, initially concentrating on folk and folk-rock acts for artists such as The Youngbloods and Joan Baez.


title: Felix Pappalardi

text: As a producer, Pappalardi is perhaps best known for his work with Cream, beginning with their second album, "Disraeli Gears". He contributed instrumentation for his studio arrangements and he and his wife, Gail Collins, wrote the Cream hit "Strange Brew" with Eric Clapton. He also produced The Youngbloods' first album.


title: Felix Pappalardi

text: As a musician, Pappalardi is widely recognized as a bassist, vocalist, and founding member of the American hard rock band (and heavy metal forerunner) Mountain, a band born out of his working with future bandmate Leslie West's soul-inspired rock and roll band The Vagrants, and producing West's 1969 "Mountain" solo album. The band's original incarnation actively recorded and toured between 1969 and 1971. Pappalardi produced the band's albums, and co-wrote and arranged a number of the band's songs with Collins and West.


title: Felix Pappalardi

text: The band's signature song "Mississippi Queen" is still heard regularly on classic rock radio stations. They also had a hit with the song "Nantucket Sleighride" written by Pappalardi and Collins.


title: Felix Pappalardi

text: Pappalardi generally played Gibson basses on Mountain's live and studio recordings. He was most often seen with an EB-1 violin bass but there are also photographs of him playing an EB-0 live (likely because they had the same pickup configuration and scale length). Pappalardi obtained his sound by playing Gibson basses with a single Humbucker in the neck through a set of Sunn amplifiers that, he claimed, once belonged to Jimi Hendrix.


title: Felix Pappalardi

text: Pappalardi was forced to retire because of partial deafness, ostensibly from his high-volume shows with Mountain. He continued producing throughout the 1970s, released a solo album ("Don't Worry, Ma") and recorded with Kazuo Takeda's band Creation (who had opened for a reunited Mountain during their 1973 tour of Japan).


title: Felix Pappalardi

text: In May 1973, the British music magazine "NME" reported that Pappalardi would be producing and playing bass on "Queen of the Night", the debut album for Maggie Bell, former singer of Stone the Crows, but this proved to be false.


title: Felix Pappalardi

text: Pappalardi was shot and killed by his wife, Gail Collins Pappalardi, on April 17, 1983, in their apartment on the East Side of Manhattan, with a derringer he had given her as a gift a few months previously. She was subsequently charged with second-degree murder and was found guilty of the lesser criminally negligent homicide.


title: Place of worship

text: A place of worship is a specially designed structure or space where individuals or a group of people such as a congregation come to perform acts of devotion, veneration, or religious study. A building constructed or used for this purpose is sometimes called a house of worship. Temples, churches, mosques, and synagogues are examples of structures created for worship. A monastery may serve both to house those belonging to religious orders and as a place of worship for visitors. Natural or topographical features may also serve as places of worship, and are considered holy or sacrosanct in some religions; the rituals associated with the Ganges river are an example in Hinduism.


title: Place of worship

text: Under International Humanitarian Law and the Geneva Conventions, religious buildings are offered special protection, similar to the protection guaranteed hospitals displaying the Red Cross or Red Crescent. These international laws of war bar firing upon or from a religious building.


title: Place of worship

text: Religious architecture expresses the religious beliefs, aesthetic choices, and economic and technological capacity of those who create or adapt it, and thus places of worship show great variety depending on time and place.


title: Place of worship

text: The word "church" derives from the Greek "ekklesia", meaning "the called-out ones". Its original meaning is to refer to the body of believers, or the body of Christ. The word "church" is used to refer to a Christian place of worship by some Christian denominations, including Anglicans and Catholics. Other Christian denominations, including the Religious Society of Friends, Mennonites, Christadelphians, and some unitarians, object to the use of the word "church" to refer to a building, as they argue that this word should be reserved for the body of believers who worship there. Instead, these groups use words such as "Hall" to identify their places of worship or any building in use by them for the purpose of assembly.


title: Place of worship

text: A Hindu temple is a symbolic house, seat and body of god. It is a structure designed to bring human beings and gods together, using symbolism to express the ideas and beliefs of Hinduism. The symbolism and structure of a Hindu temple are rooted in Vedic traditions, deploying circles and squares. A temple incorporates all elements of Hindu cosmos—presenting the good, the evil and the human, as well as the elements of Hindu sense of cyclic time and the essence of life—symbolically presenting dharma, kama, artha, moksa, and karma.


title: Place of worship

text: A mosque (/mɒsk/; from ), literally meaning "place of prostration", with the same root as "سجدہ", is a place of worship for followers of Islam.


title: Place of worship

text: There are strict and detailed requirements in Sunni jurisprudence (fiqh) for a place of worship to be considered a masjid, with places that do not meet these requirements regarded as musallas. There are stringent restrictions on the uses of the area formally demarcated as the mosque (which is often a small portion of the larger complex), and, in the Islamic Sharia law, after an area is formally designated as a mosque, it remains so until the Last Day.


title: Place of worship

text: Many mosques have elaborate domes, minarets, and prayer halls, in varying styles of architecture. Mosques originated on the Arabian Peninsula, but are now found in all inhabited continents. The mosque serves as a place where Muslims can come together for salat (صلاة ṣalāt, meaning "prayer") as well as a center for information, education, social welfare, and dispute settlement. The imam leads the congregation in prayer.


title: Place of worship

text: Derasar is a word used for a Jain temple in Gujarat and southern Rajasthan. Basadi is a Jain shrine or temple in Karnataka


title: UFO religion

text: A UFO religion is any religion in which the existence of extraterrestrial (ET) entities operating unidentified flying objects (UFOs) is an element of belief. Typically, adherents of such religions believe the ETs to be interested in the welfare of humanity which either already is, or eventually will become, part of a pre-existing ET civilization. Other religions predate the UFO era of the mid 20th century, but incorporate ETs into a more supernatural worldview in which the UFO occupants are more akin to angels than physical aliens, but this distinction may be blurred within the overall subculture. These religions have their roots in the tropes of early science fiction (especially space opera) and weird fiction writings, in ufology, and in the subculture of UFO sightings and alien abduction stories. Historians have considered the Aetherius Society, founded by George King, to be the first UFO religion.


title: UFO religion

text: Some adherents of UFO religions believe that the arrival or rediscovery of alien civilizations, technologies, and spirituality will enable humans to overcome current ecological, spiritual, and social problems. Issues such as hatred, war, bigotry, poverty and so on are said to be resolvable through the use of superior alien technology and spiritual abilities. Such belief systems are also described as millenarian in their outlook.


title: UFO religion

text: UFO religions developed first in such countries as the United States, Canada, France, the United Kingdom, and Japan as the concept presumes the cultural context of a society technologically advanced enough to conceive of ET as such and one in which religion of any kind is not discouraged or suppressed. The term "flying saucers" and the popular notion of the UFO originated in 1947. The study of UFO religions among sociologists, historians, theologians, scholars of religious studies and new religious movements began during the 1950s.


title: UFO religion

text: The Aetherius Society was founded in the United Kingdom in 1955. Its founder, George King, claimed to have been contacted telepathically by an alien intelligence called Aetherius, who represented an "Interplanetary Parliament." According to Aetherians, their society acts as a vehicle through which "Cosmic Transmissions of advanced metaphysical significance" can be disseminated to humanity. These "transmissions" were recorded on magnetic reel-to-reel tape by persons present during each "telepathic transmission" as George King sat in a state of "Samadhi" and the "transmission" was "delivered" via his own voicebox. In 1956 and 1957, and on occasion before a public audience, several of these "transmissions" forecast flying saucer activity in specific parts of the world on certain dates (You Are Responsible! Aetherius Society 1961). Shortly after these dates, newspapers, such as the "Sunday Times" and "The Daily Telegraph", reported sightings which coincided with the dates and locations forecast in these "transmissions". As a spiritual teacher, George King taught certain yoga practices, spiritual healing, Eastern mantra and "dynamic prayer"—tools for spiritual self-advancement and service to the world—which the Aetherius Society is principally based upon.


