title: Little Woods

text: In January 2017, it was announced Tessa Thompson, Lily James, Luke Kirby, James Badge Dale and Lance Reddick joined the cast, with Nia DaCosta directing from a screenplay she wrote. The film was produced by Rachael Fung, Gabrielle Nadig, and Tim Headington.


title: Little Woods

text: The film had its world premiere at the Tribeca Film Festival on 21 April 2018. Shortly after, NEON acquired distribution rights to the film. It was screened at the Los Angeles Film Festival on 24 September 2018. It was released on 19 April 2019. In Australia, the film was released on May 16, 2019


title: Little Woods

text: On review aggregator website Rotten Tomatoes, the film holds an approval rating of based on reviews, with an average rating of . The site's critics consensus reads: "Led by standout work from Tessa Thompson, "Little Woods" tells a grimly absorbing tale that marks a commendable debut for writer-director Nia DaCosta." On Metacritic, the film has a weighted average score of 74 out of 100, based on 21 critics, indicating "generally favorable reviews".


title: Culex

text: Culex is a genus of mosquitoes, several species of which serve as vectors of one or more important diseases of birds, humans, and other animals. The diseases they vector include arbovirus infections such as West Nile virus, Japanese encephalitis, or St. Louis encephalitis, but also filariasis and avian malaria. They occur worldwide except for the extreme northern parts of the temperate zone, and are the most common form of mosquito encountered in some major U.S. cities, such as Los Angeles.


title: Culex

text: The adult morphology is typical of flies in the suborder Nematocera with the head, thorax, and abdomen clearly defined and the two forewings held horizontally over the abdomen when at rest. As in all Diptera capable of flight, the second pair of wings is reduced and modified into tiny, inconspicuous halteres.


title: Culex

text: Formal identification is important in mosquito control, but it is demanding and requires careful measurements of bodily proportions and noting the presence or absence of various bristles or other bodily features.


title: Culex

text: In the field, informal identification is more often important, and the first question as a rule is whether the mosquito is anopheline or culicine. Given a specimen in good condition, one of the first things to notice is the length of the maxillary palps. Especially in the female, palps as long as the proboscis are characteristic of anopheline mosquitoes. Culicine females have short palps. Anopheline mosquitoes tend to have dappled or spotted wings, while culicine wings tend to be clear. Anopheline mosquitoes tend to sit with their heads low and their rear ends raised high, especially when feeding, while culicine females keep their bodies horizontal.


title: Culex

text: Anopheline larvae tend to float horizontal at the surface of the water when not in motion, whereas culicine larvae float with head low and only the siphon at the tail held at the surface.


title: Culex

text: The developmental cycle of most species takes about two weeks in warm weather. The metamorphosis is typical of holometabolism in an insect: the female lays eggs in rafts of as many as 300 on the water's surface. Suitable habitats for egg-laying are small bodies of standing fresh water: puddles, pools, ditches, tin cans, buckets, bottles, and water storage tanks (tree boles are suitable for only a few species). The tiny, cigar-shaped, dark brown eggs adhere to each other through adhesion forces, not any kind of cement, and are easily separated. Eggs hatch only in the presence of water, and the larvae are obligately aquatic, linear in form, and maintain their position and mostly vertical attitude in water by movements of their bristly mouthparts. To swim, they lash their bodies back and forth through the water.


title: Culex

text: During the larval stage, the insect lives submerged in water and feeds on particles of organic matter, microscopic organisms or plant material; after several instars it then develops into a pupa. Unlike the larva, the pupa is comma-shaped. It does not feed, but can swim in rapid jerking motions to avoid potential predators. It must remain in regular contact with the surface to breathe, but it must not become desiccated. After 24–48 hours, the pupa ruptures and the adult emerges from the shed exoskeleton.


title: Culex

text: Diseases borne by one or more species of "Culex" mosquitoes vary in their dependence on the species of vector. Some are rarely and only incidentally transmitted by "Culex" species, but "Culex" and closely related genera of culicine mosquitoes readily support perennial epidemics of certain major diseases if they become established in a particular region.


title: Culex

text: The "Culex pipiens pipiens" bioform of "Culex pipiens" usually inhabits areas above ground and targets avian species. The "Culex pipiens molestus" bioform, on the other hand, usually inhabits underground cavities and targets human hosts. When these two bioforms hybridize, the progeny shows depolarization in both habitat and host preferences. As a result, these hybridized species play a role in disease transmission. This is because avian species amplify diseases such as West Nile virus. A hybridized mosquito can become infected by feeding on an avian amplifier and then feed on a human, effectively passing on West Nile pathogens to that human.


title: Culex

text: Nonanal has been identified as a compound that attracts "Culex" mosquitoes, perhaps pheromonally. Nonanal acts synergistically with carbon dioxide.


title: Culex

text: "Culex" is a diverse genus. It comprises over 20 subgenera that include a total of well over 1,000 species. Publications of newly described species are frequent.


title: UFC on ESPN: Tsarukyan vs. Gamrot

text: UFC on ESPN: Tsarukyan vs. Gamrot (also known as UFC on ESPN 38 and UFC Vegas 57) was a mixed martial arts event produced by the Ultimate Fighting Championship that took place on June 25, 2022, at the UFC Apex facility in Enterprise, Nevada, part of the Las Vegas Metropolitan Area, United States.


title: UFC on ESPN: Tsarukyan vs. Gamrot

text: A lightweight bout between Arman Tsarukyan and former KSW Featherweight and Lightweight Champion Mateusz Gamrot headlined the event.


title: UFC on ESPN: Tsarukyan vs. Gamrot

text: A flyweight bout between Tagir Ulanbekov and Tyson Nam was expected to take place at the event, despite never being officially announced. They were originally expected to meet a year earlier at , but the matchup did not take place due to an undisclosed illness for Ulanbekov.


title: UFC on ESPN: Tsarukyan vs. Gamrot

text: Former UFC Flyweight Championship challenger (also flyweight winner) Tim Elliott was expected to face Amir Albazi in a flyweight bout. However, Elliott pulled out in mid June due to anterior cruciate ligament (ACL) and meniscus injuries. Albazi was rescheduled against Francisco Figueiredo at UFC 278.


title: Ford Transit Custom

text: The Ford Transit Custom is a mid-sized, front wheel drive van produced by Ford Europe since 2012. It is the smaller version of the Ford Transit Mk.8. As with the rest of the Transit lineup, the more luxurious passenger versions were branded Tourneo Custom.


title: Ford Transit Custom

text: The Ford Transit Custom was unveiled at the 2012 Commercial Vehicle Show at the National Exhibition Centre in Birmingham, England. Currently, the Transit Custom is not sold in the United States and Canada, but it is sold in Mexico. It was not sold in China until 2016. An updated version with mild styling changes and a new engine family was introduced in 2017.


title: Ford Transit Custom

text: One engine was available between 2012 and 2016, a 2.2-litre inline-four "Duratorq" turbodiesel, in three power output levels: and of torque, and , and . It was succeeded in 2017 by a 2.0-litre "EcoBlue" turbodiesel that was compliant with Euro 6 emissions standards and offered comparable output levels. An ECOnetic package was available for the lowest-output model, which added an automatic engine start-stop system, low rolling resistance tires, and electronic controls to drive consumption and emissions down to and of , respectively.


title: Ford Transit Custom

text: An optional mild hybrid system was introduced to the "EcoBlue" engines in 2019. A belt-driven starter/generator replaces the alternator, which is connected to a 48 V, 10 A-hr lithium-ion battery. Mild hybrid vehicles are equipped with a start-stop system that shuts down the engine when the vehicle is stopped or decelerating at less than , returning energy to the storage battery and providing an improvement in fuel economy of approximately three to eight percent.


title: Ford Transit Custom

text: Also in 2019, Ford introduced a plug-in hybrid electric vehicle (PHEV) version of the Tourneo, which uses Ford's 1-litre "EcoBoost" petrol engine and an electric traction motor with a 13,6 kWh battery. The PHEV is a series hybrid where the petrol engine acts as a range extender, as the front wheels of the car are driven by the electric engine. It can go on electricity, but up to using the petrol engine. Fuel consumption is reported to be . This version will be available in the second half of 2019.


title: Ford Transit Custom

text: The Ford Transit Custom Nugget is a small van designed as a camper (aka campervan) that is sold by Ford and converted by Westfalia. It has various features of overnight camping, such as a sink, stove, and foldout beds. The "Nugget" was launched in select European markets in the spring of 2019.


title: Ford Transit Custom

text: The Swift Monza is a campervan conversion produced by Swift Leisure and based on the Tourneo version of the Transit Custom. It is available with the 2.0 EcoBlue 128PS turbodiesel engine. It is aimed at young families


title: Ford Transit Custom

text: The second generation Transit Custom was unveiled in March 2021, with production to commence at Ford Otosan in 2023. The forthcoming (in 2024) Volkswagen Transporter (T7) will be built as a sibling of the second generation Transit Custom.


title: Ford Transit Custom

text: On November 22, 2022, the passenger version, the Tourneo Custom, was revealed. Like the panel van, the MPV will be available in electric, plug-in hybrid and diesel versions, as well as the Active crossover variant.


title: Ford Transit Custom

text: The E-Transit Custom is a battery-electric panel van variant announced in March 2021 alongside the second-generation Transit Custom and given its final name in May 2022. Key specifications include an estimated range of using the WLTP driving cycle. Production of the E-Transit Custom is expected to begin in the second half of 2023 at Ford Otosan. The all-electric E-Transit Custom adds another drivetrain option to both the VW T7 Transporter and the Ford Transit Custom, which are expected to continue offering mild hybrid, plug-in hybrid, and diesel options.


title: Ford Transit Custom

text: The 400 V traction battery of the E-Transit Custom uses the same pouch cells as the Ford F-150 Lightning, with a total useable capacity of 74 kW-hr. The revised target range is . Charging at rates of up to 125 kW (DC) or 11 kW (AC) are possible. The traction motor output power is either , depending on the purchaser's choice, with a peak output torque of for both variants.


