Causes.

Economic sanctions.

The United States, the European Union and many other countries had imposed economic sanction on Russia following its military intervention in Ukraine in early 2014, Russia's annexation of Crimea and Russian assistance to separatists fighting Ukraine in the War in Donbass. Despite the financial crisis, international aid to Russia was not considered likely.  Economic sanctions contributed to the decline of the ruble since some Russian oil companies have been prevented from rolling over debt, forcing them to exchange their rubles for U.S. dollars or other foreign currencies on the open market to meet their interest payment obligations on their existing debt.  The impact of the Western sanctions on Russian economy has been limited by design, since the sanctions only affected a limited number of individuals and companies. Russian counter-sanctions however reduced imports of food into Russia, which led to rising inflation and an increase in food prices. As result, the average salary decreased and the number of people living under the poverty line increased.

Fall in oil prices.

The Russian economy depends largely on crude oil exports. In February 2014 crude oil prices started to slide down due to the boom in American shale oil production. For every $1 decline in crude oil prices, the Russian economy loses billions of dollars. The price of oil fell from $100 per barrel in June 2014 to $60 per barrel in December 2014. The drop in the oil prices was caused by a drop in the demand for oil across the world, as well as increased oil production in the United States. This fall in oil prices hit Russia hard, as roughly half of the Russian Federation's governmental revenue comes from the sale of oil and gas. Russia's economy suffers from Dutch disease, a term economists use to describe a situation in which a country focuses on developing its natural resources to the detriment of other economic activity. In 2014, Russia needed an oil price of $100 per barrel to have a balanced budget. As the price of oil falls, Russia continues to sell its oil at operational capacity, without the ability to dramatically increase oil production to compensate for the lower price, and thus due to the reduced profit from selling oil, the government has substantially lower income. Russia is not alone in feeling the ill effects of falling oil prices, as several other countries, including Venezuela, Nigeria, and Kazakhstan, also faced reduced revenues and economic activity.  In August 2015, oil prices fell to US$37 per barrel and then bounced to more than US$45 on 28 August. Now as OPEC has reduced production from November 2016 oil prices have started to move up and so does the ruble.

Other possible causes.

Russian President Vladimir Putin has been criticized for running a kleptocracy, in which a small number of rent-seeking plutocrats drain the economy. Russia was ranked second in the world on "The Economist"'s 2014 crony-capitalism index. Putin accused the Western nations of engineering the Russian economic crisis. He has also said, "Our (Western) partners have not stopped. They decided that they are winners, they are an empire now and the rest are vassals and they have to be driven into a corner."  Russia was already near a recession before the Crimean crisis, and Russia ranks low on the World Economic Forum's rankings of road quality, technological adaptation, and burden of government regulation. Russia's already-weak economy left it less able to withstand the challenges imposed by low oil prices and international sanctions. The Russian Central Bank's "erratic response" to the falling ruble has also been blamed for deepening the crisis.

Russian monetary policy.

Decline in the Russian ruble.

Since the Great Recession, yields on U.S. treasuries and other low-risk assets have decreased due primarily to the liquidity-trap and also unconventional stimulative measures by central banks, such as ZIRP and quantitative easing. This has led investor patterns to become what is known as "reach for yield" with emerging market debt: emerging market debt is being bought by developed economy investors due to investors seeking greater interest on their holdings of debt. This led to increased issuance of debt by Russian companies in foreign currency-denominated terms, with $502 billion in foreign-currency denominated debt as of June 2014, up from $325 billion at the end of 2007.  The recent decline in the Russian ruble has increased the costs for Russian companies to make interest payments on debt issued in U.S. dollar or other foreign currencies that have strengthened against the ruble; thus it costs Russian companies more of their ruble-denominated revenue to repay their debt holders in dollars or other foreign currencies. As of March 2016, the ruble was devalued more than 50 percent since July 2014.

Central Bank intervention.

On 15 December 2014, Russia had foreign currency reserves worth around $400 billion, the sixth-highest total in the world, giving Russia the ability to prop up the ruble. On 15 December, the Central Bank of Russia spent almost $2 billion in an attempt to strengthen the declining ruble.  Just before 1 a.m. local time on 16 December 2014, the Central Bank increased its key interest rate from 10.5% to 17% in an attempt to slow or stop the decline of the ruble. It was the sixth increase in interest rates by the Central Bank during 2014.  Despite the Central Bank's intervention, the ruble declined further, to as low as 79 Russian rubles to one U.S. dollar, compared to 33 rubles to the dollar in January 2014. The ruble strengthened from its lows on 16 December after the Central Bank said it would not implement capital controls.  On 22 December, the Central Bank lent $530 million to Trust Bank, which became the first bank to accept a government bailout during the crisis.  On 12 January 2015, the Central Bank's 2014 data of net currency interventions was reported by Interfax, a Russian news agency, to have been $76.13 billion and, including $11.9 billion in December 2014.  In 2015, the Central Bank decreased interest rates numerous times. On 30 January, the Bank cut the interest rate from 17% to 15%. On 13 March, it was lowered to 14%, and 12.5% on 30 April. Inflation had slowed to 16.5% by 26 April, down from approximately 17% in March. On 15 June, the interest rate was lowered to 11.5%, and 11% on 31 July. Inflation as of 27 July was 15.8%, an increase from 15.3% in June, as a result of a temporary tariff increase, said the Bank.  State-owned agency TASS reported a loss of US$5.4 billion in the Bank's foreign reserves to US$369.2 billion on the week of 23–30 October.  In January 2017, Russia had foreign currency reserves of around $391 billion, an inflation rate of 5.0% and interest rate of 10.0%.

Financial, economic, and social impact.

Impact on Russia.

On 16 December 2014, the RTS Index, denominated in U.S. dollars, declined 12%, the most on any given day since the midst of the global financial crisis in November 2008, and the MICEX Index declined 8.1% at one point before ending the day higher. This increased the decline of RTS Index, up until 16 December, of nearly 30% during the month of December. In response to rising interest rates and bank runs, the interest rate on Russian three-month interbank loans rose to 28.3%, higher than at any point in the Great Recession of 2008.  To get rid of the Russian rubles which were declining in value, many Russians chose to purchase durable goods, such as washing machines, televisions, furniture, and jewelry, and to change their pensions and savings from being in rubles to US dollars or euros. Several currency changers offered cash only at much greater exchange rates: USD up to 99.8 RUB (official rate was 61.15) and EUR up to 120–150 RUB (official rate was 76.15). Some foreign companies halted their business activities in Russia, including Volvo car dealerships and the online stores of Apple and Steam, due to the high volatility and decline of the Russian ruble. Additionally, IKEA temporarily suspended sales of certain goods in Russia, in part due to the volatility and in part due to a lack of adequate supply, as numerous Russians bought IKEA furniture.  Many Western financial institutions, including Goldman Sachs, started cutting the flow of cash to Russian companies since they had restricted some longer-term ruble-denominated repurchase agreements (repos). These actions were intended to protect Western firms from the high volatility of the ruble. Repos had allowed Russian companies to exchange securities for cash with Western financial institutions, so the restrictions added pressure to the Russian financial system.  Russia may also be excluded from the MSCI Emerging Markets Index, composed of 26 countries' indices, if capital controls or currency controls are implemented by Russia, since such measures would make it more difficult for foreign entities to access Russian securities markets. Russia would be reclassified as a standalone market in that event.  The 20 December print edition of "The Economist" predicted that Russia would face the "lethal combination" of a major recession and high inflation in 2015. Others predicted that the crisis would spread to the banking sector. On the other hand, President Putin has argued that Russia was not in crisis, and that cheaper oil prices would lead to a global economic boom that would push up the price of oil, which would in turn help the Russian economy.  On the week of 15 December, Russian gold and foreign currencies reserves were reduced by "US$15.7 billion to below US$400 billion for the first time since August 2009 and down from [more than] $510 billion at the start of the year." Between 15 and 25 December, annual inflation had climbed to more than 10%. Prices of goods, including beef and fish, rose 40 to 50% within a few months before the end of the year due to Russia's ban on Western imports.  In 2014, car sales in Russia fell by 12% from the previous year. The largest Russian oil company, Rosneft, whose large shareholding is owned by the British oil company BP, lost U.S. and European assets and 86% of profits in the third quarter 2014. Rosneft attributed the decline to falling oil prices and ruble devaluation.  The crisis threatened the continued existence of the Kontinental Hockey League, and several teams missed or delayed payments to their players.  Russian President Putin ordered Dmitry Medvedev's Cabinet to not take their day off on 2015 New Year's Day because of the crisis.  As of December 2014, prices of meat, fish, and grain were inflated as a result of ruble devaluation. Some businesses had closed down, especially in the far eastern region of Russia's Siberia due to future rising lease fees.  The state-owned gas company, Gazprom, lost 86% in the 2014 net income, dropping to (US$3.1 billion), because of ruble devaluation, plunge on oil prices, Ukraine crisis, and rising impairment costs. Overall revenues of the year grew 6.4% to PP 5.59 trillion ($106.3 billion).  According to a September 2015 survey conducted by Nielsen Russia, 49% of around 1,000 sampled people had not visited a bar in 2015 mainly due to economic crisis; 46%, not a pub; 62%, not a nightclub. In comparison, according to a 2014 survey, 28% had not visited a bar in the previous year, 2014; 32%, not a pub; 45%, not a nightclub. Survey conductors concluded that rising prices in restaurants and bars had been factors to declining attendance in those places.

Demographic consequences.

Calculations presented by a group of demographers from the Russian Presidential Academy of National Economy and Public Administration demonstrate that the crisis may have very serious demographic consequences (simultaneous growth of mortality and decline of fertility)  As of March 2015, officially, three million Russians more than the previous year live with less than ₽9,662 (US$169) monthly income, totalling to twenty-three million.  In 2016 over 330,000 Russian citizens applied for US permanent residency through the Green Card lottery program, a 24% increase over the previous year. According to New World Wealth study, over 2,000 millionaires emigrated from Russia.

Global financial markets.