title: UFO religion

text: Founded in 1979 with the publication of "SubGenius Pamphlet #1" by Ivan Stang and Philo Drummond, the Church of the SubGenius has been known as a "parody religion" due to its extensive use of comedy and parody. In spite of this, the organization claims over 10,000 followers worldwide who have paid $30 to become "ordained SubGenius ministers", and it has been embraced by many skeptic and atheist groups. With the publication of "The Book of the SubGenius" in 1983, the Church of the SubGenius prophesied that its founder, J.R. "Bob" Dobbs, was in contact with an exterrestrial race called the Xists ("X-ists"), and these Xists were scheduled to launch a worldwide invasion of Earth on July 5, 1998. (See also: X-Day (Church of the SubGenius)) The day of the scheduled invasion came and went without an appearance by the Xists, but church members remain unconvinced. The church now holds annual "X-Day" celebrations on July 5 of every year. The church also claims that its members are not entirely human, having descended from the Yeti.


title: UFO religion

text: The Heaven's Gate group achieved notoriety in 1997 when founder Marshall Applewhite convinced 39 followers to commit mass suicide. Members reportedly believed themselves to be aliens, awaiting a spaceship that would arrive with Comet Hale-Bopp. The suicide was undertaken in the apparent belief that their souls would be transported onto the spaceship, which they thought was hiding behind the comet. They underwent elaborate preparations for their trip, including purchasing and wearing matching shoes and living in a darkened house to simulate the long journey they expected to have in outer space.


title: UFO religion

text: The International Raëlian Movement has been described as "the largest UFO religion in the world." Raëlians believe that scientifically advanced extraterrestrials, known as the Elohim, created life on Earth through genetic engineering, and that a combination of human cloning and "mind transfer" can ultimately provide eternal life. Past religious teachers, like Jesus, Buddha and Muhammad, are said to have been sent by these scientifically advanced extraterrestrials to teach humanity. The Elohim are said to be planning a future visit to complete their revelation and education of humanity.


title: UFO religion

text: Raëlian Priest Thomas said on this topic, "The difference between Raëlians and Heaven's Gate and Jim Jones etc., is that the others destructively believed in a God who would give them a better life after death, just like most believers in a monotheistic religion do today, and hence the risk for suicide chasing afterlife rewards … as Raëlians we want the best right now in our life, who would want to die now in that scenario with all those pleasures to enjoy? Raëlians believe in enjoying life now, with happiness and laughter."


title: UFO religion

text: Scientology has been discussed in the context of UFO religions in "UFO Religions" by Christopher Partridge, "The Encyclopedic Sourcebook of UFO Religions" by James R. Lewis, and "UFO Religion: Inside Flying Saucer Cults and Culture" by Gregory Reece. Stories of extraterrestrial civilizations and interventions in past lives form a part of the belief system of Scientology. The most well-known story publicized and held up to ridicule by critics is that of Xenu, the ruler of the Galactic Confederacy who is said to have brought billions of frozen people to Earth 75 million years ago and placed them near a number of volcanoes, and dropped hydrogen bombs into them, thus killing the entire population in an effort to solve overpopulation. The spirits of these people were then captured by Xenu and mass implanted with numerous suggestions and then "packaged" into clusters of spirits.


title: UFO religion

text: From the early 1950s onward, Scientology's founder, L. Ron Hubbard, published a number of books, lectures, and other works describing what he termed "space opera".


title: UFO religion

text: Scientology teaches that all humans have experienced innumerable past lives, including lives in ancient advanced extraterrestrial societies, such as Helatrobus and the Marcabians. Traumatic memories from these past lives are said to be the cause of many present-day physical and mental ailments. Scientologists also believe that human beings possess superhuman powers which cannot be restored until they have been fully rehabilitated as spiritual beings through the practice of "auditing", using methods set out by Hubbard in his various works.


title: UFO religion

text: According to Hubbard, a thetan (the Scientology term for a soul) has a body. When that body dies the thetan goes to a "landing station" on the planet Venus, where they are re-implanted and are programmed to forget their previous lifetimes. The Venusians then "capsule" each thetan and send them back to Earth to be dumped into the Gulf of California; whereupon, each thetan searches for a new body to inhabit. To avoid these inconveniences, Hubbard advised Scientologists to simply refuse to go to Venus after their death.


title: UFO religion

text: Founded by Ernest L. Norman and his wife, Ruth, in 1954, the Unarians are a group headquartered in El Cajon, California, who believe that, through the use of Four-dimensional space physics, they are able to communicate with supposed advanced intelligent beings that allegedly exist on "higher frequency" planes. Unarians believe in past lives and hold that the Solar System was once inhabited by ancient interplanetary civilizations.


title: UFO religion

text: "The Universal Industrial Church of the New World Comforter" is a UFO religion of the One World Family Commune founded in 1967 by Allen Michael (formerly Noonan). Michael claimed that in 1947, under his birth name Allen Noonan, while he was a pictorial sign painter in Long Beach, California, he was contacted by the Great Galactic Being that was manifesting itself as the Milky Way galaxy. He was asked to serve as the spiritual Comforter and preach supernatural truth to the world. During his services Michael often quoted from and provided his interpretations of the Bible. In 1967 in the Haight and Ashbury neighborhood of San Francisco, he founded the One World Family Commune as a pilot model of living that he was preaching as the Comforter. He claimed to have physically encountered a flying saucer in 1954 at Giant Rock in the Mojave Desert of California. During the Summer of Love, he began the One World Family Commune opening a vegan restaurant on the northeast corner of Haight and Scott streets in San Francisco, California, called the "Here and Now." 7 similar restaurants followed. In 1969, the commune established a vegan restaurant in a much larger space on Telegraph Avenue and Haste Street in Berkeley and the name of the restaurant was changed to "Mustard Seed" and later became "One World Family Natural Food Center", which also included a bakery, a pizzeria, a clothing store and an assembly room for public events. They lived in two adjacent houses that are now home to the Lothlorien house of the Berkeley Student Cooperative. The commune published a vegetarian cookbook called "Cosmic Cookery". There was a large mural on the side of the restaurant painted by Allen Michael that had written above it the phrase "Farmers, Workers, Soldiers Unite — The People's Spiritual Reformation 1776–1976!" The farmer was holding a pitchfork, the worker was holding a hammer, and the soldier was holding a gun, and they had their arms around each other's shoulders. Above the three were three flying saucers coming in for a landing. In 1973, Allen Michael founded "The Universal Industrial Church of the New World Comforter" and published the first volume of his channeled revelations, "The Everlasting Gospel". In 1975, the church headquarters and the vegetarian restaurant relocated to Stockton, California. Allen Noonan ran for president of the United States in the 1980 and 1984 elections on the "Utopian Synthesis Party" ticket.