title: Ford Transit Custom

text: Maximum cargo volume ranges from carrying a load of up to ; the maximum length of cargo that can be accommodated is . The van will be offered with either short or long wheelbase, and low or high roof.


title: Criticism of communist party rule

text: The actions by governments of communist states have been subject to criticism across the political spectrum. According to the critics, the rule by communist parties leads to totalitarianism, political repression, restrictions of human rights, poor economic performance and cultural and artistic censorship. Communist party rule has been especially criticized by anti-communists and right-wing critics, but also by other socialists such as anarchists, communists, democratic socialists, libertarian socialists and Marxists. Ruling communist parties have also been challenged by domestic dissent.


title: Criticism of communist party rule

text: Several authors noted gaps between official policies of equality and economic justice and the reality of the emergence of a new class in communist countries which thrived at the expense of the remaining population. In Central and Eastern Europe, the works of dissidents Václav Havel and Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn gained international prominence, as did the works of disillusioned ex-communists such as Milovan Đilas, who condemned the new class or nomenklatura system that had emerged under communist party rule. Major criticism also comes from the anti-Stalinist left and other socialists. Its socio-economic nature has been much debated, varyingly being labelled a form of bureaucratic collectivism, state capitalism, state socialism, or a totally unique mode of production.


title: Criticism of communist party rule

text: Communist party rule has been criticized as authoritarian or totalitarian for suppressing and killing political dissidents and social classes (so-called "enemies of the people"), religious persecution, ethnic cleansing, forced collectivization and use of forced labor in concentration camps. Communist party rule has also been accused of genocidal acts in Cambodia, China, Poland and Ukraine, although there is scholarly dispute regarding the Holodomor's classification as genocide. Western criticism of communist rule has also been grounded in criticism of socialism by economists such as Friedrich Hayek and Milton Friedman, who argued that the state ownership and planned economy characteristic of Soviet-style communist rule were responsible for economic stagnation and shortage economies, providing few incentives for individuals to improve productivity and engage in entrepreneurship. Anti-Stalinist left and other left-wing critics see it as an example of state capitalism and have referred to it as a "red fascism" contrary to left-wing politics. Other leftists, including Marxist–Leninists, criticize it for its repressive state actions while recognizing certain advancements such as egalitarian achievements and modernization under such states. Counter-criticism is diverse, including the view it presents a biased or exaggerated anti-communist narrative. Some academics propose a more nuanced analysis of communist party rule.


title: Criticism of communist party rule

text: Excess deaths under communist party rule have been discussed as part of a critical analysis of communist party rule. According to Klas-Göran Karlsson, discussion of the number of victims of communist party rule has been "extremely extensive and ideologically biased." Any attempt to estimate a total number of killings under communist party rule depends greatly on definitions, ranging from a low of 10–20 million to as high as 148 million. The criticism of some of the estimates are mostly focused on three aspects, namely that (i) the estimates are based on sparse and incomplete data when significant errors are inevitable; (ii) the figures are skewed to higher possible values; and (iii) those dying at war and victims of civil wars, Holodomor and other famines under communist party rule should not be counted. Others have argued that, while certain estimates may not be accurate, "quibbling about numbers is unseemly. What matters is that many, many people were killed by communist regimes." Right-wing commentators argue that these excess deaths and killings are an indictment of communism, while opponents of this view, including members of the political left, argue that these killings were aberrations caused by specific authoritarian regimes instead of communism, and point to mass deaths in wars that they claim were caused by capitalism and anti-communism as a counterpoint to communist killings.


title: Criticism of communist party rule

text: After the Russian Revolution, communist party rule was consolidated for the first time in Soviet Russia (later the largest constituent republic of the Soviet Union, formed in December 1922) and criticized immediately domestically and internationally. During the first Red Scare in the United States, the takeover of Russia by the communist Bolsheviks was considered by many a threat to free markets, religious freedom and liberal democracy. Meanwhile, under the tutelage of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union the only party permitted by the Soviet Union constitution, state institutions were intimately entwined with those of the party. By the late 1920s, Joseph Stalin consolidated the regime's control over the country's economy and society through a system of economic planning and five-year plans.


title: Criticism of communist party rule

text: Between the Russian Revolution and the Second World War, Soviet-style communist rule only spread to one state that was not later incorporated into the Soviet Union. In 1924, communist rule was established in neighboring Mongolia, a traditional outpost of Russian influence bordering the Siberian region. However, throughout much of Europe and the Americas criticism of the domestic and foreign policies of the Soviet regime among anticommunists continued unabated. After the end of World War II, Soviet Union took control over the territories reached by the Red Army, establishing what later became known as Eastern Bloc. Following the Chinese Revolution, the People's Republic of China was proclaimed in 1949 under the leadership of the Chinese Communist Party.


title: Criticism of communist party rule

text: Between the Chinese Revolution and the last quarter of the 20th century, communist rule spread throughout East Asia and much of the Third World and new communist regimes became the subject of extensive local and international criticism. Criticism of the Soviet Union and Third World communist regimes have been strongly anchored in scholarship on totalitarianism which asserts that communist parties maintain themselves in power without the consent of the governed and rule by means of political repression, secret police, propaganda disseminated through the state-controlled mass media, repression of free discussion and criticism, mass surveillance and state terror. These studies of totalitarianism influenced Western historiography on communism and Soviet history, particularly the work of Robert Conquest and Richard Pipes on Stalinism, the Great Purge, the Gulag and the Soviet famine of 1932–1933.


title: Criticism of communist party rule

text: Criticism of communist regimes has centered on many topics, including their effects on the economic development, human rights, foreign policy, scientific progress and environmental degradation of the countries they rule.


title: Criticism of communist party rule

text: Political repression is a topic in many influential works critical of communist rule, including Robert Conquest's accounts of Stalin's Great Purge in "The Great Terror" and the Soviet famine of 1932–33 in "The Harvest of Sorrow"; Richard Pipes' account of the "Red Terror" during the Russian Civil War; Rudolph Rummel's work on "democide"; Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's account of Stalin's forced labor camps in "The Gulag Archipelago"; and Stéphane Courtois' account of executions, forced labor camps and mass starvation in communist regimes as a general category, with particular attention to the Soviet Union under Joseph Stalin and China under Mao Zedong.


title: Criticism of communist party rule

text: Soviet-style central planning and state ownership has been another topic of criticism of communist rule. Works by economists such as Friedrich Hayek and Milton Friedman argue that the economic structures associated with communist rule resulted in economic stagnation. Other topics of criticism of communist rule include foreign policies of expansionism, environmental degradation and the suppression of free cultural expression.


title: Criticism of communist party rule

text: Criticism of communist rule has also centered on the censorship of the arts. In the case of the Soviet Union, these criticisms often deal with the preferential treatment afforded to socialist realism. Other criticisms center on the large-scale cultural experiments of certain communist regimes. In Romania, the historical center of Bucharest was demolished and the whole city was redesigned between 1977 and 1989. In the Soviet Union, hundreds of churches were demolished or converted to secular purposes during the 1920s and 1930s. In China, the Cultural Revolution sought to give all artistic expression a 'proletarian' content and destroyed much older material lacking this. Advocates of these policies promised to create a new culture that would be superior to the old while critics argue that such policies represented an unjustifiable destruction of the cultural heritage of humanity.


title: Criticism of communist party rule

text: There is a well-known literature focusing on the role of the falsification of images in the Soviet Union under Stalin. In "The Commissar Vanishes: The Falsification of Photographs in Stalin's Russia", David King writes: "So much falsification took place during the Stalin years that it is possible to tell the story of the Soviet era through retouched photographs". Under Stalin, historical documents were often the subject of revisionism and forgery, intended to change public perception of certain important people and events. The pivotal role played by Leon Trotsky in the Russian Revolution and Civil War was almost entirely erased from official historical records after Trotsky became the leader of a Communist faction that opposed Stalin's rule.


title: Criticism of communist party rule

text: The emphasis on the "hard sciences" of the Soviet Union has been criticized. There were very few Nobel Prize winners from Communist states. Soviet research in certain sciences was at times guided by political rather than scientific considerations. Lysenkoism and Japhetic theory were promoted for brief periods of time in biology and linguistics respectively, despite having no scientific merit. Research into genetics was restricted because Nazi use of eugenics had prompted the Soviet Union to label genetics a "fascist science". Suppressed research in the Soviet Union also included cybernetics, psychology, psychiatry and organic chemistry.


title: Criticism of communist party rule

text: Soviet technology in many sectors lagged Western technology. Exceptions include areas like the Soviet space program and military technology where occasionally Communist technology was more advanced due to a massive concentration of research resources. According to the Central Intelligence Agency, much of the technology in the Communist states consisted simply of copies of Western products that had been legally purchased or gained through a massive espionage program. Some even say that stricter Western control of the export of technology through the Coordinating Committee for Multilateral Export Controls and providing defective technology to Communist agents after the discovery of the Farewell Dossier contributed to the fall of Communism.


title: Criticism of communist party rule

text: Both critics and supporters of communist rule often make comparisons between the economic development of countries under communist rule and non-communist countries, with the intention of certain economic structures are superior to the other. All such comparisons are open to challenge, both on the comparability of the states involved and the statistics being used for comparison. No two countries are identical, which makes comparisons regarding later economic development difficult; Western Europe was more developed and industrialized than Eastern Europe long before the Cold War; World War II damaged the economies of some countries more than others; and East Germany had much of its industry dismantled and moved to the Soviet Union for war reparations. For example, virtually every electrified and/or double tracked railroad in East Germany was reduced to a single track non-electrified railroad by Soviet demontage after World War II.