The financial crisis in Russia affected other global financial markets. U.S. financial markets declined, with the Dow Jones Industrial Average down nearly 3% in 3 business days, in part due to the Russian financial crisis. The crisis drew comparisons to the 1998 Russian financial crisis that affected global markets. Economist Olivier Blanchard of the IMF noted that the uncertainty caused by Russia's economic crisis could lead to greater worldwide risk aversion in a manner similar to the Financial crisis of 2007–08. However, the 2014 international sanctions on Russia decreased Russia's financial connections with the broader financial world, which in turn lowered the risk that an ailing Russian economy would affect the worldwide economy. Since 1998, Russia and many other countries have adopted a floating exchange rate, which could also help to prevent Russian financial woes from affecting the rest of the world.  Foreign exchange trading service FXCM said on 16 December 2014 it would restrict U.S. dollar-ruble trading starting the next day, due to the volatility of the ruble. They also said that most Western banks have stopped reporting the exchange rate of the U.S. dollar for rubles (USD/RUB). Liquidity in the U.S. dollar-ruble market has also declined sharply.  Financial institutions that hold relatively high amounts of Russian debt or other assets have been affected by the Russian financial crisis. The PIMCO Emerging Markets Bond Fund also had 21% of its holdings in Russian corporate and sovereign debt as of the end of September 2014, which has declined about 7.9% from about 16 November 2014 to 16 December 2014.  Companies from North America and Europe that heavily relied on Russian economy have been affected by the crisis. American car company Ford Motor Company experienced a 40% decline in car sales in January–November 2014, according to Association of European Businesses, and terminated "about 950 jobs at its Russia joint in April [2014]." German car company Volkswagen experienced a 20% decline in the same period. American oil company ExxonMobil alongside Rosneft were unable to continue an Arctic project after the discovery of oil there due to sanctions over the crises in the Ukraine. British oil company BP lost 17% of market share. French energy company Total S.A. shelved joint shale exploration plans with Russian oil company Lukoil due to sanctions.  German engineering company Siemens lost 14% of Russian revenue in 2014. German sportswear company Adidas closed down stores and suspended development plans in Russia. Danish beer company Carlsberg Group lost more than 20% of Russian shares. American fast food company McDonald's closed twelve stores, which Russian officials said was due to "sanitary violations". French food conglomerate Danone experienced a loss of operating margins in the first half of 2014 due to rising milk prices.  In January 2015, ratings agency Standard & Poor's lowered Russia's credit rating to junk status and economic rating from BBB- to BB+. Moody's followed this decision in February 2015.

Impact on former republics of the Soviet Union.

The devaluation of the Russian ruble affected the currencies of many post-Soviet states, which are tied through trade and remittances by migrant workers in Russia. For many post-Soviet states, trade with Russia represents over 5% of their GDP.

The financial crisis in Russia in 2014–2015 was the result of the sharp devaluation of the Russian ruble beginning in the second half of 2014. A decline in confidence in the Russian economy caused investors to sell off their Russian assets, which led to a decline in the value of the Russian ruble and sparked fears of a Russian financial crisis. The lack of confidence in the Russian economy stemmed from at least two major sources. The first is the fall in the price of oil in 2014. Crude oil, a major export of Russia, declined in price by nearly 50% between its yearly high in June 2014 and 16 December 2014. The second is the result of international economic sanctions imposed on Russia following Russia's annexation of Crimea and the Russian military intervention in Ukraine.

Finanční krize v Rusku od konce roku 2014 do poloviny roku 2016 byla důsledkem značného poklesu směnného poměru ruského rublu vůči hlavním světovým měnám, který začal v druhé polovině roku 2014. Již ke konci toho roku se kurz rublu stabilizoval na úrovni vyšší než v okamžiku největšího poklesu. Měnová krize v Rusku zasáhla také některé další postsovětské republiky.


Plot.

Fred, Daphne, Velma, Shaggy and Scooby-Doo attend the opening of an exhibition at the Coolsonian Criminology Museum commemorating their past solved cases with monster costumes on display. However, the celebrations are interrupted by a masked man known as the Evil Masked Figure who steals two costumes using the reanimated Pterodactyl Ghost. The gang are ridiculed by journalist Heather Jasper Howe, who starts a smear campaign against them. Concluding an old enemy is the mastermind, the gang revisit old cases, dismissing the former Pterodactyl Ghost, Jonathan Jacobo, due to his apparent death during a failed prison escape three years ago, they guess that Jeremiah Wickles, the Black Knight Ghost's portrayer and Jacobo's cell mate in prison, is the culprit. Scooby and Shaggy, after overhearing the rest of the gang criticizing their tendency to bumble every operation, and especially their most recent offense in failing to secure the Pterodactyl Ghost at the museum, resolve to better themselves and become real detectives.  Going to Wickles' mansion, the group fall through a trapdoor and into a cage targeting unwelcome callers, but escape with the aid of Daphne's cosmetics. Inside, the gang find a book that serves as an instruction manual on how to create monsters. Scooby-Doo and Shaggy find a note inviting Wickles to visit the Faux Ghost nightclub. They are attacked by the Black Knight Ghost, but escape when Daphne fights him off while Velma discovers its weak spot and disables it. Before fleeing, the rest of the gang had previously discovered through the book found in Wickles' mansion that the key ingredient to creating the monsters was a substance called "randomonium", which can be found at the old silver mining town. Daphne, Velma and Fred go to the museum accompanied by the curator Patrick Wisely, but discover that the rest of the costumes have been stolen. Heather Jasper Howe turns the city against them.  Following the lead from Wickles' note, their first clue ever, Scooby and Shaggy sneak into the Faux Ghost wearing disguises to try and solve the mystery, only to discover it's a hangout for all the villains Mystery Inc. unmasked. After speaking to Wickles, they hear how he has mended his evil ways. Scooby causes a dance scene and his disguise falls off, and the two escaped through a trash chute. On their way out, they spot Patrick uncharacteristically assaulting someone who appears to be a member of his staff, ordering him to find answers to who vandalized his museum. Escaping an awkward interaction with Patrick, Scooby and Shaggy spot Wickles leaving the club and follow him. Daphne, Velma and Fred go to the mines, finding Wickles' plans to turn it into an amusement park. As they confront Wickles, he states that he and Jacobo hated each other and that he has no connection to the museum robberies.  The gang then find the Monster Hive where the costumes are brought to life as real monsters. Shaggy and Scooby play around with the machine's control panel, bringing several costumes to life, and the gang flees with the panel as the Evil Masked Figure terrorizes the city. Escaping to their old high school clubhouse, the gang realizes they can reverse the control panel's power by altering its wiring. Captain Cutler's Ghost emerges from the lake, forcing the gang to head back to the mines, encountering the various monsters along the way. When Velma tries to give Scooby and Shaggy the control panel they refuse to take it believing they'll just ruin everything and admit that they feel inadequate compared to the rest of the gang. Velma convinces them they are fine just the way they are. Velma sees Patrick in the mines, finding a shrine dedicated to Jacobo built by Patrick, but Patrick proves his innocence by helping Velma after a catwalk unexpectedly gives way under her, before being taken away by the Pterodactyl Ghost.  The gang confront the Evil Masked Figure as the Tar Monster captures all of them but Scooby, who uses a fire extinguisher to freeze the Tar Monster's body. He reactivates the control panel, transforming the costumes back to normal. The gang takes the Evil Masked Figure to the authorities, Velma and Daphne unmasking him as Heather. When asked why Heather did what she had to do, Velma suddenly pulls and peels Heather's face off, revealing she is actually Jacobo in disguise; Jacobo had survived the fall from the prison wall, and sought to get revenge on the sleuths by discrediting them. Jacobo's cameraman Ned is also arrested as an accomplice.  The sleuths are praised as heroes in Coolsville. In the Faux Ghost, the gang celebrates their victory with the reformed criminals.

Production.

In June 2002, at the time of the release of "Scooby-Doo", Dan Fellman, the president of Warner Bros., confirmed that a sequel was in the works, and was slated for a 2004 release. In March 2003, it was announced that Freddie Prinze Jr., Sarah Michelle Gellar, Neil Fanning, Matthew Lillard and Linda Cardellini would reprise their roles in the sequel. In April 2003, the next month, filming for the sequel began in Vancouver, with Seth Green joining the cast.

Reception.

Box office.

The film opened March 26, 2004, and grossed $29.4 million (over 3,312 theaters, $8,888 average) during its opening weekend, ranking No. 1. It grossed a total of $84.2 million in North America, and went on to earn $181.5 million worldwide, more than $90 million less than the $275.7 million worldwide "Scooby-Doo" grossed two years earlier. It was the twenty eighth most successful film of 2004, and ranks as the sixth highest-grossing film featuring a dog as a major character. The film was released in the United Kingdom on April 2, 2004, and topped the country's box office for the next three weekends, before being dethroned by "".

Critical response.

On Rotten Tomatoes, the film holds a rating of 22% based on 118 reviews and an average rating of 4.27/10. The site's consensus reads: "Only the very young will get the most out of this silly trifle." On Metacritic, the film has a score of 34 out of 100 based on 28 critics, indicating "generally unfavorable reviews". Audiences polled by CinemaScore gave the film an average grade of "A−" on an A+ to F scale, an improvement over the previous film's "B+".  Roger Ebert of the "Chicago Times", gave the film two stars out of four, stating: "This is a silly machine to whirl goofy antics before the eyes of easily distracted audiences, and it is made with undeniable skill." Dave Kehr of "The New York Times", gave the film a negative review, saying: "In the strictly secular-humanist world of "Scooby-Doo", there are no real ghosts, but only humans desperate for attention who disguise themselves as supernatural figures." Peter Bradshaw of "The Guardian", gave the film a two out of five stars, stating: "it's straight down the line family fare, nothing inspired, nothing objectionable: a few funny lines." Nick DeSemlyn of "Empire Magazine", also gave the film two out of five stars, saying: "This sequel is a step up from the first. Scooby's animation is improved, there are some fun action sequences and a smattering of amusing moments. But the same manic mugging that spoiled the original mars this movie, and the result is a film only a six year-old on a sugar rush could love" Common Sense Media gave the film two out of five stars, saying: "Sequel is milder than original; potty humor, peril, violence." The film won the Razzie Award for Worst Remake or Sequel.

Home media.

Warner Home Video released the film on DVD and VHS on September 14, 2004, in both full-screen and widescreen editions. The DVD included deleted scenes from the film's production and other special features, such as two music videos, a "making of" and trailers. On November 9, 2010, Warner Bros. released both the film and its predecessor as a double feature Blu-ray.