title: UFO religion

text: The Universe People or "Cosmic people of light powers" (Czech: "Vesmírní lidé sil světla") is a Czech movement centered around Ivo A. Benda. Its belief system is based upon the existence of extraterrestrial civilizations communicating with Benda and other "contacters" since October 1997 telepathically and later by direct personal contact. According to Benda, those civilizations operate a fleet of spaceships led by Ashtar (sometimes written "Ashtar Sheran") orbiting and closely watching the Earth, helping the good and waiting to transport the followers into another dimension. The Universe People teaching incorporates various elements from ufology (some foreign "contacters" are credited, though often also renounced after a time as misguided or deceptive), Christianity (Jesus was a "fine-vibrations" being) and conspiracy theories (forces of evil are supposed to plan compulsory chipping of the populace).


title: UFO religion

text: The Ascended Master Teachings are a group of religions based on Theosophy. In the traditional Ascended Master Teachings of Guy Ballard and Elizabeth Clare Prophet, no mention is made of UFOs or flying saucers. However, the Ascended Master Teachings teacher Joshua David Stone in his teachings began, beginning in 1993, to refer to Ashtar, believed by some UFO enthusiasts to be the commander of a flying saucer fleet called the "Ashtar Galactic Command" that operates near Earth (crewed mostly by Venusians), as a Master along with the more traditional ascended masters. He continued to include "Ashtar" on his list of ascended masters that he mentioned he received dictations from when speaking at his yearly "Wesak Festival" Mount Shasta gatherings that began to be held in 1996. Stone also taught that the Master Jesus, under his "galactic" name Sananda, sometimes rides with "Commander Ashtar" in his flying saucer fleet.


title: UFO religion

text: According to Mormon scripture, the Earth is just one of many inhabited worlds, and there are many governing heavenly bodies, including the planet or star Kolob, which is said to be nearest the throne of God. Kolob is a star or planet described in the Book of Abraham. According to Mormon cosmology, the Earth was created near Kolob over a period of 6,000 years, then moved to its present position in the Solar System.


title: UFO religion

text: Elijah Muhammed claimed that the biblical Book of Ezekiel describes a "Mother Plane" or great "Wheel". Elijah reported in his books that his mentor, Wallace Fard Muhammad, claimed that there was hidden technology on the Earth which selected scientists all around the world are secretly aware of. Fard explained that he had a huge "Mother Plane" or "Wheel" constructed on the island of Nippon (Japan) in 1929. The movement's current leader, Louis Farrakhan, describes the "Mother Plane" thus:


title: UFO religion

text: The Honorable Elijah Muhammad told us of a giant Motherplane that is made like the universe, spheres within spheres. White people call them unidentified flying objects (UFOs). Ezekiel, in the Old Testament, saw a wheel that looked like a cloud by day but a pillar of fire by night. The Hon. Elijah Muhammad said that that wheel was built on the island of Nippon, which is now called Japan, by some of the original scientists. It took 15 billion dollars in gold at that time to build it. It is made of the toughest steel. America does not yet know the composition of the steel used to make an instrument like it. It is a circular plane, and the Bible says that it never makes turns. Because of its circular nature it can stop and travel in all directions at speeds of thousands of miles per hour. He said there are 1,500 small wheels in this mother wheel which is a half mile by a half mile (800 by 800 m). This Mother Wheel is like a small human built planet. Each one of these small planes carry three bombs.


title: UFO religion

text: The Theosophical-influenced artist and esotericist Benjamin Creme of Share International claimed that the Messiah figure he referred to as Maitreya is in telepathic contact with UFO's. Creme believed that the so-called "Space Brothers" live on the etheric planes of Venus, Mars and Jupiter and visit earth in flying saucers. Creme accepted George Adamski's UFO sightings as valid. According to Creme, the Space Brothers have mother ships up to four or five miles long. It is also believed by Creme's group, in common with the followers of Alice Bailey that the governing deity of Earth, Sanat Kumara (who is believed to live in a city called Shamballa located above the Gobi desert on the etheric plane of Earth), originally came from Venus 18,500,000 years ago. Adherents to Creme's teachings believe there is regular flying saucer traffic between Mars and Venus and the Earth in order to neutralize nuclear radiation, and that crop circles are mostly caused by flying saucers from these two planets.


title: UFO religion

text: An esoteric Nazi Gnostic sect headquartered in Vienna, Austria, called the Tempelhofgesellschaft, founded in the early 1990s, teaches what it calls a form of Marcionism. They distribute pamphlets claiming that the Aryan race originally came to Atlantis from the star Aldebaran (this information is supposedly based on "ancient Sumerian manuscripts"). They maintain that the Aryans from Aldebaran derive their power from the vril energy of the Black Sun. They teach that since the Aryan race is of extraterrestrial origin it has a divine mission to dominate all the other races. It is believed by adherents of this religion that an enormous space fleet is on its way to Earth from Aldebaran which, when it arrives, will join forces with the "Nazi Flying Saucers from Antarctica" to establish the Western Imperium.


title: UFO religion

text: This sect was originally a splinter group of the Brahma Kumaris and is known for a police and media scare in which an alleged attempt to commit ritual suicide took place in Teide National Park in Tenerife in 1998. Apparently, the 32 members of the sect believed that they would be collected by a spacecraft and taken to an unspecified destination.


title: UFO religion

text: The New Message from God is at once both a set of teachings with claims of divine authority and the new religious movement that promotes these teachings. It is entirely based on the work of Marshall Vian Summers, who is granted elevated status as "the Messenger" on the basis of these teachings. Summers and his adherents represent that he is a prophet on the order of the Buddha, Jesus, and Muhammad, in receipt of an unworldly communication having salvific power for individuals and for the planet among others in a populated universe. Summers has recorded these communications on tape, the transcription approaching ten thousand pages. Key components of this communication include warnings of an incursion upon Earth called the Intervention, and pronouncements about the future involving global upheaval and interaction between the human race and extraterrestrials which, Summers claims, are from "the Greater Community."


title: Menton

text: Menton (; , written "Menton" in classical norm or "Mentan" in Mistralian norm; ) is a commune in the Alpes-Maritimes department in the Provence-Alpes-Côte d'Azur region on the French Riviera, close to the Italian border.


title: Menton

text: Menton has always been a frontier town. Since the end of the 14th century, it was on the border between County of Nice, held by the Duke of Savoy, and Republic of Genoa. It was an exclave of the Principality of Monaco until the disputed French plebiscite of 1860, when it was added to France. It had been always a fashionable tourist centre with grand mansions and gardens. Its temperate Mediterranean climate is especially favourable to the citrus industry, with which it is strongly identified.


title: Menton

text: Although the name's spelling and pronunciation in French are identical to those for the word that means "chin", there does not seem to be any link with this French word. According to the French geographer Ernest Nègre, the name "Menton" comes from the Roman name "Mento". However, it is possible that the name of the city comes from "Mons Ottonis" (reconstituted) from the name of Otton II, the count of Ventimiglia from 1162-1200. In Mentonasc, the city's name is "Mentan" (), and in Italian "Mentone" ().


title: Menton

text: An inhabitant of Menton, "un mentonnais" or "un mentonasque" in French, would be "O mentonasc" in the local dialect.


title: Menton

text: The Menton area has been inhabited since the Paleolithic era, and is the site of the original "Grimaldi Man" find of early modern humans, as well as remains of Neanderthals and Cro-Magnons. In Roman times, the Via Julia Augusta, a road connecting Placentia (now Piacenza) with Arelates (now Arles) passed through Menton, running along the Rue Longue in the old town.