title: Criticism of communist party rule

text: Advocates of Soviet-style economic planning have claimed the system has in certain instances produced dramatic advances, including rapid industrialization of the Soviet Union, especially during the 1930s. Critics of Soviet economic planning, in response, assert that new research shows that the Soviet figures were partly fabricated, especially those showing extremely high growth in the Stalin era. Growth was high in the 1950s and 1960s, in some estimates much higher than during the 1930s, but later declined and according to some estimates became negative in the late 1980s. Before collectivization, Russia had been the "breadbasket of Europe". Afterwards, the Soviet Union became a net importer of grain, unable to produce enough food to feed its own population.


title: Criticism of communist party rule

text: China and Vietnam achieved much higher rates of growth after introducing market reforms such as socialism with Chinese characteristics starting in the late 1970s and 1980s, with higher growth rates being accompanied by declining poverty. The communist states do not compare favorably when looking at nations divided by the Cold War. North Korea versus South Korea; and East Germany versus West Germany. East German productivity relative to West German productivity was around 90 percent in 1936 and around 60–65 percent in 1954. When compared to Western Europe, East German productivity declined from 67 percent in 1950 to 50 percent before the reunification in 1990. All the Eastern European national economies had productivity far below the Western European average.


title: Criticism of communist party rule

text: Some countries under communist rule with socialist economies maintained consistently higher rates of economic growth than industrialized Western countries with capitalist economies. From 1928 to 1985, the economy of the Soviet Union grew by a factor of 10 and GNP per capita grew more than fivefold. The Soviet economy started out at roughly 25 percent the size of the economy of the United States. By 1955, it climbed to 40 percent. In 1965, the Soviet economy reached 50% of the contemporary United States economy and in 1977 it passed the 60 percent threshold. For the first half of the Cold War, most economists were asking when, not if, the Soviet economy would overtake the United States economy. Starting in the 1970s and continuing through the 1980s, growth rates slowed down in the Soviet Union and throughout the socialist bloc. The reasons for this downturn are still a matter of debate among economists, but one hypothesis is that the socialist planned economies had reached the limits of the extensive growth model they were pursuing and the downturn was at least in part caused by their refusal or inability to switch to intensive growth. Further, it could be argued that since the economies of countries such as Russia were pre-industrial before the socialist revolutions, the high economic growth rate could be attributed to industrialization. Also while forms of economic growth associated with any economic structure produce some winners and losers, some point out that high growth rates under communist rule were associated with particularly intense suffering and even mass starvation of the peasant population.


title: Criticism of communist party rule

text: Unlike the slow market reforms in China and Vietnam where communist rule continues, the abrupt end to central planning was followed by a depression in many of the states of the former Soviet Union and Eastern Europe which chose to adopt the so-called economic shock therapy. For example, in the Russian Federation GDP per capita decreased by one-third between 1989 and 1996. As of 2003, all of them have positive economic growth and almost all have a higher GDP/capita than before the transition. In general, critics of communist rule argue that socialist economies remained behind the industrialized West in terms of economic development for most of their existence while others assert that socialist economies had growth rates that were sometimes higher than many non-socialist economies, so they would have eventually caught up to the West if those growth rates had been maintained. Some reject all comparisons altogether, noting that the communist states started out with economies that were generally much less developed to begin with.


title: Criticism of communist party rule

text: Criticism of communist rule include a focus on environmental disasters. One example is the gradual disappearance of the Aral Sea and a similar diminishing of the Caspian Sea because of the diversion of the rivers that fed them. Another is the pollution of the Black Sea, the Baltic Sea and the unique freshwater environment of Lake Baikal. Many of the rivers were polluted and several, like the Vistula and Oder rivers in Poland, were virtually ecologically dead. Over 70 percent of the surface water in the Soviet Union was polluted. In 1988, only 30 percent of the sewage in the Soviet Union was treated properly. Established health standards for air pollution was exceeded by ten times or more in 103 cities in the Soviet Union in 1988. The air pollution problem was even more severe in Eastern Europe. It caused a rapid growth in lung cancer, forest die-back and damage to buildings and cultural heritages. According to official sources, 58 percent of total agricultural land of the former Soviet Union was affected by salinization, erosion, acidity, or waterlogging. Nuclear waste was dumped in the Sea of Japan, the Arctic Ocean and in locations in the Far East. It was revealed in 1992 that in the city of Moscow there were 636 radioactive toxic waste sites and 1,500 in Saint Petersburg.


title: Criticism of communist party rule

text: According to the United States Department of Energy, socialist economies also maintained a much higher level of energy intensity than either the Western nations or the Third World. This analysis is confirmed by the Institute of Economic Affairs, with Mikhail Bernstam stating that economies of the Eastern Bloc had an energy intensity between twice and three times higher as economies of the West. Some see the aforementioned examples of environmental degradation are similar to what had occurred in Western capitalist countries during the height of their drive to industrialize in the 19th century. Others claim that Communist regimes did more damage than average, primarily due to the lack of any popular or political pressure to research environmentally friendly technologies.


title: Criticism of communist party rule

text: Some ecological problems continue unabated after the fall of the Soviet Union and are still major issues today, which has prompted supporters of former ruling Communist parties to accuse their opponents of holding a double standard. Nonetheless, other environmental problems have improved in every studied former Communist state. However, some researchers argued that part of improvement was largely due to the severe economic downturns in the 1990s that caused many factories to close down.


title: Criticism of communist party rule

text: A number of communist states also used forced labour as a legal form of punishment for certain periods of time and again, critics of these policies assert that many prisoners who were sentenced to serve terms of imprisonment in forced labor camps such as the Gulag were sent there for political rather than criminal reasons. Some of the Gulag camps were located in very harsh environments, such as Siberia, which resulted in the death of a significant fraction of inmates before they could complete their prison sentences. Officially, the Gulag was shut down in 1960, but it remained "de facto" in action for some time afterward. North Korea continues to maintain a network of prison and labor camps that an estimated 200,000 people are imprisoned in. While the country does not regularly deport its citizens, it maintains a system of internal exile and banishment.


title: Criticism of communist party rule

text: Many deaths were also caused by involuntary deportations of entire ethnic groups as part of the population transfer in the Soviet Union. Many Prisoners of War taken during World War II were not released as the war ended and died in the Gulags. Many German civilians died as a result of atrocities committed by the Soviet army during the evacuation of East Prussia) and due to the policy of ethnic cleansing of Germans from the territories they lost due to the war during the expulsion of Germans after World War II.


title: Criticism of communist party rule

text: In the literature on communist rule, many anticommunists have asserted that communist regimes tend to impose harsh restrictions on the freedom of movement. These restrictions, they argue, are meant to stem the possibility of mass emigration, which threatens to offer evidence pointing to widespread popular dissatisfaction with their rule.


title: Criticism of communist party rule

text: Between 1950 and 1961, 2.75 million East Germans moved to West Germany. During the Hungarian Revolution of 1956 around 200,000 people moved to Austria as the Hungarian-Austrian border temporarily opened. From 1948 to 1953 hundreds of thousands of North Koreans moved to the South, stopped only when emigration was clamped down after the Korean War.


title: Criticism of communist party rule

text: In Cuba, 50,000 middle-class Cubans left between 1959 and 1961 after the Cuban Revolution and the breakdown of Cuban-American relations. Following a period of repressive measures by the Cuban government in the late 1960s and 1970s, Cuba allowed for mass emigration of dissatisfied citizens, a policy that resulted in the Mariel Boatlift of 1980, which led to a drop in emigration rates during the later months. In the 1990s, the economic crisis known as the Special Period coupled with the United States' tightening of the embargo led to desperate attempts to leave the island on "balsas" (rafts, tires and makeshift vessels). Many Cubans currently continue attempts to emigrate to the United States In total, according to some estimates, more than 1 million people have left Cuba, around 10% of the population. Between 1971 and 1998, 547,000 Cubans emigrated to the United States alongside 700,000 neighboring Dominicans, 335,000 Haitians and 485,000 Jamaicans. Since 1966, immigration to the United States was governed by the 1966 Cuban adjustment act, a United States law that applies solely to Cubans. The ruling allows any Cuban national, no matter the means of the entry into the United States, to receive a green card after being in the country a year. Havana has long argued that the policy has encouraged the illegal exodus, deliberately ignoring and undervaluing the life-threatening hardships endured by refugees.


title: Criticism of communist party rule

text: After the victory of the communist North in the Vietnam War, over 2 million people in former South Vietnamese territory left the country (see Vietnamese boat people) in the 1970s and 1980s. Another large group of refugees left Cambodia and Laos. Restrictions on emigration from states ruled by communist parties received extensive publicity. In the West, the Berlin wall emerged as a symbol of such restrictions. During the Berlin Wall's existence, sixty thousand people unsuccessfully attempted to emigrate illegally from East Germany and received jail terms for such actions; there were around five thousand successful escapes into West Berlin; and 239 people were killed trying to cross. Albania and North Korea perhaps imposed the most extreme restrictions on emigration. From most other communist regimes, legal emigration was always possible, though often so difficult that attempted emigrants would risk their lives in order to emigrate. Some of these states relaxed emigration laws significantly from the 1960s onwards. Tens of thousands of Soviet citizens emigrated legally every year during the 1970s.


title: Criticism of communist party rule

text: According to Klas-Göran Karlsson, "[i]deologies are systems of ideas, which cannot commit crimes independently. However, individuals, collectives and states that have defined themselves as communist have committed crimes in the name of communist ideology, or without naming communism as the direct source of motivation for their crimes." Authors such as Daniel Goldhagen, John Gray, Richard Pipes and Rudolph Rummel consider the ideology of communism to be a significant, or at least partial, causative factor in the events under communist party rule. "The Black Book of Communism" claims an association between communism and criminality, arguing that "Communist regimes [...] turned mass crime into a full-blown system of government" while adding that this criminality lies at the level of ideology rather than state practice. On the other hand, Benjamin Valentino does not see a link between communism and mass killing, arguing that killings occur when power is in the hands of one person or a small number of people, when "powerful groups come to believe it is the best available means to accomplish certain radical goals, counter specific types of threats, or solve difficult military problem", or there is a "revolutionary desire to bring about the rapid and radical transformation of society."