Video games.

Two video games loosely following the plot of the film were released in 2004 to coincide with the film's release; a 3D point and click adventure on the PC and a 2D beat-em-up platformer on the Game Boy Advance. In both games, one ending could only be seen by entering a code displayed at the end of the film.

Soundtrack.

A soundtrack was released on March 23, 2004, on compact disc and cassette tape.

Cancelled sequel.

In October 2002, during the filming of "Scooby-Doo 2", Warner Bros. approved production of a third film. Dan Forman and Paul Foley were hired to write the script for "Scooby-Doo 3". In August 2004, Matthew Lillard said in an interview that the third "Scooby-Doo" film was canceled because the second had not done as well as expected, which he attributed to Warner Bros. releasing it at an inappropriate time. In a 2019 interview, James Gunn revealed that he was set to write and direct but the film did not happen due to the financial disappointment of the previous film, stating, "although it did well, it didn't do well enough to warrant a third, so the movie was never made." Gunn tweeted the plot for the canceled film that The Mystery Inc. gang are hired by a town in Scotland who complain they are being plagued by monsters but we discover throughout the film the monsters are actually the victims. Scooby and Shaggy have to come to terms with their own prejudices and narrow belief systems.

Scooby-Doo 2: Monsters Unleashed (also referred to as Scooby-Doo 2) is a 2004 American live-action/computer-animated family horror comedy film based on the animated television franchise "Scooby-Doo". It is the second installment in the "Scooby-Doo" live-action film series and a sequel to 2002's "Scooby-Doo", and was directed by Raja Gosnell, written by James Gunn, and released by Warner Bros. Pictures. The film stars Freddie Prinze Jr., Sarah Michelle Gellar, Linda Cardellini, Matthew Lillard, Seth Green, Tim Blake Nelson, Peter Boyle and Alicia Silverstone, with Neil Fanning reprising his role as the voice of Scooby-Doo. The film was released on March 26, 2004. It generally received negative reviews and grossed $181 million, considerably less than its predecessor. Its poor reception resulted in a third film (set to be written and directed by James Gunn) being cancelled.

Scooby-Doo 2: Nespoutané příšery (v anglickém originále Scooby-Doo 2: Monsters Unleashed) je americký komediálně-mysteriózní film z roku 2004 režiséra Raji Gosnella, natočený na motivy stejnojmenných animovaných seriálů studia Hanna-Barbera. Scénář napsal James Gunn, v hlavních rolích se představili Freddie Prinze Jr., Sarah Michelle Gellar, Matthew Lillard, Linda Cardellini a Seth Green. Snímek pojednává o skupině čtyř mladých lidí, kteří společně se psem Scoobym řeší záhady. Snímek je sequelem filmu "Scooby-Doo" z roku 2002.


History.

ILGA-Europe was founded in 1996, when its parent organisation, the International Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Trans and Intersex Association, established separate regions. It took over responsibility for supporting the development of the LGBT movement in Europe including Transgender Europe, Inter-LGBT, and for relationships with the European Union, Council of Europe and the Organisation for Security and Co-operation in Europe.  Initially ILGA-Europe worked entirely on the basis of volunteer resources. However, in 2001, its potential contribution to the European Union's anti-discrimination policies (established under Article 13 of the Treaty of Amsterdam) was recognised through the provision of core funding, currently through the PROGRESS Programme. This enabled ILGA-Europe to set up an office in Brussels, to recruit permanent staff, and to conduct an extensive programme of work in relation to sexual orientation discrimination within the EU Member States and the accession countries. Financial support from the Sigrid Rausing Trust, the Open Society Institute, Freedom House, the US State Department and the Ministry of Education, Culture and Science of the Netherlands allows ILGA-Europe to extend its work in areas not covered by EU funding, including Eastern Europe and Central Asia, and on transgender issues.  ILGA-Europe has hosted its annual conference at the end of October, since 2000, where member organisations elect the Executive Board and decide on the next year's working priorities.

Current work.

ILGA-Europe works to promote equality and non-discrimination for LGBTI people in asylum, education, employment, family law, freedom of assembly, hate crime, hate speech and health; and works worldwide to protect human rights defenders, trans people and intersex people. The Association provides funding and training for its 500 member organisations, ""to maximise efficiency and the use of resources by LGBTI organisations in working towards achievement of their goals; to maximise the impact of advocacy work at the European level; to ensure sustainability of the LGBTI movement in Europe.""  ILGA-Europe works with EU Institutions, the Council of Europe and the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe to promote equality by lobbying and advocacy, including supporting the adoption of the proposed EU Anti-Discrimination Directive, that would ban discrimination on the grounds of age, disability, religion or belief and sexual orientation in all areas of EU competence. It also uses strategic litigation at the European Court of Human Rights and the European Court of Justice to end discrimination, by identifying gaps in protections, encouraging organisations and individuals to develop court cases, and support such cases with legal resources and amicus curiae briefs.  For the 2014 European Parliament election, ILGA-Europe promoted its "Come Out 2014 European Election Pledge" to candidate MEPs, which focused on priority LGBTI issues for the 2014–2019 Parliament: an EU roadmap on LGBTI equality; EU human rights enforcement; completing the EU Anti-Discrimination directive; combating homophobic and transphobic violence; an inclusive definition of 'family'; trans rights and depatholigisation; action against school bullying; health discrimination and inequalities; LGBTI asylum seekers; and making the EU champion LGBTI rights worldwide. 187 elected MEPs (25 percent) signed the pledge, including 83 members of the PES, 14 ALDE members and 14 from the EPP.  Today ILGA-Europe has more than 20 staff who work in four areas: Advocacy, Communications, Finance and Administration, and Programmes. All are based at the organisation's office in the European Quarter in Brussels.

Rainbow Europe.

Each May, ILGA-Europe releases its "Rainbow Europe" review, to mark the International Day Against Homophobia and Transphobia. It reviews the human rights situation and assesses what life is like for LGBTI people in every European country, covering discrimination, family recognition, hate speech/crimes, gender recognition, freedom of assembly, association and express, and asylum laws. In 2016, Malta came top of the rankings; it was rated to have 88% progress toward respect of human rights and full equality, just ahead of Belgium and the United Kingdom. Azerbaijan was ranked as the worst for LGBTI equality, scoring just 5%, closely followed by Russia, Armenia and Turkey. The biggest increase since the 2015 review, was that of Greece by 19 points (picking 58%). The 2016 "Rainbow Europe" reviews are given in the table below.

International Intersex Forum.

To include intersex people in its remit, ILGA-Europe and ILGA have jointly sponsored the only international gathering of intersex activists and organisations. The International Intersex Forum has taken place in Europe annually since 2011.  The third forum was held in Malta in 2013 with 34 people representing 30 organisations from all continents. The closing statement affirmed the existence of intersex people, reaffirmed "the principles of the First and Second International Intersex Fora and extend the demands aiming to end discrimination against intersex people and to ensure the right of bodily integrity, physical autonomy and self-determination". For the first time, participants made a statement on birth registrations, in addition to other human rights issues.

ILGA-Europe is the European region of the International Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Trans and Intersex Association. It is an advocacy group promoting the interests of lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans and intersex (LGBTI) people, at the European level. Its membership comprises more than 500 organisations from throughout Europe and Central Asia. The Association enjoys consultative status at Economic and Social Council of the United Nations (ECOSOC) and participatory status at the Council of Europe.

ILGA-Europe je evropská frakce Mezinárodní lesbické, gay, bisexuální, trans a intersex asociace. Jedná se o lobbistickou skupinu hájících zájmy leseb, gayů, bisexuálů, transgender a intersex na evropské úrovni. Počet jejích členů se pohybuje v řádu 407 organizací napříč celou Evropou. Asociace má konzultativní status v Ekonomické a sociální radě OSN a účastnický status v rámci Rady Evropy.


The beginning.

The origins of machine translation can be traced back to the work of Al-Kindi, a 9th-century Arabic cryptographer who developed techniques for systemic language translation, including cryptanalysis, frequency analysis, and probability and statistics, which are used in modern machine translation. The idea of machine translation later appeared in the 17th century. In 1629, René Descartes proposed a universal language, with equivalent ideas in different tongues sharing one symbol.  In the mid-1930s the first patents for "translating machines" were applied for by Georges Artsrouni, for an automatic bilingual dictionary using paper tape. Russian Peter Troyanskii submitted a more detailed proposal that included both the bilingual dictionary and a method for dealing with grammatical roles between languages, based on the grammatical system of Esperanto. This system was separated into three stages: stage one consisted of a native-speaking editor in the source language to organize the words into their logical forms and to exercise the syntactic functions; stage two required the machine to "translate" these forms into the target language; and stage three required a native-speaking editor in the target language to normalize this output. Troyanskii's proposal remained unknown until the late 1950s, by which time computers were well-known and utilized.

The early years.

The first set of proposals for computer based machine translation was presented in 1949 by Warren Weaver, a researcher at the Rockefeller Foundation, "Translation memorandum". These proposals were based on information theory, successes in code breaking during the Second World War, and theories about the universal principles underlying natural language.  A few years after Weaver submitted his proposals, research began in earnest at many universities in the United States. On 7 January 1954 the Georgetown-IBM experiment was held in New York at the head office of IBM. This was the first public demonstration of a machine translation system. The demonstration was widely reported in the newspapers and garnered public interest. The system itself, however, was no more than a "toy" system. It had only 250 words and translated 49 carefully selected Russian sentences into English – mainly in the field of chemistry. Nevertheless, it encouraged the idea that machine translation was imminent and stimulated the financing of the research, not only in the US but worldwide.  Early systems used large bilingual dictionaries and hand-coded rules for fixing the word order in the final output which was eventually considered too restrictive in linguistic developments at the time. For example, generative linguistics and transformational grammar were exploited to improve the quality of translations. During this period operational systems were installed. The United States Air Force used a system produced by IBM and Washington University, while the Atomic Energy Commission and Euratom, in Italy, used a system developed at Georgetown University. While the quality of the output was poor it met many of the customers' needs, particularly in terms of speed.  At the end of the 1950s, Yehoshua Bar-Hillel was asked by the US government to look into machine translation, to assess the possibility of fully automatic high quality translation by machines. Bar-Hillel described the problem of semantic ambiguity or double-meaning, as illustrated in the following sentence:  The word "pen" may have two meanings: the first meaning, something used to write in ink with; the second meaning, a container of some kind. To a human, the meaning is obvious, but Bar-Hillel claimed that without a "universal encyclopedia" a machine would never be able to deal with this problem. At the time, this type of semantic ambiguity could only be solved by writing source texts for machine translation in a controlled language that uses a vocabulary in which each word has exactly one meaning.