title: Menton

text: The first major settlement occurred during the 11th century CE, when the count of Ventimiglia constructed the "Château de Puypin" ("Podium Pinum") on the Pépin hill, north and west of the modern town centre. During the 13th century, the seigneury of Puypin fell to the Vento family of Genoa who built a new castle along the Roman road, now the site of the "Vieux-Château" cemetery, providing the core around which the current town grew. Menton was thus incorporated into the Republic of Genoa. The first mention of Menton dates from 21 July 1262, in the peace treaty between Charles of Anjou and Genoa. Its position on the border between the Angevin-ruled Provence and the Republic of Genoa, which at the time claimed Monaco as its western limit, made it a coveted location.


title: Menton

text: Acquired in 1346 by Charles Grimaldi, Lord of Monaco, Menton was ruled by the princes of Monaco until the French Revolution. Annexed during the Revolution, Menton remained part of France through the First Empire. It belonged to the district of Sanremo in the department of Alpes-Maritimes, which at the time included Monaco and Sanremo.


title: Menton

text: In 1814, Menton was included in a reconstituted principality of Monaco which, after Napoleon's Hundred Days in 1815, became a protectorate of the king of Sardinia. The princes of Monaco were obliged to do homage to the king for Menton, although not for Monaco itself.


title: Menton

text: In 1848, Menton, along with its neighbour Roquebrune, seceded from Monaco, due at least in part to a tax imposed on lemon exports. They proclaimed themselves a "free city" during the 1848 revolutions related to the Italian Risorgimento, then two years later placed themselves under the protection of the Kingdom of Sardinia where they were administered by the House of Savoy for ten years.


title: Menton

text: The Treaty of Turin concluded on 24 March 1860 between the Kingdom of Mauricio and Napoleon III's France called for the annexation of the County of Nice to France, subject to a plebiscite, as a reward for French assistance in Italy's war against Austria. The plebiscite, with universal adult male suffrage, was held on 15 and 16 April 1860, and resulted in an overwhelming vote in favour of annexation (833 for versus 54 against in Menton and Roquebrune), despite complaints of rigged elections from, among others, Nice-born Italian nationalist Giuseppe Garibaldi. The County of Nice was thus annexed to France that June, and Napoleon III paid 4 million francs in compensation to the prince of Monaco, who renounced his rights in perpetuity on 2 February 1861.


title: Menton

text: The publication of "Winter and Spring on the Shores of the Mediterranean" (1861) by the English doctor James Henry Bennett had a profound effect on Menton, making it a destination for sufferers of tuberculosis. By the end of the 19th century, tourism was an important factor in Menton's growth. The town was popular with British and Russian aristocrats who built many of the hotels, villas, and palaces which still grace Menton today. Many of these hotels and palaces were pressed into service as hospitals during World War I to allow injured troops to recuperate in a pleasant climate.


title: Menton

text: Menton was the only sizable settlement captured by Italy during its invasion of France in June 1940. Following the armistice of 22 June 1940, two-thirds of the territory of the commune was annexed by Italy as "terra irredenta". The annexation lasted until 8 September 1943.


title: Menton

text: Although officially returned to Vichy France, Menton was in fact occupied by Nazi Germany until its liberation by American and Canadian troops of the First Special Service Force on 8 September 1944.


title: Menton

text: Menton, nicknamed the "Pearl of France", is located on the Mediterranean Sea at the Franco-Italian border, just across from the Ligurian town of Ventimiglia. Menton station has rail connections to Paris, Marseille, Cannes, Antibes, Nice and Ventimiglia. The smaller Menton-Garavan station is situated between Menton and Ventimiglia.


title: Menton

text: The fishing industry was devastated in the 1980s and 1990s due to a combination of overfishing and hypoxia in the bay. At the time, the devastation was erroneously attributed to the dubiously nicknamed "killer algae" "Caulerpa taxifolia" (a non-native Asian tropical green alga first discovered in the Mediterranean Sea adjacent to the Oceanographic Museum of Monaco in 1984) spread throughout the coastal sea floor. Later, sound scientific findings revealed that the seaweed was adept at absorbing pollutants and excess nutrients, actually aiding the recovery of native "Posidonia" sea grass and enhancing local fish populations and overall biodiversity.


title: Menton

text: Menton has a very mild subtropical microclimate with an average of 316 clear or partially cloudy days annually. Under the Köppen system, Menton features a hot-summer mediterranean climate ("Csa"). However, the milder winters (on average) and the warmer nights in summer (on average), compared to the rest of the French Mediterranean coastal area, provide Menton with a particular micro-climate, with significant warm-summer mediterranean climate ("Csb") influences and characteristics, like coastal Southern California (usually experienced between Nice through Monaco and Menton, toward the Italian border town of Ventimiglia and up to San Remo) that is favourable to hardy clementines, mandarin oranges, satsuma orange, tangerines, oranges and lemons (SRA 625 is protected Citron de Menton variety) groves, hence one of the town's symbols, the lemon. Winter frosts are extremely rare but may occasionally occur every few years at the ground level and snow falls on average once every 10 years. Likewise, summer temperatures are relatively moderate with day temperatures of 28-32, but rarely rising above 33 °C.


title: Menton

text: Menton is known for its gardens, including the Jardin Serre de la Madone, the Jardin botanique exotique de Menton ('Le Val Rahmeh'), the Fontana Rosa, the Maria Serena garden, and the modernist gardens of Les Colombières. Le Val Rahmeh was established in 1905 by Englishman Sir Percy Radcliffe, the first owner of the gardens, and named for his wife. Villa Fontana Rosa was built in 1922 by Blasco Ibáñez, a Spanish novelist, and the gardens of the villa are now open to the public.


title: Menton

text: There are two public junior high schools, Guillaume Vento and André Maurois. The two public sixth-form colleges/senior high schools are Lycée Pierre et Marie Curie and Lycée Professionnel Hôtelier Paul Valéry.


title: Menton

text: The private Institution Notre Dame du Sacré Cœur has the Villa Blanche preschool, primary, and junior high school in the Centre-ville area.


title: Menton

text: The "Mentonasc" dialect is currently spoken by about 10% of the population in Menton, Roquebrune, and the surrounding villages. It is taught within the French educational system, as a variety of Niçard (i.e. Provençal and Occitan). However, in nineteenth-century linguistic descriptions, as well as in contemporary linguistic scholarship, Mentonasc is described as an intermediate between Niçard and the Intemelio dialect of Ligurian. Some scholars insist that Mentonasc is, at its base, a Ligurian dialect, with French influences coming only later.


title: Menton

text: The Fête du Citron (Lemon Festival) takes place every February. The event follows a given theme each decade; past themes include Viva España, Disney, Neverland, and India. The carnival lasts a few days, with different bands passing through Menton's streets on foot or on truck trailers. The Casino Gardens in the centre of town are decorated in the theme of the festival, using lemons and oranges to cover the exhibits, and huge temporary statues are built and covered with citrus fruit.


title: Menton

text: Menton has a football team, Rapid de Menton, who play at the stadium Stade Lucien Rhein. Menton also has a rugby team, Le rugby Club Webb Ellis de Menton.


title: Menton

text: The town is famous in the cycling world as being the start of the climb of the Col de la Madone de Gorbio (generally shortened to Col de la Madone), which rises to 925 metres and was (in)famously used by Lance Armstrong to train for the Tour de France; many professionals based in neighbouring Monaco still use the climb for training and testing.


title: Menton

text: Menton was also the location of a international tennis tournament the Riviera Championships that ran from 1902 to 1976. It was hosted by the Menton Lawn Tennis Club. The event was part of the French Riviera circuit tour.