title: Criticism of communist party rule

text: Christopher J. Finlay argues that Marxism legitimates violence without any clear limiting principle because it rejects moral and ethical norms as constructs of the dominant class and states that "it would be conceivable for revolutionaries to commit atrocious crimes in bringing about a socialist system, with the belief that their crimes will be retroactively absolved by the new system of ethics put in place by the proletariat." According to Rustam Singh, Karl Marx alluded to the possibility of peaceful revolution, but he emphasized the need for violent revolution and "revolutionary terror" after the failed Revolutions of 1848. According to Jacques Sémelin, "communist systems emerging in the twentieth century ended up destroying their own populations, not because they planned to annihilate them as such, but because they aimed to restructure the 'social body' from top to bottom, even if that meant purging it and recarving it to suit their new Promethean political "imaginaire"."


title: Criticism of communist party rule

text: Daniel Chirot and Clark McCauley write that, especially in Stalin's Soviet Union, Mao's China and Pol Pot's Cambodia, a fanatical certainty that socialism could be made to work motivated communist leaders in "the ruthless dehumanization of their enemies, who could be suppressed because they were 'objectively' and 'historically' wrong. Furthermore, if events did not work out as they were supposed to, then that was because class enemies, foreign spies and saboteurs, or worst of all, internal traitors were wrecking the plan. Under no circumstances could it be admitted that the vision itself might be unworkable, because that meant capitulation to the forces of reaction." Michael Mann writes that communist party members were "ideologically driven, believing that in order to create a new socialist society, they must lead in socialist zeal. Killings were often popular, the rank-and-file as keen to exceed killing quotas as production quotas."


title: Criticism of communist party rule

text: According to Rummel, the killings committed by communist regimes can best be explained as the result of the marriage between absolute power and the absolutist ideology of Marxism. Rummel states that "communism was like a fanatical religion. It had its revealed text and its chief interpreters. It had its priests and their ritualistic prose with all the answers. It had a heaven, and the proper behavior to reach it. It had its appeal to faith. And it had its crusades against nonbelievers. What made this secular religion so utterly lethal was its seizure of all the state's instruments of force and coercion and their immediate use to destroy or control all independent sources of power, such as the church, the professions, private businesses, schools, and the family." Rummels writes that Marxist communists saw the construction of their utopia as "though a war on poverty, exploitation, imperialism and inequality. And for the greater good, as in a real war, people are killed. And, thus, this war for the communist utopia had its necessary enemy casualties, the clergy, bourgeoisie, capitalists, wreckers, counterrevolutionaries, rightists, tyrants, rich, landlords, and noncombatants that unfortunately got caught in the battle. In a war millions may die, but the cause may be well justified, as in the defeat of Hitler and an utterly racist Nazism. And to many communists, the cause of a communist utopia was such as to justify all the deaths."


title: Criticism of communist party rule

text: Benjamin Valentino writes the following "apparently high levels of political support for murderous regimes and leaders should not automatically be equated with support for mass killing itself. Individuals are capable of supporting violent regimes or leaders while remaining indifferent or even opposed to specific policies that these regimes and carried out." Valentino quotes Vladimir Brovkin as saying that "a vote for the Bolsheviks in 1917 was not a vote for Red Terror or even a vote for a dictatorship of the proletariat." According to Valentino, such strategies were so violent because they economically dispossess large numbers of people, commenting: "Social transformations of this speed and magnitude have been associated with mass killing for two primary reasons. First, the massive social dislocations produced by such changes have often led to economic collapse, epidemics, and, most important, widespread famines. ... The second reason that communist regimes bent on the radical transformation of society have been linked to mass killing is that the revolutionary changes they have pursued have clashed inexorably with the fundamental interests of large segments of their populations. Few people have proved willing to accept such far-reaching sacrifices without intense levels of coercion." According to Jacques Sémelin, "communist systems emerging in the twentieth century ended up destroying their own populations, not because they planned to annihilate them as such, but because they aimed to restructure the 'social body' from top to bottom, even if that meant purging it and recarving it to suit their new Promethean political "imaginaire.""


title: Criticism of communist party rule

text: As an ideology, Marxism–Leninism stresses militant opposition to imperialism. Lenin considered imperialism "the highest stage of capitalism" and in 1917 made declarations of the unconditional right of self-determination and secession for the national minorities of Russia. During the Cold War, communist states have been accused of, or criticized for, exercising imperialism by giving military assistance and in some cases intervening directly on behalf of Communist movements that were fighting for control, particularly in Asia and Africa.


title: Criticism of communist party rule

text: Western critics accused the Soviet Union and the People's Republic of China of practicing imperialism themselves, and communist condemnations of Western imperialism hypocritical. The attack on and restoration of Moscow's control of countries that had been under the rule of the tsarist empire, but briefly formed newly independent states in the aftermath of the Russian Civil War (including Armenia, Georgia and Azerbaijan), have been condemned as examples of Soviet imperialism. Similarly, Stalin's forced reassertion of Moscow's rule of the Baltic states in World War II has been condemned as Soviet imperialism. Western critics accused Stalin of creating satellite states in Eastern Europe after the end of World War II. Western critics also condemned the intervention of Soviet forces during the 1956 Hungarian Revolution, the Prague Spring and the war in Afghanistan as aggression against popular uprisings. Maoists argued that the Soviet Union had itself become an imperialist power while maintaining a socialist façade (social imperialism). China's reassertion of central control over territories on the frontiers of the Qing dynasty, particularly Tibet, has also been condemned as imperialistic by some critics.


title: Criticism of communist party rule

text: Some states under communist rule have been criticized for directly supporting terrorist groups such as the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, the Red Army Faction and the Japanese Red Army. North Korea has been implicated in terrorist acts such as Korean Air Flight 858.


title: Criticism of communist party rule

text: According to Richard Pipes, the Soviet Union shares some responsibility for World War II. Pipes argues that both Adolf Hitler and Benito Mussolini used the Soviet Union as a model for their own regimes and that Hitler privately considered Stalin a "genius". According to Pipes, Stalin privately hoped that another world war would weaken his foreign enemies and allow him to assert Soviet power internationally. Before Hitler took power, Stalin allowed the testing and production of German weapons that were forbidden by the Versailles Treaty to occur on Soviet territory. Stalin is also accused of weakening German opposition to the Nazis before Hitler's rule began in 1933. During the 1932 German elections, for instance, he forbade the German Communists from collaborating with the Social Democrats. These parties together gained more votes than Hitler and some have later surmised could have prevented him from becoming Chancellor.


title: Criticism of communist party rule

text: Professor Matthew Krain states that many scholars have pointed to revolutions and civil wars as providing the opportunity for radical leaders and ideologies to gain power and the preconditions for mass killing by the state. Professor Nam Kyu Kim writes that exclusionary ideologies are critical to explaining mass killing, but the organizational capabilities and individual characteristics of revolutionary leaders, including their attitudes towards risk and violence, are also important. Besides opening up political opportunities for new leaders to eliminate their political opponents, revolutions bring to power leaders who are more apt to commit large-scale violence against civilians in order to legitimize and strengthen their own power. Genocide scholar Adam Jones states that the Russian Civil War was very influential on the emergence of leaders like Stalin and accustomed people to "harshness, cruelty, terror." Martin Malia called the "brutal conditioning" of the two World Wars important to understanding communist violence, although not its source.


title: Criticism of communist party rule

text: Historian Helen Rappaport describes Nikolay Yezhov, the bureaucrat in charge of the NKVD during the Great Purge, as a physically diminutive figure of "limited intelligence" and "narrow political understanding. [...] Like other instigators of mass murder throughout history, [he] compensated for his lack of physical stature with a pathological cruelty and the use of brute terror." Russian and world history scholar John M. Thompson places personal responsibility directly on Stalin. According to Thompson, "much of what occurred only makes sense if it stemmed in part from the disturbed mentality, pathological cruelty, and extreme paranoia of Stalin himself. Insecure, despite having established a dictatorship over the party and country, hostile and defensive when confronted with criticism of the excesses of collectivization and the sacrifices required by high-tempo industrialization, and deeply suspicious that past, present, and even yet unknown future opponents were plotting against him, Stalin began to act as a person beleaguered. He soon struck back at enemies, real or imaginary." Professors Pablo Montagnes and Stephane Wolton argue that the purges in the Soviet Union and China can be attributed to the "personalist" leadership of Stalin and Mao, who were incentivized by having both control of the security apparatus used to carry out the purges and control of the appointment of replacements for those purged. Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Žižek attributes Mao allegedly viewing human life as disposable to Mao's "cosmic perspective" on humanity.


title: Criticism of communist party rule

text: Many mass killings occurred under 20th-century communist regimes. Death estimates vary widely, depending on the definitions of deaths included. The higher estimates of mass killings account for crimes against civilians by governments, including executions, destruction of population through man-made hunger and deaths during forced deportations, imprisonment and through forced labor. Terms used to define these killings include "mass killing", "democide", "politicide", "classicide", a broad definition of "genocide", "crimes against humanity", "holocaust", and "repression".


title: Criticism of communist party rule

text: Scholars such as Stéphane Courtois, Steven Rosefielde, Rudolph Rummel and Benjamin Valentino have argued that communist regimes were responsible for tens or even hundreds of millions of deaths. These deaths mostly occurred under the rule of Stalin and Mao, therefore these particular periods of communist rule in Soviet Russia and China receive considerable attention in "The Black Book of Communism", although other communist regimes have also caused high number of deaths, not least the Khmer Rouge regime in Cambodia, which is often acclaimed to have killed more of its citizens than any other in history. These accounts often divide their death toll estimates into two categories, namely executions of people who had received the death penalty for various charges, or deaths that occurred in prison; and deaths that were not caused directly by the regime, as the people in question were not executed and did not die in prison, but are considered to have died as an indirect result of state or communist party policies. Those scholars argue that most victims of communist rule fell in this category, which is often the subject of considerable controversy.