The 1960s, the ALPAC report and the seventies.

Research in the 1960s in both the Soviet Union and the United States concentrated mainly on the Russian–English language pair. The objects of translation were chiefly scientific and technical documents, such as articles from scientific journals. The rough translations produced were sufficient to get a basic understanding of the articles. If an article discussed a subject deemed to be confidential, it was sent to a human translator for a complete translation; if not, it was discarded.  A great blow came to machine-translation research in 1966 with the publication of the ALPAC report. The report was commissioned by the US government and delivered by ALPAC, the Automatic Language Processing Advisory Committee, a group of seven scientists convened by the US government in 1964. The US government was concerned that there was a lack of progress being made despite significant expenditure. The report concluded that machine translation was more expensive, less accurate and slower than human translation, and that despite the expenditures, machine translation was not likely to reach the quality of a human translator in the near future.  The report recommended, however, that tools be developed to aid translators – automatic dictionaries, for example – and that some research in computational linguistics should continue to be supported.  The publication of the report had a profound impact on research into machine translation in the United States, and to a lesser extent the Soviet Union and United Kingdom. Research, at least in the US, was almost completely abandoned for over a decade. In Canada, France and Germany, however, research continued. In the US the main exceptions were the founders of Systran (Peter Toma) and Logos (Bernard Scott), who established their companies in 1968 and 1970 respectively and served the US Department of Defense. In 1970, the Systran system was installed for the United States Air Force, and subsequently by the Commission of the European Communities in 1976. The METEO System, developed at the Université de Montréal, was installed in Canada in 1977 to translate weather forecasts from English to French, and was translating close to 80,000 words per day or 30 million words per year until it was replaced by a competitor's system on 30 September 2001.  While research in the 1960s concentrated on limited language pairs and input, demand in the 1970s was for low-cost systems that could translate a range of technical and commercial documents. This demand was spurred by the increase of globalisation and the demand for translation in Canada, Europe, and Japan.

The 1980s and early 1990s.

By the 1980s, both the diversity and the number of installed systems for machine translation had increased. A number of systems relying on mainframe technology were in use, such as Systran, Logos, Ariane-G5, and Metal.  As a result of the improved availability of microcomputers, there was a market for lower-end machine translation systems. Many companies took advantage of this in Europe, Japan, and the USA. Systems were also brought onto the market in China, Eastern Europe, Korea, and the Soviet Union.  During the 1980s there was a lot of activity in MT in Japan especially. With the fifth generation computer Japan intended to leap over its competition in computer hardware and software, and one project that many large Japanese electronics firms found themselves involved in was creating software for translating into and from English (Fujitsu, Toshiba, NTT, Brother, Catena, Matsushita, Mitsubishi, Sharp, Sanyo, Hitachi, NEC, Panasonic, Kodensha, Nova, Oki).  Research during the 1980s typically relied on translation through some variety of intermediary linguistic representation involving morphological, syntactic, and semantic analysis.  At the end of the 1980s, there was a large surge in a number of novel methods for machine translation. One system was developed at IBM that was based on statistical methods. Makoto Nagao and his group used methods based on large numbers of translation examples, a technique that is now termed example-based machine translation. A defining feature of both of these approaches was the neglect of syntactic and semantic rules and reliance instead on the manipulation of large text corpora.  During the 1990s, encouraged by successes in speech recognition and speech synthesis, research began into speech translation with the development of the German Verbmobil project.  The Forward Area Language Converter (FALCon) system, a machine translation technology designed by the Army Research Laboratory, was fielded 1997 to translate documents for soldiers in Bosnia.  There was significant growth in the use of machine translation as a result of the advent of low-cost and more powerful computers. It was in the early 1990s that machine translation began to make the transition away from large mainframe computers toward personal computers and workstations. Two companies that led the PC market for a time were Globalink and MicroTac, following which a merger of the two companies (in December 1994) was found to be in the corporate interest of both. Intergraph and Systran also began to offer PC versions around this time. Sites also became available on the internet, such as AltaVista's Babel Fish (using Systran technology) and Google Language Tools (also initially using Systran technology exclusively).

2000s.

The field of machine translation has seen major changes in the last few years. Currently a large amount of research is being done into statistical machine translation and example-based machine translation. In the area of speech translation, research has focused on moving from domain-limited systems to domain-unlimited translation systems. In different research projects in Europe (like TC-STAR) and in the United States (STR-DUST and US-DARPA-GALE), solutions for automatically translating Parliamentary speeches and broadcast news have been developed. In these scenarios the domain of the content is no longer limited to any special area, but rather the speeches to be translated cover a variety of topics. More recently, the French-German project Quaero investigates the possibility of making use of machine translations for a multi-lingual internet. The project seeks to translate not only webpages, but also videos and audio files on the internet.  Today, only a few companies use statistical machine translation commercially, e.g. Omniscien Technologies (formerly Asia Online), SDL / Language Weaver (sells translation products and services), Google (uses its proprietary statistical MT system for some language combinations in Google's language tools), Microsoft (uses its proprietary statistical MT system to translate knowledge base articles), and Ta with you (offers a domain-adapted machine translation solution based on statistical MT with some linguistic knowledge). There has been a renewed interest in hybridisation, with researchers combining syntactic and morphological (i.e., linguistic) knowledge into statistical systems, as well as combining statistics with existing rule-based systems.

Machine translation is a sub-field of computational linguistics that investigates the use of software to translate text or speech from one natural language to another.

Strojový překlad je dlouhodobě "důležitým" úkolem zpracování přirozeného jazyka zabývající se procesem automatického překladu přirozených jazyků za pomoci počítače. Ačkoliv první zmínky o strojovém překladu pochází již ze 17. století, skutečný výzkum této oblasti byl zahájen až v 50. letech 20. století. Jedním z prvním zaznamenaných projektů byl americký Georgetownský experiment z roku 1954. Obdobné pokusy byly následně prováděny i v Sovětském svazu. Úspěch experimentů vyústil ve významnou finanční podporu vývoje strojového překladu ze stran vlád. Pokrok ve výzkumu byl však výrazně pomalejší, než se předpokládalo. Zpráva ALPACu z roku 1966 zhodnotila vývoj strojového překladu jako neefektivní a nenaplňující původní očekávání po experimentu v Georgetownu, což mělo za následek snížení financování výzkumu.


Background.

Most of the material on Nickelback's debut album was written by the band's lead vocalist and guitarist Chad Kroeger dating back as far as 1993, and was largely influenced by the music of Seattle during that period, particularly grunge. The album's title track was written about and named after a teenage friend of Kroeger's called Kirby, who was involved in a road traffic accident in which the driver of the other vehicle was his girlfriend at the time, who was killed as a result of the collision. Speaking about the incident, Kroeger recalled that "He [Kirby] came over a hill in the middle of nowhere on a dirt gravel road and had a head-on collision with a car. He stumbled out of the car bleeding and bashed up pretty bad, and he opened up the [door of the other] car, and it's his girlfriend. She snuck out at the same time, was going to see him and he killed her on the back of a dirt road. I tried to imagine what they could possibly feel like, and that's where that song comes from."  "Curb" was recorded in January 1996 at Turtle Recording Studios in Richmond, British Columbia. The album was produced, engineered, mixed and mastered by Larry Anschell, founder of Turtle Recording. "Fly" and "Window Shopper" were taken directly from the band's debut EP "Hesher", which was recorded at Crosstown Studios North Vancouver, British Columbia with producer Jeff Boyd and released earlier in the year. "Where?" and "Left" were also originally released on "Hesher", but were subsequently re-recorded for "Curb". The album's title track features two guest musicians: drummer Boyd Grealy and cellist Ariel Watson. "Just Four" was re-recorded for the band's 2001 major label debut album "Silver Side Up" with the title "Just For".

Controversy.

On January 25, 2002, Nickelback's former management company Amar Management filed a breach of contract lawsuit against the band that claimed that the group had "wrongfully terminated the contract and has failed to pay the management company commissions, disbursements, and various other fees as a result of services rendered". The band counter-claimed that the management company had "wrongfully retained or took possession of "Curb" from the plaintiffs [Nickelback] in August of 1998", seeking to regain ownership of the album's original master recordings. The latter claim was settled in Nickelback's favour, giving them the full rights to their debut album. In 2003, the album's producer Larry Anschell also sued the band for "production royalties and property rights" to the songs on "Curb".

Reception.

"Curb" received mixed to negative reviews from critics. In "The New Rolling Stone Album Guide", published in 2004, "Curb" was awarded one and a half stars and criticised for its "generic heft [which] got the band nowhere". Reviewing the album for musicOMH, David Rafaello claimed that "Curb" is "stuck in a time capsule labelled'mid-90s paralysis'", suggesting that it was only released internationally in 2002 in an attempt to "cash in on the momentary fame and success of the group". Continuing to condemn the album, Rafaello suggested that "It's hard to think of another recent release by any major force that is so monochromatic and derivative", berating frontman Chad Kroeger's vocal performance and labelling "most" of the songs on the record as "dull".  Upon its international release by Roadrunner Records in 2002, "Curb" registered at number 182 on the US "Billboard" 200. The album also entered the UK Albums Chart at number 185, peaked at number 24 on the UK Rock & Metal Albums Chart, reached number 79 on the German Albums Chart, and reached number 72 on the Swiss Albums Chart. Despite not charting in the band's home country, "Curb" was certified gold by Music Canada in 2010 for sales of 50,000 units, and in 2015 was certified silver by the British Phonographic Industry for sales in the UK of 60,000 units.

Curb is the debut studio album by Canadian rock band Nickelback. Recorded at Turtle Recording Studios in Richmond, British Columbia with producer Larry Anschell, it was originally released exclusively in Canada by FACTOR (the Foundation Assisting Canadian Talent on Recordings) in 1996. The album was reissued locally later in the year by Shoreline Records. After Nickelback signed with Roadrunner Records in 1999, "Curb" was released internationally on June 25, 2002.