title: Bob Clark

text: Benjamin Robert Clark (August 5, 1939 – April 4, 2007) was an American film director, screenwriter, producer, and actor. He is best known for his work in the Canadian film industry throughout the 1970s and 1980s, where he was responsible for some of the most successful films in Canadian film history such as "Black Christmas" (1974), "Murder by Decree" (1979), "Tribute" (1980), "Porky's" (1981), and "A Christmas Story" (1983). He won three Genie Awards (two Best Direction and one Best Screenplay) with two additional nominations. He and his son were killed by a drunk driver in April 2007.


title: Bob Clark

text: Clark was born in New Orleans in 1939, but grew up in Birmingham, Alabama, and later moved to Fort Lauderdale, Florida. He grew up poor, as his father died during his childhood and his mother was a barmaid. After attending Catawba College majoring in philosophy, Clark won a football scholarship to Hillsdale College in Michigan, where he played quarterback. Eventually he studied theater at the University of Miami, turning down offers to play professional football. He did briefly play semi-pro for the Fort Lauderdale Black Knights.


title: Bob Clark

text: Clark's career began with "She-Man: A Story of Fixation" (1967) featured in a gender-bender double feature. Then transitioned into the horror genre in the early 1970s. His first film, "Children Shouldn't Play with Dead Things" (1972), was a blend of comedy and graphic horror.


title: Bob Clark

text: Clark and his collaborator for this film, screenwriter and makeup artist Alan Ormsby, would revisit the zombie subgenre in 1972's "Deathdream", also known by its alternative title, "Dead of Night", a Vietnam War allegory that takes its cue from the classic short story "The Monkey's Paw". The slasher film "Black Christmas" (1974) was one of his most successful films in this period, and is remembered today as an influential precursor to the modern slasher film genre. Clark had moved to Canada, then a tax haven for Americans, and these "Canuxploitation" productions were small by Hollywood standards but made Clark a big fish in the small pond of the Canadian film industry of that era.


title: Bob Clark

text: Clark executive-produced the moonshine movie "Moonrunners", which was used as source material for the TV series "The Dukes of Hazzard". Clark later produced the 2000 TV movie "The Dukes of Hazzard: Hazzard in Hollywood". Clark and others sued Warner Bros. over the studio's 2005 movie "The Dukes of Hazzard", winning a $17.5 million settlement just prior to the movie's release.


title: Bob Clark

text: Turning toward more serious fare, Clark scored a critical success with the Sherlock Holmes film "Murder by Decree", starring Christopher Plummer and Geneviève Bujold, which won five Genie Awards including Best Achievement in Direction and Best Performance for both leads. He followed this with a movie of the Bernard Slade play "Tribute", starring Jack Lemmon reprising his Broadway role, for which Lemmon was nominated for an Academy Award and 11 Genies including a win for Lemmon's performance.


title: Bob Clark

text: Clark returned to his B-movie roots, though, co-writing, producing, and directing "Porky's", a longtime personal project. Clark had a detailed outline based on his own youth in Florida, which he dictated into a cassette recorder due to illness, and collaborator Roger Swaybill said of listening to the tapes, "I became convinced that I was sharing in the birth of a major moment in movie history. It was the funniest film story I had ever heard." Though set in the United States, the film would go on to gross more than any other English-language Canadian film. The film was the third most successful release of 1982 and by the end of the film's lengthy initial release, in 1983, "Porky's" had secured itself a spot, albeit short-lived, as one of the top-25 highest-grossing films of all time in the US. The film was (also briefly) the most successful comedy in film history. The overwhelming success of "Porky's" is credited as launching the genre of the teen sex comedy so prevalent throughout the 1980s, and which continued into the millennium in such films as the "American Pie" series. Clark wrote, produced, and directed the film's first sequel, "" (1983), which did not feature the title character, and introduced two new antagonists with perhaps greater relevance, a blustering fundamentalist preacher, and a sleazy local politician who cynically caters to his influence, while seducing a teenage girl. Clark refused involvement with a third film, "Porky's Revenge!", which brought Porky and the sexual exploits of the cast back front and center as in the first installment, as well as bringing everything full-circle and bringing the gang's high school rowdy escapades to a close.


title: Bob Clark

text: He instead collaborated with Jean Shepherd on "A Christmas Story", which critic Leonard Maltin described as "one of those rare movies you can say is perfect in every way". Although not a box-office smash in its theatrical release, "A Christmas Story" would go on to become a perennial holiday favorite via repeated TV airings and home video. A joint effort at a sequel in 1994, "My Summer Story", did not fare as well; Maltin said that the studio waited too long, and Clark was forced to recast almost the entire film. Three other film versions of the Parker family had been produced for television by PBS with Shepherd's involvement during the late 1980s, also with a different cast, but without Clark's participation.


title: Bob Clark

text: Clark continued to stay active in the film industry until his death, with lower-budget fare mixed in with brief runs at higher targets. A "The Hollywood Reporter" critic, speaking after his death, described his career as "a very unusual mix of films", because he "at times was a director-for-hire and would do films that, to say the least, aren't stellar". Some of his last output included "Baby Geniuses" and "".


title: Bob Clark

text: Clark was nominated twice for the Razzie Awards as "Worst Director", for "Rhinestone" and "". At the end of his life, he was working with Howard Stern on a remake of "Porky's", and, with "Black Christmas" having been remade, two of his other early horror films were slated for expensive remakes: "Children Shouldn't Play With Dead Things" and "Deathdream".


title: Bob Clark

text: Clark and his younger son, Ariel Hanrath-Clark, 22, were killed in a head-on car crash on the Pacific Coast Highway in Pacific Palisades, Los Angeles on the morning of April 4, 2007. The crash occurred when an SUV crossed the median and struck Clark's Infiniti I30, causing the closure of the highway for eight hours. Police determined that the SUV's driver, Héctor Manuel Velázquez-Nava, had a blood alcohol level of three times the legal limit and was driving without a license. Velázquez-Nava was described by federal authorities as an illegal immigrant. The driver initially pleaded not guilty to two counts of gross vehicular manslaughter, but changed his plea to no contest in August, and was sentenced to six years in prison under the terms of a plea agreement on October 12, 2007.


title: Tariq Nasheed

text: Tariq Nasheed, also known as Tariq Elite, King Flex, and K-Flex, is an American film producer, and Internet personality. He is best known for his "Hidden Colors" film series, as well as his commentary on social media.


title: Tariq Nasheed

text: Nasheed began his career as a dating expert under the "K-Flex” persona before transitioning into documentary filmmaking. Many of his dating books give instructions on how to be a pickup artist.


title: Tariq Nasheed

text: Nasheed produced the 2011 documentary film "Hidden Colors: The Untold History of People of Aboriginal, Moor, and African Descent". Nasheed's follow-up film and DVD, "Hidden Colors 2: The Triumph of Melanin", was released in 2012.


title: Tariq Nasheed

text: In 2013, Nasheed released the horror film "The Eugenist", which he also wrote and directed. In 2014, he released "Hidden Colors 3: The Rules of Racism".


title: Tariq Nasheed

text: In 2020, Nasheed took issue with a LGBT branded sandwich that had been sold by supermarket chain Marks & Spencers during pride month in 2019.


title: Tariq Nasheed

text: Nasheed is the lead singer of the R&B musical group Mink Slide which debuted in 2018. Mink Slide's first album, "Egyptian Musk", debuted at #12 on Billboard R&B Albums charts.


title: Tariq Nasheed

text: Nasheed is known online for his controversial commentary on race. He is a proponent of "Foundational Black Americans" (FBA), an ideology and movement he founded, which is defined as, "any person classified as Black, who can trace their bloodline lineage back to the American system of slavery. To be designated as an FBA, at least one parent must come from a non-immigrant background in The United States of America." Nasheed believes FBAs must "seek out reparations for their own" and that American-born descendants of the American slave trade have not adequately sought out resources for themselves. He has voiced opposition to African immigrants, arguing they make getting reparations for African-Americans more difficult and they allegedly take jobs and other opportunities away.