title: Criticism of communist party rule

text: In most communist states, the death penalty was a legal form of punishment for most of their existence, with a few exceptions. While the Soviet Union formally abolished the death penalty between 1947 and 1950, critics argue that this did nothing to curb executions and acts of genocide. Critics also argue that many of the convicted prisoners executed by authorities under communist rule were not criminals but political dissidents. Stalin's Great Purge in the late 1930s (from roughly 1936–1938) is given as the most prominent example of the hypothesis. With regard to deaths not caused directly by state or party authorities, "The Black Book of Communism" points to famine and war as the indirect causes of what they see as deaths for which communist regimes were responsible. In this sense, the Soviet famine of 1932–33 and the Great Leap Forward are often described as man-made famines. These two events alone killed a majority of the people seen as victims of communist states by estimates such as Courtois'. Courtois also blames Mengistu Haile Mariam's regime for having exacerbated the 1983–1985 famine in Ethiopia by imposing unreasonable political and economic burdens on the population.


title: Criticism of communist party rule

text: The authors of "The Black Book of Communism", Norman Davies, Rummel and others have attempted to give estimates of the total number of deaths for which communist rule of a particular state in a particular period was responsible, or the total for all states under communist rule. The question is complicated by the lack of hard data and by biases inherent in any estimation. The number of people killed under Stalin's rule in the Soviet Union by 1939 has been estimated as 3.5–8 million by Geoffrey Ponton, 6.6 million by V. V. Tsaplin and 10–11 million by Alexander Nove. The number of people killed under Stalin's rule by the time of his death in 1953 has been estimated as 1–3 million by Stephen G. Wheatcroft, 6–9 million by Timothy D. Snyder, 13–20 million by Rosefielde, 20 million by Courtois and Martin Malia, 20 to 25 million by Alexander Yakovlev, 43 million by Rummel and 50 million by Davies. The number of people killed under Mao's rule in the People's Republic of China has been estimated at 19.5 million by Wang Weizhi, 27 million by John Heidenrich, between 38 and 67 million by Kurt Glaser and Stephan Possony, between 32 and 59 million by Robert L. Walker, over 50 million by Rosefielde, 65 million by Cortois and Malia, well over 70 million by Jon Halliday and Jung Chang in "" and 77 million by Rummel.


title: Criticism of communist party rule

text: The authors of "The Black Book of Communism" have also estimated that 9.3 million people were killed under communist rule in other states: 2 million in North Korea, 2 million in Cambodia, 1.7 million in Africa, 1.5 million in Afghanistan, 1 million in Vietnam, 1 million in Eastern Europe and 150,000 in Latin America. Rummel has estimated that 1.7 million were killed by the government of Vietnam, 1.6 million in North Korea (not counting the 1990s famine), 2 million in Cambodia and 2.5 million in Poland and Yugoslavia. Valentino estimates that 1 to 2 million were killed in Cambodia, 50,000 to 100,000 in Bulgaria, 80,000 to 100,000 in East Germany, 60,000 to 300,000 in Romania, 400,000 to 1,500,000 in North Korea, and 80,000 to 200,000 in North and South Vietnam.


title: Criticism of communist party rule

text: Between the authors Wiezhi, Heidenrich, Glaser, Possony, Ponton, Tsaplin and Nove, Stalin's Soviet Union and Mao's China have an estimated total death rate ranging from 23 million to 109 million. "The Black Book of Communism" asserts that roughly 94 million died under all communist regimes while Rummel believed around 144.7 million died under six communist regimes. Valentino claims that between 21 and 70 million deaths are attributable to the Communist regimes in the Soviet Union, the People's Republic of China and Democratic Kampuchea alone. Jasper Becker, author of "Hungry Ghosts", claims that if the death tolls from the famines caused by communist regimes in China, the Soviet Union, Cambodia, North Korea, Ethiopia and Mozambique are added together, the figure could be close to 90 million. These estimates are the three highest numbers of victims blamed on communism by any notable study. However, the totals that include research by Wiezhi, Heidenrich, Glasser, Possony, Ponton, Tsaplin and Nove do not include other periods of time beyond Stalin or Mao's rule, thus it may be possible when including other communist states to reach higher totals. In a 25 January 2006 resolution condemning the crimes of communist regimes, the Council of Europe cited the 94 million total reached by the authors of the "Black Book of Communism".


title: Criticism of communist party rule

text: Explanations have been offered for the discrepancies in the number of estimated victims of communist regimes:


title: Criticism of communist party rule

text: According to historian J. Arch Getty, over half of the 100 million deaths which are attributed to communism were due to famines. Stéphane Courtois posits that many communist regimes caused famines in their efforts to forcibly collectivize agriculture and systematically used it as a weapon by controlling the food supply and distributing food on a political basis. Courtois states that "in the period after 1918, only Communist countries experienced such famines, which led to the deaths of hundreds of thousands, and in some cases millions, of people. And again in the 1980s, two African countries that claimed to be Marxist–Leninist, Ethiopia and Mozambique, were the only such countries to suffer these deadly famines."


title: Criticism of communist party rule

text: Scholars Stephen G. Wheatcroft, R. W. Davies and Mark Tauger reject the idea that the Ukrainian famine was an act of genocide that was intentionally inflicted by the Soviet government. Getty posits that the "overwhelming weight of opinion among scholars working in the new archives is that the terrible famine of the 1930s was the result of Stalinist bungling and rigidity rather than some genocidal plan." Wheatcroft argued that the Soviet government's policies during the famine were criminal acts of fraud and manslaughter, though not outright murder or genocide. In contrast according to Simon Payaslian, the scholarly consensus classifies the Holodomor as a genocide. Russian novelist and historian Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn opined on 2 April 2008 in "Izvestia" that the 1930s famine in the Ukraine was no different from the Russian famine of 1921 as both were caused by the ruthless robbery of peasants by Bolshevik grain procurements.


title: Criticism of communist party rule

text: Pankaj Mishra questions Mao's direct responsibility for the Great Chinese Famine, noting that "[a] great many premature deaths also occurred in newly independent nations not ruled by erratic tyrants." Mishra cites Nobel laureate Amartya Sen's research demonstrating that democratic India suffered more excess mortality from starvation and disease in the second half of the 20th century than China did. Sen wrote that "India seems to manage to fill its cupboard with more skeletons every eight years than China put there in its years of shame."


title: Criticism of communist party rule

text: Benjamin Valentino writes: "Although not all the deaths due to famine in these cases were intentional, communist leaders directed the worst effects of famine against their suspected enemies and used hunger as a weapon to force millions of people to conform to the directives of the state." Daniel Goldhagen says that in some cases deaths from famine should not be distinguished from mass murder, commenting: "Whenever governments have not alleviated famine conditions, political leaders decided not to say no to mass death – in other words, they said yes." Goldhagen says that instances of this occurred in the Mau Mau Rebellion, the Great Leap Forward, the Nigerian Civil War, the Eritrean War of Independence, and the War in Darfur. Martin Shaw posits that if a leader knew the ultimate result of their policies would be mass death by famine, and they continue to enact them anyway, these deaths can be understood as intentional.


title: Criticism of communist party rule

text: Historians and journalists, such as Seumas Milne and Jon Wiener, have criticized the emphasis on communism when assigning blame for famines. In a 2002 article for "The Guardian", Milne mentions "the moral blindness displayed towards the record of colonialism", and he writes: "If Lenin and Stalin are regarded as having killed those who died of hunger in the famines of the 1920s and 1930s, then Churchill is certainly responsible for the 4 million deaths in the avoidable Bengal famine of 1943." Milne laments that while "there is a much-lauded "Black Book of Communism", [there exists] no such comprehensive indictment of the colonial record." Weiner makes a similar assertion while comparing the Holodomor and the Bengal famine of 1943, stating that Winston Churchill's role in the Bengal famine "seems similar to Stalin's role in the Ukrainian famine." Historian Mike Davis, author of "Late Victorian Holocausts", draws comparisons between the Great Chinese Famine and the Indian famines of the late 19th century, arguing that in both instances the governments which oversaw the response to the famines deliberately chose not to alleviate conditions and as such bear responsibility for the scale of deaths in said famines.


title: Criticism of communist party rule

text: Historian Michael Ellman is critical of the fixation on a "uniquely Stalinist evil" when it comes to excess deaths from famines. Ellman posits that mass deaths from famines are not a "uniquely Stalinist evil", commenting that throughout Russian history, famines, and droughts have been a common occurrence, including the Russian famine of 1921–1922, which occurred before Stalin came to power. He also states that famines were widespread throughout the world in the 19th and 20th centuries in countries such as India, Ireland, Russia and China. According to Ellman, the G8 "are guilty of mass manslaughter or mass deaths from criminal negligence because of their not taking obvious measures to reduce mass deaths" and Stalin's "behaviour was no worse than that of many rulers in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries."


title: Criticism of communist party rule

text: Both anti-communists and communists have criticized the personality cults of many communist rulers, especially the cults of Stalin, Mao, Fidel Castro and Kim Il-sung. In the case of North Korea, the personality cult of Kim Il-sung was associated with inherited leadership, with the succession of Kim's son Kim Jong-il in 1994 and grandson Kim Jong-un in 2011. Cuban communists have also been criticized for planning an inherited leadership, with the succession of Raúl Castro following his brother's illness in mid-2006.