Po vydání extended playe "Hesher" na začátku roku 1996 nahrála skupina v září téhož roku své debutové plnohodnotné album. Spousta materiálu pochází z roku 1993, kdy byla napsána většina textu zpěvákem a kytaristou Chadem Kroegerem, přestože autorství skladeb je připisováno všem členům skupiny.


Geography.

Administrative Divisions.

As of 2012, Haiyang administers four subdistricts and 10 towns:

Leisure resorts.

The city, known for its newly discovered primitive beauty, is a prime destination for beach sports with its 230 kilometer coastline, and climatically and typographically is quite similar to Scotland. In the past decade, this city has quickly become one of top summer resorts and vacation paradises in China, and in northeast Asia at large.

Historical affiliation.

Haiyang was first settled with Laiyi people, one of peripheral Chinese ethnic minorities, some 2,300 years ago, and was annexed into China proper over centuries of dynasty rule and wars. Haiyang was consecutively under administration of Qi Kingdom in Warring Period, Jiaodong Province in Qin Dynasty, Laizhou Prefecture in Tang, Song and Yuan Dynasties and Dengzhou Prefecture in Ming Dynasty.

Dasongwei Fortress.

In 1389, Dasongwei Fortress, one of the nine coastal Fortresses of the time to guard against Japanese invasion and pirate attacks, was set up to govern both administratively and militarily the today's area of Haiyang, which land was ever called Dansylvania in the 19th century. In 1734, Dasongwei Fortress is officially renamed as Haiyang, which name lasts to date covering the south coast of Shandong Peninsula with an area of more than 3,000 kilometers. In 1947, the newly founded communist government cut off the eastern land of Haiyang to create another county of Rushan, since then Haiyang's 1,886 kilometer area forms a shape of flying phoenix towards west Pacific Ocean.

European settlement.

From the late 19th century until World War I, Haiyang was a strategic town on the route between the two European settlements of Tsingtao and Weihaiwei, respectively taken by Germany in 1898 and Britain in 1898 on lease basis, and commercial and trade activities were active until 1947 when communist troops took over.

Haiyang Port.

Haiyang Port is one of the pivotal ports along south coastline of Shandong Peninsula with sea route connecting Korea, Japan and south Chinese ports. In May 1860, French navy tried to land for taking the fortress and failed. In August 1947, the government troops retreated from the port for Tsingtao after defeat by the communists. In April 1963, the Taiwan-based Chinese nationalist troops tried to land for taking back the city and all were defeated and captured by the paramilitaries. Haiyang Port is today one of the trade ports for the peninsula province with active export-oriented manufactures, and administratively under Qingdao Customs and Port authorities.

Asian Beach Games.

Haiyang hosted the 2012 Asian Beach Games, the first ever to be held in China, which was announced by the Olympic Council of Asia in Doha on December 2, 2006.

Vacation facilities.

Haiyang is nicknamed West Pacific Paradise partially due to its literal meaning of the city name, which means Ocean and Sun. With Laoshan mountain range in the northwest and Kunyu maintain range in the northeast, Haiyang boasts the nationwide best facilities of beach sporting and leisure resorts, including but not limited to Tiger Beach Golf Courses, Yachting Clubs, sailing events, Sand Carving Parks, Beach Volleyball Club, Beach Basketball Club, Music Festival, Japanese Village, seaview gardens and terrains, Phoenix Wetland Reserve, National Forest Park and Coast Film Park. Rocky Islands some 80 kilometers off the shore are another vacation resort of the city.

Haiyang (), a coastal city in Shandong province in eastern China, located on the Yellow Sea (southern) coast of the Shandong Peninsula. It is a county-level city under the administration of the prefecture-level city of Yantai.

Městský okres Chaj-jang () je městský okres v městské prefektuře Jen-tchaj v provincii Šan-tung v Čínské lidové republice. Leží na jižním pobřeží Šantungského poloostrova na břehu Žlutého moře, má rozlohu 1881 čtverečních kilometrů a v roce 2001 v něm žilo bezmála sedm set tisíc obyvatel.


Early life.

Charles Ponzi was born in Lugo, Emilia-Romagna, Italy, in 1882. He told "The New York Times" he had come from a family in Parma. Ponzi's ancestors had been well-to-do, and his mother continued to use the title "Donna", but the family had subsequently fallen upon hard times and had little money. Ponzi took a job as a postal worker early on, but soon was accepted into the University of Rome La Sapienza. His richer friends considered the university a "four-year vacation", and he was inclined to follow them around to bars, cafés, and the opera. This resulted in Ponzi spending all his money, and four years later he was broke and without a degree. During this time, a number of Italian boys were migrating to the U.S. and returning to Italy as rich people. Ponzi's family encouraged him to do the same, thereby returning his family to its lost glory.

Arrival in the United States.

On November 15, 1903, Ponzi arrived in Boston aboard the S.S. "Vancouver". By his own account, Ponzi had $2.50 in his pocket, having gambled away the rest of his life savings during the voyage. "I landed in this country with $2.50 in cash and $1 million in hopes, and those hopes never left me," he later told "The New York Times". He quickly learned English and spent the next few years doing odd jobs along the East Coast, eventually taking a job as a dishwasher in a restaurant, where he slept on the floor. Ponzi managed to work his way up to the position of waiter, but was fired for theft and shortchanging customers.

Move to Montreal and Banco Zarossi.

In 1907, after some years of failing to do well in the U.S., Ponzi moved to Montreal, Quebec, Canada and became an assistant teller in the newly opened Banco Zarossi, a bank started by Luigi "Louis" Zarossi to service the influx of Italian immigrants arriving in the city. By this time, Ponzi had a winning personality and spoke English, Italian, and French, which Zuckoff says helped him get the job at Banco Zarossi.  It was at Banco Zarossi that Ponzi first saw the scheme of ""robbing Peter to pay Paul"" (which subsequently would be called a Ponzi scheme). Zarossi paid 6% interest on bank deposits — double the going rate at the time — and was growing rapidly as a result. Ponzi eventually rose to bank manager. However, he found out that the bank was in serious financial trouble because of bad real estate loans, and that Zarossi was funding the interest payments not through profit on investments, but by using money deposited in newly opened accounts. The bank eventually failed and Zarossi fled to Mexico with a large portion of the bank's money.  Ponzi stayed in Montreal and, for some time, lived at Zarossi's house helping the man's abandoned family, while planning to return to the U.S. and start over. As Ponzi was penniless, this proved to be very difficult. Eventually he walked into the offices of a former Zarossi customer, Canadian Warehousing, and finding no one there, wrote himself a check for $423.58 in a checkbook he found, forging the signature of Damien Fournier, a director of the company. Confronted by police who had taken note of his large expenditures just after the forged check was cashed, Ponzi held out his wrist up and said, "I'm guilty". He ended up spending three years at St. Vincent-de-Paul Federal Penitentiary, a bleak facility located on the outskirts of Montreal. Rather than inform his mother of his imprisonment, he posted her a letter stating that he had found a job as a "special assistant" to a prison warden.  After his release in 1911, Ponzi decided to return to the U.S., but got involved in a scheme to smuggle Italian illegal immigrants across the border. He was caught and spent two years in Atlanta Prison. Here he became a translator for the warden, who was intercepting letters from mobster Ignazio "the Wolf" Lupo. Ponzi ended up befriending Lupo. Another prisoner, Charles W. Morse, became a true role model to Ponzi. Morse, a wealthy Wall Street businessman and speculator, fooled doctors during medical exams by eating soap shavings to give the appearance of ill-health. Morse was soon released from prison. Ponzi completed his prison term following Morse's release, having an additional month added to his term due to his inability to pay a $50 fine.

Work in a mining camp and in Boston.

After Ponzi's release from prison, he made his way back to Boston. While working at a mining camp as a nurse, he came up with the idea of going to another mining camp, starting a utility there that would supply water and power, and selling its stock. During this time, a fellow nurse called Pearl Gosid had suffered severe burns in an accident. Despite not knowing her, Ponzi volunteered to two major operations to donate of his skin from his back and legs to Pearl. This resulted in pleurisy and similar complications, and Ponzi losing his job.  Thereafter Ponzi continued to travel around looking for work, and in Boston, he met Rose Maria Gnecco, a stenographer, to whom he proposed marriage. Gnecco came from a family of Italian-American immigrants who had a small fruit stall in downtown Boston. Though Ponzi did not tell Gnecco about his years in jail, his mother sent Gnecco a letter telling her of Ponzi's past. Nonetheless, she married him in 1918. For the next few months, Ponzi worked at a number of businesses, including his father-in-law's grocery, and the import-export company JR Poole before hitting upon an idea to sell advertising in a large business listing to be sent to various businesses. He was unable to sell this idea to businesses, and his company failed soon after. Ponzi took over his wife's family's fledgling fruit company for a short time, but to no avail, and it also failed shortly thereafter.

Origin of the term "Ponzi scheme" and IRC scheme.

An idea to trade IRCs.

In the summer of 1919, Ponzi decided to set up a small office at 27 School Street, Boston, coming up with ideas and writing to people he knew in Europe trying to sell them as opportunities. A few weeks later, he received a letter from a company in Spain asking about the advertising catalog. Inside the envelope was an international reply coupon (IRC), something which he had never seen before. He asked about the IRC and found a weakness in the system which would, in theory, allow him to make money.  The purpose of the postal reply coupon was to allow someone in one country to send it to a correspondent in another country, who could use it to pay the postage of a reply. IRCs were priced at the cost of postage in the country of purchase, but could be exchanged for stamps to cover the cost of postage in the country where redeemed; if these values were different, there was a potential profit. Inflation after World War I had greatly decreased the cost of postage in Italy expressed in U.S. dollars, so that an IRC could be bought cheaply in Italy and exchanged for U.S. stamps of higher value, which could then be sold. Ponzi claimed that the net profit on these transactions, after expenses and exchange rates, was in excess of 400%. This was a form of arbitrage, or profiting by buying an asset at a lower price in one market and immediately selling it in a market where the price is higher, which was (and is) completely legal.  Seeing an opportunity, Ponzi quit his job as a translator to set his IRC scheme in motion, but needed a large capital outlay to buy IRCs at cheaper European currencies. He first tried to borrow money from banks including the Hanover Trust Company, but they were not convinced and its manager, Shimelensky, turned him down.  Undaunted, Ponzi set up a stock company to raise money from the public. He also went to several of his friends in Boston and promised that he would double their investment in 90 days. Ponzi later shortened this to 45 days at 50% interest, thus doubling investments in three months, in an environment when banks were paying only 5% annual interest. The great returns available from postal reply coupons, he explained to them, made such incredible profits easy. Some people invested and were paid off as promised, receiving $750 interest on initial investments of $1,250.