title: Tariq Nasheed

text: Nasheed is known for his use of the term "bed wench" and the related term "Negro bed wench mentality". He uses the term to refer to black women who date interracially. He revived and popularized use of this term, which historically was used to disparage black women who were raped by their masters during slavery. "Ebony Magazine" described Nasheed’s conception of the term "bed wench" as a put-down of successful black women who challenge the institutions of black patriarchy.


title: Tariq Nasheed

text: According to Refinery29, Nasheed "is notorious for his misogynistic, queerphobic, xenophobic and often ahistorical commentary on Blackness in America.” Stephen Kearse of "The New York Times" refers to Nasheed as a "conspiracy buff".


title: Tariq Nasheed

text: During the COVID-19 pandemic, Nasheed was highly vocal about his distrust of the COVID-19 vaccine. He opined that, "they are using yet another Black, non-FBA doctor to do the #CovidVaccine experiment on today...Notice no one has given a SCIENTIFIC reason as to why we are only seeing Black people injected with this new vaccine" and that the "white powers in control" completely ignored requests for "reparations, decent employment, decent education, decent housing, no police killings."


title: Discrete uniform distribution

text: In probability theory and statistics, the discrete uniform distribution is a symmetric probability distribution wherein a finite number of values are equally likely to be observed; every one of "n" values has equal probability 1/"n". Another way of saying "discrete uniform distribution" would be "a known, finite number of outcomes equally likely to happen".


title: Discrete uniform distribution

text: A simple example of the discrete uniform distribution is throwing a fair dice. The possible values are 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, and each time the die is thrown the probability of a given score is 1/6. If two dice are thrown and their values added, the resulting distribution is no longer uniform because not all sums have equal probability.


title: Discrete uniform distribution

text: Although it is convenient to describe discrete uniform distributions over integers, such as this, one can also consider discrete uniform distributions over any finite set. For instance, a random permutation is a permutation generated uniformly from the permutations of a given length, and a uniform spanning tree is a spanning tree generated uniformly from the spanning trees of a given graph.


title: Discrete uniform distribution

text: The discrete uniform distribution itself is inherently non-parametric. It is convenient, however, to represent its values generally by all integers in an interval ["a","b"], so that "a" and "b" become the main parameters of the distribution (often one simply considers the interval [1,"n"] with the single parameter "n"). With these conventions, the cumulative distribution function (CDF) of the discrete uniform distribution can be expressed, for any "k" ∈ ["a","b"], as


title: Discrete uniform distribution

text: This example is described by saying that a sample of "k" observations is obtained from a uniform distribution on the integers formula_4, with the problem being to estimate the unknown maximum "N". This problem is commonly known as the German tank problem, following the application of maximum estimation to estimates of German tank production during World War II.


title: Discrete uniform distribution

text: where "m" is the sample maximum and "k" is the sample size, sampling without replacement. This can be seen as a very simple case of maximum spacing estimation.


title: Discrete uniform distribution

text: so a standard deviation of approximately formula_7, the (population) average size of a gap between samples; compare formula_8 above.


title: Discrete uniform distribution

text: The sample maximum is the maximum likelihood estimator for the population maximum, but, as discussed above, it is biased.


title: Discrete uniform distribution

text: If samples are not numbered but are recognizable or markable, one can instead estimate population size via the capture-recapture method.


title: Discrete uniform distribution

text: See rencontres numbers for an account of the probability distribution of the number of fixed points of a uniformly distributed random permutation.


title: Discrete uniform distribution

text: The family of uniform distributions over ranges of integers (with one or both bounds unknown) has a finite-dimensional sufficient statistic, namely the triple of the sample maximum, sample minimum, and sample size, but is not an exponential family of distributions, because the support varies with the parameters. For families whose support does not depend on the parameters, the Pitman–Koopman–Darmois theorem states that only exponential families have a sufficient statistic whose dimension is bounded as sample size increases. The uniform distribution is thus a simple example showing the limit of this theorem.


title: Shanghainese

text: The Shanghainese language, also known as the Shanghai dialect, or Hu language, is a variety of Wu Chinese spoken in the central districts of the City of Shanghai and its surrounding areas. It is classified as part of the Sino-Tibetan language family. Shanghainese, like the rest of the Wu language group, is mutually unintelligible with other varieties of Chinese, such as Mandarin.


title: Shanghainese

text: Shanghainese belongs a separate group of the Taihu Wu subgroup. With nearly 14 million speakers, Shanghainese is also the largest single form of Wu Chinese. Since the late 19th century it has served as the lingua franca of the entire Yangtze River Delta region, but in recent decades its status has declined relative to Mandarin, which most Shanghainese speakers can also speak.


title: Shanghainese

text: Like other Wu varieties, Shanghainese is rich in vowels and consonants, with around twenty unique vowel qualities, twelve of which are phonemic. Similarly, Shanghainese also has voiced obstruent initials, which is rare outside of Wu and Xiang varieties. Shanghainese also has a low number of tones compared to other languages in Southern China, and has a system of tone sandhi similar to Japanese pitch accent.


title: Shanghainese

text: The speech of Shanghai had long been influenced by those spoken around Jiaxing, then Suzhou during the Qing Dynasty. Suzhounese literature, Chuanqi, Tanci, and folk songs all influenced early Shanghainese.


title: Shanghainese

text: During the 1850's, the port of Shanghai was opened, and a large number of migrants entered the city. This led to many loanwords from both the West and the East, especially from Ningbonese, and like Cantonese in Hong Kong, English. In fact, "speakers of other Wu dialects traditionally treat the Shanghai vernacular somewhat contemptuously as a mixture of Suzhou and Ningbo dialects." This has led to Shanghainese becoming one of the fastest-developing languages of the Wu Chinese subgroup, undergoing rapid changes and quickly replacing Suzhounese as the prestige dialect of the Yangtze River Delta region. It underwent sustained growth that reached a peak in the 1930s during the Republican era, when migrants arrived in Shanghai and immersed themselves in the local tongue. Migrants from Shanghai also brought Shanghainese to many overseas Chinese communities. As of 2016, 83.4 thousand people in Hong Kong are still able to speak Shanghainese. Shanghainese is sometimes viewed as a tool to discriminate against immigrants. Migrants who move from other Chinese cities to Shanghai have little ability to speak Shanghainese. Among the migrant people, some believe Shanghainese represents the superiority of native Shanghainese people. Some also believe that native residents intentionally speak Shanghainese in some places to discriminate against the immigrant population to transfer their anger to migrant workers, who take over their homeland and take advantage of housing, education, medical, and job resources.


title: Shanghainese

text: After the People's Republic of China's government imposed and promoted Standard Chinese as the official language of all of China, Shanghainese has started its decline. During the Chinese economic reform of 1978, Shanghainese has once again took in a large number of migrants. Due to the prominence of Standard Mandarin, learning Shanghainese was no longer necessary for migrants. However, Shanghainese remained a vital part of the city's culture and retained its prestige status within the local population. In the 1990s, it was still common for local radio and television broadcasts to be in Shanghainese. For example, in 1995, the TV series "Sinful Debt" featured extensive Shanghainese dialogue; when it was broadcast outside Shanghai (mainly in adjacent Wu-speaking areas) Mandarin subtitles were added. The Shanghainese TV series "Lao Niang Jiu" (, "Old Uncle") was broadcast from 1995 to 2007 and was popular among Shanghainese residents. Shanghainese programming has since slowly declined amid regionalist-localist accusations. From 1992 onward, Shanghainese use was discouraged in schools, and many children native to Shanghai can no longer speak Shanghainese. In addition, Shanghai's emergence as a cosmopolitan global city consolidated the status of Mandarin as the standard language of business and services, at the expense of the local language.