title: Criticism of communist party rule

text: Large-scale political repression under communist rule has been the subject of extensive historical research by scholars and activists from a diverse range of perspectives. A number of researchers on this subject are former Eastern bloc communists who become disillusioned with their ruling parties, such as Alexander Yakovlev and Dmitri Volkogonov. Similarly, Jung Chang, one of the authors of "", was a Red Guard in her youth. Others are disillusioned former Western communists, including several of the authors of "The Black Book of Communism". Robert Conquest, another former communist, became one of the best-known writers on the Soviet Union following the publication of his influential account of the Great Purge in "The Great Terror", which at first was not well received in some left-leaning circles of Western intellectuals. Following the end of the Cold War, much of the research on this topic has focused on state archives previously classified under communist rule.


title: Criticism of communist party rule

text: The level of political repression experienced in states under communist rule varied widely between different countries and historical periods. The most rigid censorship was practiced by the Soviet Union under Stalin (1922–1953), China under Mao during the Cultural Revolution (1966–1976) and the communist regime in North Korea throughout its rule (1948–present). Under Stalin's rule, political repression in the Soviet Union included executions of Great Purge victims and peasants deemed "kulaks" by state authorities; the Gulag system of forced labor camps; deportations of ethnic minorities; and mass starvations during the Soviet famine of 1932–1933, caused by either government mismanagement, or by some accounts, caused deliberately. "The Black Book of Communism" also details the mass starvations resulting from Great Leap Forward in China and the Killing Fields in Cambodia. Although political repression in the Soviet Union was far more extensive and severe in its methods under Stalin's rule than in any other period, authors such as Richard Pipes, Orlando Figes and works such as the "Black Book of Communism" argue that a reign of terror began within Russia under the leadership of Vladimir Lenin immediately after the October Revolution, and continued by the Red Army and the Cheka over the country during the Russian Civil War. It included summary executions of hundreds of thousands of "class enemies" by Cheka; the development of the system of labor camps, which would later lay the foundation for the Gulags; and a policy of food requisitioning during the civil war, which was partially responsible for a famine causing three to ten million deaths.


title: Criticism of communist party rule

text: Alexander Yakovlev's critique of political repression under communist rule focus on the treatment of children, which he numbers in the millions, of alleged political opponents. His accounts stress cases in which children of former imperial officers and peasants were held as hostages and sometimes shot during the civil war. His account of the Second World War highlights cases in which the children of soldiers who had surrendered were the victims of state reprisal. Some children, Yakovlev notes, followed their parents to the Gulags, suffering an especially high mortality rate. According to Yakovlev, in 1954 there were 884,057 "specially resettled" children under the age of sixteen. Others were placed in special orphanages run by the secret police in order to be reeducated, often losing even their names, and were considered socially dangerous as adults. Other accounts focus on extensive networks of civilian informants, consisting of either volunteers, or those forcibly recruited. These networks were used to collect intelligence for the government and report cases of dissent. Many accounts of political repression in the Soviet Union highlight cases in which internal critics were classified as mentally ill (diagnosed with disorders such as sluggishly progressing schizophrenia) and incarcerated in mental hospitals). The fact that workers in the Soviet Union were not allowed to organize independent, non-state trade union has also been presented as a case of political repression in the Soviet Union. Various accounts stressing a relationship between political repression and communist rule focus on the suppression of internal uprisings by military force such as the Tambov rebellion and the Kronstadt rebellion during the Russian Civil War as well as the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests and massacre in China. Ex-communist dissident Milovan Đilas, among others, focused on the relationship between political repression and the rise of a powerful new class of party bureaucrats, called the nomenklatura, that had emerged under communist rule and exploited the rest of the population.


title: Criticism of communist party rule

text: Historian Anne Applebaum asserts that "without exception, the Leninist belief in the one-party state was and is characteristic of every communist regime" and "the Bolshevik use of violence was repeated in every communist revolution." Phrases said by Vladimir Lenin and Cheka founder Felix Dzerzhinsky were deployed all over the world. Applebaum notes that as late as 1976 Mengistu Haile Mariam unleashed a Red Terror in Ethiopia. Lenin is quoted as saying to his colleagues in the Bolshevik government: "If we are not ready to shoot a saboteur and White Guardist, what sort of revolution is that?"


title: Criticism of communist party rule

text: Historian Robert Conquest stressed that events such as Stalin's purges were not contrary to the principles of Leninism, but rather a natural consequence of the system established by Lenin, who personally ordered the killing of local groups of class enemy hostages. Alexander Yakovlev, architect of perestroika and glasnost and later head of the Presidential Commission for the Victims of Political Repression, elaborates on this point, stating: "The truth is that in punitive operations Stalin did not think up anything that was not there under Lenin: executions, hostage taking, concentration camps, and all the rest." Historian Robert Gellately concurs, arguing that "[t]o put it another way, Stalin initiated very little that Lenin had not already introduced or previewed."


title: Criticism of communist party rule

text: Philosopher Stephen Hicks of Rockford College ascribes the violence characteristic of 20th-century communist party rule to these collectivist regimes' abandonment of protections of civil rights and rejection of the values of civil society. Hicks writes that whereas "in practice every liberal capitalist country has a solid record for being humane, for by and large respecting rights and freedoms, and for making it possible for people to put together fruitful and meaningful lives", in communist party rule "practice has time and again proved itself more brutal than the worst dictatorships prior to the twentieth century. Each socialist regime has collapsed into dictatorship and begun killing people on a huge scale."


title: Criticism of communist party rule

text: Author Eric D. Weitz says that events such as mass killing in communist states are a natural consequence of the failure of the rule of law, seen commonly during periods of social upheaval in the 20th century. For both communist and non-communist mass killings, "genocides occurred at moments of extreme social crisis, often generated by the very policies of the regimes." According to this view, mass killings are not inevitable but are political decisions. Soviet and Communist studies scholar Steven Rosefielde writes that communist rulers had to choose between changing course and "terror-command" and more often than not chose the latter. Sociologist Michael Mann argues that a lack of institutionalized authority structures meant that a chaotic mix of both centralized control and party factionalism were factors to the events.


title: Criticism of communist party rule

text: Starting with the first five-year plan in the Soviet Union in the late 1920s and early 1930s, Soviet leaders pursued a strategy of economic development concentrating the country's economic resources on heavy industry and defense rather than on consumer goods. This strategy was later adopted in varying degrees by communist leaders in Eastern Europe and the Third World. For many Western critics of communist strategies of economic development, the unavailability of consumer goods common in the West in the Soviet Union was a case in point of how communist rule resulted in lower standards of living.


title: Criticism of communist party rule

text: The allegation that communist rule resulted in lower standards of living sharply contrasted with communist arguments boasting of the achievements of the social and cultural programs of the Soviet Union and other communist states. For instance, Soviet leaders boasted of guaranteed employment, subsidized food and clothing, free health care, free child care and free education. Soviet leaders also touted early advances in women's equality, particularly in Islamic areas of Soviet Central Asia. Eastern European communists often touted high levels of literacy in comparison with many parts of the developing world. A phenomenon called Ostalgie, nostalgia for life under Soviet rule, has been noted amongst former members of Communist countries, now living in Western capitalist states, particularly those who lived in the former East Germany.


title: Criticism of communist party rule

text: The effects of communist rule on living standards have been harshly criticized. Jung Chang stresses that millions died in famines in communist China and North Korea. Some studies conclude that East Germans were shorter than West Germans probably due to differences in factors such as nutrition and medical services. According to some researchers, life satisfaction increased in East Germany after the reunification. Critics of Soviet rule charge that the Soviet education system was full of propaganda and of low quality. United States government researchers pointed out the fact that the Soviet Union spent far less on health care than Western nations and noted that the quality of Soviet health care was deteriorating in the 1970s and 1980s. In addition, the failure of Soviet pension and welfare programs to provide adequate protection was noted in the West.


title: Criticism of communist party rule

text: After 1965, life expectancy began to plateau or even decrease, especially for males, in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe while it continued to increase in Western Europe. This divergence between two parts of Europe continued over the course of three decades, leading to a profound gap in the mid-1990s. Life expectancy sharply declined after the change to market economy in most of the states of the former Soviet Union, but may now have started to increase in the Baltic states. In several Eastern European nations, life expectancy started to increase immediately after the fall of communism. The previous decline for males continued for a time in some Eastern European nations, like Romania, before starting to increase.


title: Criticism of communist party rule

text: In "The Politics of Bad Faith", conservative writer David Horowitz painted a picture of horrendous living standards in the Soviet Union. Horowitz claimed that in the 1980s rationing of meat and sugar was common in the Soviet Union. Horowitz cited studies suggesting the average intake of red meat for a Soviet citizen was half of what it had been for a subject of the tsar in 1913, that blacks under apartheid in South Africa owned more cars per capita and that the average welfare mother in the United States received more income in a month than the average Soviet worker could earn in a year. According to Horowitz, the only area of consumption in which the Soviets excelled was the ingestion of hard liquor. Horowitz also noted that two-thirds of the households had no hot water and a third had no running water at all. Horowitz cited the government newspaper "Izvestia", noting a typical working-class family of four was forced to live for eight years in a single eight by eight foot room before marginally better accommodation became available. In his discussion of the Soviet housing shortage, Horowitz stated that the shortage was so acute that at all times 17 percent of Soviet families had to be physically separated for want of adequate space. A third of the hospitals had no running water and the bribery of doctors and nurses to get decent medical attention and even amenities like blankets in Soviet hospitals was not only common, but routine. In his discussion of Soviet education, Horowitz stated that only 15 percent of Soviet youth were able to attend institutions of higher learning compared to 34 percent in the United States. However, large segments of citizens of many former communist today states say that the standard of living has fallen since the end of the Cold War, with majorities of citizens in the former East Germany and Romania were polled as saying that life was better under Communism.