Securities Exchange Company.

In January 1920, Ponzi started his own company, the "Securities Exchange Company," to promote the scheme. In the first month, eighteen people invested in his company with a total of $1,800. He paid them promptly for the very next month, with the money obtained from the newer set of investors.  Ponzi set up a larger office, this time in the Niles Building on School Street. Word spread, and investments came in at an ever-increasing rate. Ponzi hired agents and paid them generous commission for every dollar they brought in. In just one month's time, between February and March 1920, the total amount invested had risen from $5,000 to $25,000 ($ to $ in, respectively). As the frenzy began building, Ponzi hired agents to seek out new investors in New England and New Jersey. At that time, investors were being paid impressive rates, which subsequently encouraged others to invest. By May 1920, he had made $420,000 (). By June 1920, people had invested $2.5 million in Ponzi's scheme (). By July, he was raking in a million dollars per week and rising. By the end of July, he was approaching a million dollars per day.  Ponzi began depositing the money in the Hanover Trust Bank of Boston (a small bank on Hanover Street in the mostly Italian North End), in the hope that once his account was large enough he could impose his will on the bank or even be made its president; he bought a controlling interest in the bank through himself and several friends after depositing $3 million. By July 1920, Ponzi had made millions. People were mortgaging their homes and investing their life savings. Most did not take their profits, but reinvested. Ponzi's company meanwhile had set up branches from Maine to New Jersey.  Even though Ponzi's company was bringing in fantastic sums of money each day, the simplest financial analysis would have shown that the operation was running at a large loss. As long as money kept flowing in, existing investors could be paid with the new money. This was the only method Ponzi had to continue providing returns to existing investors, as he made no effort to generate legitimate profits.  Ponzi's initial investors consisted of working-class immigrants like himself. Gradually news travelled upwards, and many well-to-do Boston Brahmins also invested in his scheme. In its heyday, nearly 75% of Boston's police force had invested in the scheme. Ponzi's investors even included those closest to him, like his chauffeur John Collins and his own brother-in-law. Ponzi was indiscriminate about whom he allowed to invest, from young newspaper boys investing a few dollars to high-net-worth individuals, like a banker from Lawrence, Kansas who invested $10,000. Summarily, he was willing to take any cent from any investor.

Infeasibility of Ponzi's scheme.

Though Ponzi was still paying back investors, mostly from money from subsequent investors, he had not yet figured out a way to actually change the IRCs to cash. He also subsequently realized that changing the coupons to money was a logistical impossibility. For example: for the initial eighteen investors of January 1920, for their $1800 investment, it would have taken 53,000 postal coupons to actually realize the arbitrage profits. For the subsequent 15,000 investors that Ponzi had, he would have had to fill "Titanic"-sized ships with postal coupons just to ship them to the U.S. from Europe. However, Ponzi found that all the interest payments returned to him, as investors kept re-investing.

Ponzi's subsequent lifestyle.

Ponzi lived luxuriously: he bought a mansion in Lexington, Massachusetts, and he maintained accounts in several banks across New England besides Hanover Trust. He bought a Locomobile, the finest car of that time. He had initially bought two first class tickets to Italy for a delayed honeymoon with Rose, but instead decided to change them to bring his mother from Italy to the U.S. in a first-class stateroom on an ocean liner. She lived with Ponzi and Rose for some time in Lexington, but died soon after. On July 31, 1920, Ponzi told Father Pasquale Di Milla, the director of the Italian Children's Home in Jamaica Plain, that he would donate $100,000 in honor of his mother. Ponzi also bought a macaroni company and part of a wine company in an attempt to gain profits that could be used to repay the investors of his IRC scheme.

Suspicion.

Ponzi's rapid rise naturally drew suspicion. When a Boston financial writer suggested there was no way Ponzi could legally deliver such high returns in a short period of time, Ponzi sued for libel and won $500,000 in damages. As libel law at the time placed the burden of proof on the writer and publisher, this effectively neutralized any serious probes into his dealings for some time.  Nonetheless, there were still signs of his eventual ruin. Joseph Daniels, a Boston furniture dealer who had given Ponzi furniture which he could not afford to pay for, sued Ponzi to cash in on the gold rush. The lawsuit was unsuccessful, but it did prompt people to begin asking how Ponzi could have gone from being penniless to being a millionaire in a short span of time. There was a run on the Securities Exchange Company, as some investors decided to pull out. Ponzi paid them and the run stopped.  On July 24, 1920, "The Boston Post" printed a favorable article on Ponzi and his scheme that brought in investors faster than ever. At that time, Ponzi was making $250,000 a day. Ponzi's good fortune was increased by the fact that just below this favorable article, which seemed to imply that Ponzi was indeed returning 50% return on investment after only 45 days, was a bank advertisement that stated that the bank was paying 5% returns annually. The next business day after this article was published, Ponzi arrived at his office to find thousands of Bostonians waiting to give him their money.  Despite this reprieve, "Post" acting publisher Richard Grozier (who was running the paper in the absence of his father Edwin, its owner and publisher) and city editor Eddie Dunn were suspicious and assigned investigative reporters to look into Ponzi. He was also under investigation by Massachusetts authorities, and, on the day the "Post" printed its article, Ponzi met with state officials. He managed to divert the officials from checking his books by offering to stop taking money during the investigation, a fortunate choice, as proper records were not being kept. Ponzi's offer temporarily calmed the suspicions of the state officials.

Collapse of the scheme.

On July 26, the "Post" started a series of articles that asked hard questions about the operation of Ponzi's money machine. The paper contacted Clarence Barron, the financial journalist who headed Dow Jones & Company, to examine Ponzi's scheme. Barron observed that though Ponzi was offering fantastic returns on investments, Ponzi himself was not investing with his own company.  Barron then noted that to cover the investments made with the Securities Exchange Company, 160 million postal reply coupons would have to be in circulation. However, only about 27,000 actually were in circulation. The United States Post Office stated that postal reply coupons were not being bought in quantity at home or abroad. The gross profit margin in percent on buying and selling each IRC was colossal, but the overhead required to handle the purchase and redemption of these items, which were of extremely low cost and were sold individually, would have exceeded the gross profit. Barron noted that if Ponzi really was doing what he claimed to do, he would effectively be profiting at the expense of a government—either the governments where he bought the coupons or the U.S. government. For this reason, Barron argued that even if Ponzi's operation was legitimate, it was immoral to take advantage of a government in this manner.  The "Post" articles caused a panic run on the Securities Exchange Company. Ponzi paid out $2 million in three days to a wild crowd outside his office. He canvassed the crowd, passed out coffee and doughnuts, and cheerfully told them they had nothing to worry about. Many changed their minds and left their money with him. However, this attracted the attention of Daniel Gallagher, the United States Attorney for the District of Massachusetts. Gallagher commissioned Edwin Pride to audit the Securities Exchange Company's books—an effort made difficult by the fact Ponzi's bookkeeping system consisted merely of index cards with investors' names.  In the meantime, Ponzi had hired a publicist, William McMasters. However, McMasters quickly became suspicious of Ponzi's endless talk of postal reply coupons, as well as the ongoing investigation against him. He later described Ponzi as a "financial idiot" who did not seem to know how to add. The "denouement" for Ponzi began in late July, when McMasters found several highly incriminating documents that indicated Ponzi was merely "robbing Peter to pay Paul". McMasters went to Grozier, his former employer, with this information. Grozier offered him $5,000 for his story, which was printed in the "Post" on August 2, 1920. McMaster's article declared Ponzi hopelessly insolvent, reporting that while he claimed $7 million in liquid funds, he was actually at least $2 million in debt. With interest factored in, McMasters wrote, Ponzi was as much as $4.5 million in the red. The story touched off a massive run, and Ponzi paid off in one day. He then sped up plans to build a massive conglomerate that would engage in banking and import/export operations.  Massachusetts Bank Commissioner Joseph Allen became concerned that if major withdrawals exhausted Ponzi's reserves, it would bring Boston's banking system to its knees. Allen's suspicions were further aroused when he found out a large number of Ponzi-controlled accounts had received more than $250,000 in loans from Hanover Trust. This led Allen to speculate that Ponzi was not nearly as well-financed as he claimed, since he was getting large loans from the bank he effectively controlled. He ordered two bank examiners to keep an eye on Ponzi's accounts.  On August 9, the bank examiners reported that enough investors had cashed their checks on Ponzi's main account there that it was almost certainly overdrawn. Allen then ordered Hanover Trust not to pay out any more checks from Ponzi's main account. He also orchestrated an involuntary bankruptcy filing by several small Ponzi investors. The move forced Massachusetts Attorney General J. Weston Allen to release a statement that there was little to support Ponzi's claims of large-scale dealings in postal coupons. State officials then invited Ponzi note holders to come to the Massachusetts State House to furnish their names and addresses for the purpose of the investigation. On the same day, Ponzi received a preview of Pride's audit, which revealed Ponzi was at least $7 million in debt.  On August 11, it all came crashing down for Ponzi. First, the "Post" came out with a front-page story about his criminal activities in Montreal thirteen years earlier, including his forgery conviction and his role at Zarossi's scandal-ridden bank. That afternoon, Bank Commissioner Allen seized Hanover Trust due to numerous irregularities. The commissioner thus inadvertently foiled Ponzi's plan to "borrow" funds from the bank vaults as a last resort in the event all other efforts to obtain funds failed.  By the morning of August 12, Ponzi's certificate of deposit at Hanover Trust, which had been worth $1.5 million, was reduced to $1 million after bank officials tapped into it to cover the overdraft. Even if he had been able to convert it into cash, he would have had only $4 million in assets. Amid reports that he was about to be arrested any day, Ponzi surrendered to federal authorities that morning and accepted Pride's figures. He was charged with mail fraud for sending letters to his marks telling them their notes had matured. He was originally released on $25,000 bail and was immediately re-arrested on state charges of larceny, for which he posted an additional $10,000 bond. After the "Post" released the results of the audit, the bail bondsman feared Ponzi might flee the country and withdrew the bail for the federal charges. Attorney General Allen declared that if Ponzi managed to regain his freedom, the state would seek additional charges and seek a bail high enough to ensure Ponzi would stay in custody.