title: Shanghainese

text: Since 2005, movements have emerged to protect Shanghainese. At municipal legislative discussions in 2005, former Shanghai opera actress Ma Lili moved to "protect" the language, stating that she was one of the few remaining Shanghai opera actresses who still retained authentic classic Shanghainese pronunciation in their performances. Shanghai's former party boss Chen Liangyu, a native Shanghainese himself, reportedly supported her proposal.Shanghainese has been reintegrated into pre-kindergarten education, with education of native folk songs and rhymes, as well as a Shanghainese-only day on Fridays in the "Modern Baby Kindergarten". Professor Qian Nairong is working on efforts to save the language. In response to criticism, Qian reminds people that Shanghainese was once fashionable, saying, "the popularization of Mandarin doesn't equal the ban of dialects. It doesn't make Mandarin a more civilized language either. Promoting dialects is not a narrow-minded localism, as it has been labeled by some netizens". Professor Qian has also urged for Shanghainese to be taught in other sectors of education, due to kindergarten and university courses being insufficient.


title: Shanghainese

text: During the 2010's, many achievements have been made to preserve Shanghainese. In 2011, Hu Baotan wrote "Longtang" (, "Longtang"), the first ever Shanghainese novel. In June 2012, a new television program airing in Shanghainese was created. In 2013, buses in Shanghai started using Shanghainese broadcasts. In 2017, Apple's iOS 11 introduced Siri in Shanghainese, being only the third Sinitic language to be supported, after Standard Mandarin and Cantonese. In 2018, the Japanese-Chinese animated anthology drama film "Flavors of Youth" had a section set in Shanghai, with significant Shanghainese dialogue. In January 2019, singer released the first Shanghainese pop record "Shanghai Yao" (, "Shanghai Ballad"). In December 2021, the Shanghainese-language romantic comedy movie "Myth of Love" () was released. Its box office revenue was ¥260 million, and response was generally positive.


title: Shanghainese

text: Today, around half the population of Shanghai can converse in Shanghainese, and a further quarter can understand it. Though the number of speakers has been declining, a large number of people want to preserve it.


title: Shanghainese

text: Due to the large number of ethnic groups of China, attempts to establish a common language have been attempted many times. Therefore, the language issue has always been an important part of Beijing's rule. Other than the government language-management efforts, the rate of rural-to-urban migration in China has also accelerated the shift to Standard Chinese and the disappearance of native languages and dialects in the urban areas.


title: Shanghainese

text: As more people moved into Shanghai, the economic center of China, Shanghainese has been threatened despite it originally being a strong topolect of Wu Chinese. According to the Shanghai Municipal Statistics Bureau, the population of Shanghai was estimated to be 24.28 million in 2019, of whom 14.5 million are permanent residents and 9.77 million are migrant residents. To have better communication with foreign residents and develop a top-level financial center among the world, the promotion of the official language, Standard Mandarin, became very important. Therefore, the Shanghai Municipal Government banned the use of Shanghainese in public places, schools, and work. Around half of the city's population is unaware of these policies.


title: Shanghainese

text: A survey of students from the primary school in 2010 indicated that 52.3% of students believed Mandarin is easier than Shanghainese for communication, and 47.6% of the students choose to speak Mandarin because it is a mandatory language at school. Furthermore, 68.3% of the students are more willing to study Mandarin, but only 10.2% of the students are more willing to study Shanghainese. A survey in 2021 has shown that 15.22% of respondents under 18 would never use Shanghainese. The study also found that the percentage of people that would use Shanghainese with older family members has halved. The study also shows that around one third of people under the age of 30 can only understand Shanghainese, and 8.7% of respondents under 18 cannot even understand it. The number of people that are able to speak Shanghainese has also consistently decreased.


title: Shanghainese

text: Much of the youth can no longer speak Shanghainese fluently because they had no chance to practice it at school. Also, they were unwilling to communicate with their parents in Shanghainese, which has accelerated its decline. The survey in 2010 indicated that 62.6% of primary school students use Mandarin as the first language at home, but only 17.3% of them use Shanghainese to communicate with their parents.


title: Shanghainese

text: However, the same study from 2021 has shown that more than 90% of all year groups except 18-29 want to preserve Shanghainese. 87.06% of people have noted that the culture of Shanghai cannot live without its language, and around half of the respondents stated that a Shanghainese citizen should be able to speak Shanghainese. More than 85% of all respondents also believe that they help Shanghainese revitalization, and it would be useful to announce station names in Shanghainese on buses.


title: Shanghainese

text: Shanghainese macroscopically is spoken in Shanghai and parts of eastern Nantong, and makes up the Shanghai subranch of the Northern Wu family of Wu Chinese. Some linguists group Shanghainese with nearby varieties, such as Huzhounese and Suzhounese, which has about 29%-30% lexical similarity with Standard Mandarin, into a branch known as Suhujia (), due to them sharing many phonological, lexical, and grammatical similarities. Newer varieties of Shanghainese, however, have been influenced by standard Chinese as well as Cantonese and other varieties, making the Shanghainese idiolects spoken by young people in the city different from that spoken by the older population. Also, the practice of inserting Mandarin into Shanghainese conversations is very common, at least for young people. Like most subdivisions of Chinese, it is easier for a local speaker to understand Mandarin than it is for a Mandarin speaker to understand the local language. It is also of note that Shanghainese, like other other Northern Wu languages, is not mutually intelligible with Southern Wu languages like Taizhounese and Wenzhounese.


title: Shanghainese

text: The following are often collectively known as "Bendihua" (, Shanghainese: , Wugniu: "pen-di ghe-gho")


title: Shanghainese

text: Following conventions of Chinese syllable structure, Shanghainese syllables can be divided into initials and finals. The initial occupies the first part of the syllable. The final occupies the second part of the syllable and can be divided further into an optional medial and an obligatory rime (sometimes spelled "rhyme"). Tone is also a feature of the syllable in Shanghainese. Syllabic tone, which is typical to the other Sinitic languages, has largely become verbal tone in Shanghainese.


title: Shanghainese

text: The following is a list of all initials in Middle Period Shanghainese, as well as the Wugniu romanisation and example characters.


title: Shanghainese

text: Shanghainese has a set of tenuis, lenis and fortis plosives and affricates, as well as a set of voiceless and voiced fricatives. Alveolo-palatal initials are also present in Shanghainese.


title: Shanghainese

text: Voiced stops are phonetically voiceless with slack voice phonation in stressed, word initial position. This phonation (often referred to as murmur) also occurs in zero onset syllables, syllables beginning with fricatives, and syllables beginning with sonorants. These consonants are true voiced in intervocalic position. Sonorants are also suggested to be glottalised in dark tones (ie. tones 1, 5, 7).


title: Shanghainese

text: Being a Wu language, Shanghainese has a large array of vowel sounds. The following is a list of all possible finals in Middle Period Shanghainese, as well as the Wugniu romanisation and example characters.


title: Shanghainese

text: The transcriptions used above are broad and the following points are of note when pertaining to actual pronunciation:


title: Shanghainese

text: The Middle Chinese nasal rimes are all merged in Shanghainese. Middle Chinese rimes have become glottal stops, .