title: Criticism of communist party rule

text: In terms of living standards, economist Michael Ellman asserts that in international comparisons state socialist nations compared favorably with capitalist nations in health indicators such as infant mortality and life expectancy. Amartya Sen's own analysis of international comparisons of life expectancy found that several communist countries made significant gains and commented "one thought that is bound to occur is that communism is good for poverty removal". Poverty exploded following the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, tripling to more than one-third of Russia's population in just three years. By 1999, around 191 million people in former Eastern Bloc countries and Soviet republics were living on less than $5.50 a day.


title: Criticism of communist party rule

text: Communist countries, states, areas and local communities have been based on the rule of parties proclaiming a basis in Marxism–Leninism, an ideology which is not supported by all Marxists, communists and leftists. Many communists disagree with many of the actions undertaken by ruling Communist parties during the 20th century.


title: Criticism of communist party rule

text: Elements of the left opposed to Bolshevik plans before they were put into practice included the revisionist Marxists, such as Eduard Bernstein, who denied the necessity of a revolution. Anarchists (who had differed from Marx and his followers since the split in the First International), many of the Socialist Revolutionaries and the Marxist Mensheviks supported the overthrow of the tsar, but vigorously opposed the seizure of power by Lenin and the Bolsheviks.


title: Criticism of communist party rule

text: Criticisms of Communist rule from the left continued after the creation of the Soviet state. The anarchist Nestor Makhno led the Revolutionary Insurrectionary Army of Ukraine against the Bolsheviks during the Russian Civil War and the Socialist Revolutionary Fanya Kaplan tried to assassinate Lenin. Bertrand Russell visited Russia in 1920 and regarded the Bolsheviks as intelligent, but clueless and planless. In her books about Soviet Russia after the revolution, "My Disillusionment in Russia" and "My Further Disillusionment in Russia", Emma Goldman condemned the suppression of the Kronstadt rebellion as a "massacre". Eventually, the Left Socialist Revolutionaries broke with the Bolsheviks.


title: Criticism of communist party rule

text: Anti-revisionists (which includes radical Marxist–Leninist factions, Hoxhaists and Maoists) criticize the rule of the communist states by claiming that they were state capitalist states ruled by revisionists. Though the periods and countries defined as state capitalist or revisionist varies among different ideologies and parties, all of them accept that the Soviet Union was socialist during Stalin's time. Maoists view the Soviet Union and most of its satellites as "state capitalist" as a result of de-Stalinization; some of them also view modern China in this light, believing that the People's Republic of China became state capitalist after Mao's death. Hoxhaists believe that the People's Republic of China was always state capitalist and uphold Socialist Albania as the only socialist state after the Soviet Union under Stalin.


title: Criticism of communist party rule

text: Left communists claim that the "communist" or "socialist" states or "people's states" were actually state capitalist and thus cannot be called "socialist". Some of the earliest critics of Leninism were the German-Dutch left communists, including Herman Gorter, Anton Pannekoek and Paul Mattick. Though most left communists see the October Revolution positively, their analysis concludes that by the time of the Kronstadt revolt the revolution had degenerated due to various historical factors. Rosa Luxemburg was another communist who disagreed with Lenin's organizational methods which eventually led to the creation of the Soviet Union.


title: Criticism of communist party rule

text: Amadeo Bordiga wrote about his view of the Soviet Union as a capitalist society. In contrast to those produced by the Trotskyists, Bordiga's writings on the capitalist nature of the Soviet economy also focused on the agrarian sector. Bordiga displayed a kind of theoretical rigidity which was both exasperating and effective in allowing him to see things differently. He wanted to show how capitalist social relations existed in the kolkhoz and in the sovkhoz, one a cooperative farm and the other the straight wage-labor state farm. He emphasized how much of agrarian production depended on the small privately owned plots (he was writing in 1950) and predicted quite accurately the rates at which the Soviet Union would start importing wheat after Russia had been such a large exporter from the 1880s to 1914. In Bordiga's conception, Stalin and later Mao, Ho Chi Minh and Che Guevara were "great romantic revolutionaries" in the 19th century sense, i.e. bourgeois revolutionaries. He felt that the Stalinist regimes that came into existence after 1945 were just extending the bourgeois revolution, i.e. the expropriation of the Prussian Junker class by the Red Army through their agrarian policies and through the development of the productive forces.


title: Criticism of communist party rule

text: After the split between Leon Trotsky and Stalin, Trotskyists have argued that Stalin transformed the Soviet Union into a bureaucratic and repressive one-party state and that all subsequent Communist states ultimately followed a similar path because they copied Stalinism. There are various terms used by Trotskyists to define such states, such as "degenerated workers' state" and "deformed workers' state", "state capitalist" or "bureaucratic collectivist". While Trotskyists are Leninists, there are other Marxists who reject Leninism entirely, arguing that the Leninist principle of democratic centralism was the source of the Soviet Union's slide away from communism.


title: Criticism of communist party rule

text: In October 2017, Nathan J. Robinson wrote an article titled "How to Be a Socialist without Being an Apologist for the Atrocities of Communist Regimes", arguing that it is "incredibly easy to be both in favor of socialism and against the crimes committed by 20th century communist regimes. All it takes is a consistent, principled opposition to authoritarianism".


title: Criticism of communist party rule

text: Some academics and writers argue that anti-communist narratives have exaggerated the extent of political repression and censorship in states under communist party rule and drawn comparisons with what they see as atrocities that were perpetrated by capitalist countries, particularly during the Cold War. They include Mark Aarons, Vincent Bevins, Noam Chomsky, Jodi Dean, Kristen Ghodsee, Seumas Milne and Michael Parenti.


title: Criticism of communist party rule

text: Parenti argues that communist states experienced greater economic development than they would have otherwise, or that their leaders were forced to take harsh measures to defend their countries against the Western Bloc during the Cold War. In addition, Parenti states that communist party rule provided some human rights such as economic, social and cultural rights not found under capitalist states such as that everyone is treated equal regardless of education or financial stability; that any citizen can keep a job; or that there is a more efficient and equal distribution of resources. Professors Paul Greedy and Olivia Ball report that communist parties pressed Western governments to include economic rights in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.


title: Criticism of communist party rule

text: Professor David L. Hoffmann argues that many actions of communist party rule were rooted in the response Western governments gave during World War I and that communist party rule institutionalized them. While noting "its brutalities and failures", Milne argues that "rapid industrialisation, mass education, job security and huge advances in social and gender equality" are not accounted and the dominant account of communist party rule "gives no sense of how communist regimes renewed themselves after 1956 or why western leaders feared they might overtake the capitalist world well into the 1960s."


title: Atypical antidepressant

text: An atypical antidepressant is any antidepressant medication that acts in a manner that is different from that of most other antidepressants. Atypical antidepressants include agomelatine, bupropion, iprindole, mianserin, mirtazapine, nefazodone, opipramol, tianeptine, and trazodone. The agents vilazodone and vortioxetine are partly atypical. Typical antidepressants include the , , , and , which act mainly by increasing the levels of the monoamine neurotransmitters serotonin and/or norepinephrine. Among TCAs, trimipramine is an atypical agent in that it appears not to do this. In August 2020, Esketamine (JNJ-54135419) was approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) for the treatment for treatment-resistant depression with the added indication for the short-term treatment of suicidal thoughts.


title: Atypical antidepressant

text: Buprenorphine/samidorphan (ALKS-5461) is an antidepressant with a novel mechanism of action which was formerly under development and considered an atypical antidepressant. They act faster than available antidepressants.


title: Ghanashyam Nayak

text: Ghanashyam Nayak (12 May 1944 – 3 October 2021) was an Indian drama, film and television actor. He had appeared in a number of tele serials, drama as well as films. His last memorable role was of Natwarlal Prabhashankar Udhaiwala a.k.a. Nattu Kaka in "Taarak Mehta Ka Ooltah Chashmah".


title: Ghanashyam Nayak

text: Nayak was born on 12 May 1944 in Undhai village in Mehsana district. He was son of Ranglal Nayak who was associated with Gujarati drama as music director.


title: Ghanashyam Nayak

text: He started as child artist in drama and Hindi films and gradually worked towards comedy and character roles. Bhavai was one of his popular act. He played a Bhavai actor in Hum Dil De Chuke Sanam with Aishwarya Rai Bachchan.


title: Ghanashyam Nayak

text: He had appeared in approximately 100 Gujarati and Hindi films and around 350 Hindi television series. He also acted in more than 100 Gujarati stage plays. He gave playback in more than 12 Gujarati films with maestros like Asha Bhosle & Mahendra Kapoor. He also dubbed more than 350 Gujarati films.


title: Ghanashyam Nayak

text: Speaking to "ETimes", Vikas mentioned that the treatment of the cancer was tough since there was no set line of medicine considering it was a rare form of cancer. Even though the chemotherapy worked for some time and it seemed like it showed results, Nayak's health kept deteriorating and cancer spread to his entire body within one year.


title: Ghanashyam Nayak

text: Nayak's funeral was conducted the next day, on 4 October 2021. His last wish was fulfilled by his son who had a professional makeup artist do his father's makeup as he began his final journey towards his heavenly abode. In his latest interview with a news daily, Nayak's son, Vikas opened up on how the family supported him and stayed with him throughout the difficult phase.


title: Metaprogramming

text: Metaprogramming is a programming technique in which computer programs have the ability to treat other programs as their data. It means that a program can be designed to read, generate, analyze or transform other programs, and even modify itself while running. In some cases, this allows programmers to minimize the number of lines of code to express a solution, in turn reducing development time. It also allows programs a greater flexibility to efficiently handle new situations without recompilation.


title: Metaprogramming

text: Metaprogramming can be used to move computations from run-time to compile-time, to generate code using compile time computations, and to enable self-modifying code. The ability of a programming language to be its own metalanguage is called reflection. Reflection is a valuable language feature to facilitate metaprogramming.


title: Metaprogramming

text: Metaprogramming was popular in the 1970s and 1980s using list processing languages such as LISP. LISP hardware machines were popular in the 1980s and enabled applications that could process code. They were frequently used for artificial intelligence applications.