Magnitude of losses.

The news brought down five other banks in addition to Hanover Trust. Ponzi's investors were practically wiped out, receiving less than 30 cents to the dollar. They saw their financial pictures all but destroyed; they lost about $20 million in 1920 dollars (approximately $ million in dollars). By comparison, Bernard Madoff's similar scheme that collapsed in 2008 cost his investors about $18 billion, 53 times the losses of Ponzi's scheme.

Prison and later life.

In two federal indictments, Ponzi was charged with 86 counts of mail fraud and faced life imprisonment. At the urging of his wife, Ponzi pleaded guilty on November 1, 1920, to a single count before Judge Clarence Hale, who declared before sentencing, "Here was a man with all the duties of seeking large money. He concocted a scheme which, on his counsel's admission, did defraud men and women. It will not do to have the world understand that such a scheme as that can be carried out... without receiving substantial punishment." Ponzi was sentenced to five years in federal prison.

Massachusetts.

Ponzi was released after three and a half years and was almost immediately indicted on twenty-two state charges of larceny, which came as a surprise to Ponzi; he thought he had a deal calling for the state to drop any charges against him if he pleaded guilty to the federal charges. He sued, claiming that he would be facing double jeopardy if Massachusetts essentially retried him for the same offenses spelled out in the federal indictment. The case, "Ponzi v. Fessenden", made it all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court. On March 27, 1922, the Supreme Court ruled that federal plea bargains have no standing regarding state charges. It also ruled that Ponzi was not facing double jeopardy because Massachusetts was charging him with larceny while the federal government charged him with mail fraud, even though the charges implicated the same criminal operation.  In October 1922, Ponzi was tried on the first ten larceny counts. Since he was insolvent, Ponzi served as his own attorney and, being as persuasive as he had been with his duped investors, the jury acquitted him on all charges. He was tried a second time on five of the remaining charges, and the jury deadlocked. Ponzi was found guilty at a third trial, and was sentenced to an additional seven to nine years in prison as "a common and notorious thief". Remarkably, during his various prison terms, Ponzi continued to receive Christmas cards from some of his more gullible investors, as well as requests from others to invest their money—from his prison cell.  After word got out that Ponzi had never obtained American citizenship (despite having lived in the U.S. for most of the time since 1903), federal officials initiated efforts to have him deported as an undesirable alien in 1922.

Florida.

In September 1925, Ponzi was released on bail as he appealed the state conviction, and fled to the Springfield neighborhood of Jacksonville, Florida and launched the Charpon Land Syndicate ("Charpon" is an amalgamation of his name), offering investors tiny tracts of land, some under water, and promising 200% returns in 60 days. In reality, it was a scam that sold swampland in Columbia County. Ponzi was indicted by a Duval County grand jury in February 1926 and charged with violating Florida trust and securities laws. A jury found him guilty on the securities charges, and the judge sentenced him to a year in the Florida State Prison. Ponzi appealed his conviction and was freed after posting a $1,500 bond.  Ponzi traveled to Tampa, where he shaved his head, grew a mustache, and tried to flee the country as a crewman on a merchant ship bound for Italy. However, he revealed his identity to a shipmate. Word spread to a deputy sheriff, who followed the ship to its last American port of call in New Orleans and placed Ponzi under arrest. After Ponzi's pleas to Calvin Coolidge and Benito Mussolini for deportation were ignored, he was sent back to Massachusetts to serve out his prison term. Ponzi served seven more years in prison.  In the meantime, government investigators tried to trace Ponzi's convoluted accounts to figure out how much money he had taken and where it had gone. They never managed to untangle it and could conclude only that millions had gone through his hands.

Italy.

Ponzi was released in 1934. With the release came an immediate order to have him deported to Italy. He asked for a full pardon from Massachusetts Governor Joseph B. Ely. However, on July 13, Ely turned the appeal down. Ponzi's charismatic confidence had faded, and when he left the prison gates, he was met by an angry crowd. He told reporters before he left, "I went looking for trouble, and I found it." On October 7, Ponzi was officially deported.  Rose stayed in the U.S. and divorced Ponzi in 1937. She had not wanted to leave Boston, and Ponzi was in no position to support her in any event.  In Italy, Ponzi jumped from scheme to scheme, but little came of them. He eventually got a job in Brazil as an agent for Ala Littoria, the Italian state airline. During World War II, however, the airline's operation in the country was shut down after the British intelligence services intervened and Brazil sided with the Allies. During that time, Ponzi also wrote his autobiography.

Death.

Ponzi spent the last years of his life in poverty, working occasionally as a translator. His health deteriorated and in 1941 a heart attack left him considerably weakened. His eyesight began failing, and by 1948 he was almost completely blind. A brain hemorrhage paralyzed his right leg and arm. Ponzi died in a charity hospital in Rio de Janeiro, the Hospital São Francisco de Assis of Federal University of Rio de Janeiro, on January 18, 1949.  Supported by his last and only friend, Francisco Nonato Nunes, a barber who spoke English and had notions of Italian, Ponzi granted one last interview to an American reporter, telling him, "Even if they never got anything for it, it was cheap at that price. Without malice aforethought, I had given them the best show that was ever staged in their territory since the landing of the Pilgrims! It was easily worth fifteen million bucks to watch me put the thing over."

Charles Ponzi (, ; born Carlo Pietro Giovanni Guglielmo Tebaldo Ponzi; March 3, 1882 – January 18, 1949) was an Italian swindler and con artist in the U.S. and Canada. His aliases include "Charles Ponci", "Carlo", and "Charles P. Bianchi". Born and raised in Italy, he became known in the early 1920s as a swindler in North America for his money-making scheme. He promised clients a 50% profit within 45 days or 100% profit within 90 days, by buying discounted postal reply coupons in other countries and redeeming them at face value in the U.S. as a form of arbitrage. In reality, Ponzi was paying earlier investors using the investments of later investors. While this type of fraudulent investment scheme was not originally invented by Ponzi, it became so identified with him that it now is referred to as a "Ponzi scheme". His scheme ran for over a year before it collapsed, costing his "investors" $20 million.

Charles Ponzi, narozený jako Carlo Ponzi, užívající pseudonymy Charles Ponci, Carlo a Charles P. Bianchi (3. března 1882 – 18. ledna 1949), byl italský podvodník působící v Severní Americe.


History.

Jerusalem (in Latin also Hierosolyma) was one of the Apostles' original bishoprics. It was renamed Aelia Capitolina in 135 AD, again Jerusalem in 325. In 451 it was promoted as Patriarchal See. After 649, Pope Martin appointed John of Philadelphia (Amman) as Patriarchal vicar of Jerusalem to replace Sergius of Jaffa.  In 1054, the Great Schism split Christianity into the Eastern Orthodox Church—which consisted of the four Orthodox Christian Patriarchs of Antioch, Jerusalem, Constantinople and Alexandria—under the stewardship of Constantinople; and the Catholic Church, which consisted of the Pope of Rome and virtually all of Western Christianity. Apart from the Maronites, most Christians in the Holy Land came under the jurisdiction of the Eastern Orthodox Patriarchate of Jerusalem.

Latin Kingdom of Jerusalem.

In 1099, the Western Crusaders captured Jerusalem, set up the Kingdom of Jerusalem and established a Latin hierarchy under a Latin Patriarch (in communion with Rome), while expelling the Orthodox Patriarch. The Latin Patriarchate was divided into four archdioceses—their heads bearing the titles of Archbishop of Tyre, Archbishop of Caesarea, Archbishop of Nazareth and Archbishop of Petra—and a number of suffragan dioceses. The Latin Patriarch took over control of the Latin quarter of the city of Jerusalem (the Holy Sepulchre and the immediate surroundings) as his Metropolitan see, and had as his direct suffragans the bishops of Lydda-Ramla, Bethlehem, Hebron and Gaza, and the abbots of the Temple, Mount Sion and the Mount of Olives.  The Latin Patriarch resided in Jerusalem from 1099 to 1187, while Orthodox Patriarchs continued to be appointed, but resided in Constantinople. In 1187, the Crusaders were forced to flee Jerusalem, and the Latin Patriarchy moved to Acre (Akka), while the Orthodox Patriarch returned to Jerusalem. The Catholic Church continued to appoint residential Latin Patriarchs. The Crusader Kingdom of Jerusalem endured almost 200 years until the last vestiges of the Kingdom were conquered by the Muslim Mamluks in 1291, and the Latin hierarchy was effectively eliminated in the Levant. With the Fall of Acre, the Latin Patriarch moved to The Kingdom of Cyprus in 1291.

Titular Latin Patriarchate of Jerusalem.

In 1374, the Kingdom of Cyprus underwent a severe upheaval when it was invaded by the Genoese, who conquered Famagusta and held King Peter II captive.  From that time on, the Latin Patriarchs of Jerusalem ceased to reside in Cyprus. The Catholic Church continued to appoint titular Patriarchs of Jerusalem, but from then on they were based at the Basilica di San Lorenzo fuori le Mura in Rome.  In 1342, Pope Clement VI officially committed the care of the Holy Land to the Franciscans and the Franciscan Custos of the Holy Lands (The Grand Masters of the Order of the Holy Sepulchre) held the title "ex officio" under the Papal bull "Gratiam agimus" by Pope Clement VI, unless someone was specifically appointed to the honorary office.  Yet in 1570 it gained territories from the suppressed Archdiocese of Nicosia and Diocese of Paphos, and in 1571 it gained more territories from the suppressed Diocese of Limassol and Diocese of Famagosta, all in former Crusader Kingdom of Cyprus, which had fallen to the Ottoman Turks.

Modern Patriarchate of Jerusalem.