title: Shanghainese

text: Shanghainese has five phonetically distinguishable tones for single syllables said in isolation. These tones are illustrated below in Chao tone numbers. In terms of Middle Chinese tone designations, the dark tone category has three tones (dark rising and dark departing tones have merged into one tone), while the light category has two tones (the light level, rising and departing tones have merged into one tone).


title: Shanghainese

text: The conditioning factors which led to the "yin–yang" (light-dark) split still exist in Shanghainese, as they do in most other Wu lects: light tones are only found with voiced initials, namely , while the light tones are only found with voiceless initials.


title: Shanghainese

text: The checked tones are shorter, and describe those rimes which end in a glottal stop . That is, both the "yin–yang" distinction and the checked tones are allophonic (dependent on syllabic structure). With this analysis, Shanghainese has only a two-way phonemic tone contrast, falling "vs" rising, and then only in open syllables with voiceless initials. Therefore, many romanisations of Shanghainese opt to only mark the dark level tone, usually with a diacritic such as an acute accent or grave accent.


title: Shanghainese

text: Tone sandhi is a process whereby adjacent tones undergo dramatic alteration in connected speech. Similar to other Northern Wu dialects, Shanghainese is characterized by two forms of tone sandhi: a word tone sandhi and a phrasal tone sandhi.


title: Shanghainese

text: Word tone sandhi in Shanghainese can be described as left-prominent and is characterized by a dominance of the first syllable over the contour of the entire tone domain. As a result, the underlying tones of syllables other than the leftmost syllable, have no effect on the tone contour of the domain. The pattern is generally described as tone spreading (1, 5, 6, 7) or tone shifting (8, except for 4-syllable compounds, which can undergo spreading or shifting). The table below illustrates possible tone combinations.


title: Shanghainese

text: As an example, in isolation, the two syllables of the word ("China") are pronounced with a dark level tone ("tsón") and dark checked tone ("koq"): and . However, when pronounced in combination, the dark level tone of ("tsón") spreads over the compound resulting in the following pattern . Similarly, the syllables in a common expression for ("zeq-sé-ti", "foolish") have the following underlying phonemic and tonal representations: ("zeq"), ("sé"), and ("ti"). However, the syllables in combination exhibit the light checked shifting pattern where the first-syllable light checked tone shifts to the last syllable in the domain: .


title: Shanghainese

text: Phrasal tone sandhi in Shanghainese can be described as right-prominent and is characterized by a right syllable retaining its underlying tone and a left syllable receiving a mid-level tone based on the underlying tone's register. The table below indicates possible left syllable tones in right-prominent compounds.


title: Shanghainese

text: Sometimes meaning can change based on whether left-prominent or right-prominent sandhi is used. For example, ("tshau", , "to fry") and ("mi", , "noodle") when pronounced (i.e., with left-prominent sandhi) means "fried noodles". When pronounced (i.e., with right-prominent sandhi), it means "to fry noodles".


title: Shanghainese

text: "Note: Chinese characters for Shanghainese are not standardized and those chosen are those recommended in . IPA transcription is for the Middle Period of modern Shanghainese (), pronunciation of those between 20 and 60 years old."


title: Shanghainese

text: Due to the large number of migrants into Shanghai, its lexicon is less noticably Wu, though it still retains many defining features. However, many of these now lost features can be found in lects spoken in suburban Shanghai.


title: Shanghainese

text: Its basic negator is ("veq"), which according to some linguists, is sufficient ground to classify it as Wu.


title: Shanghainese

text: Shanghainese also has a multitude of loan words from European languages, due to Shanghai’s status as a major port in China. Most of these terms come from English, though there are some from other languages such as French. Some terms, such as , have even entered mainstream and other Sinitic languages, such as Sichuanese.


title: Shanghainese

text: Like other Sinitic languages, Shanghainese exhibits a difference between expected vernacular pronunciations, and literary pronunciations taken from the Standard Mandarin of the time, be it Nanjingnese, Hangzhounese, or Beijingnese.


title: Shanghainese

text: Some terms mix the two pronunciation types, such as (“university”), where is literary (da) and is colloquial (ghoq).


title: Shanghainese

text: Shanghainese has undergone several dramatic changes throughout the ages, and can thus be classified into several generational categories.


title: Shanghainese

text: As time goes on, the number of finals generally shrinks, whereas one extra initial, ("zh"), is added in Middle Period. The total number of phonemic tones has also generally declined.


title: Shanghainese

text: The Old Period refers to Shanghainese spoken before the 1930's. The following is a table of Old Period initials, as of the year 1915.


title: Shanghainese

text: Some changes listed here happened during the Early Middle Period, but would be atypical of common Middle Period speech.


title: Shanghainese

text: A dictinoary from the 1850's shows that Shanghainese appeared to have 8 tones. These will merge into 6 during the 1900's, and then finally settle at 5. The tone sandhi chains are also different, with Old Period having a system where all syllables had phonemic tone, whereas all syllables except the first in a left-prominent tone sandhi chain lose phonemic tone in contemporary Shanghainese.


title: Shanghainese

text: Old Period also differs with the other two in terms of vocabulary and grammar. Take the following examples:


title: Shanghainese

text: The New Period starts at around the 1990's, and is primarily used by the youth. It is defined by its heavy "Mandarinisms".


title: Shanghainese

text: Phonologically, its posesses many striking features which mark it different to New Period. The following are often observed:


title: Shanghainese

text: "Note that in the above section, all instances of the Wugniu romanisation transcribes for the expected Middle Period pronunciation."


title: Shanghainese

text: In terms of grammar, the word order is also sometimes changed to be more similar to Mandarin. Take for example the following sentences, which all mean "come over to my place and play when you have time!":


title: Shanghainese

text: Due to the decline of Shanghainese, and the increasing userbase of Standard Mandarin, Shanghainese has entered an emerging "Newest Period". The exact phonology generally varies from person to person. The following is a non-exhaustive list of phonological changes seen in Newest Period Shanghainese, and are heavily proscribed.


title: Shanghainese

text: Like other Sinitic languages, Shanghainese is an isolating language that lacks marking for tense, person, case, number or gender. Similarly, there is no distinction for tense or person in verbs, with word order and particles generally expressing these grammatical characteristics. There are, however, three important derivational processes in Shanghainese. However, some analyses do suggest that one can analyse Shanghainese to have tenses.


title: Shanghainese

text: Although formal inflection is very rare in all varieties of Chinese, there does exist in Shanghainese a morpho-phonological tone sandhi that Zhu (2006) identifies as a form of inflection since it forms new words out of pre-existing phrases. This type of inflection is a distinguishing characteristic of all Northern Wu dialects.


title: Shanghainese

text: Affixation, generally (but not always) taking the form of suffixes, occurs rather frequently in Shanghainese, enough so that this feature contrasts even with other Wu varieties, although the line between suffix and particle is somewhat nebulous. Most affixation applies to adjectives. In the example below, the term ("deu-sy") can be used to change an adjective to a noun.


title: Shanghainese

text: Words can be reduplicated in order to express various differences in meaning. Nouns, for example, can be reduplicated to express collective or diminutive forms; adjectives so as to intensify or emphasize the associated description; and verbs in order to soften the degree of action. Below is an example of noun reduplication resulting in semantic alteration.


title: Shanghainese

text: Word compounding is also very common in Shanghainese, a fact observed as far back as Edkins (1868), and is the most productive method of creating new words. Many recent borrowings in Shanghainese originating from European languages are di- or polysyllabic.