title: Metaprogramming

text: Metaprogramming enables developers to write programs and develop code that falls under the generic programming paradigm. Having the programming language itself as a first-class data type (as in Lisp, Prolog, SNOBOL, or Rebol) is also very useful; this is known as "homoiconicity". Generic programming invokes a metaprogramming facility within a language by allowing one to write code without the concern of specifying data types since they can be supplied as parameters when used.


title: Metaprogramming

text: Lisp is probably the quintessential language with metaprogramming facilities, both because of its historical precedence and because of the simplicity and power of its metaprogramming. In Lisp metaprogramming, the unquote operator (typically a comma) introduces code that is evaluated at program definition time rather than at run time; see Self-evaluating forms and quoting in Lisp. The metaprogramming language is thus identical to the host programming language, and existing Lisp routines can be directly reused for metaprogramming, if desired. This approach has been implemented in other languages by incorporating an interpreter in the program, which works directly with the program's data. There are implementations of this kind for some common high-level languages, such as RemObjects’ Pascal Script for Object Pascal.


title: Metaprogramming

text: A simple example of a metaprogram is this POSIX Shell script, which is an example of generative programming:


title: Metaprogramming

text: This script (or program) generates a new 993-line program that prints out the numbers 1–992. This is only an illustration of how to use code to write more code; it is not the most efficient way to print out a list of numbers. Nonetheless, a programmer can write and execute this metaprogram in less than a minute, and will have generated over 1000 lines of code in that amount of time.


title: Metaprogramming

text: A quine is a special kind of metaprogram that produces its own source code as its output. Quines are generally of recreational or theoretical interest only.


title: Metaprogramming

text: Not all metaprogramming involves generative programming. If programs are modifiable at runtime or if incremental compilation is available (such as in C#, Forth, Frink, Groovy, JavaScript, Lisp, Elixir, Lua, Nim, Perl, PHP, Python, REBOL, Ruby, Rust, SAS, Smalltalk, and Tcl), then techniques can be used to perform metaprogramming without actually generating source code.


title: Metaprogramming

text: One style of generative approach is to employ domain-specific languages (DSLs). A fairly common example of using DSLs involves generative metaprogramming: lex and yacc, two tools used to generate lexical analyzers and parsers, let the user describe the language using regular expressions and context-free grammars, and embed the complex algorithms required to efficiently parse the language.


title: Metaprogramming

text: Metaprogramming can be used to weave behavioral changes in a program, as done in aspect-oriented programming. For instance, metaprogramming can be used to inject feature flags or to explore possible patches for fixing bugs.


title: Metaprogramming

text: Some argue that there is a sharp learning curve to make complete use of metaprogramming features. Since metaprogramming gives more flexibility and configurability at runtime, misuse or incorrect use of the metaprogramming can result in unwarranted and unexpected errors that can be extremely difficult to debug to an average developer. It can introduce risks in the system and make it more vulnerable if not used with care. Some of the common problems which can occur due to wrong use of metaprogramming are inability of the compiler to identify missing configuration parameters, invalid or incorrect data can result in unknown exception or different results. Due to this, some believe that only high-skilled developers should work on developing features which exercise metaprogramming in a language or platform and average developers must learn how to use these features as part of convention.


title: Metaprogramming

text: The IBM/360 and derivatives had powerful macro assembler facilities that were often used to generate complete assembly language programs or sections of programs (for different operating systems for instance). Macros provided with CICS transaction processing system had assembler macros that generated COBOL statements as a pre-processing step.


title: Metaprogramming

text: Usage of dependent types allows proving that generated code is never invalid. However, this approach is bleeding-edge and is rarely found outside of research programming languages.


title: World news

text: World news or international news or even foreign coverage is the news media jargon for news from abroad, about a country or a global subject. For journalism, it is a branch that deals with news either sent by foreign correspondents or news agencies, or – more recently – information that is gathered or researched through distance communication technologies, such as telephone, satellite TV or the internet.


title: World news

text: Although in most of the English-speaking world this field is not usually regarded as a specific specialization for journalists, it is so in nearly all the world. Particularly in the United States, there is a blurred distinction between world news and "national" news when they include directly the national government or national institutions, such as wars in which the US are involved or summits of multilateral organizations in which the US are a member.


title: World news

text: At the birth of modern journalism, most news were foreign, as registered by the courants of the 17th century in West and Central Europe, such as the "Daily Courant" (England), the "Nieuwe Tijudinger" (Antwerp), the "Relation" (Strasbourg), the "Avisa Relation oder Zeitung" (Wolfenbüttel) and the "Courante Uyt Italien, Duytsland & C." (Amsterdam). Since these papers were aimed at bankers and merchants, they brought mostly news from other markets, which usually meant other nations. In any case, it is worthy to remark that nation-states were still incipient in 17th-century Europe.


title: World news

text: From the 19th century on, with newspapers already established in Europe, the United States and a few other countries, innovations in telecommunications such as the telegraph made news from abroad easier to be spread. The first news agencies were then founded, like AFP (France), Reuters (UK), Wolff (currently DPA, Germany) and the AP (US).


title: World news

text: War journalism is one of the best known subfields of world news (although war coverage can be national for the media of belligerent countries themselves).


title: World news

text: There are essentially two types of reporters who do foreign reporting: the foreign correspondent (full-time reporter employed by a news source) and the special envoy (sent abroad to cover a specific subject, temporarily stationed in a location).


title: World news

text: The correspondent is a reporter based in a foreign city (often the capital of a country) covering a region, a country or sometimes even an entire continent. He or she regularly files stories to the news editor. He/she gathers materials for these stories from local officials, members of the community, and the local media, as well as from events he/she directly witnesses. Correspondents typically stay in touch with the local community and maintain contacts with other journalists and correspondents in order to identify strategic sources in the government, among diplomats, members of the military and other organizations on the ground who may provide important information.


title: World news

text: The number of foreign correspondents has dropped significantly over the past 20 years or more. Often, a media company is either uninterested or unable to afford to support a single correspondent, such as in many developing countries. In some places, they cannot obtain visas due to political constraints, or otherwise dangerous conditions prohibit a media company from stationing a reporter there. In recent years, the drop in foreign correspondents has been due to cutbacks within media companies (often, but not always, a result of economics alone). Among English language newspapers, only eight daily newspapers have full-time correspondents in more than ten foreign stations, four from the US, three from the UK and one from India:


title: World news

text: 35 – "Wall Street Journal" (US): Baghdad, Bangkok, Beijing, Beirut, Berlin, Brussels, Buenos Aires, Dubai, Frankfurt, Hong Kong, Istanbul, Jakarta, Jerusalem, Johannesburg, Kabul, Kuala Lumpur, Lagos, London, Manila, Mexico City, Moscow, Mumbai, New Delhi, Paris, Prague, Rio de Janeiro, Rome, São Paulo, Seoul, Shanghai, Singapore, Taipei, Tokyo, Toronto, Zurich


title: World news

text: 24 – "New York Times" (US): Baghdad, Beijing, Beirut, Berlin, Cairo, Caracas, Dakar, Hong Kong, Islamabad, Jakarta, Jerusalem, Johannesburg, Kabul, London, Mexico City, Moscow, Mumbai, Nairobi, New Delhi, Paris, Rome, São Paulo, Shanghai, Tokyo


title: World news

text: 19 – "Financial Times" (UK): Beijing, Berlin, Bombay, Brussels, Dubai, Frankfurt, Hong Kong, Jakarta, Jerusalem, Moscow, Mumbai, New Delhi, New York, Paris, Taipei, Tokyo, Shanghai, Sydney, Washington


title: World news

text: 17 – "Washington Post" (US): Baghdad, Beijing, Berlin, Bogotá, Cairo, Islamabad, Jerusalem, Kabul, London, Mexico City, Moscow, Nairobi, New Delhi, Paris, Shanghai, Tehran, Tokyo


title: World news

text: 15 – "The Guardian" (UK): Accra, Bangkok, Beijing, Berlin, Brussels, Kabul, Islamabad, Jerusalem, Los Angeles, Madrid, New York, Paris, Rome, Tehran, Tokyo


title: World news

text: 13 – "The Daily Telegraph" (UK): Beijing, Brussels, Jerusalem, Kabul, Los Angeles, Moscow, Nairobi, New Delhi, New York, Paris, Shanghai, Sydney, Washington


title: World news

text: 13 – "Los Angeles Times" (US): Baghdad, Beijing, Beirut, Cairo, Islamabad, Jerusalem, Johannesburg, Kabul, London, Mexico City, Moscow, New Delhi, Seoul


title: World news

text: 12 – "The Hindu" (India): Addis Ababa, Beijing, Colombo, Dhaka, Dubai, Islamabad, Kathmandu, London, Moscow, Paris, Singapore, Washington


title: World news

text: When reporters working abroad have no permanent labor contract with media outlets, they are called stringers. Since they have no salary, stringers usually produce material for several different companies at once.


title: World news

text: A news agency is an organization of journalists established to supply news reports to news organizations: newspapers, magazines, and radio and television broadcasters. Such an agency may also be referred to as a wire service, newswire or news service. The bulk of major news agency services contains foreign news.


title: World news

text: The major news agencies generally prepare hard news stories and feature articles that can be used by other news organizations with little or no modification, and then sell them to other news organizations. They provide these articles in bulk electronically through wire services (originally they used telegraphy; today they frequently use the Internet). Corporations, individuals, analysts and intelligence agencies may also subscribe.


title: Democratic Party of Turkmenistan

text: The party was led by former Soviet provincial party leader Saparmurat Niyazov from the dissolution of the Soviet Union in the early 1990s until his death in 2006. In 2013, President Gurbanguly Berdimuhamedow suspended his party membership for the duration of his presidency. The current leader is Ata Serdarov. Their rule is described as authoritarian.