A resident Latin Patriarch was re-established in 1847 by Pius IX, with Bishop Joseph Valerga being appointed to the office. Though officially superseding the Franciscans, Valerga was also the Grand Master of the Order. On Valerga's death in 1872, Vincent Braco was appointed, and following his death in 1889, the Ottoman Sultan authorised the re-establishment of a Latin hierarchy. The Grand Masters of the Order continued to be named as Latin Patriarchs until 1905.  The Co-Cathedral of the Most Holy Name of Jesus is the principal, or "mother" Church of the Latin Patriarchate, the church in which the Latin Patriarch of Jerusalem has his official chair (cathedra). However, the Basilica of the Holy Sepulchre has the title of cathedral of the patriarchate. The residence of the Patriarch is in the Old City, near the Co-Cathedral, while the seminary, which is responsible for the liturgical education, is in Beit Jala, a town 10 km south of Jerusalem, where it has been since 1936.  In 1987, Michel Sabbah became the first native Palestinian to be appointed Latin Patriarch. The Latin Patriarch of Jerusalem is now the diocesan archbishop of Latin Catholics of the "Catholic Archdiocese of Jerusalem" and has jurisdiction for all Latin Church Catholics in Israel, Palestine, Jordan and Cyprus.  The prerogatives of the Patriarch in his relation with government authorities overlap with the prerogatives of the Apostolic Nuncio to Israel and the Apostolic Delegate to Jerusalem and Palestine.  In 2003, the Latin Patriarch was one of the signatories of the "Statement regarding the Separation Wall by heads of Churches in Jerusalem," and in 2006, the Jerusalem Declaration on Christian Zionism, which repudiates Christian Zionism as inconsistent with Christian teaching. In 2008, Sabbah also signed the Kairos Palestine Document (published in 2009, after Sabbah term) against Israeli occupation.  In 2008, Archbishop Fouad Twal was appointed Patriarch to succeed Patriarch Michel Sabbah. He exercised his mandate from June 21, 2008, until June 24, 2016, when he reached the canonical age of retirement and Pope Francis accepted his resignation. Pope Francis appointed Pierbattista Pizzaballa as Apostolic Administrator "sede vacante" of the Latin Patriarchate of Jerusalem, until the appointment of a new Patriarch.  Pope Paul VI visited in January 1964, Pope John Paul II in March 2000, Pope Benedict XVI in May 2009 and Pope Francis in May 2014.

Statistics and extent.

As per 2015, it pastorally served 293,053 Catholics in 66 parishes with 464 priests (81 diocesan, 383 religious), 9 deacons, 1,652 lay religious (590 brothers, 1,062 sisters) and 55 seminarians.  The proper Archdiocese of the patriarchal see of Jerusalem has jurisdiction over all 'Latin Church' Catholics (not Eastern Catholics) in the Holy Land (Israel, Palestine and Jordan) as well as Cyprus. In Jerusalem, the Latin Catholic community is the largest Christian community, with some 4,500 people out of an estimated Christian population of about 11,000.

Special churches.

In Jerusalem, the patriarch has his Cathedral archiepiscopal see, a Minor Basilica and World Heritage Site: the Basilica of the Holy Sepulchre, as well as the Co-Cathedral, also a World Heritage Site: Co-Cathedral of the Most Holy Name of Jesus, and four other Minor Basilicas and World Heritage Sites: Basilica of the Agony, Basilica of St. Stephen, Dormition Abbey of the Virgin Mary and St. Anne’s Church.  Other cities in the archdiocese have more Minor Basilicas: Basilica of the Annunciation in Nazareth, Basilica of the Transfiguration in Mount Tabor, Carmelite Monastery of Stella Maris in Haifa and Church of Emmaus in Emmaus (El Qubeibeh), and two other World Heritage Sites, both in Bethlehem : Church of St. Catherine and Church of the Nativity.

List of Latin Patriarchs of Jerusalem.

Prior to the Great Schism, there were no separate Latin and Greek Orthodox Churches, and thus no separate Patriarchs. For Patriarchs of Jerusalem of the unified Church prior to the Schism, see Greek Orthodox Patriarch of Jerusalem.  "Jerusalem itself was lost in 1187; seat of the Patriarch moved (with the kingdom in retreat) to Acre.  "Acre lost in 1291; see in exile moved to Cyprus, then Rome after 1374; titular patriarchs until 1847".  The Franciscan Custodian of the Holy Land held the title from 1342 to 1830 under the Papal bull "Gratiam agimus" by Pope Clement VI. The bull declared the Franciscans as the official custodians of the Holy Places in the name of the Catholic Church, "unless someone was specifically appointed in the honorary office".  "During the Western Schism, the Patriarch was appointed by both Popes resulting in overlapping appointments."  "Restoration of resident Latin Patriarchs of Jerusalem in 1847".  "Latin patriarchate hierarchy re-established in 1889". "Vacant" (2016.06.24 –...); Pierbattista Pizzaballa is the Apostolic Administrator

The Latin Patriarchate of Jerusalem () is the Catholic episcopal see of Jerusalem, officially seated in the Church of the Holy Sepulchre. It was originally established in 1099 with the Kingdom of Jerusalem encompassing the newly territories in the Holy Land conquered by the First Crusade. From 1374-1847 it was a titular see, with the Patriarchs of Jerusalem being based at the Basilica di San Lorenzo fuori le Mura in Rome. A resident Latin Patriarch was re-established in 1847 by Pius IX.

Latinský patriarchát jeruzalémský (latinsky "Patriarchatus Hierosolymitanus Latinorum") je římskokatolická diecéze, která pokrývá území Izraele, Palestinské autonomie, Jordánska a Kypru. Latinský jeruzalémský patriarcha je z titulu své funkce členem Rady východních katolických patriarchů, předsedou Konference latinských biskupů arabských oblastí, předsedou Shromáždění katolických ordinářů ve Svaté zemi a velkopřevorem Řádu Božího hrobu a je jediným římskokatolickým biskupem (s výjimkou papeže), který je oslovován titulem ""Vaše Blaženosti"".


Early life.

Rolf Åke Mikael Nyqvist was born on 8 November 1960 in Stockholm, the son of a Swedish mother and an Italian father (from Florence). As a young child, he was adopted from an orphanage. At age 17, Nyqvist spent his senior year of high school as an exchange student in Omaha, Nebraska. There, he took his first acting class and played a small part in the school's production of "Death of a Salesman" by Arthur Miller. He returned to Sweden and was accepted at ballet school, but gave it up after one year. An ex-girlfriend suggested he try theatre and, at age 24, was accepted to the Malmö Theatre Academy.

Career.

Nyqvist's first major role was as police officer John Banck in the first set of "Beck" TV series in 1997. His first big breakthrough came in 2000 with the film "Together" directed by Lukas Moodysson. The movie achieved great international success and earned Nyqvist his first Guldbagge Award nomination for Best Actor in a Supporting Role for his portrayal of a misguided husband with anger issues. He later played the leading man in the Swedish romantic comedy "Grabben i graven bredvid" for which he won a Guldbagge Award for Best Actor in Leading Role. In 2004, he played the lead role in "As It Is in Heaven" as Daniel Daréus, a conductor and musician. "As It Is in Heaven" was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Foreign Film. In 2006, he starred in "Suddenly" where Nyqvist plays Lasse – a man who must come to terms with the sudden loss of his wife and son. In the 2007 film "The Black Pimpernel", Nyqvist portrays Swedish ambassador to Chile, Harald Edelstam, who helped many people flee execution by dictator Augusto Pinochet during and after the 1973 Chilean coup d'état.  Nyqvist garnered international attention starring as Mikael Blomkvist in "The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo" (Swedish title: ), "The Girl Who Played with Fire" (Swedish title: ), and "The Girl Who Kicked the Hornets' Nest" (Swedish title: ). These films were adapted from the "Millennium" series of novels by Stieg Larsson.  He starred as a terrorist in the 2011 film, "Abduction", directed by John Singleton. He was also part of the permanent ensemble at the Swedish Royal Dramatic Theatre. Nyqvist appeared in the 2011 action thriller "", the fourth film of the series. In the film, Nyqvist portrays a madman code-named 'Cobalt', who wants to instigate a global war between Russia and the United States because he believes a war will restore ecological balance to the planet. In 2014, he appeared in "John Wick" as a New York Russian mob boss who is forced to protect his son from a legendary hit man played by Keanu Reeves. In a movie shot in 2017 and 2018, Nyqvist starred as Russian submarine captain Sergei Andropov in "Hunter Killer". In the film he is one of only three survivors of his submarine that has been destroyed by Russian sabotage. The movie was released posthumously on October 26, 2018. He is interviewed on the DVD and Blu-ray releases; in the section on the production of the movie.

Personal life.

Nyqvist described his childhood, and his quest as an adult to find his biological parents, in his autobiographical novel, "Just After Dreaming" (Swedish title: ).  In 1990, he married the Finnish scenographer Catharina Ehrnrooth. They had two children—Ellen, born in 1991, and Arthur, who was born in 1996.

Death.

Nyqvist died of lung cancer on 27 June 2017 in Stockholm. He was 56.

Rolf Åke Mikael Nyqvist (; 8 November 1960 – 27 June 2017), better known as Michael Nyqvist, was a Swedish actor. Educated at the School of Drama in Malmö, he became well known for playing police officer Banck in the 1997–1998 Martin Beck TV series and for his leading role in the 2001 film "Grabben i graven bredvid". He was internationally recognized for his role as Mikael Blomkvist in the acclaimed "Millennium" series and as the lead villains in "" (as Kurt Hendricks) and "John Wick" (as Viggo Tarasov). In 2004, he played the leading role in "As It Is in Heaven" which was nominated for Best Foreign Language Film at the 77th Academy Awards.

Rolf Åke Mikael Nyqvist (8. listopadu 1960 – 27. června 2017) byl švédský herec, známý v Česku zejména z role novináře Mikaela Blomkvista v televizní adaptaci trilogie Milénium knižní předlohy spisovatele Stiega Larrsona. Ve Švédsku se proslavil vedlejší rolí policisty Johna Bancka v seriálu o komisaři Beckovi. V Hollywoodu hrál např. ve filmech John Wick, nebo. Jeho posledním natočeným filmem je Útok z hlubin, jež bude mít premiéru posmrtně.